Chapter 1

The principal issue in this chapter is the morality of abortion, but it is helpful to place this within the larger context of reproductive choices in general. It is helpful for students to reflect on the question of whether, and to what extent, reproduction is a choice. This affects a variety of issues, including contraception, various techniques of assisted reproduction (including in vitro fertilization), genetic screening and manipulation during pregnancy, and abortion. (It also affects a largely ignored issue here, adoption.)

Reproductive choices, however, are not confined simply to the issue of whether to have an abortion or not. Increasingly, couples (and individuals) are faced with choices about how far they want to go in their quest to have children.

This video centers around abortion clinic protests. It’s an interesting video because it really forces the question of what consequences follow from believing that the fetus is a human being. It seems that abortion clinic protesters believe two propositions:

ROY McMILLAN, Abortion Abolition Society: It says thou shalt not do murder.

FRIEND OF PATIENT: Get away from my [expletive deleted] vehicle.

ROY McMILLAN: She's wearing a cross around her neck-

FRIEND OF PATIENT: Get away from my [expletive deleted] vehicle.

ROY McMILLAN: -and [unintelligible] -are you a Christian, ma'am?

FRIEND OF PATIENT: Get away from my [expletive deleted] vehicle.

1st CLINIC STAFF MEMBER; Do not allow visitors access to secure areas.

JOB APPLICANT: Are you going to have somebody here physically?

2nd CLINIC STAFF MEMBER: Oh, yes, we're going to armed guards on the property.

JOB APPLICANT: And when you say armed, are you talking about with guns?

2nd CLINIC STAFF MEMBER: Right.

3rd CLINIC STAFF MEMBER: And we have been guarding this building with our lives.

TED KOPPEL: [voice-over] On the inside, employees who know they may be killed just because they work there.

TED KOPPEL: [voice-over] On the outside, people who say it's all right to kill for the cause.

ROY McMILLAN: I have been selected by God to be a liberator of unborn children from death. I believe that.

TED KOPPEL: [voice-over] Tonight, 'The Clinic: Living Under Siege.'

ANNOUNCER: This is ABC News Nightline. Reporting from Washington, Ted Koppel.

TED KOPPEL: It has always been the object of intensely emotional debate. It has evolved into something resembling a guerrilla war. As in all guerrilla warfare, it is infinitely more difficult and costly to defend against an attack than to launch one. The targets - in this case, abortion clinics and all those who work in them - the targets are easily identifiable, as we saw again in Brookline, Massachusetts, only last December 30th. It is not that easy to know and identify those who plan to attack the clinics. They may be few in number, but they can pick their targets from among the 3,000 or so abortion clinics around the country, and unless extraordinary efforts are taken to defend each clinic, more, among those who work in them, will almost certainly die.

With that in mind, a Nightline team spent a number of days at the Jackson Women's Health Organization in Jackson, Mississippi, where they are just completing construction. Eventually, its organizers say, they wanted to become a more general kind of women's health clinic, but when it opens they will almost certainly and exclusively be providing the one service that is most in demand, abortion. That makes them a target.

JOB APPLICANT: I have done OB-GYN, I've done labor and delivery, I've done intensive care.

2nd CLINIC STAFF MEMBER: Have you ever assisted on abortions before?

JOB APPLICANT: Uh-huh.

2nd CLINIC STAFF MEMBER: We do not intend just to be an abortion provider. We're going to hopefully have some evening GYN clinics for working women who simply want to come in and get their annual Pap smears, their breast exams.

Excuse me a moment. Jackson Women's Health Organization.

SUSAN HILL, National Women's Health Organization President: The providers in Mississippi had been under siege for the last few years, and several had stopped providing abortions. Every state should have more than one provider in the state. Women in the states needs choices and they need options, so we decided to come to Jackson and to establish another facility.

This clinic, so far, has been one of the quieter clinics, surprisingly. We didn't anticipate that. We thought that we were going to have more trouble here than in our last clinic we established, which was in Fargo, North Dakota. In that one we had tremendous problems, construction problems, and a lot of threats to the construction crews. Here we've only had threats to the crew in the last week or two.

WINGO JOHNSON, Construction Foreman: The threat of violence toward our crew is always, you know, a potential, because these people are not mentally balanced, they're liable to vent their frustrations in any form. They're not rational enough to realize that if abortions are legal, their problem is with the state of Mississippi, not with the abortion clinics or the people building abortion clinics.

SUSAN HILL: I've been doing this for 23 years, and so I sort of have always described being an abortion provider as like getting on a roller coaster ride, and there are ups and downs, hills and valleys, and then there's smooth sailing for a few months or years, and then there's another hill and another valley. Unfortunately, those hills and valleys have gotten more violent and more dangerous in the last year or two.

EMERGENCY MEDICAL TECHNICIAN: And there's a wound in the back with no exit wounds.

TV CORRESPONDENT: Eyewitnesses said a white man with dark curly hair, dressed in black, walked in, pulled a rifle from his duffel bag and opened fire, hitting two people waiting for patients and two clinic workers. Ten minutes later, a mile and a half away, a similar attack. A gunman, possibly the same one, entered the Preterm Health Services Clinic and began shooting. Three people, two women and one man, were hit. One of the women, a clinic employee, later died at a hospital.

SUSAN HILL: Well, I think the shootings in Boston alarmed me more than almost anything, although I think I didn't realize how much until I saw the pictures of the young women and- and then went into our clinic in Raleigh and saw the same age women working in front of a desk the next day, and looking at me and saying that they trusted me to make sure that they were safe, and that they would come to work. And I felt an incredible responsibility, and a real weight that I wasn't sure I could make them as safe as they needed to be.

ROY McMILLAN: You're wearing a cross and you just brought somebody to an abortion clinic, young lady? Do you know what the sixth commandment says? It says thou shalt not do murder.

FRIEND OF PATIENT: Get away from my [expletive deleted] vehicle.

ROY McMILLAN: She's wearing a cross around her neck-

FRIEND OF PATIENT: Get away from my [expletive deleted] vehicle.

ROY McMILLAN: -and [unintelligible] -are you a Christian, ma'am?

FRIEND OF PATIENT: Get away from my [expletive deleted] vehicle.

ROY McMILLAN: Ma'am, I'm trying to save a life.

FRIEND OF PATIENT: I'm going to hurt somebody here in a minute.

ROY McMILLAN: Please don't carry on with that language.

FRIEND OF PATIENT: Where's the phone. I'm going to call the police.

ROY McMILLAN: Ma'am, I'm not doing anything illegal, I'm just talking to her.

FRIEND OF PATIENT: You're standing by me and you're bothering me.

ROY McMILLAN: Standing by people is not illegal, ma'am. I'm just asking you to please have influence on your friend.

GAIL CHADWICK, Pro-Choice Mississippi Director: Up until the receptionists were murdered, we still believed the doctors were the primary target. Even when Paul Hill murdered Dr. Britton in Florida last July, the fact that he also murdered his escort, James Barrett, we were hoping might be a fluke, but now we realize that this is an escalating domestic terrorism that is going to be difficult to control.

ROY McMILLAN: Those employees chose to work in a place where human beings are killed. They chose to enter the killing zones and they need to understand and be warned that people who choose to kill and to be accessories to murder may very well have violence done against them to stop the violence that they are perpetrating on human beings in the womb.

Linda Bird Francke’s essay is a powerful piece that usually elicits strong reactions. I would ask students to write a reaction piece to Francke’s essay. One of the strengths of the Francke essay is that it does not fall into the stereotypical mold. She is married, has children and obviously values them, and makes a difficult choice which she recognizes as difficult.

The narrative selections are quite different both in style and in topic. Linda Bird Francke is a journalist; Lauritzen a philosopher. Francke narrates the decision to have an abortion; Lauritzen looks at the choice to pursue pregnancy through artificial means. I think the Francke piece is more likely to touch students emotionally, since more of them have thought directly about the issue of abortion than about infertility. Also, the Francke piece fits in nicely with the later piece by Stanley Hauerwas.

Jane English, "Abortion and the Concept of a Person." This is a great article. It’s nicely structured, the arguments can be easily outlined, etc. Furthermore, it takes an important premise—the idea that the issue of abortion stands or falls on the question of the personhood of the fetus—and challenges it in interesting ways.

I find it helpful, by the way, to supplement the discussion of the English article with some lecture material on Judith Jarvis Thomson’s article on "A Defense of Abortion." Students often do not like the argument because of its superficial implausibility, but they begin to see the point of arguments and how to develop them.

Stanley Hauerwas, "Why Abortion Is a Religious Issue." Arguments such as English’s focus on specific premises. In contrast, Hauerwas looks at background assumptions, and in this piece tries to articulate some of the background assumptions that make abortion a religious issue for many Christians. I have always found this to be a very strong statement of a religious position on this issue. It is not polemical, but neither does it meet its opponents on their own ground. Rather, it tries to show the ways in which a Christian encounters this problem on a different moral landscape.

Don Marquis, "Why Abortion Is Immoral." Marquis’ article, which is reprinted here in its entirety, is a very strongly argued piece. One of its chief virtues, from my point of view, is that it sidesteps scientific debates about fetal development and instead looks at the crucial issue of a "future-like-ours." This is also an interesting position because it does not condemn contraception or euthanasia.

George W. Harris, "Fathers and Fetuses." This piece addresses an often neglected issue: what morally legitimate voice should biological fathers have in the decision about abortion? Harris’s piece does a nice job of sketching out s series of cases, outlining the morally relevant differences between them, and then staking out a reasonable position on when a woman’s decision to have an abortion would count as a wrongful harm to the father.

In teaching this article, be wary of creating a misleading impression. All too often, I suspect, the issue in not that the woman wants an abortion and the man does not. In many cases, the situation is reversed. Women have been pressured by men into having abortions, and sometimes have had them simply for lack of support from the biological fathers. A concern with the Harris article may inadvertently obscure this important and more common issue.

Search Thomas (http://thomas.loc.gov) for latest information on abortion legislation.