On Abortion

TESTIMONY before Senate hearing on Abortion at the Bloomfield Township Library on February 7, 1970

I would like to share with you the moral and ethical reasoning that compels me to reject the present abortion legislation of the State of Michigan and to advocate the right of any woman to determine whether she shall bear a child or not. I shall not enter into medical reasoning, which I am not qualified to discuss nor into the niceties of legal reasoning, which is best left to lawyers. The moral issue is what concerns me.

It is certainly true that one of the basic moral values of the Jewish and Christian traditions is the ideal of compassion. The ideal implies that one must do all in his power to reduce the amount of unnecessary suffering in the world, both for himself and for others. It further implies that no man should promote a situation of avoidable suffering by failing to prevent it. To passively allow unnecessary pain to exist is an act of deliberate cruelty and is immoral.

One of the avoidable cruelties which I regularly witness is the birth of the unwanted child. The child, who is not desired by his mother, grows up with the painful scars of rejection. No mother, who resents the presence of her child, can effectively restrain her feelings and shield her child from the harm of her own displeasure. Whether the rejection is due to physical deformity, conception under rape, financial hardship, or the desire for greater personal freedom, the psychical result is that the child suffers the I absence of necessary love. The mother, in turn, suffers the agony of guilt – the agony of not being able to provide the child with the love he requires.

A mother, therefore, who chooses to abort an unwanted child is, from the moral viewpoint of compassion, choosing to perform a moral act. She is choosing to prevent avoidable suffering. Moreover, since the fetus cannot be regarded as an individual person until it evolves into an autonomous being whose life functions do not depend on the life functions of the mother – that is to say, since the fetus cannot be regarded as an individual person until the trauma of birth, the moral issue of the taking of human life is not relevant to the mother’s decision to abort. No man has the right, outside of the need of self-defense, to take the life of another individual. But the fetus is not an individual, in the ordinary sense of that word. A born infant is.

The only moral reason for refusing compassion would be the reason of public welfare. Only if an act of compassion would threaten the survival of society is it ethically dangerous.

Throughout most of human history compassionate abortion was immoral. In an underpopulated world, in a world where there was a shortage of people to guarantee social continuity and to perform necessary work, deliberate abortion was selfish and subversive of the general welfare. Neither the suffering of the unwanted child nor the agony of the resentful mother could ethically override the public need.

But in the world of 1970, on an over-populated planet, any act that stabilizes or reduces the number of human beings, and which does not do injury to the welfare of existing persons, is a moral act. An irony exists. What used to be moral has now become immoral. And what used to be immoral has now become moral.

It is not that the ethical principle has changed. It is that the conditions of human survival have changed. What the public welfare used to forbid it now allows. And what the public welfare used to allow it now forbids. Indiscriminate reproduction is now unethical. Compassionate abortion is now desirable.

I therefore urge, in the interests of the public welfare, that the legislature of the State of Michigan give each woman the lawful power to determine privately and discreetly, whether she shall give birth to a child or not. Such legislative decision would be eminently moral.