Stopping a Beating Heart

Last Sunday while waiting at a red light, I noticed this bumper sticker on the car ahead of me: “Abortion Stops a Beating Heart.”

The ad copywriter in me thought, “Wow, what an emotionally powerful slogan.” Then my feminist brain kicked in. At exactly what point, I wondered, does the fetal heartbeat begin? (40 weeks from conception, I learned today.) And what about the mother’s heartbeat… what about her future, her feelings, her life?

Equivocation aside, in most cases an abortion does stop a beating heart. So why, when I can’t go to an animal shelter without agonizing over the puppies I leave behind, when my heart swells with tenderness at the sight of a baby’s face, related to me or not, do I stand so firmly as a pro-choice advocate?

Another way of phrasing this conflict: Can I preserve a choice I believe is fundamental to a woman’s freedom without sacrificing that part of conscience that instinctively protects the small and helpless?

Yes, I can.

Pro-life supporters often use abortion as a handle for dragging the dead horse of their oppressive convictions through everyone else’s rights. “Pro-life” implies support for the vibrancy of living. But typically, those with pro-life views oppose sex education, premarital sex, the distribution of condoms to protect teenagers from contracting AIDS, same-sex parent adoptions of children who might otherwise languish in institutions, and most importantly, social welfare programs to support the unwanted children and unqualified parents who would proliferate without the option of legal abortion. These views do not support life. They punish it.

Pro-lifers wave the flag of a moral code from centuries ago, one in which all sex outside of marriage is promiscuous, one that defines sexually active single women as immoral while excusing the same behavior in men as “normal.” In this punitive view, women who fail society by having sex outside of marriage deserve the burden of an unwanted pregnancy. But when pregnancy is enforced as a punishment, it is the unwanted child it creates that suffers most.

I know that many decent, caring people hold pro-life views. At the March for Women’s Lives in Washington, DC three years ago, as marchers passed the pro-life contingent near the end of the march route, I saw an elderly woman, probably a grandmother, holding a “ Choose Life” placard. She seemed bravely alone as nearly a million pro-choice marchers streamed by. I wondered: was she genuinely heartbroken over the loss of aborted lives? Did her concern for life prompt her to contribute to the homeless? Oppose the war in Iraq? One thing I know for certain is that she was never forced by pro-choice opinion to have an abortion against her will. By definition, “pro-choice” has no agenda to influence decisions to have, or not to have, babies. It merely provides an opportunity to act in accordance with individual conscience.

Yes, not counting the morning-after pill (which pro-lifers also oppose), abortion after 40 days of pregnancy stops a beating heart. It’s too bad that pro-lifers don’t militate for a society that loves, wants and supports all children and every beating heart, including the ones already born. For now, though, abortion enables us to create wanted lives or not, and to consider ourselves courageous, not immoral, when we take responsibility for these choices.