Forced Fertilization

I don't know where I stand on abortion. Neither should you. Our notions about taking life are complicated, and still evolving. We wrongly share with nations like Iran and China the distinction of killing people when we don't like things they've done. We also rightly make it possible, in some cases, for people to take their own lives when they've decided they don't want them any more.

Both of these examples involve issues of consent and autonomy. Capital punishment is always wrong for the same reason suicide (and its cousin, euthanasia) are sometimes right -- because of the intentionalities of the person being killed.

That's part of why abortion is a complicated issue. It not only involves an entity possessing no conscious intentionality (though an inferrable one: To live), but prohibiting abortion to preserve the autonomy of the unborn is an infringement on the autonomy of the mother.

Abortion is also complicated because of the nature of the entity being aborted. Birth itself no longer seems a reasonable time at which life ought to be accorded equal rights and protections under the law. Any time you draw a line, in this issue, it's going to be arbitrary on some level. That's why it is, or should be, impossible given our current scientific knowledge to know for certain when and why abortion is okay, if you think it ever is.

South Dakota is about to pass an unconstitutional law banning almost all abortions. (Despite the outcry, the bill is at least logically consistent: If your premise is that a fetus is a life, that life is surely not less valuable or deserving of protection depending on the circumstances -- i.e., rape or incest -- of its conception). The point, of course, is to give the new Supreme Court a chance to overturn Roe v. Wade. And while it's hardly a sure bet, there's certainly reason to think the court might.

The problem with the South Dakota bill is that it makes no distinctions based on anything. A zygote is a fetus is a life. If you don't care about the nature of that life, or the degree of differentiation, or the qualia of that life, then it's a fine argument. But maybe rather than oppose this approach, pro-choice forces ought to start educating people on the logical implications of this slippery slope, by pushing the amniotic envelope, as it were.

If every embryo is entitled to equal protection under the law, and maternal autonomy carries no legal weight, then science has opened the door to a dystopian conclusion that, it would seem to me, the anti-choice forces can not escape: Forced fertilization.

Specifically, if the embryonic claim to life trumps female claims to autonomy, should not the same law that calls on us to force women to deliver children also call on us to force women to bear children? After all, it's not the fact that a woman chose to create life that legally obliges her to carry it to term -- or else South Dakota would have exempted rape. That leaves only the fact that her womb represents the embryo's sole chance for life as the legal motive for forcing her to bear the child. And if that's the case, there's no reason the law shouldn't also start assigning the excess embryos that result from in vitro fertilization to fertile women.

The South Dakota bill addresses only the reality that a woman's choice to withhold her womb -- whether she chose to conceive or not -- can lead to the death of an embryo. The pro-choice movement should take it the next step and start lobbying South Dakota to take similar steps to protect the untold thousands of embryos -- which deserve no less protection under the new law! -- by forcing women to carry them.

And if that doesn't work, let's put some scientific effort into bio-engineering a male capability for carrying embryos, so that all these undiscerningly anti-choice men can start saving embryos by spending the rest of their lives carrying them to term.