Legal Choice = Moral Equivalence?

Two years ago, when my family moved to New York City, my wife was expecting our second child. Soon after we arrived, she was watching our older daughter in a McDonald's play area, and another mother struck up a conversation with her. It was the sort of small talk to which strangers are accustomed until the other woman learned that my wife was pregnant. The woman immediately asked whether she was going to have the baby. Several days later, my wife made her first visit to the doctor's office. The nurse at the reception desk asked her the usual questions, and then asked whether she was going to have the baby.

These two experiences came to mind as I read the NYT piece, ably dissected by Mark and Rick below, in which the author revels in her decision to abort two of her triplets for no other reason than the inconvenience they posed to her lifestyle. The common theme of the article and my wife's experiences, in my view, is the utter lack of moral shame on display. There is, of course, widespread disagreement over whether abortion should be legally prohibited, but there should be no disagreement over whether abortion is a morally troubling act. Perhaps the more relevant inquiry for American society is not the likelihood that abortion will be outlawed anytime soon (between slim and none), but the likelihood that the law's protection of abortion will eventually dissipate any sort of moral presumption against the practice. As we see from the NYT author, when the burdens of shopping for large mayonnaise jars at Costco and moving to Staten Island are even part of the abortion "cost-benefit" analysis, all bets are off.

Rob