Democracy requires us to consider the hypotheticals — all of them

Opinion editor’s note: Strib Voices publishes a mix of guest commentaries online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

•••

There’s an imaginary woman who’s eight months pregnant and wants to end her pregnancy for reasons unrelated to the common exceptions to abortion bans (to prevent the death of the pregnant person, to preserve the health of the pregnant person, when the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest, and when the embryo or fetus has lethal anomalies incompatible with life). An imaginary doctor is willing to end her pregnancy.

These pretend humans get bandied about a lot in abortion politics. Some of us find it repugnant to debate about pretend people, along with the entire notion of “abortion politics.”

Yet American-style democracy requires lawmakers to bandy about pretend stuff all the time. When legislators make written laws, they have to think about how they’ll apply in real life, and that means looking to the future, which only exists in the imagination.

When I was a human-rights lawyer, judges constantly asked me about hypothetical people and situations and how the rule I wanted the court to adopt would apply in these pretend scenarios.

A mentor counseled me that a good way to test whether something is the right thing to do is to take it to its logical extreme. In the case of complete bodily autonomy, the logical extreme might look something like a very late-term abortion unrelated to the common exceptions to abortion bans. I’ve brought up this scenario, and people told me I was evil for even having the thought. They shamed me, shut me down, and canceled me on the spot. They said my thoughts were insulting.

Policing others’ views isn’t useful. Therefore, it’s unintelligent.

My views are that at some point, the right to life of the entity growing inside a pregnant woman supersedes her right to bodily autonomy.

Most people would agree that aborting a healthy eight-month-old fetus where the mother’s health isn’t at stake isn’t abortion, it’s murder. Yet many of those same people can’t bring themselves to call it murder or approve of laws calling it what it is. To these people, the bodily autonomy of the pregnant woman is such a sacred thing that they can’t abide attaching any laws restricting it, including ones banning extremely late-term abortions.

Similar to how there are 100 million people who firmly believe that “they” stole the election from Donald Trump and won’t accept an alternative viewpoint, a substantial part of our population won’t accept any ban on abortions and believe that the decision should be left exclusively to a woman and her health care team — end of discussion.

I compare the groups because they comprise vast segments of our country that seem diametrically apart on the surface, yet both make the same faulty argument we’ve been having since the beginning of time: “I’m right. Therefore, you’re wrong.”

If I can imagine a scenario, it exists. In our society, which is organized around money, I can imagine a woman feeling so desperate that she’d seek an abortion at eight months pregnant and a doctor desperate enough to do it. This isn’t about heartlessness; it’s about desperation. Imagining this scenario doesn’t make me a bad or evil person. It makes me a human capable of empathy.

We should have laws making some extremely late-term abortions illegal. Yet too many of us are against the government limiting bodily autonomy to make such laws workable unless they also come with benefits. If we’re going take away women’s right to bodily autonomy and force them to have babies, then we should help women and kids out to the fullest and put them in positions to succeed.

Any law banning abortion should come with things like free pre- and post-natal health care for all women and their babies, a universal basic income for pregnant women through at least six months post-pregnancy, and free child care and health care for children through grade school. That’s just for starters.

We’re never going to agree on abortion politics. But we can agree that you must give something if you take something away. It’s the right thing to do.

Joshua Williams lives in Minneapolis.