Perhaps the most ambitious effort ever to tighten a nation’s abortion laws is taking place in Poland, driven by a popular movement and supported by the ruling party — and almost no one in elite America seems to have noticed. NARAL Pro-Choice America hasn’t said anything.

Which is weird. With the pro-choice movement’s hypersensitivity to any challenge to free abortion, you’d expect American pro-choicers to howl in protest. This is a movement so extreme that it will fight against the most humane protection of a child just seconds before birth. They believe that if the laws protect a child who in two minutes will be human even under their definition, eventually the laws will force hurting women to have back alley abortions with coat hangers.

This is a movement so extreme that it rejects a ban on aborting children where the reason for the abortion is that the unborn child is considered the wrong sex or race. The ban, supposedly, is somehow — and this will make your head hurt — “racist” and “xenophobic,” and according to NARAL — and here’s the real reason — “a sneak attack on a woman’s right to choose.” You hear “You cannot kill an unborn girl because she’s a girl,” and they hear “Let the pro-lifers win this one and the pro-lifers will win everything.”

Sensiblely Sensitive

The movement’s hair-trigger hypersensitivity actually makes sense. It’s the way you’re going to feel when you’re desperately holding to a very bad cause — one in which the “optics” are forever going to be bad. The pro-choicers ask us to believe something we can see isn’t true, so they try to keep us from looking at it.

Let me explain. You may believe 100% in the goodness of abortion based on your belief in the individual woman’s absolute right to “control her own body.” Some version of this idea now drives pretty much all abortion advocacy in this country.

Few people outside religious circles use the “tragic necessity” language any more. It’s all about rights and autonomy now. The pregnant woman has the right to abort her child, and you have no right to stop her. Anyone who disagrees is a sexist brute or a religious fundamentalist or both.

Here’s the problem for the pro-choicer: That obviously isn’t true. The claim that a woman must “control her own body” will make intuitive sense to the average American, who’s been raised in a world of hard individualism. At first he may say, “Yeah, sure, obviously.” But once he really thinks about it, he’s on his way to defending the unborn child.

The average person knows that human relations are a lot more complicated than the pro-choice slogan allows. He knows from his own life that all sorts of people make just demands upon us, all of which are by definition demands upon our bodies. We live in a web of relationships, some chosen and some given, that bind us. Only the psychopath lives in absolute freedom.

Everyone Has Rights to Your Body

Your child has a right to your attention and that means he can expect your body to be in one place when you’d rather that body be somewhere else entirely. He wants your body in the backyard for a game of catch, when you want it to sit on the couch watching your favorite team in the ninth inning of a tie game. No one defends the couch-potato dad because he has a right to control his own body. You, I, and the head of NARAL know he doesn’t.

Everyone knows he doesn’t have the complete right to control his own body. Everyone enters into relationships that impose demands.

You get married, you husband or wife has a right to control your body. St. Paul includes sexual intimacy as one of the things spouses have a right to. You have children, they have a right to control your body. That baby crying at 3:00 a.m. asks for your presence and has far more right to it than you have to stay under the covers.

You have friends you truly care for, they have a right to control your body, especially when they really need your help. Your depressed friend has a right to see your body across the table in the coffee shop when you’d rather that body be kneeling by a flower bed planting dahlias.

Heck, you have neighbors, maybe very bad neighbors, even they have a right to control your body. You may not sunbathe naked on your front lawn. Your neighbors have the right to control your body by making sure they don’t see it.

Never Completely Free

Pregnancy is a special example, of course, because the mother’s body contains another body. That’s a burden only they feel. We shouldn’t underestimate how hard carrying a child can be, and how some mothers can feel it to be unbearable.

Still, the pro-choicers have never established how that gives the mother the absolute control of her body in a way that justifies the destruction of the baby’s body — especially for the 97% of babies voluntarily conceived.

I have two points here. The first is that the central, crucial pro-abortion argument isn’t really very good. It’s a “Because I say so” kind of argument. It starts falling apart as soon as someone responds “Who says?” It falls apart more when someone points out that as a fact of normal human life, we don’t absolutely control our own bodies. The claim falls apart completely when someone notes that another body, the baby’s, is involved.

The second point is that this explains the pro-choicer’s hyper-sensitivity to the slightest, the tiniest, possible support for life, because even the tiniest support reveals that no one has such absolute control. Even protecting unborn girls against misogyny and racism they react to as a vampire to sunlight. Absolute control means absolute control.

What We See When We Look

They don’t want the average person looking closely at their central claim. They want him to say “Yessssss!” and send his contribution. Once he looks at that central claim closely, he’s likely to see that no one lives that way. Humanity doesn’t grant anyone such complete control.

When he sees that, he will see that the mother does not have an absolute right to control her own body, when that includes destroying the body and life of her child. That should move him not only to defend the unborn but to promote ways to lessen the burden on the mothers. Because they have just demands on our bodies.