Many of my fellow conservatives are not happy with my position about abortion. They object to my conclusion that this procedure should be legal, but rare. As far as they are concerned, taking any human life is a moral abomination that should entirely cease.
I have been told more than once that life is sacred; that, every person, including a fetus has a right to life. While I agree that there is a right to life, I also believe there is a right to a quality life. If circumstances make this impossible, then preventing years of misery makes sense to me.
My critics say that many unwanted children, who have been brought to term, lead happy and productive lives. Ending their lifecycles before they begin is therefore characterized as a tragedy. I am sure they are correct in this assertion. Much good has come from individuals who might never have been.
Nonetheless, there is another side to the coin. I doubt that many of my detractors have witnessed the depth of despair I encountered during my career. Having worked as a caseworker for the New York City Welfare Department, as a counselor at a methadone maintenance program, and as a clinician at a psychiatric hospital, it is difficult to convey the personal agonies I encountered.
Thus I have interacted with unloved teenage girls whose accidental babies were treated like ragdolls. These infants were expected to provide the affection their mothers missed and hence were subjected to ongoing demands they could not meet. In other words, they too acquired a heartbreaking love deficit.
I also dealt with a stepfather who became so annoyed with his girlfriend’s crying baby, he threw it against the wall to its death. This, of course, occurred after he spent months stamping out lit cigarettes on the infant’s skin.
Then there were the schizophrenic patients whose babies acquired genes that condemned them to the same agonizing fate of their parents. Or what about the twenty-something who was so terrified of becoming a father that he shot off his pregnant girlfriend’s head before he did the same to his own.
But let me share another story I found more distressing. This concerned a young man whose mother was a white prostitute. As I wrote in my book The Limits of Idealism, she abandoned him when he was days old. This left him to be raised by his black street hustler father.
By the age of five, however, his father too abandoned him. This left him in the care of an apathetic uncle. Essentially he had to raise himself in a world where he was rejected by whites as too black and by blacks as too white.
When I knew him he was a drug addict who regularly overdosed to the point of near death. At the time, I regarded these incidents as pleas for help that I was determined to answer. My dedication would demonstrate someone in this world cared about him.
Even so, this was not sufficient to prevent his downward slide. What followed were several failed suicide attempts. Eventually he managed to insult a drug dealer so relentlessly that this man stabbed him to death in a urine soaked hallway. For years, my client had wanted to die and finally found a way to accomplish it.
This is not an isolated case. Many millions of Americans, mostly living in inner city or rural poverty, endure pain they cannot tolerate. Why do you think we are experiencing a drug epidemic in this country? Why has the number of fatal overdoes hit a record high?
Many of my readers imagine that if the appropriate services are made available, this trend can be reversed. Most have probably never attempted to provide such assistance. If they had, they would learn how difficult it is to undo the horrors of abusive childhoods.
Help is possible, but it is less attainable than in our romantic musings. Most people working in the helping professions will tell you that it is usually impossible to assist people who are not committed to helping themselves. Guess what? This includes a huge proportion of those who have endured disastrous childhoods.
Why then is it impossible to conceive of short-circuiting this suffering? Why not abortion in the first trimester before a fetus is fully human? Is preventing desperation really destroying human life?
This is a complicated world in which there are not always good answers. Absolutes have a way of colliding with harsh realities. Sometimes we must make the best out of bad situations.
Melvyn L. Fein, Ph.D.
Professor of Sociology
Kennesaw State University
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