How to be pro-life when a 12 year old is pregnant
Arming ourselves to be able to defend the pro-life position effectively necessarily involves facing tough questions, especially those relating to the “hard cases”. These are some of the toughest situations to deal with, not just because they elicit strong emotional reactions but also because they can seem, on the surface, to raise serious moral complexities. This emotional weight and perceived sophistication make them formidable as criticisms to anyone who would care to disassemble the pro-life position. Consider, for instance, a heightened circumstance that one of our recent letter writers recently depicted: an 11 or 12-year-old girl who is pregnant, most likely the victim of some horrific crime. How can the pro-life position offer a principled but compassionate response to such a sorrowful circumstance, one so often used to destabilize the very principle that it is morally reprehensible to deliberately kill an innocent human person? This article examines how to approach the perceived difficulty and respond suitably to such powerful objections.
Initial Thoughts: The Inquirer vs. The Crusader
Whenever we are faced with a challenging case question or objection, it is always wise to begin with initial thoughts regarding the person questioning. Not a question of their name, but a question of who is questioning – that is, whether he is an inquirer or a crusader – is extremely crucial, as the way we respond to him will be entirely different.
An enquirer is someone genuinely in the process of arriving at the pro-life view and on the brink of being able to appreciate its moral basis. They recognize that it is morally wrong to intentionally take an innocent human person’s life and that abortion does precisely that. But they are engaging in an inner psychological conflict in applying this moral basis to a hardcase case. They can perceive an nuance they are struggling to reconcile with their initial emotional response.
A crusader works under a completely different dynamic. They have no interest in the subtlety or the differences of your argument. They are not trying to understand. Their only aim in bringing up the hard case of the pregnant 12-year-old is to make you appear bad and win the debate by making you out to be an extremist. They use the hard case as a form of argument to try to put you in an impossible position or to elicit an uncompassionate response.
Distinguishing Complexity: Psychological vs. Moral
This brings us to a key distinction we must make: the distinction between psychological and moral complexity.
Psychological depth occurs when we know a right and wrong, like the wrongness of knowingly killing innocent human beings, but can’t get the truth of it into synch with the strong emotional feelings provoked by a hard case. Learning about a 12-year-old pregnant girl, especially one who is an assault victim, should shatter your heart. And if it does not, something is seriously amiss. We empathize and sympathize with her pain and with the pain that her family would necessarily also endure. This is completely just; it is recognition of pain and hardship. This emotional response creates psychological complexity due to the fact that we struggle with the moral truth and our intense feelings of sympathy.
Moral complexity, on the other hand, differs. It occurs when there are two real ethical values which clash and we must choose whose value is morally more important under these given circumstances. The given example of it is if you are secreting Jews in Poland during World War II when Nazis arrive at the door inquiring if you possess them. You have a moral obligation to respond truthfully but also have a moral obligation to save innocent lives. While this specific historical context is less complicated than it appears to be, it does capture the type of situation in which moral ideals would seem to clash.
Most importantly, merely because we feel sympathy for the 11 or 12-year-old girl does not mean that there is no objective moral principle operating. Psychological subtlety, developed out of our natural and appropriate emotional response to suffering, doesn’t undermine or alter fundamental moral facts.
Shaping the Hard Case Question: Does Misfortune Make Homicide Justifiable
When we arrive at the issue of the hard case of abortion, that is one like the pregnant 12-year-old, we can bring the moral image into clarity by posing one simple fundamental question: Is this a good reason for intentionally killing an innocent human person?
Applied to this specific case, the question is: Is difficulty an excuse for murder? Is the fact that this pregnancy will definitely cause severe difficulty to the 12-year-old girl an excuse to intentionally kill the innocent human life in her womb?
When stated in this straightforward way, as a defense of actively killing an innocent human being, the alleged moral delicacy which is generally asserted in favor of this practice tends to dissolve. We may see clearly to the right conclusion. Stating the question in this way forces us to confront the fact of what abortion is: the deliberate killing of a human child.
Think of the analogy: Would it ever occur to us that it’s okay to intentionally kill a toddler who is making it tough for someone? We wouldn’t say, “You can kill your six-year-old as long as it simplifies your life.” We wouldn’t think it right to “put out the life” of a newborn baby whose 13-year-old mother is struggling to care for the child just in order to make her life easier. The same fundamental ethical logic applies. We do not have a moral green light to actively destroy an innocent human life in order to make our lives easier. The principle still applies even when the circumstances are irrefutably difficult and cause vast psychological distress. Willfully killing an innocent human life just because the mother is young and the pregnancy is a burden, as long as that burden is not threatening to life, is poor moral argumentation.
Hard Cases Involving Threatening to Life
And then there is the question of threatening to life that does arise in hard case arguments. Assume that the pregnancy truly is threatening to end the life of the 12-year-old? That would require scrutiny. If, in fact, pregnancy endangers the life of the mother, we handle this question case by case as we would handle any pregnant woman. There are, in fact, situations in which pregnancy endangers the life of the mother, and one instance is ectopic pregnancy. In those instances, two human beings will typically be lost if the pregnancy is not ended. The child cannot be saved because of the site of the implantation, and the mother will die from internal bleeding.
A good doctor, of course, wishes to save both patients – mother and child. But consider, in a genuinely life-or-death case, only one can be saved and that is the mother. There, by the above pro-life syllogism (Premise 1: It is wrong to deliberately kill an innocent human; Premise 2: Abortion deliberately kills an innocent human; Conclusion: Abortion is therefore wrong), we are not referring to abortion as defined. The difference lies in the adverb “deliberately.”. When a doctor acts to preserve the mother’s life in a highly life-critical case where the child cannot live (as in an ectopic pregnancy), he does not act with intent to kill the child. He can foresee that the child will be killed, as the child cannot be preserved by current technology and will die nonetheless, but his purpose is to preserve the mother, the only life he can preserve. This is the highest moral good he can do in the circumstances.
This is the line of demarcation between intending death and foreseeing death. In abortion, the intention is to bring about the death of the human child. In a medical procedure to save a life where the death of the child is an unintended but inevitable by-product of saving the life of the mother, the intention is different.
Going back to the case of the 12-year-old girl, we have to consider: is the threat to her life, or to her health? “Health” has been defined so loosely that it can be used to justify nearly any abortion, including psychological health, economic health, or family health. These do not justify killing an innocent human being intentionally. But what of a real threat to the mother’s life?
Other than ectopic pregnancy, we can also reason that the 11 or 12-year-old’s body is too immature to carry a full-term child, or that it would be too traumatic to move a full-term child through her pelvic canal. The second argument is that abortion in such a case is morally justifiable. Do we have to kill the fetus deliberately, however, to save the mother today in medicine? There are other medical options available, such as a C-section to remove the child prematurely before their growth actively puts the mother’s life in jeopardy. While still potentially risky to the mother, premature delivery of the child via C-section is an option that does not involve actively killing the child. We should seek out such options that end the pregnancy without active killing.
A questioner, upon hearing these differences – between moral and psychological nuance, between suffering and threat to life, and between intending and foreseeing death – would necessarily begin to see and to think about them. They would come to understand the moral reasoning that you can’t just deliberately kill an innocent human person to prevent suffering.
Handling the Crusader’s Objection: Using Hard Cases as a Tactic
A crusader, on the other hand, works under an entirely different set of dynamics when making the hard case. They don’t care about your argument’s distinctions or nuances. They don’t want understanding. Their only concern in making the hard case of the pregnant 12-year-old is to make you appear bad and win the argument by portraying you as an extremist. They use the hard case as a rationale to try to place you in a position you can’t maintain or an uncompassionate response.
The way to handle the crusader is to bluff call. Glare them in the eye and say: “Okay, let us suppose that we allow abortion for any 12-year-old who is pregnant regardless of the reason. If we agree on that, will you now sign on to oppose all the other abortions that have nothing to do with 12-year-olds?”
By experience, the speaker describes how 100 percent of the time the crusader will respond with no. Their “no” assures their real position: that abortion is an intrinsic right which must be accessible for any reason. They weren’t actually upset at the pregnant 12-year-old; they were using her situation to hide behind their more extreme view that abortion shouldn’t be limited at all. They were hiding behind the victim to make you appear uncharitable. By calling their bluff, you expose their true position and demonstrate that the hard case was not actually a question but a rhetorical ploy.
The general question we are left with, either for the inquire or the crusader (although the crusader avoids it), remains: Would this be a good reason for intentionally killing an innocent human being?
Standing Firm on Pro-Life Principles in Challenging Instances
That speaks to a broader question of distinguishing between fundamental principles and issues of prudence. That we may disagree on the wisest legislative strategies or the best timing of particular bills, particularly in a challenging political environment, these are credential questions we can debate with one another in good faith. The principle that it is always morally wrong to take the life of an innocent human life in the womb, however, is not negotiable. We cannot negotiate away this core truth. The crusader attempts to employ the hard case to push us toward compromise on this very principle.
It is necessary to prepare ourselves to grapple with these hard questions and hard objections. It requires learning to be able to distinguish psychological and moral nuance, seeing through the delicacy of medical care as opposed to outright killing, and aware of the tactics of the most difficult situations not taken to seek truth but to score a point. It allows us to present the pro-life position persuasively without being unprovoked and intolerant. We must be firm in insisting on the reality that the life of the unborn, like that of any innocent human, must be preserved, even under the most hardcase of circumstances.