Once again, an elected official is advocating the Bizarro World ethics principle that those with the greatest conflict of interest in a matter are the only ones who have standing to decide it. Conflicts of interest create bias and interfere with objectivity. They are to be avoided whenever possible. How then does someone like Florida House of Representatives Member Janet Long, a Democrat from Pinellas County, while debating the controversial Florida law requiring women seeking an abortion to first have an ultrasound procedure, justify demanding that male legislators “stand down if you don’t have ovaries”?
Women are, after all, one of the two most interested parties (and there are many more) in this issue, the other being unborn embryos and fetuses. It would be equally strange for a legislator to demand that anyone in the body who wasn’t a fetus “stand down”—more so, really, since while there are women who oppose abortion, it is hard to imagine fetuses favoring the procedure, since it does, after all, kill them. Why should only one party in the tough ethical balancing act that is abortion have all the decision-making power? Philosopher John Rawls proposed the use of a “veil of ignorance” to determine what was ethical when examining social acts: the individual making the decision must imagine that he is one of the stakeholders in the decision, without knowing which one. The Lady or the Fetus? Well, one dies, and the other is stuck gestating to term a child that may louse up her life…not all that hard a choice.
Abortion advocates don’t like the “veil of ignorance,” and I don’t blame them.
But the “only women can decide about abortion” argument, apart from ignoring the interests of that pesky fetus, still requires accepting the revolutionary idea that bias and conflict of interest lead to better decisions rather than worse ones. Let’s have criminals make penal policy, and illegal immigrants make immigration policy. “Stand down” regarding college admission standards if you’re not a college applicant. And who better to regulate financial markets than Wall Street itself?
Charlie Rangel was the last elected official to take this page from the Bizarro World ethics manual, when he and others argued that only elected officials with children in the armed forces should make decisions regarding foreign wars. That’s right: make sure the national interests Congress is elected to serve are subjugated to personal relationships when the security of the country is on the line. Charlie’s tactic, however, was awfully transparent: he favored this intentional conflict exactly because it would preclude a fair and rational decision. As long as that emotion and bias-based decision matched the direction Charlie favored, however, it was fine with him. This explains Long’s position as well. She’s not looking for fairness; she just wants to stack the deck. Conflict of interest is good, as long as her interest is served by it.
Rep. Long is not seeking objectivity when she tries to take objective decision-makers out of the policy process, nor is anyone who advocates the reverse-conflict principle, no matter what their issue. It is illogical and unethical.
Don’t be fooled.
Ethics Alarms 
While I agree with your analysis for the most part, the sticking point is the fetus. The debate is not, and has never been, truly about the woman except for the most die-hard feminists. It’s about whether the unborn fetus is already a sentient human being with all the rights of a human already born, or if it only has the POTENTIAL to become one. These positions may be irreconcilable without further scientific evidence one way or another, but stuff like this certainly doesn’t help.
“Sentient” is by no means unanimously agreed upon to be the test for human life. A new born infant is no more sentient than an 8 month old embryo. We are not sentient while we are asleep. The “potential” human argument has always struck me as a concept carefully devised to support a pre-determined position, not an observation that then led to one. Women are in a tough spot biologically, and once their role is expanded beyond motherhood, children can be the equivalent of shackles. Hmmm…how do we come up with a way to justify abortion? I’ve GOT IT! The unborn child isn’t a human, he’s only a potential human!! We should be able to be completely sympathetic with the dilemma women face, and to seek a reasonable balancing of ethical considerations, without having to close our eyes and pretend this isn’t blatant intellectual dishonesty.
I think that perhaps where we can agree is that the balance is best found by a woman and her physician, rather than by the government.
I actually can’t agree with that. The physician is required to look to the patient’s interest only. The question is whether an unborn child, as separate human organism, has a right to some legal protection, which has to be provide by the government. I don’t pretend to know what that protection ideally should be or when it should kick in. But I am convinced that ethically there has to be some.
It really irritates me when people think science has anything to do with the abortion debate. It doesn’t. Science cannot tell you what is moral or ethical, that is up to society. No new research is needed, the development from fertilized egg to adult, although not completely understood, has no unanswered questions that really enter into this debate. The fetus is human, it is not a cat, a frog, or a lemon and it is alive.
The only question in this debate is when is it OK to arbitrarily end a human life. Is it OK as long as the fetus hasn’t developed enough to feel pain (or at least something similar to the way adults feel pain)? Is it OK as long as the fetus is still parisiticaly attached to the mother (the fetus is not part of the mother’s body, its DNA is different)? Is it OK as long as its brain hasn’t fully developed (at 2, 18, or 25 years, depending on who you ask)? These are all arbitrary criterion. Society decides what extenuating circumstances justify such an action, and in what cases.
The Roman’s held that a father could kill (or have killed) any of his children at any time at any age. It just depends on what you are comfortable with. It is society’s decision and everyone allowed a voice in that society should be allowed to weigh in. Legally, it is the government’s position to make laws in this matter and for someone to decide that some of the elected officials no longer get their constitutionally (state or federal) established say in this matter is very serious.
Can’t say science is completely irrelevant…not when the abortion on demand advocates claim that the fetus is no more human being than a wart or a tumor. This contention is subject to scientific confirmation or disproof, and ethical implications flow from it. If some fetus starts sending messages from the womb at 4 weeks, I think the contention that it isn’t a human being will be hard to maintain. We still have an entrenched ethic against taking innocent life, and it is strong enough that abortion advocates have twisted the idea of life into pretzels to avoid confronting it. They even embrace the magical “if the mother thinks its a life, then it is; if not, it’s a wart.”