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Introduction: Abortion: Battle Redefined
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20503 |
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MODERN THOUGHT
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5 / 1992 |
1,611 Words |
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The Vietnam era in America saw thousands of young men burning their draft cards and thousands of other citizens flaunting bumper stickers declaring, America: Love It or Leave It! Few people thought that the country would ever again find itself in the throes of such a pitched "civil war."
But then came the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized abortion, striking down antiabortion laws in all states. The ruling also made a quasi-theological declaration that the human fetus embodies only the "potentiality of human life" that appeared to reject the Vatican and evangelical Christian notion that abortion is murder.
This stirred a social "civil war" that has endured in its full fury till this day and that was equaled in bitterness only by the battles over slavery, women's suffrage, Prohibition, civil rights, and Vietnam.
As in previous "civil wars," the abortion war has pitted competing rights and goods against one another. The challenge for both polity and public has been to weight these rights and goods and to decide which deserve to be backed by government.
In the slavery imbroglio, the clash was between states' rights and human rights. With Prohibition, it was moral and health values (and the right of government to impose them on all citizens) versus individual liberty. With Vietnam, it was, on the one hand, self-determination for Saigon and anticommunism and, on the other, noninterference in a conflict that may have been none of Washington's business.
With abortion, the battle is between opposing individual rights: the right to life (of the fetus) and the right to choose (to end a pregnancy through abortion).
The debate over abortion touches such sensitive nerves because it involves some of the most fundamental elements of our lives: life, death, morality, murder, liberty, and religion.
Indeed, the debate often assumes the character of a religious war. One side cites chapter and verse of Scripture to show that the fetus--even from the time it is a zygote--is a fully ensouled human being. The other side invokes the sacrosanctity of the individual, the inviolability of personal freedom, echoing powerful trends of the past several decades that have borne up a pervasive though unorganized religion of "selfism":
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