Writing a defense of Richard Mourdock is a pretty thankless job. What it really comes down to is defending the position that any egg that is fertilized and implanted in a uterus is presumed to have a moral claim on the owner of that uterus because Jesus. What James Taranto doesn’t understand is that that clump of cells doesn’t just need the woman’s uterus. It needs her blood. It needs the calcium from her bones. It needs nutrition from the food she eats. And it needs her to care for it for roughly twenty years after it is born. You can see how blind James Taranto is to this symbiotic relationship in the following passage:
But what’s interesting about [Joe] Donnelly’s statement is that he claims to agree with Mourdock’s central premises: that God exists, and that unborn children are human beings worthy of legal protection (or, as the Hill puts it, Donnelly “is also against abortion rights”). Donnelly differs from Mourdock only in reaching the opposite conclusion on the specific question of a rape exception.
That position could be coherently defended on various grounds. One might, for example, conceive of abortion in such cases as akin to justifiable homicide. Or one might offer a purely pragmatic argument: that abortion is wrong in all cases, but only a law with such exceptions is politically attainable.
Defenders of abortion rights do not consider “homicide” to be an appropriate term for describing the termination of a early pregnancy any more than most people think an early miscarriage is a death of a person requiring a funeral and notification of kin. Trust me on this. I’ve been through it.
The defense of our position for rape victims is not that we can justify a homicide or that we are winning a political concession. The defense is that a woman is an autonomous being who has the right to decide whether she wants to continue a symbiotic relationship. If she is not mentally prepared for that relationship or if she isn’t healthy enough to have that relationship or if she in no way consented to begin that relationship, she should be free to end it up to the point that the symbiosis is no longer required.
Babies are not pop-tarts. Mothers are not toasters. But that is how men like James Taranto view pregnancy and childbirth and mothering. Ironically, it’s an infantile way of looking at things.
