To abort or not to abort

Written November 8, 2007, in response to a friend's post on the subject:

Dude, you took a nose-dive into very murky waters with that one... My feeling is that it's ultimately the mother-to-be's choice to keep the baby or not, religious arguments aside, no-one can know what life they're preventing from flowering, look at this example for instance:

A professor at the UCLA Medical School asked his students this question:

"Here is the family history: The father has syphilis. The mother has TB. They already have had four children. The first is blind. The second has died. The third is deaf. The fourth has TB. The mother is pregnant. The parents are willing to have an abortion if you decide they should.

What do you think?"

Most of the students decided on abortion.

"Congratulations," said the professor. "You have just murdered Beethoven!"

Right and wrong cannot be taken as absolute values, and since none of us are prescient, we can't justify abortion with a statement like," the baby would have been worse off if we had allowed it to live"

Pro-lifers' tend to justify their position based on the idea of a ‘special obligation’ the mother has to the foetus, while the opposite end of the argument follows something along these lines:

A famous violinist needs to be put on a special life support system that requires you to be hooked up to it continuously for nine months to facilitate his organs' recovery from an otherwise fatal illness. while it may be nice for you to offer this most humane of services to the comatose violinist, you're not necessarily obligated to, even though you're the only person who can save them..

The pro-lifers will then counter that abortion is disanalogous, arguing that two people who willingly engage in sexual intercourse, even with contraception, do so at the risk of creating a foetus; and in so doing incur the above mentioned obligation which doesn’t exist between the subject and the violinist in the example.

This argument could go on forever, even without bringing in the complexities of socio-economic circumstance, rape, incest, religion and myriad other factors. What’s the solution? If the choices made by the mother are based on love, and not hate and fear, then I think further questions of the child’s’ successful gestation, birth and later development will become moot…ultimately bringing the questions of willingness and ability to raise the child back to the mother. A loving and supportive father would help.