The Principle of Reproductive Freedom

In the comments to yesterday's post, I mentioned the reframing of the abortion debate with the term "reproductive freedom." It's distinct from both pro-life and pro-choice because it eliminates any mention of the child.
Abortion for Harris/Walz doesn't consider the existence of the child at all. They frame it as purely an issue of reproductive freedom, one into which the child and the child's life does not rightly come as any sort of consideration. It's a more unrestricted liberty for them than the first amendment's, which Walz says doesn't apply to people who are spreading 'hate speech or misinformation,' certainly more than the second's, and based on Ms. Harris' prosecutorial days, more than the fourth, fifth, sixth, or eighth. It's the only genuinely unrestricted Constitutional liberty in their opinion; I notice it's also the one the Constitution doesn't protect or mention at all.

Today Reason makes note of the striking contrast between a party which is espousing a pro-family agenda, and one that is featuring vasectomy and abortion vans outside its convention hall. (The schedules for those vans filled up well before the convention began, too.) 

Yet the principle of reproductive freedom doesn't have any enemies. The most devout Catholic agrees that no one should be forced into pregnancy; the Church opposes rape and teaches how to track ovulation cycles as a way of achieving that freedom.* This method may not be foolproof, but it is aligned with the principle that it's perfectly fine to want to be in control of one's reproduction or lack thereof. There is no group in America that opposes the principle being advocated.

What does concern some people is that business about the life of the child. That there is a living human being who is killed by an abortion is incontestably true as a matter of fact. That this killing is morally significant and shouldn't be excluded from the discussion of  how to exercise this right of reproductive freedom is apparently controversial; but it's surely a reasonable position that killing a living human being is morally significant, and therefore deserves consideration in constructing any relevant ethical position.

We are a long way from the 1990s, when abortion advocates appended a desire that abortion be rare to their desire that it should be safe and legal. We are at the point at which the debate threatens to slide past a recognition that there is any issue at all about the necessary killing here, pitting a principle that everyone accepts against... well, nothing. On this formulation there is really nothing to oppose the right, because even the strongest pro-life advocate doesn't reject the principle being asserted; they were only concerned about the life. If the life is no longer a consideration, there's really nothing to discuss. 


* The Church also teaches men reproductive freedom via chastity until marriage, which is in fact the most effective way for men to assert it. The principle of reproductive freedom doesn't extend to men on the left, as they have no parallel capacity to engender a child and then reject it in the way that abortion allows.

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