Before your unfaithful narrator begins, the Devil wishes to stress that He does not intend to discuss Anton LaVey’s opposition to abortion. Nor does He wish to discuss how Anton LaVey views demonstrated both misogyny and an unusual lack of perspective.
He will therefore not address Anton LaVey’s opinion that the wish for an abortion demonstrates ignorance, negligence, or irresponsibility on the behalf of the would-be parents, or how Anton LaVey criticized the idea that women should have the right to control their own bodies. (Perhaps this explains why, when Anton LaVey’s own daughter became pregnant at the age of 13, she became a mother two months after her 14th birthday.) Least of all does Satan want to discuss the impossibility of mandatory sterilization or use of contraceptives that Anton LaVey proposed as a “third alternative.”
The Prince of Darkness thus leaves it to others to imagine examples when an abortion might have other causes than stupidity, or whether especially women might want a time in their lives when they avoid pregnancy and only later become parents.
No, Satan has something different in mind. He is thinking of the ethical issues about abortion potentially being comparable to murder, at least in those situations where they are choices rather than medical emergencies intended to save a mother’s life.
To begin with, Satan finds that “pro-life” arguments are generally horrendous. Religious anti-abortionists usually apply arguments that make no sense outside of their religions; for example, that abortion is a crime against their god—making it a victimless crime to anyone else. Any meaningful argument should at least appeal to some level of neutrality or reason and leave superstition out of the picture.
Satan also objects to highly polarized positions. Some anti-abortionists believe that a fertilized (human) egg that has not even divided into a second cell qualifies as a human being, but Satan begs to differ. Bacteria are single-celled organisms, yes, but at that stage they are also in their adult life, as it were, whereas it takes about 26 billion times that number of cells to comprise even a newborn baby. It indeed stands a four-out-of-ten chance of developing into a healthy baby, but maintaining that the very first cell was a human being is as absurd as asserting that no child, even after the due date, is human until it is born.
There are fortunately few who claim the latter but Satan thinks there is nonetheless a gray area in-between those extremes where the debate becomes valid. It is in this area that pro-choicers prefer to debate, too, and they usually acknowledge that an embryo or a fetus (the difference is the development of vital systems versus growing bigger) has the potential to become a “real” human being.
Pro-choicers find themselves in a more difficult position than anti-choicers, however. Anti-choicers oppose any termination of pregnancy, period; but pro-choicers must either define the cell constellation in the womb as somehow non-human or admit that they are supporting the termination of innoncent human lives even if they can find good reason for it.
Satan thinks it is more difficult to distinguish between abortion and murder than pro-choice groups tend to do. He thinks they merely assume that some specific developmental stage can be determined and leaves it to the experts—presumably biologists and medical experts—to identify it while the pro-choicers themselves avoids the thought.
It might seem reasonable to conclude that if the embryo were but a lump of body matter with no brain, it would feel no pain and have no level of consciousness. But, already at four weeks the brain of the embryo is identifiable and the nervous system is beginning to form. The mother may yet have just begun to consider a pregnancy test, and it would be too late by this definition. The heart, then? That comes one week later. It is evident that at this point there are signs of life beyond a petri-dish cell-multiplication experiment, even if is on human life support.
Such an observation leads naturally to a second-best option: the distinction between abortion and murder may be the time where the fetus can survive without its mother provided it receives medical life support. (Satan is willing forego the objection that a newborn cannot survive without support either, because it is identical to the aforementioned polarized view.) This stage of pregnancy determines the current abortion time limit in the USA.
Yet, medical advances have continually lowered the age at which a fetus can be saved and suffer only minor inconveniences as an adult. As of this writing, a few fetuses have survived at an age that is lower than the abortion time limit of some countries. Nothing seems to indicate that even younger fetuses or even embryos cannot be saved as methods are improved. The assessment of when life can be sustained outside of the uterus moves steadily closer to the polarized claim that life begins at conception. Come the day when scientific advances allows the construction of an artificial uterus, pro-choicers must face the uncomfortable realization that any argument stating that abortion is only legal until a child may live outside of a uterus is functionally identical to the hitherto religious, extremist position: that life begins at conception.
When Norway became the first country to non-provisionally legalize abortion in 1964, providing abortion within the first 12 weeks of gestation, Norway bypassed such considerations by choosing the time limit so that the mother would suffer minimal medical risk. This limit is still effective today, nearly sixty years later. A similar problem as the above haunts the Norwegian argument, however: by virtue of medical advances, abortions performed weeks later than 12 weeks pose no higher risk to women today compared to the medical situation of the 1960es. The time limit steadily moves towards the other extreme where, ultimately, doctors may perform a no-risk abortion if the mother changes her mind on the due date.
Satan thinks that although medical science manages to save prenatal lives at a still earlier stage and manages to perform safe abortions at a still later stage, science does not exactly help the pro-choice arguments by doing so. Satan thinks that pro-choicers will eventually face an uncomfortable dilemma: either they change their minds and ban abortion with all the suffering this entails, or they must argue why the mother’s body takes precedence, i.e., why prenatal murder should be legalized.
The Devil prefers the latter but thinks of prenatal murder from a different perspective.
Death is not a unique point in time. It is a process. Death may seem instant, but the body undergoes a series of changes before the actual process of dying is complete, often beginning before the person becomes aware of the imminent inevitable. Not even a decapitation is an entirely instant death. There is no specific time during the process of dying that one can establish a time of death without applying a “dead enough” argument. What constitutes “enough” is constantly being pushed by medical science. Some conditions that once made the medical staff cancel life support are now considered generally temporary due to improved treatment.
Birth, like death, is not a unique time point incident either. It, too, is a process during which one cannot meaningfully establish a point in time when there is “enough life,” especially because a child needs support for several years following its birth. It is impossible to answer such a question or even reach a consensus. Satan thinks it is no coincidence that abortions usually cause varying degrees of mental trauma to the women who had them, because more often than not do they feel they somehow committed a wrong regardless how reasonable or even necessary their decision may have been.
Satan thinks the current pro-choice argument of life-capability outside of the uterus is a pseudo-argument serving to justify an arbitrary time to terminate the birth process. It strikes the Devil as an argument similar to allowing organ harvesting from a seriously injured person on the grounds that the person would die without treatment. Satan thinks there is no point in time during pregnancy where one can unambiguously state that abortion is not murder.
Were it not because anti-abortionists care little about the loss of human life while their true agenda is to force their religion and its entire package of methods to control people (not least their sex lives) down everyone’s throat, Satan might even agree with them on the murder perspective.
Satan would prefer that pro-choicers face the ethical challenges of their choice. (And, now He is at it, that anti-choicers would for once take responsibility for the consequences of their decision: causing abortions to just become more dangerous because abortion rates have been found not to drop in regions where abortion is outlawed.) He thinks pro-choicers try to hide behind the illusion that the murder is performed in such a way that it seems defensible and somehow not as murderous as stabbing a child in the back because one does not want this child around. Humans are a hypocritical species and the human brain includes a string of defense mechanisms that make you believe that crime is what only others commit where as you yourself have good reasons. But, barring medical emergencies, abortion is a choice.
At this point it may sound like His Infernal Majesty is opposed to abortion. He stays true to Christian myths, however, and takes no issue with murder. Satan sees such trivial human actions from a broader perspective: the human cost of having a child at the wrong time, in the wrong place, or for the wrong reasons is high at the individual level of the child and the parents; and the social costs of unwanted children and parents who cannot cope is difficult to imagine. Satan thinks the alternative to legalized abortion causes collateral human damage that far exceeds the sacrifice of the unborn. Abortion is not a question of whether to murder. It is a question of who to murder on a broader scale. Satan thinks pro-choicers should admit this instead of thinking the world permits binary arguments.