Trust women

In their article on Monday, Addie Darling ’12 and Natalie Scholl ’13 attacked Gomperts for privileging direct advocacy over academic debate and for her desire to avoid becoming “mired in the ethical debate over abortion.”

In 650 words they repeatedly made a point they could have made in 11: we should have complete academic and moral certainty before we act. Therefore, they concluded, Gomperts should be censured for bypassing “civil discourse” and “the aims of a liberal arts institution.”

I find their argument unconvincing. First, they assume that the academic debate Gomperts is allegedly avoiding will provide a moral answer that will reach either certainty or consensus. If only we had more time, arguments or evidence, they are implying, the issue of abortion would resolve itself.

Yet Darling and Scholl fail to understand that reasoned academic debate only converges to consensus when there is disagreement about empirics or interpretation of first principles. In the case of evolution, theories based on archeological and contemporary biological evidence can be tested and revised, and ultimately the theories can converge upon answers which were not originally obvious. The sides of the abortion debate, on the other hand, are based on mutually exclusive a priori differences, making it illogical to assume that after over 40 years one side will see the error of its ways and pack up shop.

It is also foolish to wait for a unified academic consensus before acting. We don’t need complete philosophical certainty on the nature of private property before we say African Americans can’t be owned. No reasonable person would suggest Harriet Tubman wait for the 13th Amendment before acting. We don’t need to understand the genetic or psychological causes of homosexuality before we can support gay equality. We don’t need to determine whether males and females have identical academic potentials before we can make Princeton co-ed. Analogously, we don’t need to resolve the entire abortion issue before we can observe that it is better to provide safe abortions than let women suffer harm or endanger themselves with unsafe abortion methods. It is difficult to believe that the authors consider allowing women to die of infections and bleach poisoning a more reasonable default position in the short run than that of Gomperts.

There may, therefore, be valid philosophical objections to Gompert’s conduct, but acting before there has been “sufficient” academic debate is not one of them.

Rather than avoid stating my actual views on the issue as Darling and Scholl did, I will gladly disclose that I do not believe that a fetus or embryo has a separate moral status from a pregnant woman. But you don’t need to agree with me to see that Gomperts’ actions are justified.

Let us take, for illustration, the Appellate Court case “In re A.C.,” in which Angela Carder, who had been diagnosed with a rare and usually fatal form of cancer at 13, defied all odds and lived long enough to marry and conceive. In 1987, when Carder was 26-weeks pregnant, her long-dormant cancer metastasized, forcing her to start a potentially abortive form of chemotherapy. The administrators at the George Washington University Hospital, however, wanted Carder to undergo a potentially fatal cesarean section in order to save her fetus on the grounds that it was a morally separate entity with a right to life. When she and her family refused surgery, the hospital convened a hearing and appointed her fetus a lawyer who argued successfully for a court-ordered cesarean section, which, when preformed, resulted in the deaths of both Carder and her fetus.

The Court of Appeals concluded that Carder had been deprived her right to life, body and medical autonomy by the hospital’s assertion of separate legal status for her fetus. This case and Gomperts’ work show us that reproductive freedom is not a matter of life versus choice but of life versus life. Every pregnancy contains risk, and every woman deserves protection. Every woman deserves to come first.

Thus, you need not agree on the moral status of the fetus in order to justify Gomperts’ actions. She saw that countries were banning abortions even in cases of rape, incest and health of the mother, which caused women to seek dangerous, illegal abortions using knitting needles and bleach. She concluded that offering them abortion pills Mifepristone and Misoprostol, which are effective only until the ninth week of pregnancy, was the right thing to do.

By attempting to chastise Gomperts without actually taking a stance on abortion, Darling and Scholl fail to make a convincing case for either proposition. The authors begin with a grave statistic that seems to have been forgotten by the time they conclude, so it bears repeating: “Every eight minutes somewhere in the world a woman dies needlessly as a result of illegal, unsafe abortion.” We cannot wait in vain for a moral consensus on the abortion issue before helping those in need.

Allen Paltrow is a freshman from New York, N.Y. He can be reached at apaltrow@princeton.edu.