Sometimes when the subject of abortion comes up, the subject turns to punishment. If abortion were illegal, what punishment would be appropriate for somebody who had an abortion? While pro-lifers agree that abortion is wrong and ought to be illegal under most circumstances, they differ on the subject of punishment. Some think only the doctor should be prosecuted, and the mother shouldn't be punished at all. Some think the mother ought to be treated just a severely as if she drown her toddler in a bathtub. There are various opinions betweeen these two extremes.
These differing opinions are understandable. As a pro-lifer, it seems perfectly clear to me that the unborn are just as human as the rest of us, and that their lives are just as valuable as the rest of us. That makes abortion gravely immoral. But just as there are varying kinds of homocide with varying degrees of severity, I think the same thing applies to abortion. I wouldn't consider it straight up first degree murder, though many pro-lifers would. But thinking it through isn't as easy as answering the question of the humanity of the unborn.
While we pro-lifers generally agree that the right to life trumps the right to bodily sovereignty, I don't think we should dismiss bodily sovereignty as if it carried no weight at all. I can't think of the legal name for it, but I think abortion should be considered a homocide with mitigating circumstances. When a woman takes the life of her unborn (or when she hires a hit man doctor to do it) she is, in a sense, excercising her bodily sovereignty. Since I do think we have a prima facie right to bodily sovereinty, I think a homocide that takes place in a womb is less heinous than a homocide that takes place outside the womb. I do kind of agree that the doctor who performs the abortion carries more guilt than the mother since the one they are killing isn't in their own womb.
There are two ideas that vie with one another when it comes to a mother taking the life of her unborn (or any of her children). On the one hand, mothers have obligations to their young that they don't have to other people's young. It would seem that the more dependent one's offspring are on you, the more of an obligation you have to care for them. The older they get, the more independent they become, and the less responsible you are for them. They are at their most dependent when they are in the womb. So it would seem that's the time when a mother ought to be the most protective. And thank goodness God placed them in the confines of a protective womb so a mother doesn't have to worry about losing them in a crowd. But doesn't that mean that taking its life at that stage is the absolute worst thing a mother can do--to actively kill their own offspring when it needed them the most?
On the other hand, many of us had mothers who at one time or another would say, "I brought you into this world; I'll take you out"? It's a joke, but it's funny because there's almost a grain of truth in it. You would think that if anybody had a right to take somebody's life it would be their own parents. We Christians think God has the right to take life because he created it. We don't grant humans that same right for the same reason, but procreation is the next best thing to God's creating us. So it would seem that if God has the right to take life on the basis that he made it that parents would have similar rights, though not to the same degree. We do, after all, grant parents the right to punish their children, confine them to their bedroom, make important decisions on their behalf, and to basically rule their lives. And it would seem this right goes away as the child grows older and less dependent, which means the right is strongest when the child is most dependent, which happens in the womb. That's the only time in the child's life when it absolutely belongs to the mother in the most intimate way possible. If there were a time in somebody's life when their mother had the right to take them out, you'd think it would be in the womb since that's the point at which is most "belongs" to the mother.
What's interesting to me is that these two trains of thought lead to opposite conclusions. If you follow my train of thought on the one hand, it leads to the conclusion that homocide is the most heinous when it happens in the womb, but if you follow my train of thought on the other hand, it leads to the conclusion that homocide is the least heinous when it happens in the womb.
There are different degrees of dependency, too. The dependency of the womb is different than the dependency when breast feeding, which in turn is different than when not breast feeding but still living at home. Imagine if humans were marsupials. You could put a different degree of dependency in there. There'd be the womb, then the pouch, then the breast, then the house, then maybe financial dependence while at college, and finally off into the world. In the past, whenever pro-choicers have brought up the famous violinist analogy, I've responded by bringing up the breast feeding analogy. I think the marsupial analogy would be even more interesting because a pouch is less "inside" than a womb, but more "inside" than mere breast feeding. It's a deeper degree of dependence. It would be intersting to take a poll among pro-choicers to ask whether they think "abortion" would be permissible in the pouch stage on the basis of bodily sovereignty.
My own view is that life is equally valuable regardless of its degree of dependence, location, stage of development, etc. However, since a mother does have some rights over her own body, that has to be weighed against the unborn's right to life, and while I think abortion is very wrong, it's not as wrong as killing somebody outside the womb. So the punishment for abortion shouldn't be as severe as the punishment for killing somebody outside the womb. I don't know how severe exactly the punishment should be, though. But it certainly shouldn't be anything like the death penalty or life in prison.
I think pro-lifers ought to strive to be consistent in their rhetoric. I often hear pro-lifers say, "Abortion is murder," but when it comes to the subject of punishment, they rarely ever want to treat the mother as a murderer. Of course it's consistent if you want to pin the murder on the doctor instead, but then why not be willing to convict the mother for a murder-for-hire plot? Of course there are different kinds of homocide--there's first degree murder, second degree murder, involuntary manslaughter, etc. Legal codes have all sorts of ways of differentiating between different kinds of homocide. They aren't all treated the same. I think if pro-lifers want to be consistent, they ought to strive to lable abortion in a way that's consistent with how they think it ought to be prosecuted. Don't call it murder if you don't think it ought to be prosecuted as murder.
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