Babies, hormones, and abortion

I have a new baby in the house, my third and very likely my last. He is six weeks old this week, still tiny and vulnerable, and still needing nourishment several times during the night. I was sitting up last night, having just fed him, and didn't want to try to put him back down just yet. I leaned back on the couch, lifted him to snuggle on my shoulder, and just spent a moment enjoying it.

Yes, mothers love their children because it's right and natural. For now, though, I'd like to lean on the word 'natural'. The simple act of child-bearing involves some of the strongest hormonal shifts known to the human race. The love that binds that mother and infant snuggling in the early morning is strongly driven by perfectly natural bonding hormones that work on their senses of sight, hearing, and especially scent.

Child-bearing isn't the only system that involves hormonal tweaking of social behavior, of course. Every now and then, two people meet and become very attracted to each other. Nowadays, we call this 'being in love'. Of course, the word 'love' as it has meant throughout the ages has very little to do with the hormonal cocktail driving this initial euphoria. Still, we treat it as though it is the 'strongest force in the universe', capable in many of our stories of breaking down every barrier and vanquishing every foe. We glorify it, put it on a pedestal. Increasingly, we are even using it as justification to break our most sacred contracts and important societal conventions. As long as they're "in love", why deny them anything they feel they need?

Those of you who read the title of this post are no doubt wondering where abortion comes into this. Now's your opportunity to find out. When debating pro-choicers, I often hear the unborn referred to as a 'parasite'. I have also heard the argument about whether it would be right to force a woman to, say, remain in a hospital bed to provide life support for some stranger for nine months, or even one day. The reason why pro-lifers stop and stare in dismay at people who provide these arguments is not because it is such a good and decent argument that they simply have no good counter. The reason is because we do not understand how pro-choicers can neglect the most important issue in abortion -- what the unborn actually is.

Now I'm not going to start on about whether a perfectly human life starts at conception or when you measure brain waves or when the lungs are formed... that's a perfectly good argument for a different post. I would like to address the part of the abortion debate that is rarely if ever brought up. The unborn is the woman's baby. The unborn is part of the woman in a very real and intricate way. Would pro-choicers argue for the inalienable right of a man to amputate his own perfectly healthy and properly-functioning arm? Of course not! We would be more likely to regard the man as if he was mentally ill for even wanting to do such a thing. But nature binds the unborn.. and post-birth infant.. to his mother as surely as if he was a natural, healthy, normally-functioning part of her body.

Remember, half of that unborn comes from something which has been part of that woman's body since before she was born. It is in the womb that the unborn baby girl develops in her ovaries every egg that she will ever have. Even if the father was a complete stranger, the baby is not.

Arguments that refer to the baby as a 'parasite' or a stranger with which the mother must provide life support completely neglect the identity of the unborn, a human being containing part of the mother within himself, forming a hormonal, natural bond with his mother that is every bit as real and valid as the act of 'falling in love' that we prize so highly.