Except, as the Supreme Court and most Americans recognize, this isn't an issue only about a woman's "internal organs" or her autonomy.
There's a competing interest involved.
The degree of respect and importance that we accord that competing interest is a difficult one, and not answered by one's beliefs with respect to autonomy.
It would be sufficient proof that Saletan is an asshole that he recommends abstinence for those who can practice it. There's nothing there to indicate that he doesn't respect women's right to choose how they live their lives, no there isn't. After all, he does think that those dirty sluts who just can't practice abstinence should be allowed access to contraception, which is an amazing brilliant idea he just thought up himself.
Except, as the Supreme Court and most Americans recognize, this isn't an issue only about a woman's "internal organs" or her autonomy.
There's a competing interest involved.
Calling it a difficult question, and raising a 'competing interest' sounds balanced, but it gets less persuasive the more specific you get. Whose interest? If it's the state's, then saying that the state's interest in anything overrides a woman's interest in what's happening inside her own body sounds to me like a serious invasion of her autonomy. If it's the fetus' (restricting the conversation, for the moment, to the first two trimesters), are you taking the position that the interests of a non-sentient mass of tissue with the potential, but no more, of developing into a human being is more compelling than that of the woman?
I can sympathize, while disagreeing with, someone who says that abortion is a sin because God disapproves of it. Fuzzy arguments, alluded to rather than made, about how disturbing abortion is and so maybe that disturbingness sometimes should justify a prohibition, on the other hand annoy me -- if you're going to take a moral or ethical stance, you should take it. If you haven't thought through the issue enough to have a defensible opinion on whether something is wrong, you should step away from the issue and leave it to people who do have opinions.
To put it bluntly, an embryo or fetus is a parasite in the woman's body. She has as much right to get it removed as I do to get a tumor removed from my body.
LB, I think that's a little tendentious. It seems to me Andrew was just trying to point out that one could make an argument for competing fetal interest for some other reason than that one disregarded the woman's autonomy, and he should be allowed to point out the existence of those arguments. I think Jill at Feministe would be more convincing if she said "restricting abortion is an unacceptable abridgement of women's autonomy" rather than "anyone who suggests otherwise does not believe that women are complete individuals." I suspect that you'd find remarkable overlap between the categories "wants to restrict abortion" and "does not believe that women are complete individuals," but then Jill's argument would be better served by providing evidence for that, rather than just ignoring the other way someone might come to the "abortion is wrong" conclusion.
Let me try to reformulate what I think the problem is with 'Do you trust women?' framing.
Unless you're pro-choice, the answer is going to be, 'No.' (Even if you're pro-choice, you might be inclined to a somewhat cynical, 'What, the same women that eat 10 low-fat cookies and think they're being healthy? The same women that buy lottery tickets? The same women that think ID is just a good way of doing science? I don't trust American people to make smart decisions, let alone women.')
Not all pro-lifers hate women. Not the fun ones quoted by the left, certainly, but quite a lot think that the problem is simply that the unborn have just as many rights to protection under the law as an infant would, minus health & harm to the mother concerns due to the fact that the fetus is hanging around inside the mother.
Talk of 'trusting women' to them is rather like arguing against the necessity of child protection services by insisting that we trust that mothers will always make the right decision by their children. Don't you trust women?
Certainly, if you're already pro-choice, it's compelling. But if you're pro-choice, we don't need to convince you of anything.
Better, I think, to aim for the contraceptive/more support for single moms, and take the 'we're trying to end abortion; you just want to make it illegal' angle.
I meant to be aggressive: I don't think I was unfair. Abortion is an issue which is terribly clouded by the willingness of lots of reasonable people to say, without arguing in any clear fashion that can be responded to, that it's tragic, and a difficult moral decision, and wrong, but not wrong enough that we're going to do anything about it other than avert our eyes from the women who choose to have abortions. (Hi!)
Where the 'reasonable', middle-of-the-road, position is that it's all too tragic and unseemly to discuss with clarity, it becomes very difficult to articulate a clear position for abortion rights. I'm very, very tired of listening to people talk about the ineffable awfulness of it all -- if you don't have a position you can defend, accept that it's because your thoughts on the issue aren't clear, and keep quiet until they clarify.
7: And I agree with Cala about how to engage with actual pro-lifers. My crossness is with Saletan-style handwringing from people who are probably personally pro-choice, in that if they, or their girfriend or wife or sister, needed an abortion, they'd go right ahead without significant qualms.
And to continue serial-commenting: Andrew, I didn't mean to jump on you, personally, that hard. I'm talking about Saletan and the great bulk of middle-of-the-road commentary on abortion.
To put it bluntly, an embryo or fetus is a parasite in the woman's body. She has as much right to get it removed as I do to get a tumor removed from my body.
That's certainly one view, but one unlikely to convince a conflicted moderate that unlimited access to abortion isn't only held by people who really believe that a fetus (which ends up being a baby!) is just like a cancer (which usually doesn't perpetuate the species.)
Very easy to parody and really, the issue is a whole lot more complicated than that; last I checked, no one decided to keep a tumor because they felt they were financially stable enough.
LB, what bothers me about the whole debate is that it really seems like quite a lot of pro-choicers have never met any one who is pro-life. It's like they're describing a species they've never met before and only read about in blogs ('everyone I know voted for Kerry'). And so all pro-lifers must be crazed fundamentalist Christians who believe in Jeebus (cause that's respectful) and want their daughters to live in the kitchen.
I mean, come on. Most of the country is for some sort of abortion rights, but a significant minority (40% or so?) isn't. They're not all wackjobs, any more than the majority of pro-choicers are all swingin' singles who abort babies as often as they pay their phone bill.
And it would be really nice if both sides would stop caricaturing the other. I know a whole lot of pro-life people who have all sent their daughters off to college, instilled in them can-do feminist attitudes, taught them about birth control, who think that hey, it's a life in there, and some reasons aren't good reason to end it if you do get pregnant, so be very careful.
Andrew didn't say any thing about "awfulness" or "tragedy." He said (I paraphrase) there was a competing interest (fetal, I presumed), and the argument that anyone who thought abortion should be restricted doesn't care about women's autonomy is weak (I agree). (I think it is better stated as "women's autonomy is more important than the competing interest." Another option is "the competing interest doesn't really exist; people who argue so are mistaken." I disagree with that one, but it's an option.) Those are pretty much legitimate points. Sometimes people pick apart arguments around here without offering their own affirmative ones; I see your point that this is obfuscatory in the abortion debate in particular, but this site tends not to be a place where people offer their opinions in perfectly politically framed speeches, but where, well, people pick apart arguments.
Well, the girls bogued on us during the important football games, but now that we're talking about one of those frivolous girly topics, they're all back again. Where's Bitch? Where's mmf!?
But where were any of them, when the games were on the line? Women always let you down in the hour of need.
The problem I have with pro-life people, beyond the disagreement about the rights of women over their bodies, is that since they are (for the most part) Republicans, they're not going to be in favor of generous social programs for all these unwanted kids.
I would counter the interest of the child arguments with detailed description of what the child welfare system is like. Force them to confront the reality of that. Yeah, I'm sure they'll say you can give up the kids for adoption, but still a lot of kids are going to end up in poverty, neglected, and generally screwed. Isn't thinking about these things part of the child's interest?
I read Saletan's article and, while I think his tone was patronizing and it was too full of hand-wringing, I do think that abortion needs to be reframed into a broader "choice" platform, not just because it is more winning electorally but because it's the right thing to do. It really hit me when I participated in the March for Women's Lives in D.C. – I had gone to show my support for abortion rights but the rally really tried to bring together a number of issues that affect women's reproductive lives, from comprehensive sex-education to economic equality to better health care. Too many women don't really have a "choice" – their decision is made by their circumstances, and that can be a woman who is forced to have a child she's not prepared for because she doesn't have access to an abortion provider or a woman who feels compelled to abort a pregnancy she'd like to carry to term because she doesn't feel that she can support another child.
Dear me, for the first three months or so it certainly IS an issue of a woman's internal organs. The competing interest (which, sure, should be considered in the equation along with a woman's autonomy) doesn't emerge immediately. In fact, the early fetus cells are so very much not separate from the woman's body that they often can't be detected with certainty for quite some time. Doctors routinely need 3-4 weeks before they can test definitively with blood tests and *know* whether a woman is pregnant or not -- as friends of mine who want a baby have discovered.
I don't know. I've met a lot of pro-lifers. I went to college in Texas, and college seems to be the time when people have more frequent and less-informed discussions about abortion than anywhere else.
Yes, of course some people who are pro-life send their daughters to college or encourage birth control or whatever. I don't think that just because the pro-lifers aren't raging, maniacal misogynists, that the "do you trust women?" argument doesn't hold. In fact, one of the reasons that misogynist and the incompletely-human statuts of women is so invidious is because no one knows they're doing it. Very few people will admit to thinking or believing that women are in some way inferior or incomplete, but almost all of us act as if that's true.
I've asked people several times at which stage a fetus is big enough that you'd notice it if you had one in your eye. Right-to-lifer's give human rights to 32-cell lumps of tissue that you probably couldn't even see.
The standard answer is going to be a snarky, 'Oh, so the position of liberals is that unless you're going to have a middle-class life, it's not worth living? Better to be dead than alive without an iPod?' It just ain't going to sell, because there isn't another argument about child's interest that includes (from their perspective) killing the child so it doesn't suffer later.
I think that's my biggest problem with the pro-life movement, though. The Netherlands have easy access to abortion, and a lower rate of abortion than the U.S. If ending abortion is really the issue here, then focusing on making it illegal isn't really the best way to go about it.
Want to end it? You can't. Want to minimize it? Make it so a girl can have a baby and still complete college; affordable childcare & family leave policies. Women aren't having abortions because they hate babies, but because 90% of the time, a baby puts them into a bad position financially.
Biblical Christians will, in fact argue that the woman is the weaker vessel, whatever that means, and that the wife should therefore submit herself to her husband. Men and women are different in kind and all women are inferior to all men. I'd like to ask these guys what application their principle has in the not rare cases when the wife clearly is not the weaker vessel, but the husband is.
I thought Andrew was alluding to a perfectly clear (if difficult) position. That if the argument in favor of choice is premised on self-sovereignity, self-ownership, individual autonomy, then denying self-sovereignity to the fetus while granting it to the woman requires some additional statement: that it is not good enough to just say, "it's about autonomy and self-sovereignity, and that's all there is to it." There are other arguments about choice that do not primarily rest on a classical liberal argument about autonomy and rights--say, for example, an argument about patriarchy and male domination in which the argument about abortion and choice applies solely to women.
The argument about self-sovereignity and individual autonomy in relation to choice is capacious and applies to everyone, generally; it links the argument for choice to a wide range of other rights asserted and defended, from consent to medical treatment to habeas corpus. It potentially carries to the fetus, or to any subject we regard as a human subject. (Or even in some formulations, beyond the human to animals.) If it does not carry to the fetus, then something further must be said beyond the assertion of a woman's right to self-sovereignity. Either that in the case of two lives that depend upon each other, the first life to exist takes precedence, or that the fetus is not a human subject until it is born, or that legal minors (fetuses and children) do not yet possess the full rights of adult subjects or are chattel, or some other formulation.
Some of these formulations we do not accept any longer, though they were once a common strategy to arrest the spread of a universal declaration of human rights--as, for example, the assertion that some human subjects have the status of chattel or are not fully human. And yet some assert this in the case of the fetus. It is a matter of faith or religion to assert that life begins at conception, I agree. But it sometimes feels to me equally arbitrary to say that you become a rights-bearing subject the second your head crowns out of a vagina but not a moment before that. The common form of pro-life sentiment is intensely religious and not particularly invoking of liberalism, but there is a way in which a pro-life argument potentially descends out of the history of the universality of rights and the striking down of all attempts to put up borders and boundaries to that spread. I'm pretty comfortable posting border guards myself at the species boundary, and maybe for the same reason when we're talking about fetuses prior to (and perhaps after) viability.
I'm more comfortable with an argument that says that where two lives are inextricably connected physically to one another, the life which is materially, biologically, physically autonomous and which has a prior autonomy to the other takes precedence. Partly because there are very few other cases where that statement applies, but at the same it potentially could apply to other instances, especially in the future given some biotech possibilities. If tomorrow I was told that by giving a daily blood transfusion to a neighbor, my neighbor could survive indefinitely, but without my blood, my neighbor would die, I might be a good sport and head down to the hospital to donate. If after six months, I decided I'd had enough, that I was feeling sick, bound to another life, incapable of living the way I wanted to, responsible for a life sentence of maintaining my neighbor, and I wanted to quit, then I could or should be able to say, "My life precedes yours; I can survive without you, but not you without me." If my neighbor then sued me, saying I was sentencing them to death, they would be right about the implications of my decision but not right, in my view, in their assertion of rights. It's true that I would be compromising my neighbor's self-sovereignity, but only because their self-sovereignity would require the concession of my own for its continuance.
But even that argument--that the life which is autonomous precedes and trumps that which is not--has some complicated implications in a rights-bearing conception of the human subject. What about very seriously handicapped people who require assistance to survive, but whose families no longer wish to or are capable of provisioning such assistance? What about abandoned children? Right now we resolve that problem by remanding such subjects to the care and protection of the state--but isn't that precisely what some pro-life advocates are asking for in the case of the fetus?
I can work through this clearly to a pro-choice position, but in a liberal framework I think we have to acknowledge that it involves making very strong and potentially arbitrary statements about the outer limits of rights, or about the resolution of competing rights-based claims. Much in the same way I'm absolutely comfortable saying that animals don't have rights, period: it's about a foundational definition of what a rights-bearing subject is, and a resistance to including bordering or ambiguous cases. But then I admit I run into trouble in other instances--why, for example, would I claim that a person in a long-term vegetative state who expressed a strong desire to be kept alive prior to entering such a state is still a rights-bearing subject whose prior expressed wishes must be respected?
It's why in some ways the argument about patriarchy and the oppression of women is clearer, easier (albeit limited in other ways)--it doesn't take on some of the dilemmas that couching this issue in universalist, rights-bearing terms does.
My dad used to tell me that women should obey their husbands because 'someone has to have the final word' to 'make it easy' to run a household. And also, because 'the bible says so.' It was the weirdest thing that ever came out of his mouth. I told him, I think, to fuck off.
I'm pretty sure Jill is missing Saletan's point. I take him to be making a rhetorical and strategic point: "I had an abortion, and it's my body and none of your business" and "I had an abortion, and I'm really very sad about it" register as very different moral sentiments to a lot of people. Saletan is arguing that insofar as pro-choicers are forced to adopt the former rhetoric, because to argue anything else would seem to be an unacceptable concession of abortion's wrongness, they've already let anti-abortionists frame the debate. His suggestion, to frame the debate as everyone's fight against abortion, with pro-lifers distrusting women, and pro-choicers trusting them, is both good, and, as Becks says, good policy.
I don't think that just because the pro-lifers aren't raging, maniacal misogynists, that the "do you trust women?" argument doesn't hold.
That's not exactly why it doesn't hold. It doesn't hold because the first step is to convince the pro-lifer that he doesn't actually trust women with his support of pro-life policies. But if he is really worried about babies (rationally or otherwise), he's going to agree with you that he doesn't trust women, but he's going to disagree that that's a problem. He doesn't trust men not to be child abusers, either, so he outlaws that. He doesn't trust people not to be thieves, so he locks his front door. (It's obviously not a perfect parallel, but nuance hasn't been a winning strategy in a long time.)
Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think it will be successful rhetoric, because it seems to depend on first convincing someone that his position is, indeed, misogynist. It may well be misogynist, but I don't like the odds of convincing a moderate that he should support abortion rights by first convincing him that we think he's evil.
I think (just) one of the problems with the Saletanian argument that pro-choicers should just say "Abortion is always bad, let's talk about how to minimize it" is that pro-choicers will suspect that pro-lifers won't want to stop with abortion, but will want to continue on to control women's lives in more and more ways. And we'll have damn good reason for suspecting that. As Cala points out there are exceptions, but by and large the same people and groups who are opposing abortion are also opposing sex education, and emergency contraception, and distribution of condoms in AIDS-wracked countries, etc. etc., not to mention displaying a certain indifference to the fate of the post-unborn as per 16 and 22.
Saletan himself, though he thinks he's a liberal or libertarian or something, is perfectly happy to tell people that it's best not to have sex. Before I make any concessions to someone like that, I'd like to see them concede that it's in general a good thing for women to control their own sexuality and reproductive choices, and only when there's a competing interest should the weight of governmental or societal disapproval be brought down on them.
I think that when you talk about the badness of abortion, you have to specify the kind of badness. No one ever gets pregnant in order to abort, or has recreational abortions, because there are many things about abortion which are unpleasant. But the argument is always bent in the direction of "Abortion is wrong, even where it's legal". I don't think that.
Andrew's "competing interest" immediately voids the notion of "autonomy" - doesn't it?
I don't think so. Autonomy can be trumped by other concerns outside of the abortion debate. When one's actions end up harming others, certainly, and on some models, when one's actions end up harming oneself.
pro-choicers will suspect that pro-lifers won't want to stop with abortion
Yes, but that's part of Saletan's point: as long as pro-choicers feel like they have to deny the badness of abortion, they've been forced into an undesirable rhetorical position--the debate becomes about whether it's bad or not, and almost everyone agrees that it is. Obviously, the first step isn't to just agree that it's bad, but to agree by shifting the terms of the debate.
Maybe the shorter point is "Saletan, the point of contraceptive access is not just that it reduces the number of abortions."
And to ogged in 26, that's definitely part of his argument, but I don't think it's the whole thing. I don't really see any evidence that Saletan isn't speaking for himself when he says abortion is always bad. Even if he were making your argument, he doesn't seem to notice that pro-choice politicians have been making those arguments. His selling out to abstinence shows a truly cavalier attitude toward autonomy. And on the 'abortion is a loser' front, there's this and this.
I think there are bad reasons to have abortions. I'm probably in the minority of possible political reasons because I believe that because I also believe that there shouldn't be legal restrictions, generally, figuring that since infanticide and abortion have existed throughout most of human history, making it illegal won't make it go away.
But the argument is always bent in the direction of "Abortion is wrong, even where it's legal".
I don't think that, either. But I do think that "Some abortions are made for bad reasons, even where it's legal." And the majority of these bad reasons are due to economics.
I think it's a pretty shitty society when your options are a) starve b) have an abortion, and while I don't assign any blame to the woman who has to make such a decision, I don't think it's right to say that I think that decision is ideal.
Cross-posted with 33. I think that "almost everyone agrees that abortion is bad" slides too quickly, for Saletan and in the real world, to "Almost everyone agrees that women should never get abortions," and then, boom, criminalization and the debate is over contraception. After all, if all you want is to reduce abortions, wouldn't contraception PLUS criminalization be more effective? A better position I think is, "Look, nobody wants to get an abortion."
I'm not sure that Saletan is right (disclaimer: I haven't actually read the full Saletan piece) that abortion is bad, let's all reduce it, is really the best possible framing. Or rather, it may be politically, in our peculiar American culture, but I don't actually think it's the best moral framing. Unwanted pregnancies are bad. Abortion, in that it is an insurance policy for women's autonomy in health, is good.
37: Not quite. I think it slides very quickly into restricted abortion access, not criminalization. In fact, that's where Jill's rebuttal seems to lead. She grants that contraception would reduce most of the unwanted pregnancies, and then cites mostly late-term medical problems, rape, & incest.
Maybe I only know sane pro-lifers, but most of the ones I know think abortion is accetpable in cases of danger to the mother, rape & incest.
So the worry is that Saletan's concession gets us very quickly to legal first tri-mester, and then health & rape exemptions only after that.
s/b "and health." Also, that use of "insurance policy" was a little weird, but if I'm going to go back and critique all my comments for style, I have a lot of work to do.
I think that "almost everyone agrees that abortion is bad" slides too quickly, for Saletan and in the real world, to "Almost everyone agrees that women should never get abortions,"and then, boom, criminalization and the debate is over contraception.
What? You mean because everyone believes that adultery is basically wrong, and now that's illegal?
Maybe I only know sane pro-lifers, but most of the ones I know think abortion is accetpable in cases of danger to the mother, rape & incest.
You may be too young to remember, but when the PA abortion law was being drawn up, and then-Rep. Stephen Freind wanted to leave out a rape exception, because according to studies he'd cited, women who were raped couldn't get pregnant? Turned out that the studies were done by Nazis on concentration camp victims. Freind never apologized. So I'm not too optimistic about the sanity of the pro-life people who actually get laws passed.
I agree with Tia and Weiner. I'm not willing to say "abortion is always bad". I do think "unwanted pregnancies are bad" and "look, nobody wants to have an abortion" are reasonable reframed starting points.
Bill Clinton's "safe, legal, and rare" resonated with a lot of people and it's not too far off from Saletan's position. The question is whether abortion should be rare because you can't get one (which is the trend under the current administration and their increasing restrictions) or rare because they're less necessary (due to better access to contraception, better economic opportunities, increased access to the morning-after pill, etc.)
You mean because everyone believes that adultery is basically wrong, and now that's illegal?
As some people like to point out, abortion bans have always meant that rich people can get abortions. And most politicians don't have to worry about whether they'll need abortions anyway.
It's a good point: "no one wants an abortion" is better than "abortion is always bad." You just have to muzzle the people who want to say "I got an abortion, so what? I'll get one any time I please."
44: The rape exemption went in, I think, but Freind was the sponsor of the 1989 Pennsylvania Abortion Control Act which was the subject of Planned Parenthood v. Casey. We need to worry about his sort.
I disagree so passionately that I'm not going even going to try and discuss this today. I have work to do, and it woudl take all day, and it would just make people angry.
But for the record, I am liberal, highly educated, I don't hate women or their freedom or autonomy, nor do I think them "lesser" than men or whatever, but I'm opposed to abortion 100% of the time. No exceptions for fetal deformity, rape, incest, etc. No exception for health of the mother, although I'd be willing to discuss an exception where the life of the mother was in danger, but I think that's mostly a straw man, anyway.
I'm sure I'm going to be yelled at for this, and I honestly wish I had time to elaborate/defend myself. But unfortunately this is just the wrong day for me; I'm too busy.
48 - Totally agree. That is so Not Helping The Cause, like the girl at the MFWL in D.C. wearing the "I can't wait to get my first abortion" t-shirt. And those are the people who always end up with their pictures in the paper. Sigh.
"look, nobody wants to have an abortion" is just disengenuous, and for that reason, will fail. Obviously people do want to have abortions -- often for very good reasons -- which is why this debate exists. I think the way to win this debate -- around which there has been much dissembling on both sides -- would be to state a rational argument and adhere to it, without making obviously empty rhetorical moves.
That said, I will heed Lizard Breath's advice and stay out of a debate for which my response is incompletely theorized.
You just have to muzzle the people who want to say "I got an abortion, so what? I'll get one any time I please."
It amazes me how many people think that being impossibly shrill will somehow aid their cause. Yesterday a website that I write for put up a news post which, among other things, covered the big pro-life march that's happening here in DC. The post didn't mention the pro-choice counter-observances that were occurring -- mainly because they're unlikely to snarl traffic, but also because they are (let's face it) completely reactionary PR exercises. The site's staff is overwhelmingly (entirely?) pro-choice. Someone wrote in saying that she felt this "tacitly endorsed the anti-choice position," that she'd never read the site again, and that she was going to be contacting our advertisers.
I think Tim nailed the complications I was alluding to when I referenced a competing interest. Great post.
Abortion is even more complicated that the "should we require blood transfusions for the dying neighbor/ailing-violinist" hypothetical though, because abortion generally requires the use of force against the fetus. So we're not talking any longer about a simple refusal to provide support; we're talking about an act of violence as a method of cutting off such support. Not only are you going to refuse a blood transfusion to your neighbor; you're going to do violence to his body to stop the transfusion. That may not change the ultimate result as to your right to do so, but it certainly complicates matters, and renders the thought-experiment less intuitively powerful.
LB, I can understand your desire that a person clearly articulate a full position on abortion when commenting, but I don't have one. I think the problem is an extremely difficult one to resolve in a principled way, and ultimately I find myself simply resorting to a kind of balancing between the fetal interest and the woman's interest---which brings me to a moderate pro-choice position.
And I think this ties into the larger point about pro-choice rhetoric. Most people, ultimately, rest their intuitions on a balancing of the interests, and don't commit themselves emotionally to a cognized, consistent, and complex array of first-principles and thought-experiments that might support an absolutist position one way or the other. So when moderate pro-choicers, like me, hear rhetoric that seems to evince a first-principle allegiance that ignores the quite human interests which enter into a balancing, we're inclined to distance ourselves from the rhetoric, and perhaps the political movement making the rhetoric. Such rhetoric seems unexpressive of at best, and contradictory to at worst, our own sense of the stakes.
I realize how imprecise and murky this post is. More fuel for the fire, LB. :)
"Safe, legal, and rare" is great buzzword spin, but it isn't a terribly meaningful statement. I doubt that there are people whatever whose goal is very large numbers of illegal, dangerous abortions.
48: Consensus! I mean, I'm not in favor of literal muzzling, but I agree they're not good for the movement. Though they shouldn't be any worse for the movement than loonies who fantasize about Nuremberg trials are for theirs.
On preview: Urple, I'm sure you are sincerely liberal and sincerely anti-abortion; when I make generalizations about anti-abortion people, I'm talking about the majority of them and the positions they support.
text, I mean "nobody wants an abortion" in kind of the same way as "nobody wants to go to the dentist." Obviously, lots of people prefer these things to the alternatives, but I don't think anyone wants them for themselves. On preview again, what ogged just said.
You just have to muzzle the people who want to say "I got an abortion, so what? I'll get one any time I please."
I think that's right. As some of the reactions in this piece make clear, many pro-life conservative young women have completely bought into the idea that the only people who ever need abortions are women who hate babies or who are 'sluts' who don't even practice safe sex. They'd probably be pro-choice if they believed that pro-choice women were women like them.
Right, because it isn't. My wife got pregnant the year before we had Noah, but the baby died in utero about 2.5-3 months into the pregnancy. A D&C was necessary to remove it. Luckily, the area in which we live has plenty of abortion providers, so it didn't entail a several hour drive and a hotel room. If we'd lived in North Dakota, it would have been vastly more expensive and complicated.
Abortion is *necessary*. Period. It is often enough an essential part of obstetric care, even for women who want to have a child. That doctors aren't being properly trained to perform them is heinous.
I got that was what you meant, MW, and I think that's the right sentiment. I think this debate is sort of rare, politically, in that what's required is one really clear paragraph, instead of a slogan.
I think "safe, legal, and rare" is meaningful, in that as a representation of the pro-choice position it contradicts a lot of misconceptions (pardon the pun) about it. Also, it sets out implicit policy goals: better social services for families, economic opportunities, access to contraception, and good health care.
Friends of mine (2 off the top of my head) have had to have D&Cs due to fetal death (very early term miscarriages.) Another acquaintance had an emergency abortion due to pre-eclampsia, which developed later.
Certainly, these situations are far more rare than panicky high school girls getting pregnant, but that doesn't make them straw men.
I'd hate for one of my friends to have to go before a judge to prove that her blood pressure was spiking at 210/100 in order to get medical care. (Now, that may be a straw man, but how else would a law allowing only health of mom exceptions work?)
62/64-Apostropher: I think that no one would argue that "abortion" presents any moral complication when the fetus is already dead. I think you'd be hard-pressed to find *anyone*, even in the pews of the most conversative, right-wing, woman-hating, church in the reddest-red state in America, who would find this morally problematic.
And I think you also know that's not at all what most people mean when they discuss the morality of abortion.
Urple, I know plenty of people who hold the same view that you do. They are almost all Catholic, and are similarly opposed to the death penalty, euthanasia, and war. They are good people who I respect.
Philosophically, that is a completely coherent stance and, I believe, ethically defensible. Practically, however, it simply falls apart when it smacks into reality, as it inevitably does.
I mean they put it to you one way, and put it to you another, and by the time you're through, you've gotten all bent out of shape and what you really need is a nap. And a shower.
But Urple, the doctors have to be trained to perform it. The facilities have to exist. And the more the anti-abortion crowd throws up legislative (or terroristic) roadblocks on their way to banning it outright, the more those first two conditions become scarce.
I understand the moral argument, but it doesn't square with reality.
61: Well, but is the muzzling the most appropriate way of making it clear that women who have had abortions are like the rest of us? I've had an elective, early-term abortion, I think it was a good decision, and I do bring it up in discussions like this precisely because the taboo on discussing personal experience with abortion is strong enough that it allows people to think of women who get abortions as nothing like the people they know.
74 - Yes, and true, but you're conflating the two issues: if doctors weren't allowed to perform abortions on living fetuses, no one would be bothered by their being trained to perform them on dead fetuses (as there is no moral issue here), and one would expect such training to become routine and unobjectionable.
And, if it's important to spell this out, I have no problem with doctors being trained to "abort" dead fetuses. I think any or at least most ob/gyn's should be capable of doing this, as it is at times a necessary procedure.
LB, the difference maybe between, 'See, I'm normal, educated, successful and I was in a situation where a condom broke and needed one' and 'I can't wait for my first abortion! Yeah rights!' or 'God, a baby would totally clash with my shoes.' The first is a story that needs to be told; the latter two are just fodder for the 'You're not a slut who likes shoes, are you Suzie? You'd never kill a baby' brand of rhetoric.
All deserve the same amount of rights, but I believe this is rather like debates about free speech. If I'm trying to sell the idea, I don't start with glamorizing the Skokie Nazis, but by framing them as a side-effect of a good law that sometimes lets through objectionable ideas.
LB, I can understand your desire that a person clearly articulate a full position on abortion when commenting, but I don't have one. I think the problem is an extremely difficult one to resolve in a principled way, and ultimately I find myself simply resorting to a kind of balancing between the fetal interest and the woman's interest---which brings me to a moderate pro-choice position.
And I think this ties into the larger point about pro-choice rhetoric. Most people, ultimately, rest their intuitions on a balancing of the interests, and don't commit themselves emotionally to a cognized, consistent, and complex array of first-principles and thought-experiments that might support an absolutist position one way or the other. So when moderate pro-choicers, like me, hear rhetoric that seems to evince a first-principle allegiance that ignores the quite human interests which enter into a balancing, we're inclined to distance ourselves from the rhetoric, and perhaps the political movement making the rhetoric. Such rhetoric seems unexpressive of at best, and contradictory to at worst, our own sense of the stakes.
Andrew -- (And again, I should apologize about jumping all over you before.) This is, I think, where the 'trusting women' rhetoric is applicable. Once you're balancing interests to the point where you are at a moderate pro-choice position (that is, if you aren't taking the position that the fetus has rights that trump those of the woman in all cases), you are saying that a case-by-case decision has to be made. And given that, the only remaining question is who is to make that decision -- whether you think it is best to leave it in the hands of the woman, or whether you don't trust her to make a good decision, and want to give the decision-making authority to someone else.
It is perfectly possible to be pro-choice and to think of a decision to have an abortion as a difficult one with moral weight; what comes down to an issue of first principles is whose hands that decision should be in.
82: Sure, I can't see a t-shirt saying "I can't wait to have my first abortion' as anything other than disturbing and counterproductive. T-shirts saying "I'm not sorry," on the other hand, say something quite different, and should not be unacceptable.
If I weren't at work, and there weren't people standing right behind me, I'd go a-hunting for some links that would prove otherwise even in non-minotaur cases. Apostropher will come through, I'm sure.
I thought about making the joke, "Apostropher will come through while I'm writing this comment," but then I thought maybe he'd need a little bit of time to finish. Nope. That's how you know he's not a right-winger.
And given that, the only remaining question is who is to make that decision -- whether you think it is best to leave it in the hands of the woman, or whether you don't trust her to make a good decision, and want to give the decision-making authority to someone else.
OK, this is weird to me. You seem to be taking a libertarian position against government regulation. Isn't that their basic position - "Stop mollycoddling people, and trust them to do what's right for them." I have trouble seeing you as a libertarian, I guess.
It will be very difficult trying to reason logically with the right-to-lifers when it comes to the right to life debates. This is the same group of people, generally, that supports the death penalty, the right to bear arms, and the right for civilians to shoot first and ask questions later if they feel threatened. The logic is filled with so many different holes, and such disconnect from each idea that they don't seem coherent, yet to those who believe, it is. Some probably believe that the execution of those who have an abortion is a perfectly reasonable idea. Hammurabi's code, my eye.
90: That's the other weird thing about this 'do you trust women?' meme. It endorses a libertarian ideal that seems to go against the rest of the liberal framework. In and of itself, fine, no one outside of philosophy has to have consistent views, but it's hard on the one hand to argue that this is about government deregulation and then to argue that the government needs to be involved in things like childcare/contraceptive education.
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94
The do you trust women argument is central, because virtually every anti-abortion argument hinges on the question of "under what circumstances is abortion okay?" Very few people are willing to go so far as to say that abortion should always, under every circumstance, be prohibited.
Okay, maybe Urple. For the record, I'm Catholic, and I agree with Apostropher: the *idea* of the sanctitiy of all life is a great one (let's stop swatting mosquitoes), but you run smack dab into reality--which is why the concept of sin exists in the first place. Folks can be against abortion all they like, but women are going to have 'em anyway, when their backs are against the wall.
It amazes me how every time this issue comes up, someone comes along to say that we need to get women to shut up, for their own good. Saletan has a point, which is that yes, it'll do the abortion debate a world of good if people can realize that one can find abortion regrettable *and still support the right to have one*. But in painting the pro-choice forces as the folks who have failed to make that clear, he's setting up the radical feminist straw woman we all know and love. He complains that pro-choice folks don't call themselves "pro-abortion" and then turns around and says we need to admit that abortion isn't a good thing.
90, 93: Well, I think of it as a concern with civil liberties rather than as libertarianism -- I have no quarrel with the fire department.
Seriously, government regulation is appropriate in cases where the government is in a position to know what the right answer is. Package inserts on drugs -- the benefits from increased information to consumers can be weighed against the costs of creating the insert. Laws against murder -- the right of one person to live trumps any other person's decision that she ought not to be allowed to continue to live, except in certain factually specific circumstances (self-defense, etc.)
With abortion, the position that Andrew, and a lot of other people, seem to take is that it's a difficult decision, and one that is sometimes right and sometimes wrong. At that point, a global ban becomes inappropriate, and we have to make decisions on a case by case basis. An obvious decision-maker is the woman involved -- she has the fullest understanding of the circumstances. By saying that you prefer the decision to be in the hands of some other decision-maker (a local judge? A hospital board of review?) you are saying that you think women will, in the aggregate, be less likely to make good decisions than some alternative decision-maker: you don't trust pregnant women in this role.
But even that argument--that the life which is autonomous precedes and trumps that which is not--has some complicated implications in a rights-bearing conception of the human subject. What about very seriously handicapped people who require assistance to survive, but whose families no longer wish to or are capable of provisioning such assistance? What about abandoned children? Right now we resolve that problem by remanding such subjects to the care and protection of the state--but isn't that precisely what some pro-life advocates are asking for in the case of the fetus?
I don't see how this is at all complicated. Seriously handicapped people are dependent; but their dependency can be transferred. Ditto children. You can't remand the care and protection of the fetus to the state, because it's inside the woman. The only way to get it out is to require her to carry it until it's viable, and then to induce labor or perform major surgery. In other words, to force her to continue to sacrifice her autonomy. In fact, the issue of "viability" shows that pregnancy is in a unique class--the pregnant woman doesn't just provide "care and protection"; her body actually creates the baby from the fetus. Requiring her to carry doesn't just prohibit (abortion); it compels.
A hospital board of review?) you are saying that you think women will, in the aggregate, be less likely to make good decisions than some alternative decision-maker: you don't trust pregnant women in this role.
What about suicidal people? Should any person above 18 be able to go to their doctor and get a quick scrip for an easy death?
97: The reason we say they shouldn't is that we have made the decision, as a society, that suicide is always a bad choice outside of the context of terminal illness (and there's argument within that context).
If your position is that the fetus has a right to continue developing that always outweighs the right of the woman to autonomy and control over her body, while I disagree strongly with you, trusting women is not the issue. It's the intermediate position, that abortion is sometimes right and sometimes wrong, and that someone has to make that decision on a case-by-case basis, where the issue of trusting women comes up. If you want that decision in someone else's hands, then you don't trust pregnant women to make good decisions in that regard.
Gimme a break, B. I'm looking for a case where (a) the interests implicated are either solely (or all but) those of the individual involved and (b) many still think government regulation (or counseling or whatever) is appropriate. Right to die cases are often paired with abortion cases, so suicide came to mind. If you have another that fits (a) and (b) nicely, offer it.
SCMT, I think you can use right to die for terminal patients as an analogy, but not for non-terminal suicidal patients. Virtually no one argues against intervention in the latter case.
B, just to play devil's advocate... what do you do when the answer is simply, 'No, I don't trust women'? Because I suspect that that's a more likely answer; you could easily see it framed as men and women are likely to make irrational and bad choices in situations where they're under pressure, so why should a woman faced with an unexpected pregnancy be any different?
If it's really a life that's at stake, why wouldn't we take an extra precaution?
I don't have an answer to this that doesn't say something like 'You're being misogynist and silly', which isn't going to help with framing any issues.
that suicide is always a bad choice outside of the context of terminal illness
This parallels two types of anti-abortion positions: the first says abortion is always a bad choice, and the second says that there are certain circumstances (like the absence of terminal illness) that make it a bad choice (you are a minor, etc.).
I agree, Bitchphd, that your point is exactly why abortion is different than anything else. But note that it's not really a philosophical difference, just a material one: we might say that the fetus could be a rights-bearing dependent subject that the state or public could assume responsibility for if only it wasn't inside a woman's body--that for the state to assume responsibility for it requires invading an autonomous person's body or compelling an autonomous person to surrender their autonomy. We do that for people we have determined have committed a crime but to do it to an entire class of human beings (all fertile women) for the mere fact of what they are in material and biological terms is an intolerable breach of the liberal ideals that would allegedly demand such protection. That's why I think that some general doctrine of precedence is a sound thing to turn to, but why it applies so absolutely in the case of abortion is the material fact of the fetus being inside a woman.
This does raise the usual hypotheticals about conception and pregnancy taking place in technologically-mediated forms completely outside the body, which I think most of us agree would no longer raise the problem of abortion (if the right to abort is not premised on a right of ownership of chattel, e.g., the fetus). What if, however, it was possible to extremely casually and non-invasively extract from a body an unwanted fetus and carry it to term outside a woman's body? If the main reason abortion is a special or particular case is material, what happens if the material circumstances of conception, pregnancy and birth change in major ways?
With abortion, the position that Andrew, and a lot of other people, seem to take is that it's a difficult decision, and one that is sometimes right and sometimes wrong. At that point, a global ban becomes inappropriate, and we have to make decisions on a case by case basis. An obvious decision-maker is the woman involved -- she has the fullest understanding of the circumstances. By saying that you prefer the decision to be in the hands of some other decision-maker (a local judge? A hospital board of review?) you are saying that you think women will, in the aggregate, be less likely to make good decisions than some alternative decision-maker: you don't trust pregnant women in this role.
I don't buy this. Potentially insulting analogy: in a criminal trial, if the defendant is, as the prosecution claims, responsible for the crime, then he must have been present, and have the best knowledge of the situation. So... he should be the one to determine if there were mitigating circumstances? Or what an appropriate sentence would be?
Obviously the woman has a stake in the outcome of the pregnancy. You can make the case that it's her sole right to make the decision (and I'd agree with you). But I don't think you can claim that, given the existence of a competing and legitimate interest in the outcome (the notion of which I reject), the woman is in a position to make the best decision, as judged against the interests of both parties.
Also, worth pointing out that it pretty clearly doesn't have to be a case-by-case decision. You can set up a system of standards (no late term, etc).
Because I suspect that that's a more likely answer; you could easily see it framed as men and women are likely to make irrational and bad choices in situations where they're under pressure, so why should a woman faced with an unexpected pregnancy be any different?
Because we don't favor discretionary intervention by the government into life-changing decisions in any other circumstance where there is any doubt at all to what the right answer is. Here, I think it's worthwhile to make the discussion more concrete. What kind of restrictions can you conceive of that could rationally be expected to make systematically better, rather than simply different, decisions than those of the women involved?
My last was directed to 103, but works for 106 as well. How does anyone envision this weighing of rights should take place? As a practical matter, the only circumstances that are going to be different from case to case are those relating to hardship on the mother's part -- can you really envision any kind of decent system that tells one woman that her hardships are great enough to entitle her to decide on an abortion and another that hers are not?
You can set up a system of standards (no late term, etc).
Sure, I think there are plenty of people who think of themselves as pro-choice who have no problem with a ban on abortion for non-medical reasons in the third trimester; I have sympathies with that view myself. There aren't a lot of obvious other lines to draw, though.
"Is abortion bad?" may be an important personal question, but it's not an important political question. It's a moral question, and trying to get everyone to agree about moral questions is a hopeless task. People will disagree about good and bad. People will disagree about better and worse. Can we live with that disagreement?
When do we bring the coercive power of the state - the guys (and gals) with uniforms and guns - to enforce a judgment about good and bad? Infanticide? Female genital mutilation? Polygamy? Fornication (including adultery)? Sodomy? Working on the Sabbath? Spanking children?
MHS: I think the questions "is it bad?" and "if so, how bad?" precede the questions of whether to involve the power of the state, and moral questions are frequently political. It's because I've already answered the first question "no" that I don't want the state interfering.
You don't have to say that the woman will make the best decision to say that it should still be hers. As we know, many people make the wrong decision about which religion to follow, yet we don't send the cops out after them.
Tia: I'm saying we can skip the whole good v bad decision. We use the coercive power of the state often in circumstances that aren't judged morally wrong. For instance, in this country we arrest people who drive on the left. I'm told that other, ostensibly civilized, countries do quite the opposite.
Because we don't favor discretionary intervention by the government into life-changing decisions in any other circumstance where there is any doubt at all to what the right answer is.
Oh? Child welfare intervention? Is the child better off poor with his mom or is he better off in foster care? Euthanasia? Are you better off controlling your death or waiting for it to end? It seems to me that the government weighs in on these things all the time.
It's the intermediate position, that abortion is sometimes right and sometimes wrong, and that someone has to make that decision on a case-by-case basis, where the issue of trusting women comes up.
But this intermediate position seems to stem from a recognition that there is something life-like going on there, and that the state might have an interest in protecting that right. (Most moderates are what, in favor of first term abortion legality, and then it trickles off the closer to viability?) It's not just any old intermediate position, but one where it varies pretty much with how babylike the fetus is.
Since concerns about the growing fetus seems to be driving the case-by-case intuition, unless you already assume that the fetus doesn't have any protected rights, it's not going to do much to say, "It's looking an awful lot like a baby now, but we'll trust the woman to make the right decision and only abort in the sorts of extreme circumstances." If we're talking about a life, why not admit life/health related restrictions only?
Now, as to the restrictions, I don't support any because I think they are unlikely to give us any kind of systematically better result. But it's not because I trust women to make the right decision; I'm pretty sure women fuck up decisions at least as often as men. It's because I can't think of a restriction that can be managed fairly without zillions of exceptions, and as I said, I can't imagine having an emergency and requiring a judge's input. On balance, I'd rather have a law that was too lax than one too demanding.
But 'trusting women to do the right thing' just seems empty if I try to imagine the pro-life perspective.
At a certain point, I think that the fetus has competing rights. So while I wouldn't rule out third trimester abortions entirely (since I value the life of the mother more than that of the fetus), I do think that the state has a legitimate interest in protecting the fetus at some point post viability outside of the womb.
Child welfare intervention? Is the child better off poor with his mom or is he better off in foster care? Euthanasia? Are you better off controlling your death or waiting for it to end? It seems to me that the government weighs in on these things all the time.
Child welfare circumstances are exactly what I was thinking of -- we don't look at a family and analyze whether the parents are maybe not as good as they might be and possibly the children would be better off elsewhere. Intervention is held off until the circumstances are undeniably horrific.
Now, as to the restrictions, I don't support any because I think they are unlikely to give us any kind of systematically better result. But it's not because I trust women to make the right decision; I'm pretty sure women fuck up decisions at least as often as men. It's because I can't think of a restriction that can be managed fairly without zillions of exceptions, and as I said, I can't imagine having an emergency and requiring a judge's input.
I am agreeing with you completely here. 'Trusting women' doesn't mean that every woman is necessarily going to make the right decision in every circumstance. It means that there is no preferable place to put the decision-making authority; deciding that pregnant women should be, as a class, deprived of authority to decide whether they should carry to term and that that authority should be placed elsewhere is choosing not to trust them to make good decisions.
I disagree with Michael Schneider when he seems to claim that moral questions are entirely irrelevant to politics. In general, where enforcement is possible and there's a consensus about morality, things which are immoral are illegal. Where there's a difference of opinion about morality, there's a "purely moral question". And it isn't necessary to have an absolute moral agreement to have an enforcable law; a preponderance is enough. There are those who think that they have a right to murder an unfaithful wife, but excpet maybe in Texas the law does not accomodate them.
Lizardbreath is right in 9. I don't think Saletan would do any actual hand-wringing if someone he cared about needed an abortion. His retorical hand-wringing is just unseemly.
Fair enough, John Emerson. I should confess that I don't have a completely worked out theory I can verbalize. I may have overstated: maybe morality is not irrelevant, but maybe it should be.
But I don't see that enforcablility has ever stopped anyone from passing a law. Look at drugs and sodomy.
If unenforcability is no bar, why don't we still have laws against adultery, or cohabitation? Is there no longer a preponderance of support? Or is it that while most people still think it immoral, they no longer thing it's an aspect of morality that government should enforce?
Trusting women' doesn't mean that every woman is necessarily going to make the right decision in every circumstance.
and
that that authority should be placed elsewhere is choosing not to trust them to make good decisions.
seem to be in conflict.
See, here's the tension. To me, the 'do you trust women' argument gained most of its strength via arguing that women are morally responsible enough to decide on abortion in a way that roughly shakes out along the lines that a moderate finds acceptable. No need to ban late-term abortion, because women will only use it if it's medically necessary, not for so-called frivolous reasons. No need to ban RU-486, because women are responsible enough not to treat it as birth control.
Now, if 'good decision' doesn't mean something like 'acceptable to moderate intuitions', but instead 'whatever the woman decides because she's the one in the position to know (and who would disagree, really?)', then this just isn't going to be palatable.
When the moderate guy says, 'Sorry, I don't trust women on this big of an issue', he doesn't mean, 'I don't trust her to make the best decision for herself', but 'I don't trust that she will only avail herself of late-term options when her health is endangered or whatever reasons are morally acceptable.'
Hmm, I'm still thinking about unfaithful wives in Texas. Do we prohibit such justifiable homicide (even in Texas) because we think it's wrong to kill unfaithful wives, or because we reserve the power of retributive justice to the state? We could reserve that power to the state because to do otherwise would, like allowing people the autonomy to choose which side of the road they prefer, lead to chaos.
Basically, you cut deals on which immoralities to make illegal. The tendency has been toward tolerance, on a sort of case-by-case basis, but drug laws are an exception because of Sixties backlesh.
The immorality of murder is not irrelevant to it's illegality. Deliberately driving on the wrong side of the road is morally wrong, whichever side that is. Most felonies are morally wrong, though various misdemeanor, violations, torts, etc, might not be.
MHS: That some moral questions are outside the government's purview, or that the government legislates some questions that aren't inherently moral, in order to provide uniform standards, does not mean that moral questions are, or should be, irrelevant to politics. Everyone's position on state interference in abortion is predicated on a moral judgment about the weight of the competing interests. We've mostly decided the state shouldn't legislate sexual morality. I'd guess we made this decision because of the competing interest in privacy and because of the unfitness of the government to adjudicate the issue. We still think the state gets to interfere in, say, child abuse cases; it's because of the different moral weight we give to a child and a fetus that the state shouldn't get to interfere there.
104: SCMTim, I don't think this analogy is right. Since there is virtually unanimous agreement that the vast majority of suicidal impulses are a result of mental illness, and not only should they not be aided, there's an active duty to hinder them, and there is no such agreement about any subset of abortions, those suicides are off the analogy table. What you're left with are "rational" suicides, mostly people with terminal illnesses, though I can imagine other cases. Then you can make an analogy between the "always wrong" crowd, and the "sometimes a bad idea, but a matter of individual choice" crowd.
Tia, I don't think that the agreement is unanimous, or even close. There are psychiatric imperialists who want to treat all negative behavior as pathology, but not everyone agrees.
I knew I recognized the name Steven Freind from somewhere. I had a copy of the album mentioned at that link in either late middle school or early high school.
J.E., whether or not anyone else would prefer to use the term "mental illness," I think there is widespread agreement that someone who wants to kill him or herself has been experiencing a pretty negative set of emotions for a sustained period of time. Psychiatrists call that depression; using a different term doesn't change the underlying, agreed-upon reality. There are some people who would make the argument that, say, suicide is a rational response to the human condition; I think they are a small minority.
125: Distressingly often, it happens that when I try to follow up some citation I'm looking for, I find some comment I myself made on some blog two years age.
I think Tia is right. We do have a history of preventing people who are not competent from making decisions. This includes children, the mentally handicapped, the mentally ill, and people who are drunk. It used to include women, but not so much any more. Being suicidal at least raises a question of competence, and the safe position (given the finality of the act) is to prevent them from acting while the question is considered.
(There are some suicides that aren't depressive, too, like that guy in the beginning of Love in the Time of Cholera, but I tried to make room for it by allowing that only "a vast majority" of suicides were the result of mental illness.)
"Someone who wants to kill him or herself has been experiencing a pretty negative set of emotions for a sustained period of time."
Well, yes. People don't often kill themselves out of cheerfulness and optimism.
People who disagree with your formulation may be a minority, but "almost unanimous" is way off.
I've asked and nobody has been able to tell me how clinical depression is distinguished from just being extremely unhappy. I've talked to people in heavy-duty counseling positions and they've all said that they come accross people now and then whose lives are so awful that it's hard to argue against suicide.
The troubling part of your argument in #122 is here is virtually unanimous agreement that the vast majority of suicidal impulses are a result of mental illness, and not only should they not be aided, there's an active duty to hinder them, and there is no such agreement about any subset of abortions,. By some independent characteristic (states, counties, etc.), I suspect I can come up with a political grouping that would have the same level of agreement against abortion rights. Alternatively, I suspect I could come up with a restriction on abortion that would garner the same levels of support (no using abortion as primary birthcontrol, etc.). Or combine the two to get to the necessary support levels.
"Virtual unanimity" seems to slide the abortion question from one of absolute right to the question of political right, somehow. "Political right" means "make a deal" or "frame a convincing argument" to me, and I gather that Saletan, artfully or not, is arguing that position.
Is there a distinction between saying "this is immoral (for me), I should not do it" and saying "this is immoral (for anyone) and you should be prevented from doing it, at gunpoint if necessary"?
I'm thinking of actions such as eating ham and cheese sandwiches, or eating meat, or tithing, or working on the Sabbath, or accecpting Jesus as your savior.
Are those different sorts of moral questions, or is it only that there's no general agreement on the right answer?
J.E. People with rational reasons to commit suicide are covered above with my "the vast majority of suicidal impulses," i.e. not all. There are rational reasons to commit suicide; it's just not most cases. If the Nazis have you, and you have valuable Allied secrets, sure, kill yourself to avoid being tortured and delivering them, you have my blessing. In Monster, Charlize Theron ought to have killed herself rather than kill the last guy who saw her gun.
There are a lot of comments here. I'll have to finish them later.
I want to make a two points. One of the biggest problems in talking to stridently anti-choice people, the ones who go to student conventions or email you at your NOW email, is that they are so, so terribly informed. They often have the same misinformation, as well, because they're mostly just repeating anti-choice talking points. Further, in my experience it's the Anti-Choicers who Refuse To Address Reality. They don't talk about economics, rough situations, education, any other personal difficulties. More likely, if you pick up an anti-choice pamphlet, you're likely to see the following:
"I almost got an abortion, but then I didn't. I'm so happy I made that choice!! :)"
-Rich, possibly famous, White Woman X.
Second point, which is something of a reply to Tim Burke. Why accord rights to the unborn? Because of their DNA? That doesn't seem right. Suppose you meet another, nonuman, sentient creature. Aliens come to earth or something. Would you accord such a creature rights? If it possessed significant recognizible intelligence and self-awareness, of course you would. I submit that it is not our exactly our physical shape or DNA which we accept as the basis for our right to autonomy. It is our personhood; our desires, reason, self-consciousness, and world consciousness (something like that, at any rate).
Do fetuses have such personhood? No. Neither, you might object, does a person in a coma. But such a person at least previously had personhood, and could have had an express desire to have a chance to return to herself. The situation is not analogous to that of a fetus.
Many people will say, "but the fetus has the potential to be a person." So? Why should that accord it any righs? What matters is the state of the fetus in question. Certainly it's nice to look out for the fetus's future person, in a caretaker sort of way. But that's simply one person claiming a desire to see a fetus become a person; it does not instill rights into the fetus itself.
I had pretty much this exact argument about suicide while walking around a lake in Switzerland. I was in Emerson's role, but if I remember right, the next step is for Tia to note that if one allows that depressed people aren't in the proper mental state to make the decision to commit suicide, it's not any more plausible to claim that people who appear to be, and report being, 100% happy and then decide that they want to kill themselves are more sane than people who are depressed.
131:if the desire to commit suicide is regarded in itself to be proof of mental illness, we're getting pretty circular.
True, but it need not be taken as proof. It might require the next step: if the potential suicide is hearing voices in his head, and has a fixed intent to assassinate President Jed Bartlett, that might be enough additional evidence to support a conclusion of wack-o.
People who report 100% happy might not be sane, but if they're not threatening harm to self or others, we generally let 'em go
134: I think the distinction you're looking for is between actions that are wrong only in themselves and actions that injure other possessors of rights in ways that violate those rights. While there are certainly societies that would ban wrongful actions in both of those categories, as a general rule (with some exceptions) liberal societies restrict themselves to banning the second category.
So, for someone who believed that a fetus was in no way equivalent to a person and had no rights, but nonetheless thought abortion was immoral, in some manner equivalent to the violation of Kosher rules, it would be unconventional in our society to use that as a justification for a ban on abortion.
#105: Okay, it's not a philosophical difference. It's a material one (not "just," please). But that's the entire thing about pregnancy; it's a material thing, not just a concept. In fact, I'd go so far as to say you've put your finger on what frustrates me so much about these discussions: we search about for analogies and broad theories and generally applicable rules. But the point is that pregnancy is inescapably material, and the individual circumstances of every pregnancy are inescapably material. If that changes---if, say, some day we are able to wave a magic wand and transport the embryo or fetus out of the womb ala Star Trek---then fine; ban abortion. In the meantime, though, the material fact is that women get pregnant, and as such, they *do* have the power to abort (or not). Banning abortion doesn't make it stop; it criminalizes it (and arguably makes it unsafe).
Which is also my answer to SCMT's #103: I don't think there *is* an analogy to pregnancy. It's its own unique condition.
#101: I'd say, "well then, you have a basic problem under the Constitution. You may not trust women, but nonetheless we are free and equal citizens, so phhhhtttbbb."
I realize that the "rational suicide" as comparable to abortion debate has become very theoretical here, but, oddly, it really isn't so for me.
My grandmother, a very outspoken pro-choice supporter (she was a nurse prior to legalized abortion in Canada and patched up a lot of women), committed suicide in declining health in her early sixties. She didn't consult anyone, and the actual medical details remain a secret held by my uncle, but pretty much everyone in the family is sure that she killed herself based on her rational calculus about the quality of life she foresaw for herself. A difficult time for everyone, yes, and I wish I had been able to know her. To my knowledge, though, nobody has felt justified in second-guessing her decision. And even the conservatives on that side of the family remain fervently pro-choice, in part--I suspect--to honor my grandmother's legacy.
An anecdote. (Sorry for the personal details; it was suddenly difficult for me not to put that into the debate.)
SCMT: Your original analogy was" "What about suicidal people? Should any person above 18 be able to go to their doctor and get a quick scrip for an easy death?" I'm just saying that this is unilluminating, because the answer is, no, of course not, because we all think it's a bad idea to commit suicide except in very specialized cases*, but this says precisely nothing about abortion, and it doesn't interrogate the pro-choice position on abortion at all. (Take that, ogged.) Pointing out that we don't support liberty in a case where we haven't claimed to support liberty isn't going to tell us anything about the proper level of government intervention when we do.
*And the cases where lots of liberals could and do come around to supporting suicide are much more easily delineated from the set of other suicides than the set of hypothetical good abortions from bad abortions, until you get within the set of dr-assisted suicide for the terminally ill.
144. I'm all about misguided perseverence. That photo, actually, was pretty easy to find - 3rd search result for your name. Your website was only a bit trickier.
If I understood LB in 140, she said that "person" is interchangeable with "having rights", and the type of moral question we're discussing is whether a fetus is some with rights, or without, or somewhere in between.
Is it more useful to pose it as a question of whether a fetus is a person? Or how much of a person is a fetus? I think that's what Michael was doing in 138.
If so, we should remember that personhood has changed, and includes more than it used to: descendants of former slaves, women, children. And that it's not a binary proposition - children are persons for some purposes, but not others.
144: I'm surprised. I kept coming up with some federal judge in Texas. And I should point out that the picture doesn't do me justice. I am, therefor I cover: I'm crazier than I appear.
Tia, I think that the number of rational suicides is greater than you think. And while you're probably right that the majority do not accept rational suicide, for many that's for religious reasons (which I regard as invalid).
Where someone can be shown to be medically ill in some definite way, I'd generally agree that they shouldn't be allowed commit suicide. But I've known people who wanted to medicalize all behavioral problems, to the point of denying agency to people who behaved wrongly, and justifying aggressive interventions without a clear diagnosis of mental illness.
If I understood LB in 140, she said that "person" is interchangeable with "having rights", and the type of moral question we're discussing is whether a fetus is some with rights, or without, or somewhere in between.
I may have said that, but I didn't intend to. I can conceive of positions that attribute rights to things other than persons -- animals, possibly fetuses. I meant to allude to three possibilities; whether a fetus is to be regarded as a person, or as something else with rights, or as something else without rights.
If so, we should remember that personhood has changed, and includes more than it used to: descendants of former slaves, women, children. And that it's not a binary proposition - children are persons for some purposes, but not others.
I'd disagree with this. There have been changes in the rights possessed by those classes of persons, but I don't know that it's accurate to say that people in any of those categories have ever been simply regarded as something other than persons, and I'm sure that it's wrong to say that there is any context in which children are now not regarded as persons.
It is perfectly possible to be pro-choice and to think of a decision to have an abortion as a difficult one with moral weight; what comes down to an issue of first principles is whose hands that decision should be in.
Right, but doing a balancing of the interests does not mean that there are never going to be certain circumstances which are well defined and in which abortion would be wrong. So even though I embrace a balancing, and I think that in early-term cases the decision can permissibly be left to the woman, I don't believe that the state should allow individual discretion in late-term cases.
But even a balancing involves according to a certain weight to the interests involved. The weakness of Roe, imho, is not that it finds the decision whether to terminate a pregnancy be within a right to privacy; the weakness is that it decides for the nation what moral weight we are going to accord to the life of the fetus. I happen to like the way they came out, but that doesn't mean the Court is a great, or a legitimate, or really a constitutional, mechanism for resolving that kind of question.
I don't know that it's accurate to say that people in any of those categories have ever been simply regarded as something other than persons
I'm pretty sure this is wrong. I think slaves and women at various points in history have been regarded as other than full persons. I'll look for a cite at some point.
the weakness is that it decides for the nation what moral weight we are going to accord to the life of the fetus.
Doesn't it have to? I mean, by allowing abortion at all, the Court has taken the position that a fetus is not a person -- if it were a person, then state laws that allow one class of people (fetal people) to be killed with impunity while punishing the killing of post-fetal people as murder would be a clear equal protection violation. There isn't a non-position for the Court to take; it has to attribute full constitutional rights, no rights at all, or some intermediate class of rights to the fetus.
Well, slaves had none of the rights we associate with persons. Women had fewer of the rights - voting, contract and own property (if married). Children can't marry or form binding contracts, or (in some circumstances) consent to medical treatment, and we can deprive them of liberty with less process due. I'm glossing that as being less than full persons.
Okay, but I'm uncomfortable with that gloss. There is an obvious sense in which women, slaves, and children are all and have always been regarded as people, regardless of what rights they were thought to have. Saying that a fetus is not a person calls on a different type of distinction between a fetus and a child or an adult than there ever was thought to be between a woman and a man, or a slave and a free person.
Blackfeminism made an interesting argument that I hadn't run into before, w/r/t the 14th Amendment, slaves = fetuses thing: the 14th Amendment specifically extends to "all persons born or naturalized within the United States." "Born" clearly /= fetus. So I'm wondering, apart from the moral argument, what is the Constitutional argument *for* banning abortion?
... state laws that allow one class of people (fetal people) to be killed with impunity while punishing the killing of post-fetal people as murder would be a clear equal protection violation.
Unless you have a suspect class somewhere, all you need is a relation relation between the distinction and some legitimate state purpose. I'm sure we could come up with one.
So I'm wondering, apart from the moral argument, what is the Constitutional argument *for* banning abortion?
I don't think there is one. I think the argument is that, absent an abortion right, the federal govt. or the state govts. can regulate as they see fit.
I don't have authority at hand to cite, but I've read pro-slavery tracts that clearly say that slaves aren't people - they don't feel pain the way people do, they don't have the same tender feelings about spouses and children, they're really much more like apes.
If you want to split hairs, the 14th amendment says that 'persons born' are citizens, but does say that all 'persons' shall not be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law and shall be entitled to the equal protection of the laws. If the Court took the position that fetuses were persons, albeit unborn, you could argue that they weren't citizens, but they'd still be able to make equal protection claims.
I thought that the due process clause was solely a restriction on government action, not on private actions. Parents deprive children of rights without affording them notice, opportunity to be heard, etc. all the time. (To your room! No, you don't have a right to the assistance of counsel)
Equal protection of the laws, though. Killing born person X is punishable as murder, killing fetal person Y is not punishable at all -- that seems like the most core possible case of failure of the laws to equally protect one could imagine.
I think the Court really has to take the (in my view obviously correct) factual position that a fetus is not a person in order to avoid a 14th amendment based federal abortion ban.
Just to note: I particularly find annoying the anti-choiceists who make a appeals such as "fingers! beating heart! feels pain!". Well, maybe if the people saying such things are vegetarians. But I don't think that's often the case.
I think that the number of rational suicides is greater than you think.
Well, this is a matter of intuition for both of us until one of us does a really comprehensive suicide lit search. If it helps us inch closer to consensus, when I wrote my original comment I was thinking of the set of people who might feel like committing suicide enough to ask for an rx, not the set of people who succeed. I'd grant that the proportion of rational suicides is probably higher in the second category.
Nevertheless, I'd say it's usually immmoral not to hinder suicides , because even if the person is rational, not ill, she might still be mistaken, or unfit to make decisions for her future self. If Mr. Moneybags lost everything in the crash and wants to kill himself, that might even be rational, but it doesn't mean that Mr. Moneybags + four years wouldn't have been very fulfilled as a mailroom clerk. His interest in autonomy and non-interference plummets with the total irrevocability of the decision. OTOH, there's a level of hindrance that's too great.
I don't think all behavior problems can be medicalized, necessarily, or maybe I think that whether you conceptualize them that way depends on who you are. If it helps therapists help patients live a better life, go ahead and say that a garden variety asshole has Narcisstic Personality Disorder; maybe in an important sense he does, and that will help you treat him; that's not necessarily how his girlfriend should regard him.
Courts say 'Killing person X is punishable as murder, killing person Y is not punishable at all' all the time. Self defense. Justifiable homicide. Accidental killing.
All we need is a rational relation between the distinction among persons (born v unborn) and a legitimate state interest (protecting the life of the mother works, if we believe Bphd's blog that pregnancy is riskier than abortion in most cases) and we survive the equal protection problem. Given time, we could probably invent a better state interest in the distinction.
There isn't a non-position for the Court to take; it has to attribute full constitutional rights, no rights at all, or some intermediate class of rights to the fetus.
The Court must decide whether a fetus is a person. That much seems true. But assuming the Court has decided a fetus not to be a person, the Court need not take any position at all with respect to the state interest in fetal life.
The question of "is the class of X included in the class of persons" and the question of "is the state interest in the lives of those in the class of X sufficiently compelling to allow the state to regulate/forbid abortion" are not identical questions. Put differently, the determination that X is a person is not made by weighing the interest in X living.
Apo, I meant that such things were not regarded in and of themselves as prohibitions against termination. A few vegetarians take this view, but that's about it. Anti-choiceists when they do this are therefore making an emotional argument which they themselves do not believe.
169: Civil rights law isn't my area, but I really can't picture a court holding that fetuses weren't a suspect class in that context. The very fact that the rest of us consider ourselves entitled to kill them with impunity would seem to swing it for me.
All I wanted to do in 154 is say that the Court had to take some position on the status of the fetus -- avoiding the question entirely isn't practical from the point of view of legal analysis. I suppose the Court could have taken the position that fetuses were persons, but that state laws allowing their killing had a rational basis and were required by a woman's right to privacy, but it didn't; in any case it didn't have the option of taking no position at all.
Andrew, it seems to me that once the Court admits that a fetus is not a person, then state courts cannot force women to carry their pregnancies to term in the interest of the state because the interest of the state would infringe upon the personal autonomy of the mother. (While there are laws that infringe upon our personal autonomy, suchs as drug and prostitution laws, it is my understanding that these laws are cloaked by arguments that indulging in drugs and prostitution does result in the harm of other persons. I cannot think of any laws that infringe upon our personal autonomy which are not dependent upon the prevention of harm to other persons.)
A court could say that fetuses are not people, and abortion is a protected right, and yet prohibit a woman from drinking while pregnant, because of the risk or fetal alcohol syndrome.
That's what we do with dogs. We euthanize 'em, but I'd still go to jail for beating my dog to death.
Would the 'fetuses are like dogs' argument go over well with the pro-choice people?
A court could say that fetuses are not people, and abortion is a protected right, and yet prohibit a woman from drinking while pregnant, because of the risk or fetal alcohol syndrome.
A legislature could -- I'm not sure how a court could without a statute to work from. (Also, the hysteria about drinking while pregnant is vastly overblown. Everybody knew that, right?)
Is there a distinction between saying "this is immoral (for me), I should not do it" and saying "this is immoral (for anyone) and you should be prevented from doing it, at gunpoint if necessary"?
yes, yes, yes!
Also: in the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church's teaching was that fetuses are not given souls by God i.e. not persons until the second trimester. I am not sure when/why the church's changed (medical advances?). However, given this, it's clear that the status of fetuses is neither a central matter in Christianity, nor an immutable undisputable issue, nor a matter that Catholic, Christian, or other religious types should try to enforce on other people who do not share their beliefs.
(References: Aristotle writes in a biological treatise that the male embryo is ensouled about 40 days after conception, the female after 90. Directly based on this, for much of its history the Christian church believed in delayed ensoulment and therefore did not consider abortion a sin for up to 90 days after conception).
True, a court would need a statute as a starting point. Federal court jurisdiction goes only to cases and controversies. Sorry, I should type faster so I could be clearer, and write at greater length. Sorry I was being ambiguous.
Dogs participate in some personhood. It's a fairly low level, but it's not nonexistant. I suppose I could be wrong, but it's my understanding that a dog has more cognizance of self and the world than a fetus does. Still, we consider it permisible to kill a dog, as long as it is humane.
However, now we're onto the subject of cruelty. A lot of people take the position that cruelty to a creature that feels and recognizes pain is immoral. If abortion is cruel, that should create some problems.
Fetusses are much lower than dogs. They can't hump legs, or sniff personal areas, or lick their own personal areas, or mark their territory, or any of the other canine specialties.
More placenta hilarity: a midwife friend of my aunt's once brought a placenta with her to my aunt's house and put it in the freezer. I can't remember why; maybe she was planning on cooking it, though I think she became worried it had been out of the fridge too long and decided against it. Anyway, I was there on my first vacation away from home, so we staged a big scene with me posing with scissors poised to snip the umbilical cord and took a picture which we captioned, "Tia cuts the cord."
Is that a concensus on the existence of a sliding scale of personhood, with fetuses below zero, children at about 10, some dogs (especially standard poodles) at about 35, and adult humans at perhaps 35.2? I didn't think there was such a preponderance of support for my beliefs.
People who only hump legs, sniff personal areas, and mark territory rate only a 28. But don't get me wrong, some of my best friends are like that. I think I should go, and resume my regularly scheduled life.
149: I think you mean "what Michael was doing in 137".
137: I agree with the position, but I think by that reasoning an infant is also not a person, and becomes more of a person over time, eventually reaching full personhood (or not) as they age. For this reason, I'm not morally opposed to infanticide. But I think a lot of people will find this position rather repugnant.
It's ogged. You must not avoid it--it's dreadfully beautiful--unless, that is, your constitution is too delicate, and you are prone to crying fits or vapors when struck by great emotion. Then I cannot counsel you, tho' it may be that some delights are worth the slight inconvenience of vapors.
I cannot think of any laws that infringe upon our personal autonomy which are not dependent upon the prevention of harm to other persons.)
Oh, I can. How about prohibitions of post-viable abortions except where necessary to preserve the health of the mother?
Fetuses occupy a fairly unique place in the range of beings, I think. I'm not sure how useful analogies to other beings will be here, given that the really salient aspects of a fetus (recognizably separate being with unique human DNA, in the process of developing into a full person) are not going to be found in those analogies.
Hilzoy, Obsidian Wings' resident bio-ethicist, makes an interesting (if truncated) case for considering sentience rather than viability as the point for granting the fetus more protection. Link.) Roughly, viability is getting pushed further and further back by technological advances; while extremely young fetuses can survive, the prognosis for their developmental health is not very good.
Ooh, good on you for linking that; I read it the other day at ObWi and my thinking has been informed by it. (Well, informed mostly in the "Yeah, exactly -- how come I can't articulate my thoughts like that?") I want to be hilzoy when I grow up. Then I look at myself and realize that I've already grown up.
Do you think that abortion is harmful to the fetus? Is it impinging on the desire or will of the fetus? Is it creating a negative emotional state for the fetus, or for other fetuses? I think we can agree that it's not.* We have this idea that we can look back through time and claim that a right over ourselves as fetuses. "I wouldn't want to have been aborted!". But this isn't logical. Had I been aborted, I would never had this desire, and thus it could never have been aborted, and I could never have come to harm.
What is salient to me is that abortion is the denial of the experience of life. In a way, this is no more harmful to a particular fetus than to a hypothetical fetus one didn't conceive. Nevertheless, it is a bit sad. But that's also because I, and I think many others, are optimistic about the possibilities of life. And perhaps reasonably so. Still, I do not think we need to take the step and say that a somewhat regretful act is an immoral act.
I know, and it depresses me. Hilzoy and Edward are just excellent, as were many of the commenters, and SH and Slart at least often provide interesting insight into what Republicans are thinking. But the comments have become almost unreadable. Annoying.
Everybody is assuming bad faith on others' part by now. It might have something to do with Hilzoy's much-linked posts' making the site seem more public; people (especially, unfortunately, a lot of people with whom I would tend to agree) seem not to be able to leave an argument gracefully. It's a shame, though, and I really doubt that the process is reversible.
I am hoping, however, that by coopting some of the frequent offenders into my Charles Bird "hate" site, I can help resist the slide.
Goodness, first the NYT discovers Goffman as a 'new' way of describing prejudice, and now it discovers Planned Parenthood's website.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 6:13 AM
Except, as the Supreme Court and most Americans recognize, this isn't an issue only about a woman's "internal organs" or her autonomy.
There's a competing interest involved.
The degree of respect and importance that we accord that competing interest is a difficult one, and not answered by one's beliefs with respect to autonomy.
Posted by Andrew | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 6:46 AM
It would be sufficient proof that Saletan is an asshole that he recommends abstinence for those who can practice it. There's nothing there to indicate that he doesn't respect women's right to choose how they live their lives, no there isn't. After all, he does think that those dirty sluts who just can't practice abstinence should be allowed access to contraception, which is an amazing brilliant idea he just thought up himself.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 7:05 AM
Except, as the Supreme Court and most Americans recognize, this isn't an issue only about a woman's "internal organs" or her autonomy.
There's a competing interest involved.
Calling it a difficult question, and raising a 'competing interest' sounds balanced, but it gets less persuasive the more specific you get. Whose interest? If it's the state's, then saying that the state's interest in anything overrides a woman's interest in what's happening inside her own body sounds to me like a serious invasion of her autonomy. If it's the fetus' (restricting the conversation, for the moment, to the first two trimesters), are you taking the position that the interests of a non-sentient mass of tissue with the potential, but no more, of developing into a human being is more compelling than that of the woman?
I can sympathize, while disagreeing with, someone who says that abortion is a sin because God disapproves of it. Fuzzy arguments, alluded to rather than made, about how disturbing abortion is and so maybe that disturbingness sometimes should justify a prohibition, on the other hand annoy me -- if you're going to take a moral or ethical stance, you should take it. If you haven't thought through the issue enough to have a defensible opinion on whether something is wrong, you should step away from the issue and leave it to people who do have opinions.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 7:35 AM
To put it bluntly, an embryo or fetus is a parasite in the woman's body. She has as much right to get it removed as I do to get a tumor removed from my body.
Posted by Frederick | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 7:45 AM
LB, I think that's a little tendentious. It seems to me Andrew was just trying to point out that one could make an argument for competing fetal interest for some other reason than that one disregarded the woman's autonomy, and he should be allowed to point out the existence of those arguments. I think Jill at Feministe would be more convincing if she said "restricting abortion is an unacceptable abridgement of women's autonomy" rather than "anyone who suggests otherwise does not believe that women are complete individuals." I suspect that you'd find remarkable overlap between the categories "wants to restrict abortion" and "does not believe that women are complete individuals," but then Jill's argument would be better served by providing evidence for that, rather than just ignoring the other way someone might come to the "abortion is wrong" conclusion.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 7:49 AM
Let me try to reformulate what I think the problem is with 'Do you trust women?' framing.
Unless you're pro-choice, the answer is going to be, 'No.' (Even if you're pro-choice, you might be inclined to a somewhat cynical, 'What, the same women that eat 10 low-fat cookies and think they're being healthy? The same women that buy lottery tickets? The same women that think ID is just a good way of doing science? I don't trust American people to make smart decisions, let alone women.')
Not all pro-lifers hate women. Not the fun ones quoted by the left, certainly, but quite a lot think that the problem is simply that the unborn have just as many rights to protection under the law as an infant would, minus health & harm to the mother concerns due to the fact that the fetus is hanging around inside the mother.
Talk of 'trusting women' to them is rather like arguing against the necessity of child protection services by insisting that we trust that mothers will always make the right decision by their children. Don't you trust women?
Certainly, if you're already pro-choice, it's compelling. But if you're pro-choice, we don't need to convince you of anything.
Better, I think, to aim for the contraceptive/more support for single moms, and take the 'we're trying to end abortion; you just want to make it illegal' angle.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 7:53 AM
I meant to be aggressive: I don't think I was unfair. Abortion is an issue which is terribly clouded by the willingness of lots of reasonable people to say, without arguing in any clear fashion that can be responded to, that it's tragic, and a difficult moral decision, and wrong, but not wrong enough that we're going to do anything about it other than avert our eyes from the women who choose to have abortions. (Hi!)
Where the 'reasonable', middle-of-the-road, position is that it's all too tragic and unseemly to discuss with clarity, it becomes very difficult to articulate a clear position for abortion rights. I'm very, very tired of listening to people talk about the ineffable awfulness of it all -- if you don't have a position you can defend, accept that it's because your thoughts on the issue aren't clear, and keep quiet until they clarify.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 7:57 AM
7: And I agree with Cala about how to engage with actual pro-lifers. My crossness is with Saletan-style handwringing from people who are probably personally pro-choice, in that if they, or their girfriend or wife or sister, needed an abortion, they'd go right ahead without significant qualms.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 8:00 AM
And to continue serial-commenting: Andrew, I didn't mean to jump on you, personally, that hard. I'm talking about Saletan and the great bulk of middle-of-the-road commentary on abortion.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 8:02 AM
To put it bluntly, an embryo or fetus is a parasite in the woman's body. She has as much right to get it removed as I do to get a tumor removed from my body.
That's certainly one view, but one unlikely to convince a conflicted moderate that unlimited access to abortion isn't only held by people who really believe that a fetus (which ends up being a baby!) is just like a cancer (which usually doesn't perpetuate the species.)
Very easy to parody and really, the issue is a whole lot more complicated than that; last I checked, no one decided to keep a tumor because they felt they were financially stable enough.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 8:03 AM
LB, what bothers me about the whole debate is that it really seems like quite a lot of pro-choicers have never met any one who is pro-life. It's like they're describing a species they've never met before and only read about in blogs ('everyone I know voted for Kerry'). And so all pro-lifers must be crazed fundamentalist Christians who believe in Jeebus (cause that's respectful) and want their daughters to live in the kitchen.
I mean, come on. Most of the country is for some sort of abortion rights, but a significant minority (40% or so?) isn't. They're not all wackjobs, any more than the majority of pro-choicers are all swingin' singles who abort babies as often as they pay their phone bill.
And it would be really nice if both sides would stop caricaturing the other. I know a whole lot of pro-life people who have all sent their daughters off to college, instilled in them can-do feminist attitudes, taught them about birth control, who think that hey, it's a life in there, and some reasons aren't good reason to end it if you do get pregnant, so be very careful.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 8:11 AM
Andrew didn't say any thing about "awfulness" or "tragedy." He said (I paraphrase) there was a competing interest (fetal, I presumed), and the argument that anyone who thought abortion should be restricted doesn't care about women's autonomy is weak (I agree). (I think it is better stated as "women's autonomy is more important than the competing interest." Another option is "the competing interest doesn't really exist; people who argue so are mistaken." I disagree with that one, but it's an option.) Those are pretty much legitimate points. Sometimes people pick apart arguments around here without offering their own affirmative ones; I see your point that this is obfuscatory in the abortion debate in particular, but this site tends not to be a place where people offer their opinions in perfectly politically framed speeches, but where, well, people pick apart arguments.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 8:14 AM
Cross-posted, obviously. I'm not trying to defend Saletan-style handwringing.
I have met a bunch of pro-lifers, but they were pretty much all for women's subjugation.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 8:18 AM
Well, the girls bogued on us during the important football games, but now that we're talking about one of those frivolous girly topics, they're all back again. Where's Bitch? Where's mmf!?
But where were any of them, when the games were on the line? Women always let you down in the hour of need.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 8:22 AM
The problem I have with pro-life people, beyond the disagreement about the rights of women over their bodies, is that since they are (for the most part) Republicans, they're not going to be in favor of generous social programs for all these unwanted kids.
I would counter the interest of the child arguments with detailed description of what the child welfare system is like. Force them to confront the reality of that. Yeah, I'm sure they'll say you can give up the kids for adoption, but still a lot of kids are going to end up in poverty, neglected, and generally screwed. Isn't thinking about these things part of the child's interest?
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 8:36 AM
I read Saletan's article and, while I think his tone was patronizing and it was too full of hand-wringing, I do think that abortion needs to be reframed into a broader "choice" platform, not just because it is more winning electorally but because it's the right thing to do. It really hit me when I participated in the March for Women's Lives in D.C. – I had gone to show my support for abortion rights but the rally really tried to bring together a number of issues that affect women's reproductive lives, from comprehensive sex-education to economic equality to better health care. Too many women don't really have a "choice" – their decision is made by their circumstances, and that can be a woman who is forced to have a child she's not prepared for because she doesn't have access to an abortion provider or a woman who feels compelled to abort a pregnancy she'd like to carry to term because she doesn't feel that she can support another child.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 8:38 AM
Dear me, for the first three months or so it certainly IS an issue of a woman's internal organs. The competing interest (which, sure, should be considered in the equation along with a woman's autonomy) doesn't emerge immediately. In fact, the early fetus cells are so very much not separate from the woman's body that they often can't be detected with certainty for quite some time. Doctors routinely need 3-4 weeks before they can test definitively with blood tests and *know* whether a woman is pregnant or not -- as friends of mine who want a baby have discovered.
Posted by mmf! | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 8:39 AM
I don't know. I've met a lot of pro-lifers. I went to college in Texas, and college seems to be the time when people have more frequent and less-informed discussions about abortion than anywhere else.
Yes, of course some people who are pro-life send their daughters to college or encourage birth control or whatever. I don't think that just because the pro-lifers aren't raging, maniacal misogynists, that the "do you trust women?" argument doesn't hold. In fact, one of the reasons that misogynist and the incompletely-human statuts of women is so invidious is because no one knows they're doing it. Very few people will admit to thinking or believing that women are in some way inferior or incomplete, but almost all of us act as if that's true.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 8:43 AM
'misogynist' should be 'misogyny'.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 8:44 AM
I've asked people several times at which stage a fetus is big enough that you'd notice it if you had one in your eye. Right-to-lifer's give human rights to 32-cell lumps of tissue that you probably couldn't even see.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 8:44 AM
The standard answer is going to be a snarky, 'Oh, so the position of liberals is that unless you're going to have a middle-class life, it's not worth living? Better to be dead than alive without an iPod?' It just ain't going to sell, because there isn't another argument about child's interest that includes (from their perspective) killing the child so it doesn't suffer later.
I think that's my biggest problem with the pro-life movement, though. The Netherlands have easy access to abortion, and a lower rate of abortion than the U.S. If ending abortion is really the issue here, then focusing on making it illegal isn't really the best way to go about it.
Want to end it? You can't. Want to minimize it? Make it so a girl can have a baby and still complete college; affordable childcare & family leave policies. Women aren't having abortions because they hate babies, but because 90% of the time, a baby puts them into a bad position financially.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 8:45 AM
Biblical Christians will, in fact argue that the woman is the weaker vessel, whatever that means, and that the wife should therefore submit herself to her husband. Men and women are different in kind and all women are inferior to all men. I'd like to ask these guys what application their principle has in the not rare cases when the wife clearly is not the weaker vessel, but the husband is.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 8:48 AM
I thought Andrew was alluding to a perfectly clear (if difficult) position. That if the argument in favor of choice is premised on self-sovereignity, self-ownership, individual autonomy, then denying self-sovereignity to the fetus while granting it to the woman requires some additional statement: that it is not good enough to just say, "it's about autonomy and self-sovereignity, and that's all there is to it." There are other arguments about choice that do not primarily rest on a classical liberal argument about autonomy and rights--say, for example, an argument about patriarchy and male domination in which the argument about abortion and choice applies solely to women.
The argument about self-sovereignity and individual autonomy in relation to choice is capacious and applies to everyone, generally; it links the argument for choice to a wide range of other rights asserted and defended, from consent to medical treatment to habeas corpus. It potentially carries to the fetus, or to any subject we regard as a human subject. (Or even in some formulations, beyond the human to animals.) If it does not carry to the fetus, then something further must be said beyond the assertion of a woman's right to self-sovereignity. Either that in the case of two lives that depend upon each other, the first life to exist takes precedence, or that the fetus is not a human subject until it is born, or that legal minors (fetuses and children) do not yet possess the full rights of adult subjects or are chattel, or some other formulation.
Some of these formulations we do not accept any longer, though they were once a common strategy to arrest the spread of a universal declaration of human rights--as, for example, the assertion that some human subjects have the status of chattel or are not fully human. And yet some assert this in the case of the fetus. It is a matter of faith or religion to assert that life begins at conception, I agree. But it sometimes feels to me equally arbitrary to say that you become a rights-bearing subject the second your head crowns out of a vagina but not a moment before that. The common form of pro-life sentiment is intensely religious and not particularly invoking of liberalism, but there is a way in which a pro-life argument potentially descends out of the history of the universality of rights and the striking down of all attempts to put up borders and boundaries to that spread. I'm pretty comfortable posting border guards myself at the species boundary, and maybe for the same reason when we're talking about fetuses prior to (and perhaps after) viability.
I'm more comfortable with an argument that says that where two lives are inextricably connected physically to one another, the life which is materially, biologically, physically autonomous and which has a prior autonomy to the other takes precedence. Partly because there are very few other cases where that statement applies, but at the same it potentially could apply to other instances, especially in the future given some biotech possibilities. If tomorrow I was told that by giving a daily blood transfusion to a neighbor, my neighbor could survive indefinitely, but without my blood, my neighbor would die, I might be a good sport and head down to the hospital to donate. If after six months, I decided I'd had enough, that I was feeling sick, bound to another life, incapable of living the way I wanted to, responsible for a life sentence of maintaining my neighbor, and I wanted to quit, then I could or should be able to say, "My life precedes yours; I can survive without you, but not you without me." If my neighbor then sued me, saying I was sentencing them to death, they would be right about the implications of my decision but not right, in my view, in their assertion of rights. It's true that I would be compromising my neighbor's self-sovereignity, but only because their self-sovereignity would require the concession of my own for its continuance.
But even that argument--that the life which is autonomous precedes and trumps that which is not--has some complicated implications in a rights-bearing conception of the human subject. What about very seriously handicapped people who require assistance to survive, but whose families no longer wish to or are capable of provisioning such assistance? What about abandoned children? Right now we resolve that problem by remanding such subjects to the care and protection of the state--but isn't that precisely what some pro-life advocates are asking for in the case of the fetus?
I can work through this clearly to a pro-choice position, but in a liberal framework I think we have to acknowledge that it involves making very strong and potentially arbitrary statements about the outer limits of rights, or about the resolution of competing rights-based claims. Much in the same way I'm absolutely comfortable saying that animals don't have rights, period: it's about a foundational definition of what a rights-bearing subject is, and a resistance to including bordering or ambiguous cases. But then I admit I run into trouble in other instances--why, for example, would I claim that a person in a long-term vegetative state who expressed a strong desire to be kept alive prior to entering such a state is still a rights-bearing subject whose prior expressed wishes must be respected?
It's why in some ways the argument about patriarchy and the oppression of women is clearer, easier (albeit limited in other ways)--it doesn't take on some of the dilemmas that couching this issue in universalist, rights-bearing terms does.
Posted by Timothy Burke | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 8:51 AM
My dad used to tell me that women should obey their husbands because 'someone has to have the final word' to 'make it easy' to run a household. And also, because 'the bible says so.' It was the weirdest thing that ever came out of his mouth. I told him, I think, to fuck off.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 8:52 AM
I'm pretty sure Jill is missing Saletan's point. I take him to be making a rhetorical and strategic point: "I had an abortion, and it's my body and none of your business" and "I had an abortion, and I'm really very sad about it" register as very different moral sentiments to a lot of people. Saletan is arguing that insofar as pro-choicers are forced to adopt the former rhetoric, because to argue anything else would seem to be an unacceptable concession of abortion's wrongness, they've already let anti-abortionists frame the debate. His suggestion, to frame the debate as everyone's fight against abortion, with pro-lifers distrusting women, and pro-choicers trusting them, is both good, and, as Becks says, good policy.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 8:57 AM
But isn't LizardBreath correct the way she demands Andrew set out his stall?
Andrew's "competing interest" immediately voids the notion of "autonomy" - doesn't it?
Logically - it's one versus the other - unless I'm being spectacularly dim today?
Posted by Jody Tresidder | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 8:57 AM
I don't think that just because the pro-lifers aren't raging, maniacal misogynists, that the "do you trust women?" argument doesn't hold.
That's not exactly why it doesn't hold. It doesn't hold because the first step is to convince the pro-lifer that he doesn't actually trust women with his support of pro-life policies. But if he is really worried about babies (rationally or otherwise), he's going to agree with you that he doesn't trust women, but he's going to disagree that that's a problem. He doesn't trust men not to be child abusers, either, so he outlaws that. He doesn't trust people not to be thieves, so he locks his front door. (It's obviously not a perfect parallel, but nuance hasn't been a winning strategy in a long time.)
Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think it will be successful rhetoric, because it seems to depend on first convincing someone that his position is, indeed, misogynist. It may well be misogynist, but I don't like the odds of convincing a moderate that he should support abortion rights by first convincing him that we think he's evil.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 8:58 AM
And then there's Doctor Benbow, who offered abortions on spec to pregnant women he saw on the street,
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 9:03 AM
I think (just) one of the problems with the Saletanian argument that pro-choicers should just say "Abortion is always bad, let's talk about how to minimize it" is that pro-choicers will suspect that pro-lifers won't want to stop with abortion, but will want to continue on to control women's lives in more and more ways. And we'll have damn good reason for suspecting that. As Cala points out there are exceptions, but by and large the same people and groups who are opposing abortion are also opposing sex education, and emergency contraception, and distribution of condoms in AIDS-wracked countries, etc. etc., not to mention displaying a certain indifference to the fate of the post-unborn as per 16 and 22.
Saletan himself, though he thinks he's a liberal or libertarian or something, is perfectly happy to tell people that it's best not to have sex. Before I make any concessions to someone like that, I'd like to see them concede that it's in general a good thing for women to control their own sexuality and reproductive choices, and only when there's a competing interest should the weight of governmental or societal disapproval be brought down on them.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 9:05 AM
I think that when you talk about the badness of abortion, you have to specify the kind of badness. No one ever gets pregnant in order to abort, or has recreational abortions, because there are many things about abortion which are unpleasant. But the argument is always bent in the direction of "Abortion is wrong, even where it's legal". I don't think that.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 9:09 AM
Andrew's "competing interest" immediately voids the notion of "autonomy" - doesn't it?
I don't think so. Autonomy can be trumped by other concerns outside of the abortion debate. When one's actions end up harming others, certainly, and on some models, when one's actions end up harming oneself.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 9:09 AM
pro-choicers will suspect that pro-lifers won't want to stop with abortion
Yes, but that's part of Saletan's point: as long as pro-choicers feel like they have to deny the badness of abortion, they've been forced into an undesirable rhetorical position--the debate becomes about whether it's bad or not, and almost everyone agrees that it is. Obviously, the first step isn't to just agree that it's bad, but to agree by shifting the terms of the debate.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 9:12 AM
Maybe the shorter point is "Saletan, the point of contraceptive access is not just that it reduces the number of abortions."
And to ogged in 26, that's definitely part of his argument, but I don't think it's the whole thing. I don't really see any evidence that Saletan isn't speaking for himself when he says abortion is always bad. Even if he were making your argument, he doesn't seem to notice that pro-choice politicians have been making those arguments. His selling out to abstinence shows a truly cavalier attitude toward autonomy. And on the 'abortion is a loser' front, there's this and this.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 9:13 AM
a fetus is big enough that you'd notice it if you had one in your eye
That would be one ectopic pregnancy destined for a medical journal, for sure.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 9:15 AM
I think there are bad reasons to have abortions. I'm probably in the minority of possible political reasons because I believe that because I also believe that there shouldn't be legal restrictions, generally, figuring that since infanticide and abortion have existed throughout most of human history, making it illegal won't make it go away.
But the argument is always bent in the direction of "Abortion is wrong, even where it's legal".
I don't think that, either. But I do think that "Some abortions are made for bad reasons, even where it's legal." And the majority of these bad reasons are due to economics.
I think it's a pretty shitty society when your options are a) starve b) have an abortion, and while I don't assign any blame to the woman who has to make such a decision, I don't think it's right to say that I think that decision is ideal.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 9:17 AM
Cross-posted with 33. I think that "almost everyone agrees that abortion is bad" slides too quickly, for Saletan and in the real world, to "Almost everyone agrees that women should never get abortions," and then, boom, criminalization and the debate is over contraception. After all, if all you want is to reduce abortions, wouldn't contraception PLUS criminalization be more effective? A better position I think is, "Look, nobody wants to get an abortion."
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 9:18 AM
This is the worst April Fools joke ever.
Is "bogue" even a word?
Posted by Anonymous | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 9:19 AM
I'm not sure that Saletan is right (disclaimer: I haven't actually read the full Saletan piece) that abortion is bad, let's all reduce it, is really the best possible framing. Or rather, it may be politically, in our peculiar American culture, but I don't actually think it's the best moral framing. Unwanted pregnancies are bad. Abortion, in that it is an insurance policy for women's autonomy in health, is good.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 9:20 AM
37: Not quite. I think it slides very quickly into restricted abortion access, not criminalization. In fact, that's where Jill's rebuttal seems to lead. She grants that contraception would reduce most of the unwanted pregnancies, and then cites mostly late-term medical problems, rape, & incest.
Maybe I only know sane pro-lifers, but most of the ones I know think abortion is accetpable in cases of danger to the mother, rape & incest.
So the worry is that Saletan's concession gets us very quickly to legal first tri-mester, and then health & rape exemptions only after that.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 9:22 AM
s/b "and health." Also, that use of "insurance policy" was a little weird, but if I'm going to go back and critique all my comments for style, I have a lot of work to do.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 9:22 AM
I think that "almost everyone agrees that abortion is bad" slides too quickly, for Saletan and in the real world, to "Almost everyone agrees that women should never get abortions,"and then, boom, criminalization and the debate is over contraception.
What? You mean because everyone believes that adultery is basically wrong, and now that's illegal?
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 9:27 AM
Maybe I only know sane pro-lifers, but most of the ones I know think abortion is accetpable in cases of danger to the mother, rape & incest.
You may be too young to remember, but when the PA abortion law was being drawn up, and then-Rep. Stephen Freind wanted to leave out a rape exception, because according to studies he'd cited, women who were raped couldn't get pregnant? Turned out that the studies were done by Nazis on concentration camp victims. Freind never apologized. So I'm not too optimistic about the sanity of the pro-life people who actually get laws passed.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 9:27 AM
Did it pass?
I'm not overly optimistic, either, but Freind isn't the sort I'm worried about, because it's pretty easy to make him look like an idiot.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 9:28 AM
I agree with Tia and Weiner. I'm not willing to say "abortion is always bad". I do think "unwanted pregnancies are bad" and "look, nobody wants to have an abortion" are reasonable reframed starting points.
Bill Clinton's "safe, legal, and rare" resonated with a lot of people and it's not too far off from Saletan's position. The question is whether abortion should be rare because you can't get one (which is the trend under the current administration and their increasing restrictions) or rare because they're less necessary (due to better access to contraception, better economic opportunities, increased access to the morning-after pill, etc.)
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 9:30 AM
You mean because everyone believes that adultery is basically wrong, and now that's illegal?
As some people like to point out, abortion bans have always meant that rich people can get abortions. And most politicians don't have to worry about whether they'll need abortions anyway.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 9:32 AM
"Safe, legal, and rare" is just fine with me.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 9:34 AM
It's a good point: "no one wants an abortion" is better than "abortion is always bad." You just have to muzzle the people who want to say "I got an abortion, so what? I'll get one any time I please."
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 9:34 AM
44: The rape exemption went in, I think, but Freind was the sponsor of the 1989 Pennsylvania Abortion Control Act which was the subject of Planned Parenthood v. Casey. We need to worry about his sort.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 9:35 AM
I disagree so passionately that I'm not going even going to try and discuss this today. I have work to do, and it woudl take all day, and it would just make people angry.
But for the record, I am liberal, highly educated, I don't hate women or their freedom or autonomy, nor do I think them "lesser" than men or whatever, but I'm opposed to abortion 100% of the time. No exceptions for fetal deformity, rape, incest, etc. No exception for health of the mother, although I'd be willing to discuss an exception where the life of the mother was in danger, but I think that's mostly a straw man, anyway.
I'm sure I'm going to be yelled at for this, and I honestly wish I had time to elaborate/defend myself. But unfortunately this is just the wrong day for me; I'm too busy.
Posted by Urple | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 9:37 AM
"Safe, legal, and rare" is just fine with me.
Me too.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 9:37 AM
48 - Totally agree. That is so Not Helping The Cause, like the girl at the MFWL in D.C. wearing the "I can't wait to get my first abortion" t-shirt. And those are the people who always end up with their pictures in the paper. Sigh.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 9:38 AM
"look, nobody wants to have an abortion" is just disengenuous, and for that reason, will fail. Obviously people do want to have abortions -- often for very good reasons -- which is why this debate exists. I think the way to win this debate -- around which there has been much dissembling on both sides -- would be to state a rational argument and adhere to it, without making obviously empty rhetorical moves.
That said, I will heed Lizard Breath's advice and stay out of a debate for which my response is incompletely theorized.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 9:39 AM
Do you like "everyone would prefer not to have to get an abortion," text?
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 9:41 AM
You just have to muzzle the people who want to say "I got an abortion, so what? I'll get one any time I please."
It amazes me how many people think that being impossibly shrill will somehow aid their cause. Yesterday a website that I write for put up a news post which, among other things, covered the big pro-life march that's happening here in DC. The post didn't mention the pro-choice counter-observances that were occurring -- mainly because they're unlikely to snarl traffic, but also because they are (let's face it) completely reactionary PR exercises. The site's staff is overwhelmingly (entirely?) pro-choice. Someone wrote in saying that she felt this "tacitly endorsed the anti-choice position," that she'd never read the site again, and that she was going to be contacting our advertisers.
Posted by tom | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 9:42 AM
I think Tim nailed the complications I was alluding to when I referenced a competing interest. Great post.
Abortion is even more complicated that the "should we require blood transfusions for the dying neighbor/ailing-violinist" hypothetical though, because abortion generally requires the use of force against the fetus. So we're not talking any longer about a simple refusal to provide support; we're talking about an act of violence as a method of cutting off such support. Not only are you going to refuse a blood transfusion to your neighbor; you're going to do violence to his body to stop the transfusion. That may not change the ultimate result as to your right to do so, but it certainly complicates matters, and renders the thought-experiment less intuitively powerful.
LB, I can understand your desire that a person clearly articulate a full position on abortion when commenting, but I don't have one. I think the problem is an extremely difficult one to resolve in a principled way, and ultimately I find myself simply resorting to a kind of balancing between the fetal interest and the woman's interest---which brings me to a moderate pro-choice position.
And I think this ties into the larger point about pro-choice rhetoric. Most people, ultimately, rest their intuitions on a balancing of the interests, and don't commit themselves emotionally to a cognized, consistent, and complex array of first-principles and thought-experiments that might support an absolutist position one way or the other. So when moderate pro-choicers, like me, hear rhetoric that seems to evince a first-principle allegiance that ignores the quite human interests which enter into a balancing, we're inclined to distance ourselves from the rhetoric, and perhaps the political movement making the rhetoric. Such rhetoric seems unexpressive of at best, and contradictory to at worst, our own sense of the stakes.
I realize how imprecise and murky this post is. More fuel for the fire, LB. :)
Posted by Andrew | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 9:44 AM
sure, maybe I'm being overly literalist here, and an ass, but I do like that better. Or maybe, "nobody's happy to get an abortion."
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 9:44 AM
"Safe, legal, and rare" is great buzzword spin, but it isn't a terribly meaningful statement. I doubt that there are people whatever whose goal is very large numbers of illegal, dangerous abortions.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 9:44 AM
48: Consensus! I mean, I'm not in favor of literal muzzling, but I agree they're not good for the movement. Though they shouldn't be any worse for the movement than loonies who fantasize about Nuremberg trials are for theirs.
On preview: Urple, I'm sure you are sincerely liberal and sincerely anti-abortion; when I make generalizations about anti-abortion people, I'm talking about the majority of them and the positions they support.
text, I mean "nobody wants an abortion" in kind of the same way as "nobody wants to go to the dentist." Obviously, lots of people prefer these things to the alternatives, but I don't think anyone wants them for themselves. On preview again, what ogged just said.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 9:45 AM
Jeez, I preview twice, type one sentence, and still miss a relevant post (57). I'm outie.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 9:46 AM
You just have to muzzle the people who want to say "I got an abortion, so what? I'll get one any time I please."
I think that's right. As some of the reactions in this piece make clear, many pro-life conservative young women have completely bought into the idea that the only people who ever need abortions are women who hate babies or who are 'sluts' who don't even practice safe sex. They'd probably be pro-choice if they believed that pro-choice women were women like them.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 9:47 AM
I'm not willing to say "abortion is always bad".
Right, because it isn't. My wife got pregnant the year before we had Noah, but the baby died in utero about 2.5-3 months into the pregnancy. A D&C was necessary to remove it. Luckily, the area in which we live has plenty of abortion providers, so it didn't entail a several hour drive and a hotel room. If we'd lived in North Dakota, it would have been vastly more expensive and complicated.
Abortion is *necessary*. Period. It is often enough an essential part of obstetric care, even for women who want to have a child. That doctors aren't being properly trained to perform them is heinous.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 9:47 AM
I got that was what you meant, MW, and I think that's the right sentiment. I think this debate is sort of rare, politically, in that what's required is one really clear paragraph, instead of a slogan.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 9:48 AM
I'd be willing to discuss an exception where the life of the mother was in danger, but I think that's mostly a straw man, anyway.
Well, you're wrong. You carry a rotting corpse around inside you and see what infections are possible, okay?
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 9:51 AM
I think "safe, legal, and rare" is meaningful, in that as a representation of the pro-choice position it contradicts a lot of misconceptions (pardon the pun) about it. Also, it sets out implicit policy goals: better social services for families, economic opportunities, access to contraception, and good health care.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 9:54 AM
Friends of mine (2 off the top of my head) have had to have D&Cs due to fetal death (very early term miscarriages.) Another acquaintance had an emergency abortion due to pre-eclampsia, which developed later.
Certainly, these situations are far more rare than panicky high school girls getting pregnant, but that doesn't make them straw men.
I'd hate for one of my friends to have to go before a judge to prove that her blood pressure was spiking at 210/100 in order to get medical care. (Now, that may be a straw man, but how else would a law allowing only health of mom exceptions work?)
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 9:55 AM
I doubt that there are people whatever whose goal is very large numbers of illegal, dangerous abortions.
It may not be the goal of the religious point of view, but it's the effect.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 9:56 AM
67: Zing!
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 9:59 AM
62/64-Apostropher: I think that no one would argue that "abortion" presents any moral complication when the fetus is already dead. I think you'd be hard-pressed to find *anyone*, even in the pews of the most conversative, right-wing, woman-hating, church in the reddest-red state in America, who would find this morally problematic.
And I think you also know that's not at all what most people mean when they discuss the morality of abortion.
Posted by Urple | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 10:00 AM
conversative right wingers are the worst kind in that you just can't seem to end intercourse with them, on any subject.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 10:03 AM
Urple, I know plenty of people who hold the same view that you do. They are almost all Catholic, and are similarly opposed to the death penalty, euthanasia, and war. They are good people who I respect.
Philosophically, that is a completely coherent stance and, I believe, ethically defensible. Practically, however, it simply falls apart when it smacks into reality, as it inevitably does.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 10:03 AM
I know, man, Apo introduced me to one of his more fire-beathing Southern Baptist friends the other day, and it just went on and on and on.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 10:04 AM
I mean they put it to you one way, and put it to you another, and by the time you're through, you've gotten all bent out of shape and what you really need is a nap. And a shower.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 10:07 AM
But Urple, the doctors have to be trained to perform it. The facilities have to exist. And the more the anti-abortion crowd throws up legislative (or terroristic) roadblocks on their way to banning it outright, the more those first two conditions become scarce.
I understand the moral argument, but it doesn't square with reality.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 10:07 AM
And they're constantly jabbing at you, inserting their points into the discussion.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 10:09 AM
Urple, the problem is that with illegal/massively-restricted abortion, no one becomes trained in the OB/GYN procedures for removing dead fetal tissue.
No one may have a moral problem with a D&C after a miscarriage, but the effect is certainly to ensure that it's very rare.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 10:09 AM
Apo introduced me to one of his more fire-beathing Southern Baptist friends
He has a name, you know.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 10:10 AM
61: Well, but is the muzzling the most appropriate way of making it clear that women who have had abortions are like the rest of us? I've had an elective, early-term abortion, I think it was a good decision, and I do bring it up in discussions like this precisely because the taboo on discussing personal experience with abortion is strong enough that it allows people to think of women who get abortions as nothing like the people they know.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 10:10 AM
74 - Yes, and true, but you're conflating the two issues: if doctors weren't allowed to perform abortions on living fetuses, no one would be bothered by their being trained to perform them on dead fetuses (as there is no moral issue here), and one would expect such training to become routine and unobjectionable.
And, if it's important to spell this out, I have no problem with doctors being trained to "abort" dead fetuses. I think any or at least most ob/gyn's should be capable of doing this, as it is at times a necessary procedure.
Posted by Urple | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 10:13 AM
Unitarians, on the other hand, are open-minded but limp, and you barely know they're there sometimes.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 10:16 AM
WTF, Emerson? No questions about the morality of aborting the result of an episode of bestiality?
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 10:20 AM
LB, the difference maybe between, 'See, I'm normal, educated, successful and I was in a situation where a condom broke and needed one' and 'I can't wait for my first abortion! Yeah rights!' or 'God, a baby would totally clash with my shoes.' The first is a story that needs to be told; the latter two are just fodder for the 'You're not a slut who likes shoes, are you Suzie? You'd never kill a baby' brand of rhetoric.
All deserve the same amount of rights, but I believe this is rather like debates about free speech. If I'm trying to sell the idea, I don't start with glamorizing the Skokie Nazis, but by framing them as a side-effect of a good law that sometimes lets through objectionable ideas.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 10:20 AM
LB, I can understand your desire that a person clearly articulate a full position on abortion when commenting, but I don't have one. I think the problem is an extremely difficult one to resolve in a principled way, and ultimately I find myself simply resorting to a kind of balancing between the fetal interest and the woman's interest---which brings me to a moderate pro-choice position.
And I think this ties into the larger point about pro-choice rhetoric. Most people, ultimately, rest their intuitions on a balancing of the interests, and don't commit themselves emotionally to a cognized, consistent, and complex array of first-principles and thought-experiments that might support an absolutist position one way or the other. So when moderate pro-choicers, like me, hear rhetoric that seems to evince a first-principle allegiance that ignores the quite human interests which enter into a balancing, we're inclined to distance ourselves from the rhetoric, and perhaps the political movement making the rhetoric. Such rhetoric seems unexpressive of at best, and contradictory to at worst, our own sense of the stakes.
Andrew -- (And again, I should apologize about jumping all over you before.) This is, I think, where the 'trusting women' rhetoric is applicable. Once you're balancing interests to the point where you are at a moderate pro-choice position (that is, if you aren't taking the position that the fetus has rights that trump those of the woman in all cases), you are saying that a case-by-case decision has to be made. And given that, the only remaining question is who is to make that decision -- whether you think it is best to leave it in the hands of the woman, or whether you don't trust her to make a good decision, and want to give the decision-making authority to someone else.
It is perfectly possible to be pro-choice and to think of a decision to have an abortion as a difficult one with moral weight; what comes down to an issue of first principles is whose hands that decision should be in.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 10:22 AM
bestiality is the safest sex.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 10:23 AM
or if not, you get a minotaur, so you win both ways.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 10:24 AM
82: Sure, I can't see a t-shirt saying "I can't wait to have my first abortion' as anything other than disturbing and counterproductive. T-shirts saying "I'm not sorry," on the other hand, say something quite different, and should not be unacceptable.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 10:24 AM
bestiality is the safest sex.
Not always.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 10:25 AM
If I weren't at work, and there weren't people standing right behind me, I'd go a-hunting for some links that would prove otherwise even in non-minotaur cases. Apostropher will come through, I'm sure.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 10:25 AM
I thought about making the joke, "Apostropher will come through while I'm writing this comment," but then I thought maybe he'd need a little bit of time to finish. Nope. That's how you know he's not a right-winger.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 10:27 AM
And given that, the only remaining question is who is to make that decision -- whether you think it is best to leave it in the hands of the woman, or whether you don't trust her to make a good decision, and want to give the decision-making authority to someone else.
OK, this is weird to me. You seem to be taking a libertarian position against government regulation. Isn't that their basic position - "Stop mollycoddling people, and trust them to do what's right for them." I have trouble seeing you as a libertarian, I guess.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 10:27 AM
86: Agreed.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 10:27 AM
It will be very difficult trying to reason logically with the right-to-lifers when it comes to the right to life debates. This is the same group of people, generally, that supports the death penalty, the right to bear arms, and the right for civilians to shoot first and ask questions later if they feel threatened. The logic is filled with so many different holes, and such disconnect from each idea that they don't seem coherent, yet to those who believe, it is. Some probably believe that the execution of those who have an abortion is a perfectly reasonable idea. Hammurabi's code, my eye.
Posted by tweedledopey | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 10:30 AM
90: That's the other weird thing about this 'do you trust women?' meme. It endorses a libertarian ideal that seems to go against the rest of the liberal framework. In and of itself, fine, no one outside of philosophy has to have consistent views, but it's hard on the one hand to argue that this is about government deregulation and then to argue that the government needs to be involved in things like childcare/contraceptive education.
Posted by Cala, whose superpower is serial commenting | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 10:32 AM
The do you trust women argument is central, because virtually every anti-abortion argument hinges on the question of "under what circumstances is abortion okay?" Very few people are willing to go so far as to say that abortion should always, under every circumstance, be prohibited.
Okay, maybe Urple. For the record, I'm Catholic, and I agree with Apostropher: the *idea* of the sanctitiy of all life is a great one (let's stop swatting mosquitoes), but you run smack dab into reality--which is why the concept of sin exists in the first place. Folks can be against abortion all they like, but women are going to have 'em anyway, when their backs are against the wall.
It amazes me how every time this issue comes up, someone comes along to say that we need to get women to shut up, for their own good. Saletan has a point, which is that yes, it'll do the abortion debate a world of good if people can realize that one can find abortion regrettable *and still support the right to have one*. But in painting the pro-choice forces as the folks who have failed to make that clear, he's setting up the radical feminist straw woman we all know and love. He complains that pro-choice folks don't call themselves "pro-abortion" and then turns around and says we need to admit that abortion isn't a good thing.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 10:35 AM
90, 93: Well, I think of it as a concern with civil liberties rather than as libertarianism -- I have no quarrel with the fire department.
Seriously, government regulation is appropriate in cases where the government is in a position to know what the right answer is. Package inserts on drugs -- the benefits from increased information to consumers can be weighed against the costs of creating the insert. Laws against murder -- the right of one person to live trumps any other person's decision that she ought not to be allowed to continue to live, except in certain factually specific circumstances (self-defense, etc.)
With abortion, the position that Andrew, and a lot of other people, seem to take is that it's a difficult decision, and one that is sometimes right and sometimes wrong. At that point, a global ban becomes inappropriate, and we have to make decisions on a case by case basis. An obvious decision-maker is the woman involved -- she has the fullest understanding of the circumstances. By saying that you prefer the decision to be in the hands of some other decision-maker (a local judge? A hospital board of review?) you are saying that you think women will, in the aggregate, be less likely to make good decisions than some alternative decision-maker: you don't trust pregnant women in this role.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 10:42 AM
But even that argument--that the life which is autonomous precedes and trumps that which is not--has some complicated implications in a rights-bearing conception of the human subject. What about very seriously handicapped people who require assistance to survive, but whose families no longer wish to or are capable of provisioning such assistance? What about abandoned children? Right now we resolve that problem by remanding such subjects to the care and protection of the state--but isn't that precisely what some pro-life advocates are asking for in the case of the fetus?
I don't see how this is at all complicated. Seriously handicapped people are dependent; but their dependency can be transferred. Ditto children. You can't remand the care and protection of the fetus to the state, because it's inside the woman. The only way to get it out is to require her to carry it until it's viable, and then to induce labor or perform major surgery. In other words, to force her to continue to sacrifice her autonomy. In fact, the issue of "viability" shows that pregnancy is in a unique class--the pregnant woman doesn't just provide "care and protection"; her body actually creates the baby from the fetus. Requiring her to carry doesn't just prohibit (abortion); it compels.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 10:44 AM
A hospital board of review?) you are saying that you think women will, in the aggregate, be less likely to make good decisions than some alternative decision-maker: you don't trust pregnant women in this role.
What about suicidal people? Should any person above 18 be able to go to their doctor and get a quick scrip for an easy death?
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 10:46 AM
So now that the girls are all here -- which team plane is more likely to crash on the way to the Superbowl? I say Pittburgh.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 10:47 AM
SCMT, come on. What is that, the abortion equivalent of the "ticking time bomb" argument?
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 10:49 AM
97: The reason we say they shouldn't is that we have made the decision, as a society, that suicide is always a bad choice outside of the context of terminal illness (and there's argument within that context).
If your position is that the fetus has a right to continue developing that always outweighs the right of the woman to autonomy and control over her body, while I disagree strongly with you, trusting women is not the issue. It's the intermediate position, that abortion is sometimes right and sometimes wrong, and that someone has to make that decision on a case-by-case basis, where the issue of trusting women comes up. If you want that decision in someone else's hands, then you don't trust pregnant women to make good decisions in that regard.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 10:52 AM
Gimme a break, B. I'm looking for a case where (a) the interests implicated are either solely (or all but) those of the individual involved and (b) many still think government regulation (or counseling or whatever) is appropriate. Right to die cases are often paired with abortion cases, so suicide came to mind. If you have another that fits (a) and (b) nicely, offer it.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 10:53 AM
SCMT, I think you can use right to die for terminal patients as an analogy, but not for non-terminal suicidal patients. Virtually no one argues against intervention in the latter case.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 10:56 AM
B, just to play devil's advocate... what do you do when the answer is simply, 'No, I don't trust women'? Because I suspect that that's a more likely answer; you could easily see it framed as men and women are likely to make irrational and bad choices in situations where they're under pressure, so why should a woman faced with an unexpected pregnancy be any different?
If it's really a life that's at stake, why wouldn't we take an extra precaution?
I don't have an answer to this that doesn't say something like 'You're being misogynist and silly', which isn't going to help with framing any issues.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 10:56 AM
that suicide is always a bad choice outside of the context of terminal illness
This parallels two types of anti-abortion positions: the first says abortion is always a bad choice, and the second says that there are certain circumstances (like the absence of terminal illness) that make it a bad choice (you are a minor, etc.).
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 11:01 AM
I agree, Bitchphd, that your point is exactly why abortion is different than anything else. But note that it's not really a philosophical difference, just a material one: we might say that the fetus could be a rights-bearing dependent subject that the state or public could assume responsibility for if only it wasn't inside a woman's body--that for the state to assume responsibility for it requires invading an autonomous person's body or compelling an autonomous person to surrender their autonomy. We do that for people we have determined have committed a crime but to do it to an entire class of human beings (all fertile women) for the mere fact of what they are in material and biological terms is an intolerable breach of the liberal ideals that would allegedly demand such protection. That's why I think that some general doctrine of precedence is a sound thing to turn to, but why it applies so absolutely in the case of abortion is the material fact of the fetus being inside a woman.
This does raise the usual hypotheticals about conception and pregnancy taking place in technologically-mediated forms completely outside the body, which I think most of us agree would no longer raise the problem of abortion (if the right to abort is not premised on a right of ownership of chattel, e.g., the fetus). What if, however, it was possible to extremely casually and non-invasively extract from a body an unwanted fetus and carry it to term outside a woman's body? If the main reason abortion is a special or particular case is material, what happens if the material circumstances of conception, pregnancy and birth change in major ways?
Posted by Timothy Burke | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 11:02 AM
With abortion, the position that Andrew, and a lot of other people, seem to take is that it's a difficult decision, and one that is sometimes right and sometimes wrong. At that point, a global ban becomes inappropriate, and we have to make decisions on a case by case basis. An obvious decision-maker is the woman involved -- she has the fullest understanding of the circumstances. By saying that you prefer the decision to be in the hands of some other decision-maker (a local judge? A hospital board of review?) you are saying that you think women will, in the aggregate, be less likely to make good decisions than some alternative decision-maker: you don't trust pregnant women in this role.
I don't buy this. Potentially insulting analogy: in a criminal trial, if the defendant is, as the prosecution claims, responsible for the crime, then he must have been present, and have the best knowledge of the situation. So... he should be the one to determine if there were mitigating circumstances? Or what an appropriate sentence would be?
Obviously the woman has a stake in the outcome of the pregnancy. You can make the case that it's her sole right to make the decision (and I'd agree with you). But I don't think you can claim that, given the existence of a competing and legitimate interest in the outcome (the notion of which I reject), the woman is in a position to make the best decision, as judged against the interests of both parties.
Also, worth pointing out that it pretty clearly doesn't have to be a case-by-case decision. You can set up a system of standards (no late term, etc).
Posted by tom | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 11:03 AM
Because I suspect that that's a more likely answer; you could easily see it framed as men and women are likely to make irrational and bad choices in situations where they're under pressure, so why should a woman faced with an unexpected pregnancy be any different?
Because we don't favor discretionary intervention by the government into life-changing decisions in any other circumstance where there is any doubt at all to what the right answer is. Here, I think it's worthwhile to make the discussion more concrete. What kind of restrictions can you conceive of that could rationally be expected to make systematically better, rather than simply different, decisions than those of the women involved?
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 11:04 AM
My last was directed to 103, but works for 106 as well. How does anyone envision this weighing of rights should take place? As a practical matter, the only circumstances that are going to be different from case to case are those relating to hardship on the mother's part -- can you really envision any kind of decent system that tells one woman that her hardships are great enough to entitle her to decide on an abortion and another that hers are not?
You can set up a system of standards (no late term, etc).
Sure, I think there are plenty of people who think of themselves as pro-choice who have no problem with a ban on abortion for non-medical reasons in the third trimester; I have sympathies with that view myself. There aren't a lot of obvious other lines to draw, though.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 11:12 AM
"Is abortion bad?" may be an important personal question, but it's not an important political question. It's a moral question, and trying to get everyone to agree about moral questions is a hopeless task. People will disagree about good and bad. People will disagree about better and worse. Can we live with that disagreement?
When do we bring the coercive power of the state - the guys (and gals) with uniforms and guns - to enforce a judgment about good and bad? Infanticide? Female genital mutilation? Polygamy? Fornication (including adultery)? Sodomy? Working on the Sabbath? Spanking children?
Posted by Michael H Schneider | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 11:12 AM
MHS: I think the questions "is it bad?" and "if so, how bad?" precede the questions of whether to involve the power of the state, and moral questions are frequently political. It's because I've already answered the first question "no" that I don't want the state interfering.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 11:16 AM
You don't have to say that the woman will make the best decision to say that it should still be hers. As we know, many people make the wrong decision about which religion to follow, yet we don't send the cops out after them.
Tia: I'm saying we can skip the whole good v bad decision. We use the coercive power of the state often in circumstances that aren't judged morally wrong. For instance, in this country we arrest people who drive on the left. I'm told that other, ostensibly civilized, countries do quite the opposite.
Posted by Michael H Schneider | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 11:22 AM
Because we don't favor discretionary intervention by the government into life-changing decisions in any other circumstance where there is any doubt at all to what the right answer is.
Oh? Child welfare intervention? Is the child better off poor with his mom or is he better off in foster care? Euthanasia? Are you better off controlling your death or waiting for it to end? It seems to me that the government weighs in on these things all the time.
It's the intermediate position, that abortion is sometimes right and sometimes wrong, and that someone has to make that decision on a case-by-case basis, where the issue of trusting women comes up.
But this intermediate position seems to stem from a recognition that there is something life-like going on there, and that the state might have an interest in protecting that right. (Most moderates are what, in favor of first term abortion legality, and then it trickles off the closer to viability?) It's not just any old intermediate position, but one where it varies pretty much with how babylike the fetus is.
Since concerns about the growing fetus seems to be driving the case-by-case intuition, unless you already assume that the fetus doesn't have any protected rights, it's not going to do much to say, "It's looking an awful lot like a baby now, but we'll trust the woman to make the right decision and only abort in the sorts of extreme circumstances." If we're talking about a life, why not admit life/health related restrictions only?
Now, as to the restrictions, I don't support any because I think they are unlikely to give us any kind of systematically better result. But it's not because I trust women to make the right decision; I'm pretty sure women fuck up decisions at least as often as men. It's because I can't think of a restriction that can be managed fairly without zillions of exceptions, and as I said, I can't imagine having an emergency and requiring a judge's input. On balance, I'd rather have a law that was too lax than one too demanding.
But 'trusting women to do the right thing' just seems empty if I try to imagine the pro-life perspective.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 11:24 AM
At a certain point, I think that the fetus has competing rights. So while I wouldn't rule out third trimester abortions entirely (since I value the life of the mother more than that of the fetus), I do think that the state has a legitimate interest in protecting the fetus at some point post viability outside of the womb.
Posted by Bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 11:28 AM
Child welfare intervention? Is the child better off poor with his mom or is he better off in foster care? Euthanasia? Are you better off controlling your death or waiting for it to end? It seems to me that the government weighs in on these things all the time.
Child welfare circumstances are exactly what I was thinking of -- we don't look at a family and analyze whether the parents are maybe not as good as they might be and possibly the children would be better off elsewhere. Intervention is held off until the circumstances are undeniably horrific.
Now, as to the restrictions, I don't support any because I think they are unlikely to give us any kind of systematically better result. But it's not because I trust women to make the right decision; I'm pretty sure women fuck up decisions at least as often as men. It's because I can't think of a restriction that can be managed fairly without zillions of exceptions, and as I said, I can't imagine having an emergency and requiring a judge's input.
I am agreeing with you completely here. 'Trusting women' doesn't mean that every woman is necessarily going to make the right decision in every circumstance. It means that there is no preferable place to put the decision-making authority; deciding that pregnant women should be, as a class, deprived of authority to decide whether they should carry to term and that that authority should be placed elsewhere is choosing not to trust them to make good decisions.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 11:33 AM
I disagree with Michael Schneider when he seems to claim that moral questions are entirely irrelevant to politics. In general, where enforcement is possible and there's a consensus about morality, things which are immoral are illegal. Where there's a difference of opinion about morality, there's a "purely moral question". And it isn't necessary to have an absolute moral agreement to have an enforcable law; a preponderance is enough. There are those who think that they have a right to murder an unfaithful wife, but excpet maybe in Texas the law does not accomodate them.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 11:33 AM
Lizardbreath is right in 9. I don't think Saletan would do any actual hand-wringing if someone he cared about needed an abortion. His retorical hand-wringing is just unseemly.
Posted by Joe O | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 11:36 AM
Fair enough, John Emerson. I should confess that I don't have a completely worked out theory I can verbalize. I may have overstated: maybe morality is not irrelevant, but maybe it should be.
But I don't see that enforcablility has ever stopped anyone from passing a law. Look at drugs and sodomy.
If unenforcability is no bar, why don't we still have laws against adultery, or cohabitation? Is there no longer a preponderance of support? Or is it that while most people still think it immoral, they no longer thing it's an aspect of morality that government should enforce?
Posted by Michael H Schneider | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 11:43 AM
Trusting women' doesn't mean that every woman is necessarily going to make the right decision in every circumstance.
and
that that authority should be placed elsewhere is choosing not to trust them to make good decisions.
seem to be in conflict.
See, here's the tension. To me, the 'do you trust women' argument gained most of its strength via arguing that women are morally responsible enough to decide on abortion in a way that roughly shakes out along the lines that a moderate finds acceptable. No need to ban late-term abortion, because women will only use it if it's medically necessary, not for so-called frivolous reasons. No need to ban RU-486, because women are responsible enough not to treat it as birth control.
Now, if 'good decision' doesn't mean something like 'acceptable to moderate intuitions', but instead 'whatever the woman decides because she's the one in the position to know (and who would disagree, really?)', then this just isn't going to be palatable.
When the moderate guy says, 'Sorry, I don't trust women on this big of an issue', he doesn't mean, 'I don't trust her to make the best decision for herself', but 'I don't trust that she will only avail herself of late-term options when her health is endangered or whatever reasons are morally acceptable.'
So what's a 'good decision'?
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 11:44 AM
Hmm, I'm still thinking about unfaithful wives in Texas. Do we prohibit such justifiable homicide (even in Texas) because we think it's wrong to kill unfaithful wives, or because we reserve the power of retributive justice to the state? We could reserve that power to the state because to do otherwise would, like allowing people the autonomy to choose which side of the road they prefer, lead to chaos.
Posted by Michael H Schneider | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 11:56 AM
Basically, you cut deals on which immoralities to make illegal. The tendency has been toward tolerance, on a sort of case-by-case basis, but drug laws are an exception because of Sixties backlesh.
The immorality of murder is not irrelevant to it's illegality. Deliberately driving on the wrong side of the road is morally wrong, whichever side that is. Most felonies are morally wrong, though various misdemeanor, violations, torts, etc, might not be.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 11:56 AM
MHS: That some moral questions are outside the government's purview, or that the government legislates some questions that aren't inherently moral, in order to provide uniform standards, does not mean that moral questions are, or should be, irrelevant to politics. Everyone's position on state interference in abortion is predicated on a moral judgment about the weight of the competing interests. We've mostly decided the state shouldn't legislate sexual morality. I'd guess we made this decision because of the competing interest in privacy and because of the unfitness of the government to adjudicate the issue. We still think the state gets to interfere in, say, child abuse cases; it's because of the different moral weight we give to a child and a fetus that the state shouldn't get to interfere there.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 12:01 PM
104: SCMTim, I don't think this analogy is right. Since there is virtually unanimous agreement that the vast majority of suicidal impulses are a result of mental illness, and not only should they not be aided, there's an active duty to hinder them, and there is no such agreement about any subset of abortions, those suicides are off the analogy table. What you're left with are "rational" suicides, mostly people with terminal illnesses, though I can imagine other cases. Then you can make an analogy between the "always wrong" crowd, and the "sometimes a bad idea, but a matter of individual choice" crowd.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 12:07 PM
Tia, I don't think that the agreement is unanimous, or even close. There are psychiatric imperialists who want to treat all negative behavior as pathology, but not everyone agrees.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 12:11 PM
Okay, you've pointed out some problems with my position. The situation is desperate, I'm going to have to think. This could take a while.
Posted by Michael H Schneider | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 12:14 PM
I knew I recognized the name Steven Freind from somewhere. I had a copy of the album mentioned at that link in either late middle school or early high school.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 12:15 PM
J.E., whether or not anyone else would prefer to use the term "mental illness," I think there is widespread agreement that someone who wants to kill him or herself has been experiencing a pretty negative set of emotions for a sustained period of time. Psychiatrists call that depression; using a different term doesn't change the underlying, agreed-upon reality. There are some people who would make the argument that, say, suicide is a rational response to the human condition; I think they are a small minority.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 12:18 PM
125: Distressingly often, it happens that when I try to follow up some citation I'm looking for, I find some comment I myself made on some blog two years age.
Speaking of which, I heard this awesome blonde joke.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 12:21 PM
I think Tia is right. We do have a history of preventing people who are not competent from making decisions. This includes children, the mentally handicapped, the mentally ill, and people who are drunk. It used to include women, but not so much any more. Being suicidal at least raises a question of competence, and the safe position (given the finality of the act) is to prevent them from acting while the question is considered.
Posted by Michael H Schneider | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 12:22 PM
(There are some suicides that aren't depressive, too, like that guy in the beginning of Love in the Time of Cholera, but I tried to make room for it by allowing that only "a vast majority" of suicides were the result of mental illness.)
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 12:22 PM
"Someone who wants to kill him or herself has been experiencing a pretty negative set of emotions for a sustained period of time."
Well, yes. People don't often kill themselves out of cheerfulness and optimism.
People who disagree with your formulation may be a minority, but "almost unanimous" is way off.
I've asked and nobody has been able to tell me how clinical depression is distinguished from just being extremely unhappy. I've talked to people in heavy-duty counseling positions and they've all said that they come accross people now and then whose lives are so awful that it's hard to argue against suicide.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 12:27 PM
Yes, but if the desire to commit suicide is regarded in itself to be proof of mental illness, we're getting pretty circular.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 12:28 PM
Tia:
The troubling part of your argument in #122 is here is virtually unanimous agreement that the vast majority of suicidal impulses are a result of mental illness, and not only should they not be aided, there's an active duty to hinder them, and there is no such agreement about any subset of abortions,. By some independent characteristic (states, counties, etc.), I suspect I can come up with a political grouping that would have the same level of agreement against abortion rights. Alternatively, I suspect I could come up with a restriction on abortion that would garner the same levels of support (no using abortion as primary birthcontrol, etc.). Or combine the two to get to the necessary support levels.
"Virtual unanimity" seems to slide the abortion question from one of absolute right to the question of political right, somehow. "Political right" means "make a deal" or "frame a convincing argument" to me, and I gather that Saletan, artfully or not, is arguing that position.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 12:28 PM
In The Conterfeiters by Gide, one of the characters attempts a suicide out of happiness.
Despite that, it's a good book.
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 12:31 PM
Is there a distinction between saying "this is immoral (for me), I should not do it" and saying "this is immoral (for anyone) and you should be prevented from doing it, at gunpoint if necessary"?
I'm thinking of actions such as eating ham and cheese sandwiches, or eating meat, or tithing, or working on the Sabbath, or accecpting Jesus as your savior.
Are those different sorts of moral questions, or is it only that there's no general agreement on the right answer?
Posted by Michael H Schneider | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 12:33 PM
the Counterfeiters is a good book; Teh Conterfeiters is teh suxx1!!111!!!1
Posted by text | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 12:33 PM
J.E. People with rational reasons to commit suicide are covered above with my "the vast majority of suicidal impulses," i.e. not all. There are rational reasons to commit suicide; it's just not most cases. If the Nazis have you, and you have valuable Allied secrets, sure, kill yourself to avoid being tortured and delivering them, you have my blessing. In Monster, Charlize Theron ought to have killed herself rather than kill the last guy who saw her gun.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 12:33 PM
There are a lot of comments here. I'll have to finish them later.
I want to make a two points. One of the biggest problems in talking to stridently anti-choice people, the ones who go to student conventions or email you at your NOW email, is that they are so, so terribly informed. They often have the same misinformation, as well, because they're mostly just repeating anti-choice talking points. Further, in my experience it's the Anti-Choicers who Refuse To Address Reality. They don't talk about economics, rough situations, education, any other personal difficulties. More likely, if you pick up an anti-choice pamphlet, you're likely to see the following:
"I almost got an abortion, but then I didn't. I'm so happy I made that choice!! :)"
-Rich, possibly famous, White Woman X.
Second point, which is something of a reply to Tim Burke. Why accord rights to the unborn? Because of their DNA? That doesn't seem right. Suppose you meet another, nonuman, sentient creature. Aliens come to earth or something. Would you accord such a creature rights? If it possessed significant recognizible intelligence and self-awareness, of course you would. I submit that it is not our exactly our physical shape or DNA which we accept as the basis for our right to autonomy. It is our personhood; our desires, reason, self-consciousness, and world consciousness (something like that, at any rate).
Do fetuses have such personhood? No. Neither, you might object, does a person in a coma. But such a person at least previously had personhood, and could have had an express desire to have a chance to return to herself. The situation is not analogous to that of a fetus.
Many people will say, "but the fetus has the potential to be a person." So? Why should that accord it any righs? What matters is the state of the fetus in question. Certainly it's nice to look out for the fetus's future person, in a caretaker sort of way. But that's simply one person claiming a desire to see a fetus become a person; it does not instill rights into the fetus itself.
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 12:36 PM
I had pretty much this exact argument about suicide while walking around a lake in Switzerland. I was in Emerson's role, but if I remember right, the next step is for Tia to note that if one allows that depressed people aren't in the proper mental state to make the decision to commit suicide, it's not any more plausible to claim that people who appear to be, and report being, 100% happy and then decide that they want to kill themselves are more sane than people who are depressed.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 12:38 PM
131:if the desire to commit suicide is regarded in itself to be proof of mental illness, we're getting pretty circular.
True, but it need not be taken as proof. It might require the next step: if the potential suicide is hearing voices in his head, and has a fixed intent to assassinate President Jed Bartlett, that might be enough additional evidence to support a conclusion of wack-o.
People who report 100% happy might not be sane, but if they're not threatening harm to self or others, we generally let 'em go
Posted by Michael H Schneider | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 12:42 PM
134: I think the distinction you're looking for is between actions that are wrong only in themselves and actions that injure other possessors of rights in ways that violate those rights. While there are certainly societies that would ban wrongful actions in both of those categories, as a general rule (with some exceptions) liberal societies restrict themselves to banning the second category.
So, for someone who believed that a fetus was in no way equivalent to a person and had no rights, but nonetheless thought abortion was immoral, in some manner equivalent to the violation of Kosher rules, it would be unconventional in our society to use that as a justification for a ban on abortion.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 12:44 PM
#105: Okay, it's not a philosophical difference. It's a material one (not "just," please). But that's the entire thing about pregnancy; it's a material thing, not just a concept. In fact, I'd go so far as to say you've put your finger on what frustrates me so much about these discussions: we search about for analogies and broad theories and generally applicable rules. But the point is that pregnancy is inescapably material, and the individual circumstances of every pregnancy are inescapably material. If that changes---if, say, some day we are able to wave a magic wand and transport the embryo or fetus out of the womb ala Star Trek---then fine; ban abortion. In the meantime, though, the material fact is that women get pregnant, and as such, they *do* have the power to abort (or not). Banning abortion doesn't make it stop; it criminalizes it (and arguably makes it unsafe).
Which is also my answer to SCMT's #103: I don't think there *is* an analogy to pregnancy. It's its own unique condition.
#101: I'd say, "well then, you have a basic problem under the Constitution. You may not trust women, but nonetheless we are free and equal citizens, so phhhhtttbbb."
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 12:45 PM
I interrupt this discussion to bring you this picture of Michael H. Schneider. He looks primed for a crazy-old-man-off with Emerson.
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 12:48 PM
140: Thank you, LB. Still endeavoring to think.
Posted by Michael H Schneider | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 12:48 PM
I was wondering when someone would find that picture. That should perseverance, if misguided perseverance.
Posted by Michael H Schneider | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 12:49 PM
I realize that the "rational suicide" as comparable to abortion debate has become very theoretical here, but, oddly, it really isn't so for me.
My grandmother, a very outspoken pro-choice supporter (she was a nurse prior to legalized abortion in Canada and patched up a lot of women), committed suicide in declining health in her early sixties. She didn't consult anyone, and the actual medical details remain a secret held by my uncle, but pretty much everyone in the family is sure that she killed herself based on her rational calculus about the quality of life she foresaw for herself. A difficult time for everyone, yes, and I wish I had been able to know her. To my knowledge, though, nobody has felt justified in second-guessing her decision. And even the conservatives on that side of the family remain fervently pro-choice, in part--I suspect--to honor my grandmother's legacy.
An anecdote. (Sorry for the personal details; it was suddenly difficult for me not to put that into the debate.)
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 12:51 PM
SCMT: Your original analogy was" "What about suicidal people? Should any person above 18 be able to go to their doctor and get a quick scrip for an easy death?" I'm just saying that this is unilluminating, because the answer is, no, of course not, because we all think it's a bad idea to commit suicide except in very specialized cases*, but this says precisely nothing about abortion, and it doesn't interrogate the pro-choice position on abortion at all. (Take that, ogged.) Pointing out that we don't support liberty in a case where we haven't claimed to support liberty isn't going to tell us anything about the proper level of government intervention when we do.
*And the cases where lots of liberals could and do come around to supporting suicide are much more easily delineated from the set of other suicides than the set of hypothetical good abortions from bad abortions, until you get within the set of dr-assisted suicide for the terminally ill.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 12:52 PM
131: It should be clear by now that that wasn't my argument. But if it's not: that wasn't my argument.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 12:56 PM
144. I'm all about misguided perseverence. That photo, actually, was pretty easy to find - 3rd search result for your name. Your website was only a bit trickier.
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 1:02 PM
If I understood LB in 140, she said that "person" is interchangeable with "having rights", and the type of moral question we're discussing is whether a fetus is some with rights, or without, or somewhere in between.
Is it more useful to pose it as a question of whether a fetus is a person? Or how much of a person is a fetus? I think that's what Michael was doing in 138.
If so, we should remember that personhood has changed, and includes more than it used to: descendants of former slaves, women, children. And that it's not a binary proposition - children are persons for some purposes, but not others.
144: I'm surprised. I kept coming up with some federal judge in Texas. And I should point out that the picture doesn't do me justice. I am, therefor I cover: I'm crazier than I appear.
Posted by Michael H Schneider | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 1:07 PM
Tia, I think that the number of rational suicides is greater than you think. And while you're probably right that the majority do not accept rational suicide, for many that's for religious reasons (which I regard as invalid).
Where someone can be shown to be medically ill in some definite way, I'd generally agree that they shouldn't be allowed commit suicide. But I've known people who wanted to medicalize all behavioral problems, to the point of denying agency to people who behaved wrongly, and justifying aggressive interventions without a clear diagnosis of mental illness.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 1:11 PM
If I understood LB in 140, she said that "person" is interchangeable with "having rights", and the type of moral question we're discussing is whether a fetus is some with rights, or without, or somewhere in between.
I may have said that, but I didn't intend to. I can conceive of positions that attribute rights to things other than persons -- animals, possibly fetuses. I meant to allude to three possibilities; whether a fetus is to be regarded as a person, or as something else with rights, or as something else without rights.
If so, we should remember that personhood has changed, and includes more than it used to: descendants of former slaves, women, children. And that it's not a binary proposition - children are persons for some purposes, but not others.
I'd disagree with this. There have been changes in the rights possessed by those classes of persons, but I don't know that it's accurate to say that people in any of those categories have ever been simply regarded as something other than persons, and I'm sure that it's wrong to say that there is any context in which children are now not regarded as persons.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 1:14 PM
It is perfectly possible to be pro-choice and to think of a decision to have an abortion as a difficult one with moral weight; what comes down to an issue of first principles is whose hands that decision should be in.
Right, but doing a balancing of the interests does not mean that there are never going to be certain circumstances which are well defined and in which abortion would be wrong. So even though I embrace a balancing, and I think that in early-term cases the decision can permissibly be left to the woman, I don't believe that the state should allow individual discretion in late-term cases.
But even a balancing involves according to a certain weight to the interests involved. The weakness of Roe, imho, is not that it finds the decision whether to terminate a pregnancy be within a right to privacy; the weakness is that it decides for the nation what moral weight we are going to accord to the life of the fetus. I happen to like the way they came out, but that doesn't mean the Court is a great, or a legitimate, or really a constitutional, mechanism for resolving that kind of question.
Posted by Andrew | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 1:17 PM
I don't know that it's accurate to say that people in any of those categories have ever been simply regarded as something other than persons
I'm pretty sure this is wrong. I think slaves and women at various points in history have been regarded as other than full persons. I'll look for a cite at some point.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 1:18 PM
the weakness is that it decides for the nation what moral weight we are going to accord to the life of the fetus.
Doesn't it have to? I mean, by allowing abortion at all, the Court has taken the position that a fetus is not a person -- if it were a person, then state laws that allow one class of people (fetal people) to be killed with impunity while punishing the killing of post-fetal people as murder would be a clear equal protection violation. There isn't a non-position for the Court to take; it has to attribute full constitutional rights, no rights at all, or some intermediate class of rights to the fetus.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 1:23 PM
Well, slaves had none of the rights we associate with persons. Women had fewer of the rights - voting, contract and own property (if married). Children can't marry or form binding contracts, or (in some circumstances) consent to medical treatment, and we can deprive them of liberty with less process due. I'm glossing that as being less than full persons.
Posted by Michael H Schneider | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 1:23 PM
Okay, but I'm uncomfortable with that gloss. There is an obvious sense in which women, slaves, and children are all and have always been regarded as people, regardless of what rights they were thought to have. Saying that a fetus is not a person calls on a different type of distinction between a fetus and a child or an adult than there ever was thought to be between a woman and a man, or a slave and a free person.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 1:26 PM
Blackfeminism made an interesting argument that I hadn't run into before, w/r/t the 14th Amendment, slaves = fetuses thing: the 14th Amendment specifically extends to "all persons born or naturalized within the United States." "Born" clearly /= fetus. So I'm wondering, apart from the moral argument, what is the Constitutional argument *for* banning abortion?
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 1:27 PM
... state laws that allow one class of people (fetal people) to be killed with impunity while punishing the killing of post-fetal people as murder would be a clear equal protection violation.
Unless you have a suspect class somewhere, all you need is a relation relation between the distinction and some legitimate state purpose. I'm sure we could come up with one.
Posted by Michael H Schneider | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 1:27 PM
So I'm wondering, apart from the moral argument, what is the Constitutional argument *for* banning abortion?
I don't think there is one. I think the argument is that, absent an abortion right, the federal govt. or the state govts. can regulate as they see fit.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 1:31 PM
I don't have authority at hand to cite, but I've read pro-slavery tracts that clearly say that slaves aren't people - they don't feel pain the way people do, they don't have the same tender feelings about spouses and children, they're really much more like apes.
Posted by Michael H Schneider | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 1:32 PM
If you want to split hairs, the 14th amendment says that 'persons born' are citizens, but does say that all 'persons' shall not be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law and shall be entitled to the equal protection of the laws. If the Court took the position that fetuses were persons, albeit unborn, you could argue that they weren't citizens, but they'd still be able to make equal protection claims.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 1:34 PM
I think slaves and women at various points in history have been regarded as other than full persons.
Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3 of the Constitution defines slaves as 3/5 of a person.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 1:36 PM
I thought that the due process clause was solely a restriction on government action, not on private actions. Parents deprive children of rights without affording them notice, opportunity to be heard, etc. all the time. (To your room! No, you don't have a right to the assistance of counsel)
Posted by Michael H Schneider | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 1:36 PM
sorry, LB, I misread your cooment. yes, the equal protection clause goes to 'all persons'
Posted by Michael H Schneider | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 1:39 PM
Equal protection of the laws, though. Killing born person X is punishable as murder, killing fetal person Y is not punishable at all -- that seems like the most core possible case of failure of the laws to equally protect one could imagine.
I think the Court really has to take the (in my view obviously correct) factual position that a fetus is not a person in order to avoid a 14th amendment based federal abortion ban.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 1:39 PM
I don't believe that the state should allow individual discretion in late-term cases.
Why?
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 1:39 PM
Just to note: I particularly find annoying the anti-choiceists who make a appeals such as "fingers! beating heart! feels pain!". Well, maybe if the people saying such things are vegetarians. But I don't think that's often the case.
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 1:45 PM
I think that the number of rational suicides is greater than you think.
Well, this is a matter of intuition for both of us until one of us does a really comprehensive suicide lit search. If it helps us inch closer to consensus, when I wrote my original comment I was thinking of the set of people who might feel like committing suicide enough to ask for an rx, not the set of people who succeed. I'd grant that the proportion of rational suicides is probably higher in the second category.
Nevertheless, I'd say it's usually immmoral not to hinder suicides , because even if the person is rational, not ill, she might still be mistaken, or unfit to make decisions for her future self. If Mr. Moneybags lost everything in the crash and wants to kill himself, that might even be rational, but it doesn't mean that Mr. Moneybags + four years wouldn't have been very fulfilled as a mailroom clerk. His interest in autonomy and non-interference plummets with the total irrevocability of the decision. OTOH, there's a level of hindrance that's too great.
I don't think all behavior problems can be medicalized, necessarily, or maybe I think that whether you conceptualize them that way depends on who you are. If it helps therapists help patients live a better life, go ahead and say that a garden variety asshole has Narcisstic Personality Disorder; maybe in an important sense he does, and that will help you treat him; that's not necessarily how his girlfriend should regard him.
Posted by Anonymous | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 1:47 PM
Courts say 'Killing person X is punishable as murder, killing person Y is not punishable at all' all the time. Self defense. Justifiable homicide. Accidental killing.
All we need is a rational relation between the distinction among persons (born v unborn) and a legitimate state interest (protecting the life of the mother works, if we believe Bphd's blog that pregnancy is riskier than abortion in most cases) and we survive the equal protection problem. Given time, we could probably invent a better state interest in the distinction.
Posted by Michael H Schneider | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 1:48 PM
167: I'm not sure vegetarianism is the proper comparator there. Cannibalism, maybe.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 1:48 PM
Slaves were 3/5 of a person for the purpose of assiguing seats in the House. They were unpersons in law, pretty much.
The slaveowners wanted their non-voting slaves to be represented in Congress, but they only got 6/10 of what they wanted.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 1:49 PM
168 was me, obviously.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 1:49 PM
There isn't a non-position for the Court to take; it has to attribute full constitutional rights, no rights at all, or some intermediate class of rights to the fetus.
The Court must decide whether a fetus is a person. That much seems true. But assuming the Court has decided a fetus not to be a person, the Court need not take any position at all with respect to the state interest in fetal life.
The question of "is the class of X included in the class of persons" and the question of "is the state interest in the lives of those in the class of X sufficiently compelling to allow the state to regulate/forbid abortion" are not identical questions. Put differently, the determination that X is a person is not made by weighing the interest in X living.
Posted by Andrew | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 1:52 PM
Apo, I meant that such things were not regarded in and of themselves as prohibitions against termination. A few vegetarians take this view, but that's about it. Anti-choiceists when they do this are therefore making an emotional argument which they themselves do not believe.
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 1:53 PM
it doesn't interrogate the pro-choice position on abortion at all. (Take that, ogged.)
You're only hurting yourself, Tia.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 1:55 PM
169: Civil rights law isn't my area, but I really can't picture a court holding that fetuses weren't a suspect class in that context. The very fact that the rest of us consider ourselves entitled to kill them with impunity would seem to swing it for me.
All I wanted to do in 154 is say that the Court had to take some position on the status of the fetus -- avoiding the question entirely isn't practical from the point of view of legal analysis. I suppose the Court could have taken the position that fetuses were persons, but that state laws allowing their killing had a rational basis and were required by a woman's right to privacy, but it didn't; in any case it didn't have the option of taking no position at all.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 1:56 PM
173: Absolutely.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 2:00 PM
Andrew, it seems to me that once the Court admits that a fetus is not a person, then state courts cannot force women to carry their pregnancies to term in the interest of the state because the interest of the state would infringe upon the personal autonomy of the mother. (While there are laws that infringe upon our personal autonomy, suchs as drug and prostitution laws, it is my understanding that these laws are cloaked by arguments that indulging in drugs and prostitution does result in the harm of other persons. I cannot think of any laws that infringe upon our personal autonomy which are not dependent upon the prevention of harm to other persons.)
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 2:01 PM
A court could say that fetuses are not people, and abortion is a protected right, and yet prohibit a woman from drinking while pregnant, because of the risk or fetal alcohol syndrome.
That's what we do with dogs. We euthanize 'em, but I'd still go to jail for beating my dog to death.
Would the 'fetuses are like dogs' argument go over well with the pro-choice people?
Posted by Michael H Schneider | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 2:02 PM
I cannot think of any laws that infringe upon our personal autonomy which are not dependent upon the prevention of harm to other persons.
Cruelty to animals. I'm starting to like my analogy to dogs.
Posted by Michael H Schneider | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 2:06 PM
A court could say that fetuses are not people, and abortion is a protected right, and yet prohibit a woman from drinking while pregnant, because of the risk or fetal alcohol syndrome.
A legislature could -- I'm not sure how a court could without a statute to work from. (Also, the hysteria about drinking while pregnant is vastly overblown. Everybody knew that, right?)
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 2:06 PM
Is there a distinction between saying "this is immoral (for me), I should not do it" and saying "this is immoral (for anyone) and you should be prevented from doing it, at gunpoint if necessary"?
yes, yes, yes!
Also: in the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church's teaching was that fetuses are not given souls by God i.e. not persons until the second trimester. I am not sure when/why the church's changed (medical advances?). However, given this, it's clear that the status of fetuses is neither a central matter in Christianity, nor an immutable undisputable issue, nor a matter that Catholic, Christian, or other religious types should try to enforce on other people who do not share their beliefs.
(References: Aristotle writes in a biological treatise that the male embryo is ensouled about 40 days after conception, the female after 90. Directly based on this, for much of its history the Christian church believed in delayed ensoulment and therefore did not consider abortion a sin for up to 90 days after conception).
Posted by mmf! | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 2:08 PM
True, a court would need a statute as a starting point. Federal court jurisdiction goes only to cases and controversies. Sorry, I should type faster so I could be clearer, and write at greater length. Sorry I was being ambiguous.
Posted by Michael H Schneider | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 2:10 PM
MHS,
Dogs participate in some personhood. It's a fairly low level, but it's not nonexistant. I suppose I could be wrong, but it's my understanding that a dog has more cognizance of self and the world than a fetus does. Still, we consider it permisible to kill a dog, as long as it is humane.
However, now we're onto the subject of cruelty. A lot of people take the position that cruelty to a creature that feels and recognizes pain is immoral. If abortion is cruel, that should create some problems.
Posted by Anonymous | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 2:25 PM
184 - c'est moi.
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 2:26 PM
we're onto the subject of cruelty
True, factory-farmed fetuses are no good. You should only eat the free range ones, as Michael implies in 167.
You can now resume your serious discussion.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 2:28 PM
Fetusses are much lower than dogs. They can't hump legs, or sniff personal areas, or lick their own personal areas, or mark their territory, or any of the other canine specialties.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 2:34 PM
I'm going to eat my placenta. It will be the only time I can ever eat meat again. I'm going to fry it up with mushrooms and onions.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 2:34 PM
People totally do that. Personally, I ordered takeout.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 2:37 PM
188: More recipes here, including the Placenta Cocktail.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 2:38 PM
What, do you have the Internet memorized?
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 2:39 PM
188 -- hey I saw you downing burger after burger at
the MineshaftOld Town!Posted by Jeremy Osner | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 2:40 PM
do you have the Internet memorized?
Why, yes I do.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 2:42 PM
More placenta hilarity: a midwife friend of my aunt's once brought a placenta with her to my aunt's house and put it in the freezer. I can't remember why; maybe she was planning on cooking it, though I think she became worried it had been out of the fridge too long and decided against it. Anyway, I was there on my first vacation away from home, so we staged a big scene with me posing with scissors poised to snip the umbilical cord and took a picture which we captioned, "Tia cuts the cord."
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 2:42 PM
You could eat it, or you could take it diving. (Via.)
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 2:43 PM
192: I think you misspelled bourbon.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 2:43 PM
Is that a concensus on the existence of a sliding scale of personhood, with fetuses below zero, children at about 10, some dogs (especially standard poodles) at about 35, and adult humans at perhaps 35.2? I didn't think there was such a preponderance of support for my beliefs.
People who only hump legs, sniff personal areas, and mark territory rate only a 28. But don't get me wrong, some of my best friends are like that. I think I should go, and resume my regularly scheduled life.
Posted by Michael H Schneider | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 2:46 PM
149: I think you mean "what Michael was doing in 137".
137: I agree with the position, but I think by that reasoning an infant is also not a person, and becomes more of a person over time, eventually reaching full personhood (or not) as they age. For this reason, I'm not morally opposed to infanticide. But I think a lot of people will find this position rather repugnant.
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 2:46 PM
Wow. Did I kill this thread?
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 3:09 PM
Professor Singer! This is an unexpected honor.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 3:09 PM
!99: No, but ogged is currently weaving tales of wonder and mystery in another one, and we're sitting at his feet, enrapt.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 3:12 PM
You mean FL or ogged in the thread of FL's post? I'm trying to avoid the colon thread.
Posted by pdf23ds | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 3:16 PM
It's ogged. You must not avoid it--it's dreadfully beautiful--unless, that is, your constitution is too delicate, and you are prone to crying fits or vapors when struck by great emotion. Then I cannot counsel you, tho' it may be that some delights are worth the slight inconvenience of vapors.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 3:20 PM
I cannot think of any laws that infringe upon our personal autonomy which are not dependent upon the prevention of harm to other persons.)
Oh, I can. How about prohibitions of post-viable abortions except where necessary to preserve the health of the mother?
Fetuses occupy a fairly unique place in the range of beings, I think. I'm not sure how useful analogies to other beings will be here, given that the really salient aspects of a fetus (recognizably separate being with unique human DNA, in the process of developing into a full person) are not going to be found in those analogies.
Posted by Andrew | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 4:43 PM
Hilzoy, Obsidian Wings' resident bio-ethicist, makes an interesting (if truncated) case for considering sentience rather than viability as the point for granting the fetus more protection. Link.) Roughly, viability is getting pushed further and further back by technological advances; while extremely young fetuses can survive, the prognosis for their developmental health is not very good.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 5:00 PM
Ooh, good on you for linking that; I read it the other day at ObWi and my thinking has been informed by it. (Well, informed mostly in the "Yeah, exactly -- how come I can't articulate my thoughts like that?") I want to be hilzoy when I grow up. Then I look at myself and realize that I've already grown up.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 5:04 PM
Excellent comment by hilzoy, but good god their comment section sucked.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 5:27 PM
Andrew,
Do you think that abortion is harmful to the fetus? Is it impinging on the desire or will of the fetus? Is it creating a negative emotional state for the fetus, or for other fetuses? I think we can agree that it's not.* We have this idea that we can look back through time and claim that a right over ourselves as fetuses. "I wouldn't want to have been aborted!". But this isn't logical. Had I been aborted, I would never had this desire, and thus it could never have been aborted, and I could never have come to harm.
What is salient to me is that abortion is the denial of the experience of life. In a way, this is no more harmful to a particular fetus than to a hypothetical fetus one didn't conceive. Nevertheless, it is a bit sad. But that's also because I, and I think many others, are optimistic about the possibilities of life. And perhaps reasonably so. Still, I do not think we need to take the step and say that a somewhat regretful act is an immoral act.
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 6:06 PM
* physical cruelty is still an unresolved issue. I need to research this.
Posted by Michael | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 6:07 PM
207--That was a particularly sucky thread, Cala. Or at least I hope it was: discourse has been breaking down over there for a while.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 6:11 PM
I know, and it depresses me. Hilzoy and Edward are just excellent, as were many of the commenters, and SH and Slart at least often provide interesting insight into what Republicans are thinking. But the comments have become almost unreadable. Annoying.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 6:53 PM
Everybody is assuming bad faith on others' part by now. It might have something to do with Hilzoy's much-linked posts' making the site seem more public; people (especially, unfortunately, a lot of people with whom I would tend to agree) seem not to be able to leave an argument gracefully. It's a shame, though, and I really doubt that the process is reversible.
I am hoping, however, that by coopting some of the frequent offenders into my Charles Bird "hate" site, I can help resist the slide.
Posted by Jackmormon | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 7:49 PM
A noble effort.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 01-24-06 8:03 PM