While I would like to believe that logic has its place in modern political dialogue, time and time again I have been proved wrong. Debates are little more than constant ad hominem attacks, and ads twist and corkscrew data to fit any intention imaginable.
Despite these setbacks, I believe that before any law goes into effect, all the logical conclusions should be considered. When emotions take full reign, the law often creates more problems than it attempts to solve – the stronger the emotions, the worse the problem.
So, I groaned when I saw the news about the Human Life Amendment in the paper last week. The HLA, for those unaware, attempts to codify into law the idea that a human being is a person, with all the rights attached, from the moment of conception. The amendment received the A-OK from the Colorado Supreme Court and supporters are now seeking signatures to turn the amendment into a ballot measure.
I will say, without any mind to my own views of abortion, that the HLA is a bad law.
The Human Life Amendment ditches all compromise and achieves its end (fewer abortions) by logical brute force. By defining personhood at conception, the rights to life and liberty and happiness all apply from conception, and so abortion, which would infringe upon those rights, is illegal. Under the law, abortion is murder.
But then, dear reader, what about manslaughter? Intentionally denying the right to life of a person is murder, and unintentionally doing so is manslaughter. Herein lies the problem: Unintentionally ending a pregnancy is a miscarriage.
And miscarriages occur all the time.
While some miscarriages occur due to scrambled genes and therefore no one is at fault, many occur due to specific medical conditions in the mother. Obesity, increased age, high blood pressure, diabetes, and auto-immune diseases all increase a mother’s chance of miscarrying. Once that risk rises high enough, pregnancy becomes reckless the same way a driving drunk is reckless, and under the law they must both be treated as criminally negligent.
I doubt any of the supporters of the HLA intended this result, but it is a logical extension of the law. Note I say logical extension, not logical extreme. An extreme implies that one must consider the one-in-a-million chance in order to find fault. With this law the fault is plain and clear: Either miscarriages could be considered manslaughter or people would be treating embryos and fetuses as different under the law when the law makes no such distinctions. Another law would need to be passed just to clarify the HLA.
So if we already know that such a law would need to be modified after being put into place, why are we bothering to pass a flawed and possibly damaging law in the first place?
It just isn’t logical.
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