For the many who bemoan the evils of abortion, including the author of a recent editorial in these pages, a common tactic to elicit sympathy for their cause is employing harrowing imagery of the abortion itself. They talk, for example, of sharp hooks ladling the fetus out of the womb. Such an image tugs on any reader’s heartstrings; no one wants to see a baby impaled on a sharp hook. The problem is, however, that this picture is a gross misrepresentation of reality: the majority of abortions are performed in the first trimester with a vacuum-like device—and no hooks.

The larger error committed by nearly every anti-abortion activist is, however, that their arguments consider only the unborn fetus, without mention of the woman in whose womb it resides, as if she is no more than an incubator for this precious life. Indeed, “life” is the word used by every upstanding anti-abortion activist. But it is not life that’s at stake, it is the potential for life. The law, both in word and in spirit, rightly protects life itself and not the promise of it.

What makes us human—what sets us apart from, say, dogs and chickens—is our consciousness, not the mere fact of our biological existence. A fetus in its first trimester is not a conscious being. It will never know that it might have lived. Its mother, however, is conscious. The characterization of those who have abortions as cold, callow murderers is an unfair rhetorical ploy. The great majority of those who elect to have abortions do so not out of a joy of slaughtering unborn babies, but out of necessity. They inevitably agonize over the decision, both before and for many years afterwards. Yet, for many reasons, they simply cannot have a child. To bring such a child into the world—a world which, at present, cannot support it—is a far worse crime than to abort it. I invite any American who believes that abortion should be illegal to assume the burden of adopting every child that would be born if his wish were granted.

Many of those who have abortions are young women who either didn’t have the knowledge that would have prevented conception—a knowledge which many of us who are either more privileged or more educated take for granted—or whose contraceptive failed. Condoms break. Pills sometimes don’t work. And the argument that abstinence would have prevented such tragedies is an outdated and cheaply moralizing one. Most of us live in a world of which sex has irrevocably become an integral part. Arguing that we deny the right of abortion to women who became pregnant because of neglected or failed contraception—arguing that an unwelcome child should be given the right to, more likely than not, a bad life—is akin to arguing that people who contract AIDS through intercourse should be denied treatment because, well, they deserve it.

It is all too easy for someone who has not experienced the need to have an abortion to decry its immorality; it is even easier for a man to do so, knowing that he will never be pregnant. But the protection of abortion rights is important to men as well as women—where there is a mother, there is a father. A child born into a situation in which it cannot be supported affects both.

While misuses of abortion are inevitable, it is a small price to ensure that every woman have complete authority over her body and life. The anti-abortion activists are right about one thing: the issue here is one of the right to life. But the most important life in the equation is the woman’s.

To those who would still deny a woman’s right to abortion, I have this, finally, to say: the decision of whether or not to have an abortion isn’t yours to make. You do not—and cannot—speak for the millions who will have to make this very difficult choice. It isn’t you who will carry the child in your womb for nine months; and it isn’t you who will have to raise it.

Ian R. MacKenzie ’04 is a history concentrator in Cabot House.