Contradictions in the debate over abortion

Mr. Pope and Mr. Knapp are right to raise the question of the rights of unborn babies. Of course this is a much thornier issue than environmental rights per se. People have a right to a clean environment, but there are no other people with a conflicting human right to an unhealthy environment. Environmental rights are in harmony; everyone is on the same side.

In the case of abortion, the mother also has some human rights. (I leave out the harm that is caused to others and a baby itself if it is born into circumstances that can be extremely harmful and even fatal to the baby, or the mother.)

So, we have a case here where the human rights of two different human beings are in conflict. The mother’s right to control her own body and her own life, and the baby’s right to life. This is messy and unsatisfactory, and not unlike the rights humans have not to be killed in a war. Neither side in this debate has the answer. Perhaps there is no right answer.

Nobody likes abortion. Women who choose to have abortions do not do it thoughtlessly, and would rather not be put in the situation where they are forced to make this awful choice.

But there is another possibility of resolution. This year education and access to birth control have brought the rate of murdered babies in the U.S to a point lower than at the time of f973’s Roe v. Wade decision: less than 15% per 1,000 women age 14-44.

And last year’s Guttmacher Institute reported that “”Abortions take place around the world, no matter the legal setting. … Provision of abortion is safest where it has long been legal.”

Switzerland had the lowest abortion rate at 5 per 1,000 women. The U.S. rate is 13 per 1,000 women, the same as Britain’s, the report found. Colombia and Mexico had abortion rates of 34 per 1,000 women. Pakistan’s estimated abortion rate was the highest at 50 per 1,000 women.” Another study in Pakistan found that only 30% of fertile-age women use modern contraceptives. “We found to our surprise that most of the women had more than three children, maybe as many as five,” the Pakistan director of Population Council reported. “They were almost all — 90 to 95 percent — married. They were older, so they tended to be poorer, less educated.”

If we keep providing information and access to birth control, we can to bring the abortion rate down even more. In that case, there will be no conflicting rights.

NANCY GERTH

Sandpoint