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a plague on both your wombs: sense, nonsense, and the peculiar debate on abortionFeb 13 '05 (Updated Feb 16 '05) Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line (In which the naive author mistakes the abortion debate for a curious, interesting question of logic and theology)
I should know better than to talk about the issue of abortion. Especially, I should know better than to talk about it like an exercise in reasoning. Abortion is not an issue that makes me angry, but I’m outnumbered there. Abortion is not an issue that makes me angry, because unlike (say) labor rights, or the attack on Social Security, or the continued assault on our environment, abortion is an issue where the leaders on both sides, as well as their followers, mean well. One side defends freedom and women’s rights; the other side defends the interests of the weak and helpless. Good guys versus good guys: a privilege to watch. What bugs me is how, on both sides, the smartest people I know will spout flimsy, dumb slogans as if they meant something. I probably mean you, although I assume you’ll stop once it’s pointed out. Hey, I have dumb beliefs I haven’t thought about too; no shame in it, as long as we’re open to re-thinking. It’s hard to know what I expect from this article. I’m an idealist: when someone explains to me, in thoughtful and non-rude detail, why I don’t know what I’m talking about, I’ll have one of two reactions: (1) I’ll find some serious hole(s) in their facts or logic, or (2) I’ll admit they have a point, and change my mind. Either way, I’ll enjoy the challenge. I guess that’s what I’m hoping for from y’all; the Comments section could be invigorating. Realistically, I’ll probably piiss you off, and that makes me sad. I am currently Trusted by 236 fellow Epinionators; we will see if that holds up. FORMAT: I will examine first the arguments of the pro-legal-abortion side, then the anti-abortion side, and explain why those arguments make (in most cases) no sense to me. Before we start, though, let me specify that I’m talking about what the anti-abortionists call “abortion on demand”. When a mother is bearing a child whose delivery will kill her, or a child doomed to a short and painful life due to some genetic disease, I have little patience for those “pro-life” extremists who would require such death. Luckily, such extremists are few. I also don’t want to imply that the abortion issue is pure theory to me. The facts that abortion was illegal in the 1940’s, and legal in the 1990’s, may both have changed my life radically, and for the better. (No, I didn’t get some girl pregnant; it’s something else.) However, in an issue said to implicate freedom, femininity, and God Himself, I think my personal concerns rate pretty much a zero. ********** Starting, then, with the legalizers of abortion: * ”You can’t legislate morality”. Fiddlesticks. All laws legislate morality. “Thou shalt not kill” is a moral principle. “Thou shalt not steal” is a moral principle, and “Thou shalt not drill in the Alaska Natural Wildlife Refuge” is “Thou shalt not steal” with a specific example attached. All anti-fraud and food labeling laws are part of “Thou shalt not lie for thine own gain”. “Thou shalt not build a commercial enterprise in a residential zone” is a moral principle, right or wrong, about perhaps the value of personal comfort. “Thou shalt not exceed 55 miles per hour in a zone where the posted limit is 45 miles per hour or the cops might actually get you” is just a refinement of “Thou shalt not kill” to prevent accidental killing as well. “Thou shalt fill out exactly the same personal information on three different forms going to roughly the same place” is a moral principle, although a repulsive one about the virtue of submission. “Thou shalt not kill” is, of course, the moral principle the anti-abortionists are waving, and very few people have any _general_ objection to this. Whether it applies here is another question, but no: you don’t get to take it off the menu because it’s “morality”. * ”A woman has a right to control her own body”. Another attempt to pre-empt the debate, this one not false but irrelevant (and politically counterproductive, because it refuses to hear the other side). The question is whether a woman has a right to control someone _else’s_ body, and there’s no obvious “yes” there. True, that body is dependent on her, and may be no more advanced (at an early stage) than most intestinal parasites, but that body is a human-in-the-making. Almost half the time, it is a woman-in-the-making. For the adult woman, abortion is a quality-of-life issue (a large one, yes). For the embryonic woman or man, it is a life-or-death issue. Whether the embryonic life has rights is the issue; you don’t get to just assume a “no”. * ”Anti-abortionists care so much about unborn life, but then they act against the interests of the born”. Pure name-calling. Admittedly, in some cases it seems to be true, but (1) not always (some anti-abortionists are tax-and-spend bleeding-heart liberals) and, really, not often. The mere fact that someone disagrees with your or my politics doesn’t mean they don’t care about the people affected. And (2) even if it were true, it would be beside the point. Caring about both the unborn and the born is obviously a possible stance, and seems like a rather noble one. Is it always obvious how a non-aborted child would be supported by his birth-mother? Newt Gingrich, then Speaker of the House, proposed an obvious solution: a network of government-supported “orphanages” for unwanted children. If the orphanages were even somewhat decently funded, they would clearly give the unwanted children a better shot at the good life than being aborted would. Newt’s proposal was unpopular and helped ruin his reign of dominance over the Republican Party, but it shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. * ”Anti-abortionists want to set back feminism by keeping women barefoot and pregnant”. More name-calling, but worth a look. I find it unfortunate that many in the anti-abortion movement are also against contraception, safe-sex education, and the morning-after pills which, like contraception, prevent a fetus from ever being formed. (If you’re one of those people, please skip to my section on anti-abortion arguments, where I have some theological arguments I’m trying to make on your own terms.) God said to go forth and multiply, but He also created a support network for us that we’re rapidly tearing to bits, so I think He understands why we’d want to moderate our population as we race past the six billion mark. That said, it’s not clear that we should make abortion readily available, rather than to fight for paid maternity leave and other protections for the pregnant, as well as for orphanages, adoptions, and other ways of letting an unwanted fetus be born and find a home. * ”I’m not in favor of abortion; I’m in favor of the right to choose”. Relax; I believe you. I support efforts to make abortion rarer and safer. Sadly, on the “should it be legal?” question, your wishes are beside the point. The more legal and available abortion is, the more abortions there will be. This is true, in fact, of anything that is widely desired. Abortion itself is a good example of this. Yes, there were a certain number of “back-alley” abortions in the United States for centuries, and certain doctors were known (unofficially) as last resorts for pregnant girls. But as abortion laws were liberalized – and, especially, as Roe v. Wade took affect – abortion rates skyrocketed, reaching 1.5 million per year. I checked state-by-state data, and it increased from around 8-30% of all pregnancies by state (shortly after Roe), to 20-40% in the same states (by the mid-1980’s). Even if we assume that the totals reported before Roe (generally less than 1% of all pregnancies) are much too low, it’s obvious that over time the legality turned into acceptability, and from there into frequency. I’m gonna digress here, because it’s surprisingly hard to convince people that legalizing something makes it more common. Still, it’s the case. Prohibition, for example: it’s chic to claim that drinking actually went up during Prohibition, and it’s also nonsense (although it may have been true among a select set of the upper-class, too influential to worry about actually being arrested). The most definitive history of American drinking was done by W. J. Rorabaugh in the Alcoholic Republic, as he traces not only official alcohol sales figures, but sales of the ingredients that go into making alcohol. Determining the drinking rate during Prohibition is obviously tricky, but he devotes a full chapter to the task, and concludes that drinking declined 70-75% while it was illegal. “What if he’s wrong?”, you ask, sensibly; but that’s unlikely because, when alcohol was re-legalized in 1933, the sales figures were still down 68% from 1918. Obviously, tens of millions of drinkers had gone sober; it was only as time passed that drinking rates increased, finally (in the 1980’s) passing their pre-Prohibition figures. Outlawing alcohol wasn’t popular, but it worked. The current drug war is another example where it’s fashionable, and silly, to pretend the laws don’t work. Almost all adult Americans drink liquor on a regular basis; only a modest minority of adult Americans smoke pot on a regular basis. Do you really think that’s because marijuana – which isn’t a depressant, which doesn’t give hangovers, which enhances the taste of food, which doesn’t cause impotence – is less appealing than alcohol? Of course not: it’s only a minority habit because it’s illegal. Change the law, and the stigma will fade away. Which is a roundabout way of saying that if you support legal abortion, you support more-frequent abortion. I know you don’t mean to; unfortunately, you still do. * ”Abortion is a Constitutional right”. I should tip my hand here and say that I _am_, for all of this, in favor of legal abortion – although I will point to two sensible belief systems, neither of them my own, in which opposing legal abortion is the right thing to do. But Roe vs. Wade was decided wrongly. Roe vs. Wade is just “a woman has a right to control her own body” translated into lawyer-talk. However, asking the Constitution for support makes the argument even less credible than it already was. The Bill of Rights was designed to deal with the self-evident: to take certain issues out of the realm of public discussion, while leaving everything else to “the states” (which we like to hope means loyal representatives of “the people”). One thing the Bill of Rights specifically passed on was religion – and, therefore, the theological questions of “what is life?” and “who has souls?”, which in turn answer the question of “to whom do these rights apply?”. If a fetus is a person, the hypothetical right to privacy doesn’t trump the fetus’s own rights to speech, petition, religion, gun ownership, and not being forced to house soldiers – all rights it kinda needs to get born in order to exercise. ********** On the anti-abortion side, I’ll start with three smaller arguments before I hit the main one. * "Abortion causes pain to the aborted". I promised that I can imagine two valid belief systems in which abortion should be illegal. Here’s one: if you are not only a vegetarian, but you actively believe meat-eating (and leather and other forms of animal-killing) should be illegal for everyone, then it’s equally fair to oppose abortion _after the fetus has developed a central nervous system_. This affects a minority of abortions. Until then, mind you, there’s no “self” around to feel pain, anymore than we feel pain in our sleep when someone elbows us or lands on our arm. We might squirm, and so might the fetus, but pain needs something to process it. Once that exists, a firm 100% opposition to pain is a viable political position. If you ever sneak out for steak or McNuggets, though, you don’t get to use those pictures of The Silent Scream. * "Abortion causes pain and regret in the would-be mother". Sometimes yes, sometimes no, sometimes very much the opposite. And not any of your business. * "Abortion is a symptom of a sick society focused on convenience and self-indulgence above all other values". Perhaps. So what else is new? In many cases, abortion can be seen as a responsible decision to protect the quality of life for those already alive, and to prevent a miserable, impoverished existence. You’re free to hate that decision, but not to deny the ethical thought behind it. I should probably find the study again before talking about it, but a fascinating bit of demographic research into the declining crime rates of the 1990’s found itself able to explain only half the decline through the usual suspects: a better economy, the (limited) spread of community policing, and of course the “baby bust” of the 1970’s, which resulted in fewer young men around to commit crimes by the 1990’s. The authors suggested – and argued in detail – that the other half of the decline was due to Roe vs. Wade. I’m afraid it makes sense: the aborted babies would have been, on average, poorer than the average child, less adequately cared for, and forced to move to new homes far more often. Also, one suspects, less loved. In other words, a crappy life would encourage them to use any criminal instincts they might possess. The attacks on “convenience” have an ugly undertone – often accidental, I’m sure, but occasionally verbalized – in which the birth is a form of punishment for the mother, who shouldn’t have been having sex in the first place. If you’ve ever made this argument yourself, I hope you’ll stop to consider that it’s you who are talking of babies as “punishment”, not as people. I know you didn’t intend that. The “sick society” argument is exactly as name-calling as anything the pro-legal-abortion side has ever argued. Ethical people exist on both sides. * "Abortion is murder". This is it: by far the most powerful argument in the debate. Let’s look at this question of "murder". The killing of a human bothers us more than the killing of (say) a virus or worm or stalk of wheat: is this simply because we have _minds_, an excellent reason, or is it also because we have "souls"? The mind of a fetus is a nothing, functionless. To call abortion murder, we have to posit some soul, some already-human essence that isn't implanted in its outward physical being yet. I see four possible metaphysical truths, and zero evidence for or against any of them. To choose among them is to have faith: one faith is not provably better than another. (1) Embryos and/or fetuses do not have souls. In that case, by default, abortion should be legal because, well, why not? Yes, yes, they're "potential people", but if they have no souls, they're "potential" in the same way that my love-child with Alicia Silverstone is "potential". Further, if you insist that an unwanted child be born now (for its "potential"), you may well guarantee that the mother - impoverished, exhausted, or just sated by the joys of motherhood - will not choose to conceive a later child that she otherwise would have wanted. What about _that_ potential? (2) Embryos and/or fetusus have souls, but when aborted, those souls vanish into nothing. Again, this is a “why not?”. I'll continue the argument. Consider: there are roughly 3 billion women in the world with whom I have never had sex. (In most cases, despite my supposed right to control my own body, this was not my decision.) None of them bore my child. There are a far smaller number of women with whom I’ve had exclusively protected sex. None of them bore my child either. There is one woman with whom I’ve had unprotected sex: no, I’m not proud of this. But it was close to her period, and she didn’t bear my child either. What if she’d gotten pregnant, then had an abortion? She, too, would not have borne my child. In absolutely all of these cases, the result is 0 (zero) new souls wandering around. At a moral level, therefore, abstinence and contraception and luck and abortion would be exactly equal… except that abstinence, of all the choices, did a lot more to make me a bitter and gnarled young man for so many years. (3) Embryos and/or fetusus have souls, but when aborted, those innocent souls go to Heaven. In that case, obviously, abortion is a good thing. I sound like I’m joking, but where’s the flaw in my logic? We need more pregnancies, more abortions! Help give God more company! Why does it fall to me to point this out? Letting the baby be born would only give it the chance to fall into sin, and thus into hell. (4) Embryos and/or fetusus have souls, and when aborted, those souls go to Hell, and/or to small towns in western Iowa. This is the second reasonable belief system in which abortion should be illegal. In fact, if aborted souls suffer eternally, the abortion issue may truly be the most important political issue around. To anyone in Operation Rescue who believes this, you have my completely un-ironic support. After all, you might be right. Here’s my question, though: how many people who oppose abortion actually think that aborted babies go to hell? I’m only guessing, but my guess is: very few. And if you don’t believe that – or oppose all intentional inflictions of pain on all feeling beings, from chickens to pigs to fetuses with central nervous systems – then I don’t understand why you’d oppose abortion, because I don’t see what harm it does. Yes, in honor of "potential" life, you could outlaw abortion and contraception and celibacy, but that has its own problems. I support legal abortion (though not Roe): not because the “pro-choice” arguments make sense, but because I don’t have any reason not to. Your turn, now: do you?  |
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