An Honest Question

On December 16th, my inbox contained a newsletter by Bari Weiss from The Free Press entitled "Weekend Listening: Honest Conversations About Abortion." It seems to have been occasioned by the case of Kate Cox, the Texas woman who was carrying a child afflicted with a condition called Trisomy 18. (She is carrying no longer - she went out of state to have the kid medically murdered). The newletter's purpose was to advertise several of their podcasts in which "honest conversations" dealing with the subject of abortion transpire, and to brag about the fact that not everyone at The Free Press is in agreement about the matter. Ms. Weiss quotes one of her own "researchers," one Neeraja Deshpande, at length, who gives voice to the pro-life side. Ms. Weiss (without addressing Deshpande's points) then offers her own thoughts, first shared with readers in the wake of the Dobbs decision:

I’m pro-choice. My own stance is that abortion is not trivial. It is tragic. And yet the life of the mother always takes precedence.

An obvious question arises: Why is it tragic? It can be so only if abortion involves the death of a human being. Otherwise, it is not only not tragic, it is not anything. It is no more tragic than the removal of an inflamed appendix. And if it does involve the death of a human being, "tragic" seems not quite the right word, since this death is not due to accident or natural cause, but to the intentional, homicidal act of a mother in cahoots with her medical accessory. If it is tragic, it is only for the reason that it elicits from us sorrow and pity at the child's fate, fear for the safety of many others who might meet with the same end, and wonder at how a mother could do this to her own child - but the word ought not be used to veil the nature of the act that brought the tragedy about.

 Further, if we are in fact dealing with the death of a human being, why does the mother's life take precedence? Is it because she is walking around, breathing, laughing, playing, eating, drinking, suffering, having sex and climbing the corporate ladder? I had not known that the value of an individual life was so readily measurable. In fact, I had always thought a life's value to be immeasurable, beyond measure, shall we say. And I believe that most mothers (most, I say) would give their lives for their children if by circumstance or necessity the choice had to be made. But I don't think she'd do so believing that the child's life was more valuable than hers, but only because she loves him, or her, that much. Beyond measure. 

 But if the child is in the womb, suddenly we feel entitled to start measuring value, which requires that we attenuate our love. What accounts for it? Perhaps the answer is to be found in Ms. Weiss's own words:

I also do not think a nine-week-old fetus is the same thing as a baby. Or as the woman carrying it. Which is why I do not think abortion in the first trimester is the same as murder.

She does not tell us why she thinks this. She just does. She much prefers "...places like Denmark and Ireland, which bar abortion after 12 weeks, or Germany and France, which bar it at 14 weeks, and those seem to me like sensible compromises." This is still not an answer, but one cannot be faulted for surmising that her method for determining the point at which we are in fact dealing with a human being or, rather, the extinguishing of an individual human's life, has something to do with the stage of its development. That would be the red line that one must not cross on pain of murder. She just never tells us precisely where that line is to be drawn.

And so I have a question I'd like Ms. Weiss to answer, an answer I do not expect her to give to me, but she ought to give to someone, like her readers at the FP: When did the human being we know today as Bari Weiss begin?