The moral blindness of Kamala Harris’ position on abortion

In a surprising statement during a townhall meeting earlier this month, presidential candidate Kamala Harris said, “I’ll tell you, there are probably many here and watching who, rightly, have made a decision that they do not believe in abortion. The point that I am making is not about changing their mind about what’s right for them or their family. It’s simply saying the government shouldn’t be making this decision.”

Really? She actually believes that many people have “rightly ... made a decision that they do not believe in abortion?”

Then why is she promising to reinstate Roe v. Wade if elected? In her words, she “will proudly sign back into law the protections of Roe v. Wade, which basically just says, it’s the person’s decision, not the government’s decision. That, in essence, is what’s behind my position.”

Doesn’t this sound reasonable? Abortion is one of the most personal decisions anyone can make, and so, if anything is “not the government’s decision,” it is this.

What Harris failed completely to address is why “many” people “rightly” oppose abortion, namely, because abortion takes the life of another human being. Could anything be more basic than that?

That’s why we have laws against murder and laws against rape and laws against kidnapping. All of them are transgressions against another person.

That’s also why, more specifically, we have laws against infanticide, even if the baby is intolerable, even if the child has a congenital disease, even if the mother is simply incapable of caring for the little one.

Whatever the case might be, the one thing she (or the father) is not allowed to do is terminate the life of the baby. Obviously. To do so would be to commit murder.

Had Harris simply said, “We don’t believe the fetus has full personhood, and so the government has no right to impose its will on the mother,” that would have been consistent but immoral.

But what she said was this (and I paraphrase): “Yes, many people rightly oppose abortion” — by which, she obviously meant, in their minds, they have good reason to oppose it — “and I’m not trying to change your viewpoint. That’s why we need Roe reinstated. To take this out of the government’s hands and put it in the hands of the mother.”

What she missed, quite incredibly, is that the whole reason we want to put this in the government’s hands is because we believe that abortion commits violence against a preborn child.

To paraphrase again (but with a change of subjects), “Yes, there are many who rightly oppose slavery. That’s why we need to get the ban on slavery reversed, so you can make your choices and others can make theirs.”

This is as nonsensical as her statement on abortion.

Slavery should be prohibited by law because it is a moral evil and abortion should be prohibited by law because it is a moral evil.

In my new book Hearts of Compassion, Backbones of Steel: How to Discuss Controversial Topics with Love and Kindness, I do my best to present compelling arguments for the cultural positions I oppose, seeking to help us respond with more heartfelt, compelling answers.

In the chapter on abortion, I present some agonizing, hypothetical cases, including this:

“Consider the story of a 12-year-old girl whom we’ll call Angela. She was abducted and raped by a sexual predator who had just been released from jail. Who can imagine her trauma? Who can imagine how this horrific event will impact the rest of her life? And how will it affect her whole family? But this is only the beginning. To add shock to shock, Angela finds out she is pregnant even though she is not even a teenager. How can this be? As for the sexual predator, he raped two more girls before he was caught and will spend the rest of his life in prison.

“The only positive thing is that Angela can get an abortion and put an end to the nightmare, without any of her friends and schoolmates knowing what happened to her. At least the horror can be hidden. At least her shame won’t be broadcast throughout her school and her neighborhood. At least she won’t have to put her young body through the trauma of nine months of pregnancy. At least she won’t have to worry about giving birth to a child whose father was a serial rapist and child abuser. Abortion is obviously the compassionate choice.”

We could say in response, “But cases like this, as unspeakably tragic and evil as this is, are the rarest of rare, with abortions performed because of rape or incest making up one percent of all abortions. What about the other 99%?”

That may be true, but it avoids the question at hand: how can anyone outside of this girl and her family make a decision about her life?

In response, I share stories of women who were raped and aborted their babies, only to learn that the abortion didn’t heal the pain. And I tell the stories of some of the finest people on our planet, people who have an incredible amount of good but were conceived in rape.

I can’t do justice to these responses in full here, but they all go back to that same fundamental point: abortion snuffs out a real, human life, a life with unknown potential, however tiny and still developing it may be.

And that is what Vice President Harris fails to acknowledge in the least. It is a massive moral blind spot.