Did Riker have an abortion when he phasered his clone?
Remember in "Up the long ladder", where the clones ask Riker and Pulaski to donate cells to revitalize the clones' gene pool? When Riker politely refuses, the clones stun Riker and Pulaski and take cells from them for cloning without their permission.
Riker eventually figures out what has happened. (For some unexplained reason, he and Pulaski don't seem to recall being stunned.) When he discovers the cloning chambers with clones forming that look like him and Pulaski, he destroys them with his phaser.
But consider his actions from the perspective of abortion. Riker, the owner of the cells that were taken, is acting like a host mother who is simply deciding to terminate her unintended pregnancy. He even remarked that it was his right to choose, echoing the "woman's right to choose" refrain of women's and abortion-rights advocates.
But what kind of abortion was it: of a first, second, or third trimester fetus? When Riker looks into the cloning chamber, he doesn't see a microscopic embryo, or even a small fetus; he sees a large, man shaped object that looks well on its way to becoming sentient. In this regard there is no other way to refer to the abortion than as a third trimester abortion; the "fetus" is much too well-formed to suggest otherwise.
But while Riker, in effect, is performing the equivalent of a third-trimester abortion, it is obviously not one on a fetus that is "viable." Viabity means the ability to survive outside the mother's womb. But clones are not gestated in a human womb. Instead, the cloning chamber serves as the womb. And since Riker zaps them in the cloning chamber, he is shooting them while they are still short of viability, from a symbolic perspective.
So what conclusion are we to draw from Riker's pregnancy? First, that Star Trek is making an unabashed statement that abortion is a morally acceptable choice for the host mother, even for termination of "pregnancies of convenience," even in the third trimester, just as long as the fetus is not viable. That's an important distinction to note because the US Supreme Court has ruled that once a fetus is "viable," that the government can ban an abortion. And, after all, one cannot imagine Riker phasering a clone of himself that was up and about and walking under its own power.
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