Objectify This

On Tuesday, May 15th, Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas – a Republican presidential candidate who opposes, among other things, porn and gay marriage, was in a televised presidential debate. ” Tell me,” Wendell Goler asked Senator Sam Brownback during Tuesday’s Republican presidential debate, “Since you’ve opposed abortion in every instance except to save the life of the mother, how would you explain to a rape victim . . . why her trauma should be compounded by carrying the child to term?”

Brownback acknowledged that it was “a terrible situation where there’s a rape that’s involved or incest.” But,” he added, “It nonetheless remains that this is a child that we’re talking about doing this to — of ending the life of this child.” [The footage is no longer available, due to a terms of use violation on Youtube.]

Brownback admits that rape and incest are “terrible” but asks us if those women are given the opportunity to abort their pregnancies, “will that make the woman in a better situation?” The answer, he says, is that a child is “the beautiful gift of a loving god,” – presumably the same loving god who pays the bills for that child for the next 18 years.

In their New York Times bestseller, Freakonomics, Steven D. Leavitt and Stephen J. Dubner write that
“Perhaps the most dramatic effect of legalized abortion, and one that would take years to reveal itself, was its impact on crime.

In the early 1990s, just as the first cohort of children born after Roe v. Wade was hitting its late teen years-the years during which young men enter their criminal prime-the rate of crime began to fall. What this cohort was missing, of course, were the children who stood the greatest chance of becoming criminals. And the crime rate continued to fall as an entire generation came of age minus the children whose mothers had not wanted to bring a child into the world. Legalized abortion led to less unwantedness; unwantedness leads to high crime; legalized abortion, therefore, led to less crime.”

The truth is that legalization of abortion allows members of our society to make healthier choices about when they want to bring a beautiful child into the world, and when they don’t. Abortion has an important function in society, which is to present women with the choice about when to be a mother. Those of us who believe in the sanctity of life should be concerned about the military casualties in the Iraq war or the estimated nearly 64,000 Iraqi civilians dead, or perhaps promoting the use of contraceptives. If at any given moment it were possible for men to be impregnated against their will, Brownback might feel a little differently about the rights of the woman. What’s most upsetting about this case to me is that it entails the privileging of the rights of the child above the rights of the woman.