Filler

I found a text file with commentary from my pre-blogging days, so I may reheat some when I feel like posting but don't have anything new to say. Most are excerpts from online debates I've had--in this case, a woman opined that since Greens cherish life, we should work to make abortion illegal.


If I understand you correctly, your point is that as environmentalists, we should hold all life sacred, including human fetuses. I take the opposite view: to me it is arrogant and human-centric to think that a human embryo has equal value as, say, a grown dog or an oak tree. Human DNA or not, a first-trimester fetus is on par with an algae colony in complexity and consciousness. (In fact, I would be more upset at the arbitrary murder of an algae colony, because it is part of a balanced ecosystem whereas a human fetus is not.) There are many fully conscious and fully developed humans and animals who are victims of capricious violence and death, and as far as I'm concerned, they should take priority in Green Party policy.

Practically speaking, we can't always be pro-nature and anti-violent--we need to kill other life forms for food, to correct unbalanced ecosystems, to make space for us to live, and so on. You could just as easily argue that those "feed into the hierarchy of might makes right," and maybe you'd be right, but that wouldn't change the necessity of it. (A British satirist recently suggested that environmentalists should all commit suicide, because we're damaging the planet just by being alive!) We need to weigh the merits of the options available to us, not impose a blanket prohibition on all violence; there are many historical instances when nonviolence led to more death and suffering than judicious violence would have.

So let's look at our options on abortion. First, if we made clinical abortions illegal, we would go back to the 19th century--women would be forced to stab themselves with coat hangers, drown their newborns in a river, or raise the child in an abusive relationship because of social or economic pressures. Second, we could set requirements on who can have abortions. No doubt many women today have abortions unnecessarily, but I don't think the state should be the one to decide when they are necessary and when they aren't. That would force women to publicly reveal their private life and sexual habits and would likely drive many of them to unsafe abortion clinics. Third, we could allow women to choose for themselves what is best. To me, that is the lesser of three evils even though as you point out, it is violent and anti-life.