Reality Is Greater than Ideality

In Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, 1996-Aug, a 21 year-old woman was 5 months pregnant and hopelessly addicted to glue and solvent sniffing. Having previously given birth to three children, she had at least two of them permanently harmed in the womb as a result of her addiction. Social workers tried to obtain help for the woman, but she had refused treatment. In such a case, she had already violated her responsibilities of being a mother-to-be. Even though abortion is not the perfect answer, but it’s a better result to prevent another inborn harmed child.

Promise fetuses a future is to provide them a complete and happiness-oriented future, not a broken and miserable one. Not only from the Canadian case, lots of women who suffered from rape or incest mostly give birth to their children unwillingly. In other words, their children are doomed to have their parents unconcern, or worse, dislike them. If so, this kind of kids is very likely to commit crime in their future since they cannot have a normal loving family and parents. Therefore, if we insist on illegalize abortion and force those women to have their children, we are not only forcing those mothers to give birth to a child but also putting our society into a better risks—promised enhancing crime rate.

Pro-choice side emphasizes more on practical living capacity than on ideal right of living. Even though the Constitution has promised each one of us the right of living, there is an unclear area to define who are exactly the ones to be promised; does fetus have the right as well? Can we call fetuses human beings as well? These are the questions that are still uncertain, but crimes are ongoing, so do the unwanted children keep producing. Sometimes, unwanted children not merely involve in the person will of raising them but also result from the inability of raising them. Some poor young parents might not have full knowledge about contraception or might have financial problem in contraception. Under this kind of situation, if abortion is illegalized, forcing them to give birth to as many children as them can’t avoid can only make their living situation worse. They will have no living quality and their children might therefore suffer from having not enough food to eat, such as condition in most African countries.

Between people having been born and fetuses still in wombs, we can still distinguish them clearly and obviously. In English, we call each human organism those have left their mother’s womb a person; however, we never call fetuses people. In our cognition, the difference between something and someone is consciousness. Apparently people are conscious. They can think and express themselves. Comparatively, a fetus, especially before the second and the third four weeks, is unconscious. It is a part of a human being, not a human being. As a result, when we do abortion, we don’t call it killing, because killing results in death. Death is the permanent end of a life of a person or an animal, causing grief of the person’s family or other people’s anxiety about their own safety. However, abortion causes neither of the two.

In my opinion, abortion is more a practical issue than a moral problem. If pregnancy can only bring misery and troubles, the beings that are already existing should be the ones we consider first, not those who are not being yet. For reality is the foundation of ideality, without dealing with reality—living—it’s impossible to talk about ideality—the right of living.