The abortion debate becomes … well, vivid

Not long ago, during one of PBS' highlight-reel promotions of "Downton Abbey," the hit soap opera set in the fading days of aristocratic Britain, the host warned viewers that the historical drama sometimes explores outdated Edwardian moral attitudes that we today find "appalling" or "abhorrent" or something like that.

The story line she had in mind concerned the Edwardians' harsh taboo against homosexuality.

Last spring's debate over the Confederate flag, the name of Lake Calhoun in Minneapolis and other surviving signs of respect for an era and culture that endorsed or at least tolerated slavery was another recent reminder of how unforgivingly later generations judge their forebears for certain moral errors. This extends even to erroneous ideas that to one degree or another nearly everyone once shared.

Slavery, of course, became explosively controversial among 19th-century Americans. But nearly all whites back then harbored racial attitudes that might qualify as "appalling" today.

It would be surprising if our generation produced the first morally infallible era in history. Chances seem good that, like the people of every age before us, most of us today are doing and thinking certain things — or at least going along with certain things — that will leave our descendants more or less aghast, wondering how we could have been so blind.

And the nature of moral blind spots is that we can't be sure what our era's worst mistakes are.

I pondered all this uncomfortably when I broke down recently and watched the most, well, appalling of the hidden-camera videos documenting Planned Parenthood's fetal-tissue donation program. It's the one in which Planned Parenthood personnel and undercover activists posing as tissue buyers use tweezers to idly pick through a lab tray holding little arms and legs and livers and whatnot.

What troubles me most is the thought that what this awful scene reveals is not mainly about Planned Parenthood and its special wickedness or continued worthiness.

Instead, it's a small and stark glimpse of the reality — at least part of the reality — at the bottom of a practice and a moral choice that our era, our legal and political systems, and our modern culture's collective moral sensibility has embraced — or anyhow tolerated — for 40-plus years, and scores of millions of times over.

We can only hope that abortion isn't the particular thing about our times that later generations will morally condemn, and judge our era for. Because if it is, it's a large mistake, and they will not think well of us.

It would frankly be easier to be confident about our age's future standing if today's defenders of legal abortion made a more confident and positive case for their position. But almost invariably, the pro-choice argument acknowledges that abortion is troubling and unsettling, and involves a difficult and painful personal decision.

All Americans can agree, the argument typically goes, that we should do everything possible to reduce the number of abortions — like funding birth-control services of the kind Planned Parenthood provides, enhancing sex education, etc.

It's a reasonable argument, and an honest one. But it leaves one wondering. If a thing is almost universally troubling, unsettling, difficult and painful, isn't it possible that's because there's something wrong with it?

Yes, but what's wrong may simply be that the true case for abortion rights, plainly put, involves a tragic collision of rights. A woman, in this view, has a right to defend her bodily integrity against the fetus's dramatic (if innocent) demands. Ending its life is the only way to assert that right. It is inherently a tragic decision, but it is each individual's to make.

And certainly individual women living in a society that affirms this right can't be condemned for exercising it.

Still, many Americans will never accept this sort of abortion-rights logic. Many others who do would rather not have it spelled out, maybe not even in their own minds. And so the abortion debate rages on, unresolved, dividing us far more persistently than have other sweeping changes in social norms concerning sex (and homosexuality), marriage, divorce, etc.

The decline in the abortion rate in recent years is welcome, but it's also another reminder that as generations come and go, attitudes can change.

Meanwhile, whatever else this summer's battle over the Planned Parenthood videos produces, perhaps it can usefully draw our attention to the moral questions raised by the research market for aborted fetal tissue. Granting that everything depicted in these videos may be legal, should it be?

The moral right may exist to end a fetus' life. But what confers the right on anyone to turn another's remains into a commodity for the benefit of the rest of us? The dangerous incentives created by conducting any kind of transaction (profitable or not) in human body parts obtained by choice should not be very mysterious.

And the clearest lesson of history is that every era overestimates its moral wisdom.

D.J. Tice is at Doug.Tice@startribune.com.