If I can't trust you with your baby, how can I trust you with your vote!

I am incensed!  I got up from my desk and screamed at the television “If I can’t trust you with your baby, how can I trust you with your vote!”  Full disclosure here:  This is an edited quotation.  My original rant contained language that was inappropriate for a family blog.

What blew my gasket on a Monday morning was a national TV ad that presented a string of naked women holding one-word signs to say “If you don’t trust me with my body, why should I trust you with my country?”  Trust you with your body?  From women who will parade their nakedness on TV hid only by flimsy poster board?!?!?!

The subliminal message was so loaded with bad assumptions that I hardly know where to begin.

The point – I suppose – is that they consider abortion to be the private choice of a woman about her body alone and that such a choice should be protected from any sort of limit whatsoever.

Would they really equate the abortion of a “fetus” at 8 months of development with a woman having a mole removed?

Do they really want to extend that legal protection to withholding medical care to “fetuses” that survive an abortion procedure?  Even when  that “fetus” has spent up to two hours outside the womb breathing, crying, extending an arm and grasping whatever she can? 

Are they ready to say that when a pregnant woman smokes, drinks excessively or snorts cocaine that only her body is effected or suffers consequences?

The issue of abortion deserves more thought and nuance than this ad represents.  There are some tough issues that affect one’s conclusions and we are better to face them than to avoid them.  As difficult as they are, there are some matters that need a thoughtful, open, honest and adult conversation if our nation has any hope of circumscribing a consensus on the practice of abortion.  Here’s four to start with:

• When does life begin? 
• How does viability of the fetus impact the decision to abort, particularly now that medical technology can enable survival of premature births at earlier and earlier stages of development?
• How does conception by rape or incest affect the decision to abort?  Click Here for my earlier post on this question.
• At what point is the “fetus” a human life entitled to equal protection under the law – even as we sometimes step in to protect other children from their parents?

This ad reduces abortion to a private decision by a single person accountable to themselves alone that has no resulting consequences or people affected.  It is far, far, far more than that, and we are not well served to think it is.