You know something? I agree with Amy Sullivan that abortion is a complicated issue.
I'm a cradle Catholic, born with a crush on the Berrigans and Dorothy Day, and I'm not remotely comfortable with abortion, particularly in the later stages of pregnancy.
And I still like Atrios's attitude better than Amy Sullivan's.
We're never going to apologize our way into victory over the bad guys. Atrios gets that. Amy Sullivan doesn't.
PNH, it's not Socratic ignorance when I say I don't get it. I took Sullivan's point to be not that we should apologize-- I read her as saying whether or not we apologize is not the issue. That is, we (that is, those leftish types who favor legal abortion) should rally around the legal point without making commitments on the moral front. (Or, more accurately, without making commitments about the morality of abortion, as opposed to the morality of outlawing abortion.) I'm not that queasy on abortion myself, but I find the "I'm not sorry" bit to be off-putting and strategically ill-conceived.
That's why I thought Digby had missed the boat, but maybe I'm the one who's misreading Sullivan. I think she's saying, essentially, beat the bad guys by picking the fight you can win, to use your metaphor. I agree with the general point that we shouldn't play "it's just a jump to the right" on most issues, but I don't think that's what's at issue here.
nice post. schenker, a co-contributor to Amendment Nine, also posted this earlier in response to Atrios' initial rant at Sullivan. I think it describes his position a little better, but you also have summed up a good argument as well. Cheers!
I get your point, but I think there's a larger point Sullivan is making about the question of rhetoric and who defines the issue. The problem with being neutral on people choosing to have abortions is that actually that's already what we do--"I don't believe in abortion, but I support a woman's right to have one"--and that implicitly concedes to the right the point that abortion is a Bad Thing. Which makes it a lot easier to justify whittling away at it.
The fact is, that whether or not a given abortion is a good thing or a bad thing really depends on individual circumstances, which is something that only the person making the decision can know. Hence the word "choice." I think that what really needs to be done to frame the dialogue is to be more, not less, vocal about that fact.
From both a political and a moral perspective, Atrios is on the money here. Americans have a strong prohibitionist bent. Take a look at the war on drugs, the wall of resistence to safe-sex education and condom distribution, the eighteenth amendment. We have a nasty habit of trying to rub out anything that rubs us the wrong way. Once Democrats as a group concede that abortion itself is bad, that's it - end of the line. The natural Republican response will be, "If everyone thinks this is terrible, why is it legal?"
Yes, there are and have been anti-abortion pro-choice Democrats - John Kerry, Mario Cuomo, etc. But these Dems walked a fine tightrope, and their belief that abortion itself was wrong was cast against the backdrop of their membership in a party that stridently supported a woman's right to choose. That position was able to survive as the exception that proved the rule; generalized to the Democratic Party, its awkwardness would become a lethal drag on the party itself. The one thing the Democrats can't afford to do is be incoherent on cultural issues, and incoherence is what Sullivan (and Kerry, whose remarked inspired this exchange) is asking of Democrats.
(I'd also add that neither Kerry nor Cuomo nor anyone else opposed to abortion itself but supportive of abortion rights ever won a national race; nor do I expect one to anytime soon.)
And let's be honest: John Kerry's position on abortion IS incoherent. If Kerry believes that a fertilized egg is as human as an infant or an adult human being, then he should see abortion as murder and try to abolish it. Instead he says that a woman has the right to abort that fertilized egg - the cluster of cells he believes to be a human life. In other words: when John Kerry says he believes that abortion is wrong, he's referring to a very different kind of belief than the belief he invokes when he says that every child should have health coverage. One belief is decidedly more substantial, a belief he's willing to do something about. The other is a belief that is less real, less believed-in, to the point where he can actually act against its implications with confidence.
All of which is to say that if you're pro-choice, in a very real sense you are pro-abortion: you want abortion as a procedure to be legal and available and safe, and you don't think it's a terrible psychic blot on the nation that needs to be wiped out. Keeping up some pretense that involved wagging our heads and clucking our tongues while trying to guarantee reproductive rights isn't going to fool anyone - certainly not Republicans, who will have a field day shredding those weak-kneed indecisive Democrats who can't get the nerve to stamp out another evil in our midst.
I think I disagree with you in a couple of ways. Americans *do* have a prohibitionist streak, but they also have a liberterian, stay-out-of-my-bidness streak. (Think of gun control, the way prayer-in-schools issues are framed, etc.) I think the "intrusive government" angle is the way to frame abortion-- not the "abortion is keen" line.
Second, I'm not suggesting that the democrats say that abortion is wrong or bad. I'm suggesting that they argue that whatever its moral status, it should be legal. In other words, I think that anyone who has the temptation to say that the legal issue and the moral issue are inextricably linked should perhaps rethink this.
Third, I don't think Kerry's position is incoherent. I don't think, for example, that the strength of one's belief is so directly tied to one's commitments to act in particular ways. I believe lying is wrong, but I wouldn't support laws to enforce this. Do the republicans want to bring back adultery laws? The abortion case is different in important ways, I grant, but my fingers are tired and I don't feel up to working out the argument in detail. Suffice to say that I'm confident that Kerry's view of Roe doesn't undermine his moral commitment.
Finally, I think the position I'm suggesting is one that resonates with a lot of people. I know a lot of people who accept the permissibility of abortion, and most of them, if they're honest about it, will admit to at least some doubts about the matter. Acknowledging the moral qualms in order to argue that they're not legally relevant is a humanizing position; pretending that abortion is not at all a quandry is a good way of looking like a True Believer.
A further point is that the Democratic (leftist, liberal, what you will) position on abortion is hardly monolithic. Not all supporters of abortion rights have had abortions; of those who have, a very small sample are attending demonstrations under the banner "I'm not sorry". Lots of democrats are in the John Kerry "I think abortion is morally wrong but should not be made illegal" camp that seems to make people more comfortable.
By identifying that slogan as a problem, Amy Sullivan appears to be saying that no one should publically say that they are not sorry to have had an abortion -- that personal experience with abortion must be universally kept secret or publically regretted. If we are universally committed to that position, that abortion is always regrettable, then how can we continue to defend keeping it legal?
For the preservation of abortion rights to be something that we can fight for, there have to be (and I believe there are) circumstances under which abortion is the best choice in the situation. When I had an abortion, I thought that I was making the best possible decision for myself and for all those to whom I have responsibilities, and I am in fact not sorry that I did. If I can't say that in public (while listening respectfully to those with qualms) then I can't support my belief that access to abortion is important.
I'll grant that there's a libertarian sentiment in America, but it's not as strong right now, and in the examples you cite (guns, school prayer) the freedom to X is coupled with the instrinsic benefits of X (guns keep you safer and guarantee your freedoms and are a part of American heritage, prayer in school makes our children more moral). Another example you didn't cite, but which you could have, is pornography, in which intrinsic good isn't called upon, but proximity to a good is: free speech. That is, porn is seen as an unfortunate but unavoidable outgrowth of free speech, and attempts to ban it are seen as the top of a slippery slope that could eliminate socially acceptable speech.
Abortion doesn't comfortably fit into either one of these analogues. Pro-choice groups have tried and failed to put a positive spin on abortion itself, and in fact their attempts to add that positive argument are precisely what Amy Sullivan and John Kerry are reacting against. Abortion isn't as tangibly connected to a larger collection of rights Americans think better of (pro-choice Americans certainly believe that abortion falls into the category of women's rights, but it's precisely this premise that's rejected by the anti-abortion movement).
As it is, the pro-choice argument has become a largely libertarian one - focusing on the choice itself rather than what it is you're choosing. This was good short-term strategy in the 1970s, I'd say, to get Americans to accept abortion rights at the start. It's bad strategy to maintain them in a fight with another side that maintains that you're choosing to murder someone. That is: if you refuse to define the morality of your side, the other side will, and the other side in this case is Jerry Falwell.
My point regarding Kerry is that if he actually believes that "life begins at conception" - or to use more accurate terminology, that personhood begins at conception - than he should believe that abortion is murder. Not rhetorical murder, not pretend murder, but real live, chop-up-granny-with-an-axe murder. He does not, and I demonstrate this by dint of the fact that John Kerry believes in a ban on murder but not on abortion (we can agree that most everyone agrees that lying is wrong, and yet no one wants to legislate against it; I can think of no one who believes in legalizing murder, including John Kerry).
What can we conclude from this? Kerry doesn't believe in an equivalence between a zygote and a baby, or if he does, he "believes" in it in a way that deserves scare quotes. Kerry has a term for this, in fact, that he used during the campaign: he called it an "article of faith," which is a nice way of saying, I suppose, a belief that comes about through lack of any evidence. What's more, Kerry is aware of this lack of evidence, because he describes it in terms that imply as much, and he refuses to act upon it in a way that he acts on, for example, the lack of child health coverage.
Now, I'm sure John Kerry has a deeply-held aversion to abortion. It may come from anything - from the invasiveness of the procedure, from the way it seems to suggests infanticide, from how the very premise of it, and of all of embryology to boot, rails against the "instant soul" theory of individual origin. All of these are reasons to feel "icky" about abortion, and even reasons - irrational reasons - to oppose it. But they are not rational reasons for believing that abortion itself is immoral. If they were, John Kerry would actually be opposed to abortion.
I'm not suggesting the Democratic Party go eating fetuses in public to display their proud defiance of the Jesus People. In fact, my suggestion is more along the lines of a combination of Clintonian "safe/legal/rare" and Will Saletan's framing suggestion here. But on the whole my advice to Democrats is don't freak out and run to the right on this - which is what marginalizing pro-abortion groups would be doing - because the left is unquestionably winning the culture war, and the only question is how much damage the Republican Party and the religious right can do before they wildly overreach and self-destruct. The biggest issue of the election was still terrorism, not moral values, and Democrats need to come up with a coherent, sane alternative to the clusterfuck that is the Bush Doctrine.
We may be dealing with a semantic issue here--there are two meanings of "sorry."
Are we talking "I'm sorry" as in "I'm sorry I just ran over your dog" or "I'm sorry" as in "I'm sorry your dog died of natural causes"? Sorry in the sense of expressing remorse, or sadness? I think Atrios is talking about remorse, but Sullivan isn't. I'm not remorseful about abortion being legal, but I'm sad that it's as common as it is, and think that making it less common is a worthy policy goal if it's done without risking women's lives or liberty.
I don't think that's a possible reading of Sullivan's position. She's objecting to the statement "I'm not sorry [that I had an abortion]". I can't interpret the statement she objects to in any way other than "I am not remorseful." As "I am not sad", it just doesn't make any sense as a slogan.
Clinton's "safe, legal, and rare" is a great position for Democrats on abortion, but it has to be compatible with a recognition that women who have had abortions are not by virtue of that act wrongdoers, and need not feel remorse for it.
"My point regarding Kerry is that if he actually believes that "life begins at conception" - or to use more accurate terminology, that personhood begins at conception - than he should believe that abortion is murder."
No, the most you can say logically is that he should believe that it is homicide. Whether that particular homicide is murder is a different question.
You know something? I agree with Amy Sullivan that abortion is a complicated issue.
I'm a cradle Catholic, born with a crush on the Berrigans and Dorothy Day, and I'm not remotely comfortable with abortion, particularly in the later stages of pregnancy.
And I still like Atrios's attitude better than Amy Sullivan's.
We're never going to apologize our way into victory over the bad guys. Atrios gets that. Amy Sullivan doesn't.
Posted by Patrick Nielsen Hayden | Link to this comment | 12-19-04 7:06 PM
PNH, it's not Socratic ignorance when I say I don't get it. I took Sullivan's point to be not that we should apologize-- I read her as saying whether or not we apologize is not the issue. That is, we (that is, those leftish types who favor legal abortion) should rally around the legal point without making commitments on the moral front. (Or, more accurately, without making commitments about the morality of abortion, as opposed to the morality of outlawing abortion.) I'm not that queasy on abortion myself, but I find the "I'm not sorry" bit to be off-putting and strategically ill-conceived.
That's why I thought Digby had missed the boat, but maybe I'm the one who's misreading Sullivan. I think she's saying, essentially, beat the bad guys by picking the fight you can win, to use your metaphor. I agree with the general point that we shouldn't play "it's just a jump to the right" on most issues, but I don't think that's what's at issue here.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 12-19-04 7:29 PM
nice post. schenker, a co-contributor to Amendment Nine, also posted this earlier in response to Atrios' initial rant at Sullivan. I think it describes his position a little better, but you also have summed up a good argument as well. Cheers!
http://amendmentnine.blogspot.com/2004/12/stop-that-was-wrong-left.html
Posted by Federalist X | Link to this comment | 12-19-04 7:39 PM
I get your point, but I think there's a larger point Sullivan is making about the question of rhetoric and who defines the issue. The problem with being neutral on people choosing to have abortions is that actually that's already what we do--"I don't believe in abortion, but I support a woman's right to have one"--and that implicitly concedes to the right the point that abortion is a Bad Thing. Which makes it a lot easier to justify whittling away at it.
The fact is, that whether or not a given abortion is a good thing or a bad thing really depends on individual circumstances, which is something that only the person making the decision can know. Hence the word "choice." I think that what really needs to be done to frame the dialogue is to be more, not less, vocal about that fact.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 12-19-04 8:23 PM
From both a political and a moral perspective, Atrios is on the money here. Americans have a strong prohibitionist bent. Take a look at the war on drugs, the wall of resistence to safe-sex education and condom distribution, the eighteenth amendment. We have a nasty habit of trying to rub out anything that rubs us the wrong way. Once Democrats as a group concede that abortion itself is bad, that's it - end of the line. The natural Republican response will be, "If everyone thinks this is terrible, why is it legal?"
Yes, there are and have been anti-abortion pro-choice Democrats - John Kerry, Mario Cuomo, etc. But these Dems walked a fine tightrope, and their belief that abortion itself was wrong was cast against the backdrop of their membership in a party that stridently supported a woman's right to choose. That position was able to survive as the exception that proved the rule; generalized to the Democratic Party, its awkwardness would become a lethal drag on the party itself. The one thing the Democrats can't afford to do is be incoherent on cultural issues, and incoherence is what Sullivan (and Kerry, whose remarked inspired this exchange) is asking of Democrats.
(I'd also add that neither Kerry nor Cuomo nor anyone else opposed to abortion itself but supportive of abortion rights ever won a national race; nor do I expect one to anytime soon.)
And let's be honest: John Kerry's position on abortion IS incoherent. If Kerry believes that a fertilized egg is as human as an infant or an adult human being, then he should see abortion as murder and try to abolish it. Instead he says that a woman has the right to abort that fertilized egg - the cluster of cells he believes to be a human life. In other words: when John Kerry says he believes that abortion is wrong, he's referring to a very different kind of belief than the belief he invokes when he says that every child should have health coverage. One belief is decidedly more substantial, a belief he's willing to do something about. The other is a belief that is less real, less believed-in, to the point where he can actually act against its implications with confidence.
All of which is to say that if you're pro-choice, in a very real sense you are pro-abortion: you want abortion as a procedure to be legal and available and safe, and you don't think it's a terrible psychic blot on the nation that needs to be wiped out. Keeping up some pretense that involved wagging our heads and clucking our tongues while trying to guarantee reproductive rights isn't going to fool anyone - certainly not Republicans, who will have a field day shredding those weak-kneed indecisive Democrats who can't get the nerve to stamp out another evil in our midst.
Posted by Chris Mastrangelo | Link to this comment | 12-19-04 9:52 PM
Hi, Chris.
I think I disagree with you in a couple of ways. Americans *do* have a prohibitionist streak, but they also have a liberterian, stay-out-of-my-bidness streak. (Think of gun control, the way prayer-in-schools issues are framed, etc.) I think the "intrusive government" angle is the way to frame abortion-- not the "abortion is keen" line.
Second, I'm not suggesting that the democrats say that abortion is wrong or bad. I'm suggesting that they argue that whatever its moral status, it should be legal. In other words, I think that anyone who has the temptation to say that the legal issue and the moral issue are inextricably linked should perhaps rethink this.
Third, I don't think Kerry's position is incoherent. I don't think, for example, that the strength of one's belief is so directly tied to one's commitments to act in particular ways. I believe lying is wrong, but I wouldn't support laws to enforce this. Do the republicans want to bring back adultery laws? The abortion case is different in important ways, I grant, but my fingers are tired and I don't feel up to working out the argument in detail. Suffice to say that I'm confident that Kerry's view of Roe doesn't undermine his moral commitment.
Finally, I think the position I'm suggesting is one that resonates with a lot of people. I know a lot of people who accept the permissibility of abortion, and most of them, if they're honest about it, will admit to at least some doubts about the matter. Acknowledging the moral qualms in order to argue that they're not legally relevant is a humanizing position; pretending that abortion is not at all a quandry is a good way of looking like a True Believer.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 12-19-04 10:53 PM
A further point is that the Democratic (leftist, liberal, what you will) position on abortion is hardly monolithic. Not all supporters of abortion rights have had abortions; of those who have, a very small sample are attending demonstrations under the banner "I'm not sorry". Lots of democrats are in the John Kerry "I think abortion is morally wrong but should not be made illegal" camp that seems to make people more comfortable.
By identifying that slogan as a problem, Amy Sullivan appears to be saying that no one should publically say that they are not sorry to have had an abortion -- that personal experience with abortion must be universally kept secret or publically regretted. If we are universally committed to that position, that abortion is always regrettable, then how can we continue to defend keeping it legal?
For the preservation of abortion rights to be something that we can fight for, there have to be (and I believe there are) circumstances under which abortion is the best choice in the situation. When I had an abortion, I thought that I was making the best possible decision for myself and for all those to whom I have responsibilities, and I am in fact not sorry that I did. If I can't say that in public (while listening respectfully to those with qualms) then I can't support my belief that access to abortion is important.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 12-20-04 9:06 AM
I'll grant that there's a libertarian sentiment in America, but it's not as strong right now, and in the examples you cite (guns, school prayer) the freedom to X is coupled with the instrinsic benefits of X (guns keep you safer and guarantee your freedoms and are a part of American heritage, prayer in school makes our children more moral). Another example you didn't cite, but which you could have, is pornography, in which intrinsic good isn't called upon, but proximity to a good is: free speech. That is, porn is seen as an unfortunate but unavoidable outgrowth of free speech, and attempts to ban it are seen as the top of a slippery slope that could eliminate socially acceptable speech.
Abortion doesn't comfortably fit into either one of these analogues. Pro-choice groups have tried and failed to put a positive spin on abortion itself, and in fact their attempts to add that positive argument are precisely what Amy Sullivan and John Kerry are reacting against. Abortion isn't as tangibly connected to a larger collection of rights Americans think better of (pro-choice Americans certainly believe that abortion falls into the category of women's rights, but it's precisely this premise that's rejected by the anti-abortion movement).
As it is, the pro-choice argument has become a largely libertarian one - focusing on the choice itself rather than what it is you're choosing. This was good short-term strategy in the 1970s, I'd say, to get Americans to accept abortion rights at the start. It's bad strategy to maintain them in a fight with another side that maintains that you're choosing to murder someone. That is: if you refuse to define the morality of your side, the other side will, and the other side in this case is Jerry Falwell.
My point regarding Kerry is that if he actually believes that "life begins at conception" - or to use more accurate terminology, that personhood begins at conception - than he should believe that abortion is murder. Not rhetorical murder, not pretend murder, but real live, chop-up-granny-with-an-axe murder. He does not, and I demonstrate this by dint of the fact that John Kerry believes in a ban on murder but not on abortion (we can agree that most everyone agrees that lying is wrong, and yet no one wants to legislate against it; I can think of no one who believes in legalizing murder, including John Kerry).
What can we conclude from this? Kerry doesn't believe in an equivalence between a zygote and a baby, or if he does, he "believes" in it in a way that deserves scare quotes. Kerry has a term for this, in fact, that he used during the campaign: he called it an "article of faith," which is a nice way of saying, I suppose, a belief that comes about through lack of any evidence. What's more, Kerry is aware of this lack of evidence, because he describes it in terms that imply as much, and he refuses to act upon it in a way that he acts on, for example, the lack of child health coverage.
Now, I'm sure John Kerry has a deeply-held aversion to abortion. It may come from anything - from the invasiveness of the procedure, from the way it seems to suggests infanticide, from how the very premise of it, and of all of embryology to boot, rails against the "instant soul" theory of individual origin. All of these are reasons to feel "icky" about abortion, and even reasons - irrational reasons - to oppose it. But they are not rational reasons for believing that abortion itself is immoral. If they were, John Kerry would actually be opposed to abortion.
I'm not suggesting the Democratic Party go eating fetuses in public to display their proud defiance of the Jesus People. In fact, my suggestion is more along the lines of a combination of Clintonian "safe/legal/rare" and Will Saletan's framing suggestion here. But on the whole my advice to Democrats is don't freak out and run to the right on this - which is what marginalizing pro-abortion groups would be doing - because the left is unquestionably winning the culture war, and the only question is how much damage the Republican Party and the religious right can do before they wildly overreach and self-destruct. The biggest issue of the election was still terrorism, not moral values, and Democrats need to come up with a coherent, sane alternative to the clusterfuck that is the Bush Doctrine.
Posted by Chris Mastrangelo | Link to this comment | 12-20-04 9:45 AM
We may be dealing with a semantic issue here--there are two meanings of "sorry."
Are we talking "I'm sorry" as in "I'm sorry I just ran over your dog" or "I'm sorry" as in "I'm sorry your dog died of natural causes"? Sorry in the sense of expressing remorse, or sadness? I think Atrios is talking about remorse, but Sullivan isn't. I'm not remorseful about abortion being legal, but I'm sad that it's as common as it is, and think that making it less common is a worthy policy goal if it's done without risking women's lives or liberty.
Posted by Katherine | Link to this comment | 12-20-04 1:52 PM
I don't think that's a possible reading of Sullivan's position. She's objecting to the statement "I'm not sorry [that I had an abortion]". I can't interpret the statement she objects to in any way other than "I am not remorseful." As "I am not sad", it just doesn't make any sense as a slogan.
Clinton's "safe, legal, and rare" is a great position for Democrats on abortion, but it has to be compatible with a recognition that women who have had abortions are not by virtue of that act wrongdoers, and need not feel remorse for it.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 12-20-04 4:19 PM
"My point regarding Kerry is that if he actually believes that "life begins at conception" - or to use more accurate terminology, that personhood begins at conception - than he should believe that abortion is murder."
No, the most you can say logically is that he should believe that it is homicide. Whether that particular homicide is murder is a different question.
Posted by Matthew McIrvin | Link to this comment | 12-21-04 7:22 AM