Moral Exceptions

With the Tea Party making real gains this election season, it’s becoming more and more common to hear candidates stating that they don’t believe in abortion even in cases of rape and incest.  This is a relatively new phenomenon, as in the past, even staunch anti-choice politicians wouldn’t admit to being so cold and callous as to expect teen girls who have been raped by their fathers to carry the resulting child to term.  While they might believe abortion should be outlawed in all cases with no exceptions, they rarely go that far when questioned about their abortion beliefs by the press.

Nevada senatorial candidate Sharron Angle recently stated in a television interview that women who were raped should turn lemons into lemonade because “God has a plan and a purpose for each one of our lives.”  Putting aside the debate about whether religious beliefs should influence public policy, this is an incredibly insensitive statement for a major political candidate to make.

As moral people, we not only have to measure our actions against religious and/or social yardsticks, we have to consider the broader ethical implications of those actions.  While it may be the most moral position to oppose all killing by choice, we as a society have decided that certain exceptions are allowed within that moral framework.  This is especially true when our decisions don’t impact everyone equally.

We choose to send troops into battle, knowing that a certain number of them will die.  By not sending more aid or spending more money to help Pakistan deal with massive floods or Haiti recover from their recent earthquake, we choose to allow citizens of those countries to die.  We choose to cut funding for homeless shelters, free clinics and food stamps, knowing those decisions mean American citizens will die.

In adopting these policies, we are forced to consider the resulting impact on multiple groups of people.  In cases of war, we accept that for the security of all citizens, a few soldiers must be killed.  We place our national security over the lives of those people who are killed by our bombs in Afghanistan.  In choosing the death penalty, we defer to the feelings of families whose loved ones were victims of a serial killer, despite it having a higher financial cost than life in prison without parole – a cost which must be paid for by everyone.  We carve out exceptions from our moral opposition to killing every day, and abortion shouldn’t be any different.

Even if a majority of Americans believed that abortion should be outlawed (which they don’t), we must always allow it in cases of rape and incest – because sometimes the needs of a few individuals outweigh the opinions of the many.  No matter which side of the abortion debate you’re on, the objective should be to reduce the number of unintended pregnancies, not to penalize already-victimized women because of a personal or political quest for moral certainty.