No Middle Ground

There is in the broader world a constant search for some safe, middle ground on the issue of abortion. Pro-lifers and pro-choicers desperately seek a via media between an outright ban and the heartless destruction of fully grown babies moments from birth. Pro-choicers offer up social solutions, hoping sundry welfare programs will make abortion “safe, legal and rare.” Pro-lifers offer up various exceptions, rape, incest and the health of the mother. Former President Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee gave us the Supreme Court justices that overturned Roe v. Wade. He is now suggesting a line in the sand at first trimester as his great solution. He wants Roe-Light.

It will never happen. Never. Ironically, both sides, in offering their compromises, demonstrate that they do not understand the root of the disagreement. If the unborn are alive, and they are, human, and they are, then they are due the full protection of the law. Anyone intentionally killing any baby at any stage is committing murder and should be treated as such. If, however, they are not human, then there is no more reason for them to have any legal protections than a worm. And those who kill them should have no more guilt before the law than someone stepping on a worm.

Can you imagine a law that suggests you can kill an eight year old in the first third of his ninth year without legal consequences? But if you kill the same child in months 4-12 of the child’s ninth year, you’ll be charged with murder? Can you imagine a law that says if you are sexually assaulted you can kill your child the day before it turns 9 without legal consequence but not the day after?

Or imagine a law that says you can kill your neighbor unless your neighbor provides for all your needs? This is the reasoning of those who insist that absent cradle-to-grave welfare for mother and child, murdering babies should be legal.

There is no rationality on either side of those seeking to walk a razor’s edge. Pro-lifers are pro-choicers with exceptions. Pro-choicers are pro-death. The only rational, coherent, and biblical position is to recognize that all humans, whatever their backstory, their stage of development, their IQ, are owed the full protection of the law. All who would seek to do them harm, both the assassin and whoever hires the assassin are guilty of premeditated murder.

This is not a fevered, emotional take, but simple logic. And any other view, fevered and emotional or not, is simply incoherent. All humans are cosmic accidents, meaningless flotsam bounding through a hostilely indifferent universe. Or we are, all of us, from a just conceived baby to a severely handicapped child at 7 weeks gestation to the newborn to the mother and the abortion provider, bearers of God’s image. As such all deserve the full protection of the law. Anything in between is a sign of foolishness, obtuseness, and stubborn ignorance. There is no middle ground, no scalpel’s edge on which to stand.