The House version of health care reform has reignited the abortion argument. Recent commentators have restated their opinions using familiar terminology such as “moral imperative”, “God’s image”, and the newly fashionable “socialist” medicine. There have also been references to the disproportionate number of black fetuses aborted. This statement is often left tantalizingly provocative by the tactical absence of the qualifier “elective”, suggesting that abortion, by design, has a greater involuntary gravitational pull on a mentally deficient race of people. There can be many sociological permutations developed from such a controversial subject and the above examples are among the most common. I will admit I have an intellectual prejudice leaning towards the fusion of sperm and oocyte as the beginning of human life, but I part company with those choosing to make topical adversaries of atheists and socialists. If you want to protest an enemy, go down to your nearest law school. Roe v. Wade was not a theological or moral decision. It was a legal decision.

It must be recalled Roe v. Wade was adjudicated as a privacy issue. Since the Enlightenment pregnancy has been firmly ensconced as a “medical” issue. Many societies, certainly ours, have accepted the idea and ideal of privacy between patient and doctor. The court was required to determine if this one medical manifestation could or should be pried loose from doctor patient confidence. If they had determined it should have been, then the door would have been opened to other breaches. For example, should doctors doing routine blood tests be required to report the presence of marijuana in their patient’s system to government authorities? What about the presence of the profitably taxed but more health debilitating consciousness-altering legal liquid elixirs even more readily available? Should doctors be charged to be moral watchdogs or auxiliary police when their patient’s presentation doesn’t suggest violence? Would the adoption of any particular theological conception of the beginning of life have been a contravention of the ideal of separation of church and state? What weights were the deciding lawyers of the Court obliged to give to the secular science presented to them? I believe the only way the status quo could have been maintained was to refuse to hear the case. The eventual capitulation to the inadequacies of both the legal and medical creeds to navigate at this philosophical level is evidenced by the decision to light on the third trimester when even the untrained and unlearned can see an unmistakable human being, and accord human rights from that point forward. It’s messy and deeply challenging, but I’m sure conservatives and libertarians prefer this devil we now have to letting the government into other aspects of our lives to look for his cousins.

Abortion is difficult and the best thing that can be said about it is that it is elective, not compulsory. Everyone must wrestle this beast individually now it has been let out of its cage. And I’m sorry to ask, but if we’re made in God’s image (presumably Shiva?), where do lawyers come from?