RU-486: Poisoning the springs

Human Life Review, Spring 2001 by van Gend, David

There is a line to be defended in human relations, the inviolable line between one human existence and another.

The threat of RU-486 reminds us that this line is routinely violated, and at its most vulnerable point. Vulnerable because invisible; out of sight, out of mind, somewhere on the obscure dark side of the womb.

Routinely, the equivalent of a primary school classroom of children each day is violated in our country's abortion clinics. "Children," as Bob Ellis put it, "who would have loved you." Unknown thousands of embryos are poisoned at a week of age by "morning after" pills, their existence and demise unmarked. In both of these quiet culling fields, RU-486 has its contribution to make.

Ambivalent observers like Andrew Sullivan ("R U 4 Life," p. 37) have responded to RU-486 with a harm-reduction model. He is prepared to accept RU-486 increasing the number of early abortions (up to seven weeks) if it means there will be fewer "more troublesome" late-term abortions (up to seven months). Thereby he hopes to reduce "the difficult psychological impact of late-term abortion on women and families," and the broader brutalising impact on a society aware "that such procedures are being performed on foetuses that could live outside the womb."

"If the pro-life leaders weren't such purists," he objects, they would see that "the long-term effect of RU-486 might actually be to advance the pro-life cause."

Pro-life leaders, I imagine, would first set aside his naive miscalculationunderstanding instead that late-term abortions occur for late-term reasons, unrelated to whether or not RU-486 was available six months earlier.

Late-term abortion guidelines published by Queensland practitioner Dr. David Grundmann ("Abortion over 20 weeks," Monash Centre for Human Bioethics, August 1994), include such late-term justifications as "women who do not know they are pregnant" until six months, or "minor or doubtful abnormalities" in the advanced foetus, or "major changes in socioeconomic circumstances" late in pregnancy.

Such reasons arise in specifically late-term circumstances, for which specifically early-term solutions like RU-486 are necessarily irrelevant. A teenager oblivious to being pregnant until six months was oblivious to being pregnant at six days or six weeks; what relevance there for early RU-486? Sullivan is mistaken in hoping that a reduction in late-term harm flows logically from a calculated increase in early-term harm; RU-486 remains part of the disease, not part of the cure.

Pro-life leaders might then turn to his accusation of being "purist," as opposed to pragmatist.

If "purist" means keeping pure the springs of opposition to adults killing their offspring, then they are guilty as charged. A pure sense of obligation sustains the outrage against abortion-the notion that the simple presence of another human being, however young, binds us to do no harm, to live and let live.

Sullivan's compromise with RU-486 muddies the springs, by appearing to diminish the obligation to our youngest offspring. The fact of a human existence does not vary from week to week; its ontological weight, he should have stressed, is not measurable in grams. The new name spoken at conception may take a lifetime to be fully expressed, but it is there in its fullness from the start. If such insights matter, they are incompatible with Sullivan's advice to trade off the youngest victims of RU-486 against the "more troublesome" later deaths.

This is not to dispute his point that we find emotionally "more troublesome" the cruel killing of a half-born premature baby than we do the unrecognizable loss of an early embryo. But it is to affirm that ultimately size does not matter, and emotion does not adjudicate, in our obligation to our offspring. It is to agree with Australia's Senate Select Committee on Human Embryo Experimentation in 1986, where they urged "that the concept of guardianship be adopted as the most appropriate model to indicate the respect due to the embryo." Even the embryo, our youngest charge, is to be kept within the circle of human care.

Sullivan writes from America, where the approval of RU-486 is the fulfillment of President Clinton's vow in 1993 to make it readily available, stamped with his moral authority. And as the latest presidential election confirms to overseas observers, abortion remains a defining battle in the Western culture wars.

This should not be surprising. Our culture, as a dry matter of history, counts its 2000th birthday from Bethlehem, scene of history's most famous "unplanned pregnancy," and source of the dominant image in our culture's art and spirituality until recent times, that of the mother and child.

Even to those who have forgotten our cultural roots, the relationship of mother and child is tinged with the sacred, or at least with intimate emotion. It cannot be assaulted without deep disruption and opposition.

RU-486 is only the latest assault on this life between a mother and her baby, the latest skirmish in a profound cultural struggle. There can be no retreat, no harm-reduction concessions, because to defend the border between one human existence and another, between mother and child, is to defend sacred ground.