I know it sound’s like a joke. But the punchline is totally serious. According to our laws, a woman can decide to end a human life that exists inside of her for any reason, but a hospital can’t. I know that its not exactly the same, but in many ways it is.

This is really about decisions and the context in which they are made. How we frame those decisions, and the rationale we use to justify them is important. I am not writing about this topic in a context of religious faith, or from a human rights perspective. I am writing about the decisions we make as individuals and as a society, not trying to convince you of anything, but only to give you a different framework to use when you think about these decisions.

From a pure biological sense, a woman is necessary to bring new human life into the world. Her womb is uniquely designed to nurture that life from the moment of conception, through the point of viability – that is when the baby can successfully survive outside the womb. In a sense, a neonatal ICU in a hospital performs exactly the same function when a baby is born before it is fully viable – that is able to survive without extraordinary nurture outside the womb. In a similar fashion, hospitals treat older humans who have been “damaged” who cannot survive without extraordinary measures. In a way, these humans aren’t viable either.

You have to look at science to understand. The basic survival instinct in all humans (and other creatures) is a given. Human laws have always recognized that without any prior knowledge of intent, that we all wish to keep on living. This is the reason that doctors and hospitals by default perform extraordinary measures to save human lives even when the intent of the human cannot be determined. Unless there is a Do Not Resuscitate order, or a medical durable power of attorney so that someone can speak for the unconscious human, doctors will perform every extraordinary measure to save the life. Because the normal assumption is that all living humans want to continue living.  So how does viability matter, and what about unborn humans?

In every real sense, the nurture of a child by its mother does not end at birth.  Socially and legally, we assign parents responsibility for the nurture of children for 18 years. I suppose, that our society doesn’t really get that right, because more primitive societies limit the parents responsibility until puberty, the age when a child can biologically become a parent. From this perspective, “viability” does not really happen at birth. Our society and our laws reflect this, as it is illegal for a mother or to abandon or neglect her child.

Viability isn’t really a thing. In fact, no one knows exactly when a life becomes “viable”, as each life is unique.  Is viability when a baby is born, and can survive?  What about the extraordinary measures available in the neonatal unit?  Does the availability of those measures change the definition of viability?  What happens when science finds a way to produce a human without a womb? It’s only a matter of time. Does that destroy the notion of viability altogether? Does that prove, once and for all, that life begins at conception? I suspect that it definitely does. If a man’s and a woman’s egg are combined and grown to viability outside the womb, through any other means or measures, that completely destroys any other notion about when life begins.

So then with that in mind, how and why do we rationalize abortion, as being a woman’s choice? Without the argument about viability, that prior to viability, a fetus is not a life, there really is no good rationale for allowing a woman to kill the human living in her womb. In fact, without the notion of viability, it is merely a latent form of birth control. Birth control is a form of self-selective population control. That is, when people decide that they want to have sex for purposes other than procreative reasons, and try to not fertilize the woman’s egg in the process, so as not to result in “collateral conception”. This is what happens when, having decided already that new humans are undesirable, a human was accidentally created anyway. Then what? In order to avoid all of the social and economic consequences of one’s action, one simply conspires to the kill the human.

So back to science for a moment:  Imagine, after science has solved the problem of viability, that we can nurture a human from conception all the way to “birth” or whatever you call it, when there is no womb. Imagine that instead of killing the human, it is simply removed from a womb and nurtured via alternative means until birth. What then is the problem?

The remaining problem is the notion of family, and responsibility. Our society assigns responsibility for the nurture of children to their parents.  According to our laws, the woman who gives birth is legally responsible for raising the child as his mother. If identified, the man who contributed the sperm is legally obligated to participate monetarily in child support if in no other way. So what ending the life of that unborn human really accomplishes is the avoidance of this responsibility.

But why do we need to avoid this responsibility? Why is that so important? Society is to blame. We have established a social order that opposes the biological order. We can biologically procreate at a much younger age than we are socially able to form and support a family. Our bodies tell us when “it’s time” via hormonal signals. In every high school and middle school every student’s body is sending that signal. But at the same time, society is sending a conflicting signal. In fact, that conflict doesn’t stop when school is finished. Our bodies were designed to produce lots of children, because that was what was required for survival before civilization, before modern medicine. That means for most of us, as long as we are healthy, our bodies are constantly telling us to have lots of sex, but our society has established limits, mostly economic on how many children we can have and still live “well”.

Without any discussion of morality, I suspect that if we were suddenly to change the economics of procreation, so that the newly born human were to become a source of income, rather than an economic burden, we could drastically reduce the number of abortions.  Further, if we eliminated the obligation to nurture that human for many years, we could virtually eliminate it.  Once science has provided a means to nurture the human life from conception to birth, we can do something amazing. If we simply replace the abortion procedure with a harvesting procedure and hand the woman a check. Change the incentives, and the consequences and the whole equation can change. Alas, the market for humans is a source of different moral challenges. Slavery, human trafficking, and other crimes regarding the ownership and sale of human beings dramatically interfere with the rights of those humans.

So what is my conclusion? Society is in conflict with biology. That creates a need for “escape valves” to avoid the economic and social responsibility for the normal consequences of acting out our biology. Morally, its wrong. Life is life. Of this, there is no doubt or real argument. There is simply the problem of biology and society being in conflict and finding moral ways to resolve it. Before the sexual revolution in the ’60s the signal that society was sending was much stronger. What the sexual revolution did was to convince us that it was more acceptable to listen to and act out our biology. But that didn’t solve the other aspects of the conflict. It created a greater need to avoid the unintended consequences of biology. It didn’t change the moral nature of life or the assumptions around when it is economically viable to procreate.

So let’s ask the initial question again: What is the difference between a woman and a hospital? The hospital doesn’t want to follow its biology.

And in that new punch line, is a pointer to that solution. It seems like a long shot that we could make procreation economically viable at age 12 or 13. So perhaps we could move to the other side of the equation and delay the biological signal, or at least dampen it until that age of economic viability. If that could be done without interfering with the other aspects of physical, emotional and intellectual development, it might make a difference. And while that sounds a lot less fun, it also sounds a lot less frustrating and a lot less expensive. If you want to use the phrase “planned parenthood”, this might be the way.