Why pro-lifers and pro-choices have a communication problem

I thought this essay was excellent, one of the best I've seen at identifying and analyzing the current lack of dialog between the two sides of the abortion debate. Clearly, the author is pro-life, but regardless of your position, I think you'll find his article worth reading.

FIRST THINGS: On the Square: "I submit that pro-life arguments seem absurd to any listener who has in the back of the mind a sense that the embryo or fetus is being constructed in the womb. Here’s an analogy: At what point in the automobile assembly-line process can a “car” be said to exist? I suppose most of us would point to some measure of minimum functionality (viability), like having wheels and/or a motor, but some might insist on the need for windshield wipers or say it’s not fully a car until it rolls out onto the street (is born). We would all understand, however, that there’s no clearly “right” answer as to when a car is there. And we would also agree that someone who claimed the car to be present from the insertion of the first screw at the very beginning of the assembly line would be taking an utterly absurd position. To someone who conceives of gestation as intrauterine construction, pro-life people sound just this ridiculous. For a thing being constructed is truly not there until it is nearly complete. (Moving from ordinary language to metaphysics, we would say that a constructed thing does not have its essential form until it is complete or nearly complete. And it can’t be that thing without having the form of that thing.)" ...

The difference between making and developing is not just an accident of language. Suppose we’re back in the pre-digital days and you’ve just taken a fabulous photo, one you know you will prize, with your Polaroid camera. (Say it’s a picture of a jaguar that has now darted back into the jungle, so that the photo is unrepeatable.) You are just starting to let the photo hang out to develop when I grab it and rip its cover off, thus destroying it. What would you think if I responded to your dismay with the assertion: “Hey man, it was still in the brown-smudge stage. Why should you care about brown smudges?” You would find my defense utterly absurd. Just so for pro-lifers, who find dignity in every human individual: To say that killing such a prized being doesn’t count if he or she is still developing in the womb strikes them as outrageously absurd.

By contrast, if I had simply destroyed a blank, unexposed piece of your film, you would have been much less upset. You really would have lost little more than a smudge. Passive potential does not count for much. Only developing potential already contains its own form (essence, identity), is already the what that it is in the process of manifesting.

I conclude that pro-choice folks think pro-life claims regarding embryos to be not only wrong but also absurd whenever they think (even unconsciously) that embryos are under construction in the womb. And pro-life folks find pro-choice denials of prized human dignity in embryos to be equally absurd whenever they think that the unborn child develops (indeed, develops itself, unlike the Polaroid photo) from the moment of fertilization.

The two sides are not quite parallel in this, however: Human beings do develop. To think they are constructed is flatly erroneous.