Don't forget the fourth front: terrorism.
During the brief period in my career wherein I was occasionally responsible for connecting clients with abortion providers, my take was just to be matter-of-fact about it. I hoped I was doing something, albeit minor, to normalize the experience.
Canvassing for Obama a couple months ago, a young man gave me what I think is supposed to be the politic pro-choice line: "Nobody wants to have an abortion."
I corrected him, "Nobody who isn't pregnant wants to have an abortion."
Canvassing? Four months from the election?
Six, even. Sorry, forgot the "couple months ago".
I feel like we have this conversation at least annually. Of course the "safe, legal, and rare" crowd makes up a significant bloc of the pro-choice coalition. I have no real idea, but I'd guess that the number of pro choice people who think abortion should not only be legal but isn't that big of a deal and not worth discouraging through social norms/nonlegal means make up no more than about 50% of the prochoice political coalition in the US.
I feel like we have this conversation at least annually
For the record, this reads like a criticism and I find it annoying.
I feel like we have this conversation at least annually.
It is one of those questions where the balance between the risk of buying too readily into the anti crowd's framing (abortion = bad) versus the risk of alienating the the tepidly pro-choice crowd might be expected to change with shifts in public opinion.
So it's an issue worth revisiting from time to time (don't about annually).
I corrected him, "Nobody who isn't pregnant wants to have an abortion."
That's fantastic. I will steal that if I have an opportunity where it would be appropriate.
the number of pro choice people who think abortion should not only be legal but isn't that big of a deal and not worth discouraging through social norms/nonlegal means make up no more than about 50% of the prochoice political coalition in the US.
The bolded bit seems to me to lump together two really different things. I can get on board with "safe, legal, and rare" because I'm generally happy with policies or social norms intended to discourage unwanted pregnancies, and the rarer unwanted pregnancies are, the rarer abortions are going to be. If discouraging through social norms includes discouraging someone who has an unwanted pregnancy and thinks abortion is the best option for her from getting an abortion, on the other hand, I'm totally opposed.
I'm sure you're right about less than half of pro-choice people genuinely thinking that there's nothing good at all from reducing the number of abortions. I'm really not sure at all, though, in the "safe, legal, and rare" crowd, what the breakdown is between people who agree with me that unwanted pregnancy is a bad thing, but that abortion is often the best solution for it, and people who think that abortion is to be discouraged even when an unwanted pregnancy is already in existence.
I wasn't really complaining, just pointing out that this is something people have talked about a lot here.
Yes, it's a capitulation to the Right's claim that women have abortions like they're candy. Of course, all things being equal, women would rather not get pregnant than have to go through a minor surgical procedure which costs several hundred dollars. BUT, most pregnant women who don't want to be would much rather have a minor surgical procedure than wait 9 months and give birth, which is far riskier and expensive and life-consuming than any abortion.
I attempted to have an abortion several years ago for a pregnancy which turned out to be ectopic (the abortion possibly saved my life, since had I wanted to keep the pregnancy, I would have waited several more weeks to see a medical provider and in the meantime gone backpacking and then flown cross-country.) While before the abortion hormones and my biological clock made the decision not super easy, after the fact I feel absolutely nothing but relief and like I dodged a bullet for both the abortion and the methotrexate induced miscarriage, and I shudder to think what would have happened had I had a child with my semi-abusive ex while trying to make it through an intense grad school program. I feel absolutely zero identification with the clump of cells trying to kill me. I'm now in an amazing relationship and the ex lives halfway around the world, and every time I think about my current life vs. my previous life I thank god that I never have to see my ex again.
Oh, also on terrorism, I find the levels of hypocrisy from the "Christian" right absolutely outstanding. Tiller was gunned down in cold blood while worshipping in a sanctuary. Even if you think abortion is murder, the sacrilege of committing murder in a sanctuary ought to far outweigh a murder committed elsewhere for a religious Christian. Of course, this just underlies that evangelicals don't believe Lutheranism or any other mainline Protestantism is actually a form of Christianity, and any mainline Protestant/Catholic ought to feel just as under attack from the Christian Right as any other religious or atheist group.
I have no opinion on any of the issues raised in this post.
11: There are probably (indeed, almost certainly) situations where people wind up having abortions who might have, in better circumstances, found other ways. The irony is that a lot of those situations arise where the woman faced with the decision is isolated and doesn't feel able to talk to the father or her own family, a particularly prevalent problem in heavily pro-life communities -- which after all tend to have higher abortion rates -- and where girls are frequently, to judge by the reports, essentially compelled into abortion by a shamed parent.
The gruesome, shame-inducing propaganda from the "pro-life" right, while nothing new, is deeply scummy (and really a form of emotional terrorism to match the physical terrorism of murder and clinic bombings). On the other hand, those parts of the pro-choice movement who seem to want breezy narratives about how abortion should be no big deal are not necessarily helpful, since Christian Right propaganda or no, there is some proportion of women for whom it will be an emotionally fraught experience no matter what some political faction thinks they ought to feel or not feel. Hopefully an approach prevails that's about giving people the tools to deal with whatever their abortion experience proves to be rather then trying to tell them what it should or shouldn't be.
On the other hand, those parts of the pro-choice movement who seem to want breezy narratives about how abortion should be no big deal are not necessarily helpful, since Christian Right propaganda or no, there is some proportion of women for whom it will be an emotionally fraught experience no matter what some political faction thinks they ought to feel or not feel. Hopefully an approach prevails that's about giving people the tools to deal with whatever their abortion experience proves to be rather then trying to tell them what it should or shouldn't be.
Ok. Fine. I do have opinions.
Who are these straw people of whom you speak? Perhaps they are out there, but I dont come across them very much.
The people who say that abortion can be no big deal/ a huge relief/the best thing since sliced bread, almost always say an abortion can be whatever you want it to be. That is the narrative. You are free for it to be your own experience.
Ok,.....so here is my opinion:
1. Women have always terminated pregnancies and they always will. The vast overwhelming majority suffer no mental detriment.
2. For every woman who has an abortion, there are .8 to 1.5 men who are REALLY happy that she did. Men need to step up. Abortion makes their lives better too.
3. Pro-choice people need to push back hard. We need a pledge. We can learn lessons from Grover Norquist and the gun rights advocates. They have simple principles and they advocate for them forcefully. They enforce these principles with a heavy hand. We need a simple manifesto or set of principles. Our message should be clear. We should be able to easily judge whether our representatives are following these principles.
4. Abortion needs to be de-shamed. I am a proponent of people telling their stories. Not just women, but men. "I had an abortion." Women and men should not have to speak silently in shame about their experience.
It's as though we all believe that it must be traumatic
I'd venture that a great deal of this is an extension of the extremely prevalent view that we are all highly desirous of having children. (Those -- women, chiefly -- who can't/don't have children are frequently told "Oh, I'm so sorry." But ... wouldn't it be more appropriate to say, "I see. Are you okay with that?")
I'm not sure how likely it is that abortion will cease being viewed by many as a terribly regrettable, traumatic event as long as they continue to believe that of course everyone totally wants to have kids, and can't imagine being without them.
NARAL and other organizations have been working on this for years, with variable intensity and success.
18.2 and 18.3 are exactly correct.
Who are these straw people of whom you speak? Perhaps they are out there, but I dont come across them very much.
Nor do I, nor did I during the many years that I was heavily involved in pro-choice activism and defending abortion clinics.
I'm not sure how I feel about 19.3. Not sure I'm down with pledges and oaths, though I suppose I could be persuaded, and no doubt a resistance to them can be read as my being negotiable on these matters (when in fact I'm not).
Isn't it the case now, though, that NARAL and NOW 'grade' legislators on their voting records relating to women's issues?
Further to 22: We did sometimes sing rather breezy pro-choice songs at clinics ("Have a Safe Abortion!" to the tune of "Hava Nagila"). We got rather tired of the anti's and their sanctimonious rewrite of "Eyes on the Prize":
Be a hero, save a whale
Save a baby, go to jail
Keep your eyes on the prize
Hold on
In fact we often had a lot of fun at the clinics drowning out the anti's and getting in between the patients and the anti's holding up their tiny plastic fetuses and huge bloody photos.
The depressing thing is how abortion is written out of all TV shows and movies. There's a new sitcom called "Ben and Kate" where the first sentence of the premise is
KATE FOX (Dakota Johnson, "The Social Network") followed the rules all her life...until she got pregnant in college and dropped out just shy of graduation.
Of course! That's what anyone who had been planning all her life to go to college and is about to graduate would do. Pathetic.
You'd think people in Hollywood would take the "Based on my own moral beliefs I am compelled to ignore these assholes, because to give in to their pressure would be a betrayal of my own principles" approach, like they've done with gay rights, but apparently not.
Almost-but-not-quite on topic:
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Well, this will be fun. Baby is showing up a month early. Water broke this morning, and things are moving from there.
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The depressing thing is how abortion is written out of all TV shows and movies.
Yeah. It's always hard to get my head around the fact that Bea Arthur's character Maud had an abortion, on a sitcom no less. These days a character on a serious show could perhaps consider it, but by the end of the episode there would have to be some happy resolution, where by "happy" is meant, as usual, procreative.
Yikes, Nathan. I hope things go well and safely.
26: Best wishes. Hope all is well.
26: Yay, baby! Good luck with everything.
Of course! That's what anyone who had been planning all her life to go to college and is about to graduate would do. Pathetic.
Back when I was in college, the college paper reported that according to the health services people over the previous decade or so there had been a couple hundred pregnancies and not one of those students had decided to have the kid.
26 Good luck.
These days a character on a serious show could perhaps consider it
Not just "these days"; there's been a trickle ever since Maude. While characters almost never have abortions in a show's present, the of-course-it's-your-choice-but-gosh-I-guess-I-want-to-be-a-mother-after-all story has come up repeatedly. (Including some sitcoms, e.g., Murphy Brown and Roseanne.)
There have also been a number where major-ish characters have had abortions in the past.
This is an incomplete but interesting list.
Whooooo. Good luck with everything.
From the list linked at 32:
Men in White (1934)
A nurse, fearful of telling her colleagues she needs an abortion, goes to a back-alley abortionist and gets a botched abortion. A noble doctor (Clark Gable!) performs an operation on her to save her. The word abortion, in keeping with the times, is not used and is referred to somewhat obliquely.
Has anyone seen this? I had no idea that abortion would come up in a 1930's movie, never mind be the central plot.
When's the Hays Code? If that was just pre-Code, it'd make sense.
Hays Code was 1930, which makes me think the movie probably disapproved of the nurse or depicted her as desperate.
Off to do some further research.
According to detailed research (i.e. wikipedia), the code wasn't enforced strongly until July 1, 1934.
Further research:
- The Code wasn't seriously enforced until 1934.
- Gable's co-star was Myrna Loy.
- Neither of my groovy indie video stores carries it.
On preview, pwned on the 1st one, but there's no way you got the 3rd.
Keep us updated, Nathan! Cheering you on.
26. Wheee!! Well, as one prem to another, rock on, kid!
Yeah those first few years of the 30s are what's generally referred to as "pre-code", I think, when a lot was permitted. Like, I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang is 1932, and Trouble in Paradise, which isn't all that risque but has some surprisingly unambiguous gay stuff and a challenging moral sense about sex, is the same year. Baby Face (blunt about sex and relatively non-punitive toward Barbara Stanwyck, who sleeps her way to the top) is 1933.
those first few years of the 30s are what's generally referred to as "pre-code"
Interesting. I always thought pre-code just meant before the code was ever established.
18.2: Who are these straw people of whom you speak?
Well, that you've seen fit to preemptively assume I'm talking about "straw people" is not a very auspicious starting point at all, will.
But as it happens, you can find them virtually anywhere an abortion debate crops up on the Internet, arguing strenuously that abortion should never be perceived as anything other than a routine medical procedure. They are often identifiable by the use of phrases like "clump of cells" or terms like "tumor" to describe the fetus (although not everyone who uses those terms is making this argument; Britta isn't in her comments upthread, for instance). And don't get me wrong, I see what they are going for and there are many cases in which it's genuinely true. But overall, it's not helpful.
Let me leave it alone for a second, though, and concede, for the sake of argument, your framing of "the narrative" as this:
The people who say that abortion can be no big deal/ a huge relief/the best thing since sliced bread, almost always say an abortion can be whatever you want it to be.
Well-meant and positive-sounding as it is, it's actually not an improvement. "An abortion can be whatever you want it to be" boils down to the reasoning of The Secret: the conclusion it would encourage is that if someone doesn't have a positive experience, they must have come into it with the wrong mindset. That actually would not be okay if any great number of pro-choicers were doing it. Sometimes people have reactions to an experience that are not about what they "want it to be." Pretending that is not the case with abortion would not be the smart play.
Now, as it happens, I don't see this as a common "narrative" in the pro-choice movement at all -- it looks to me like a rather idiosyncratic tactical construction on your part, and I think the "abortion should just be a routine medical procedure" argument is far more prevalent. But I do happen to agree with you that the pro-choice movement needs some definite, unambiguous messages around which everyone can unite and push, and thence some aggressiveness and message discipline.
I just don't happen to think the message should be avoidant of the moral and emotional issues that often come with abortion whether we like it or not. That avoiding those issues is a losing proposition is exactly what the trajectory of the anti-abortion movement, and the corresponding fragmentation and loss of momentum on the pro-choice side of the aisle, should tell us.
How about "An abortion is whatever the people involved feel it is: a routine medical procedure, an emotional trauma, an immense relief, or anything else that describes their experience."
Does that avoid the implicit judgmentalism you're reacting to?
It avoids the judgmentalism. But I think the more on-point argument is "the single most viable moral judge available of whether a pregnancy should be carried to term is the person whose body will carry the fetus." It's about whether a woman's body is the property of society, or her own property. Everything else is a distraction.
I think it's also important for people to be able to relate their experiences, for all sorts of reasons but particularly so that people can feel supported by the existence of others with similar experiences. And there is a tendency among handwringing 'moderates' of the William Saletan school to try to erase the class of experiences including "it was a routine medical procedure" and "it was an intense relief".
The existence of that sort of emotional reaction isn't an argument for the permissibility of abortion. It's not an argument at all. But it's still important for people to be able to communicate that that sort of reaction is neither unprecedented nor wrong.
26: Good luck to you and the momma!
On topic, when I moved to my current state I asked my docs* about whether it would be hard to procure an abortion, should I need one, and they said our state was easy-peesy. I wonder if this is as true down state as it is up state.
*I could have figured this out on my own, it was more of a litmus test question.
the "abortion should just be a routine medical procedure" argument is far more prevalent.
I've only seen this applied to medical conversations about why it's inappropriate to legislate about abortion. I've never seen this argument applied to how women are supposed to emotionally process anything.
47.1: I agree. (But then Saletan was only ever a fake "moderate.") Nobody should be trying to erase or downplay any class of experiences as regards abortion. There's a temptation among pro-choicers to try to erase "negative" experiences because the anti-choicers so systematically try to erase routine or positive ones. But that temptation should be resisted, because it's wading into quicksand; it's fighting on ground of the enemy's choosing, and alienating one's own potential allies in the process.
Much better to be simply honest and accepting of the full breadth of experience and tackle the real crux of choice (and freedom, personhood, self-possession)... of which the anti-choicers are manifestly terrified and from which they're incessantly trying to divert the debate, for the very good reason that whenever it's brought back to this essential point, they will always out themselves as the misogynistic authoritarians that they are*.
(* Case in point: the North Dakota legislator who, when asked in what circumstances a woman could have a right to an abortion, could only come up with a lurid, curiously-specific and unintentionally-revealing rape fantasy. I used to have that clip bookmarked somewhere: let me see if I can find it.)
50, I think it involved the phrase "raped as bad as you can be", or possibly "sodomized as bad as you can be", if you're in a place where you can google such things.
49: I've seen it quite explicitly applied as a universal definition of what abortion is or how it should be regarded. The prescription about what would women should feel it is is typically left implicit.
51: Yeah yeah, that's the #!@*ing one. Gimme a sec.
52: I don't interpret those "universal definition" contexts the way you have. I've always assumed that there's an implied "Medically speaking," preceding it.
But hey, if that's how you interpret it, you probably represent a fair segment of the population.
There's a temptation among pro-choicers to try to erase "negative" experiences
Well, this gets back to 18 and 22. While you've clearly seen pro-choicers using language that erases negative experiences with abortion, it's not ringing a bell for me as something I've noticed. Debunking of phony pro-life stats about increased rates of depression and so on in women who have had abortions, sure, but nothing that springs to mind directed at actual experiences. To the extent it's out there, though, you're right that pro-choicers shouldn't do it.
Here's Alyssa Rosenberg using the language "stories about women who get abortions and treat them like the routine medical procedures that they are", which clearly telegraphs that she herself thinks of abortion as a routine medical procedure. But it's in the context of suggesting that stories that present abortion in that light should exist on TV along with stories presenting abortion as a trauma -- she's asking for TV to present the fact that "People have a range of experiences with abortion."
If that's the sort of thing you're talking about as erasing negative experiences, then I agree that that sort of thing is certainly out there. I wouldn't have seen it as erasure myself.
But I think the more on-point argument is "the single most viable moral judge available of whether a pregnancy should be carried to term is the person whose body will carry the fetus." It's about whether a woman's body is the property of society, or her own property.
In other words, the exact definition of pro-choice.
Ahhh, there he is. William Napoli, unwitting revelator of the underbelly of "pro-life."
54: To give this some full-disclosure context, I myself was an advocate of "routine medical procedure" and "clump of cells / organ / tumor" reasoning at one time. I did not regard it as having an implied "medically speaking" preceding it, actually, neither so far as I could see did others of my circle; it was just the baseline of how much emotional weight -- whatever the specific medical reasons -- abortion should be given in a genuinely progressive society.
What gave me pause about this was encountering a brilliant Catholic woman who, progressive on every other front, shocked me by being anti-choice. And it wasn't for the usual set of Biblical reasons (though I am sure she had those, too). She posited a set of questions I couldn't dismiss so easily: first, the "routine medical procedure" rationale (she asked me "who gets to decide whether I see the procedure as 'routine'?" a question I fudged but could not adequately answer); second, the pursuant construction of the fetus as a "clump of cells" or as merely excising a necrotic organ or a tumor (the question was "is there any other clump of cells that answers to the potentiality of a fetus?" which I had grudgingly to admit there was not); third, what she perceived as the high-handedness of pro-choicers who in her view were trying to write her moral calculus out of the picture in advancing the above points (it was hard afterwards to deny that such people existed, since after all I at least was one).
In all the years and the many arguments about choice and anti-choice since, I have yet to encounter a pro-choicer prone to the first two arguments who was able to convincingly defend them when asked these kinds of question. The usual last-ditch response was to default to claiming I was some sort of pro-life troll who was making up fictional pro-choicers, but since I knew one certain case and dozens of other very probable cases that give this objection the lie, I have never been very convinced by it.
At any rate, there surely are some people who mean the argument more specifically than it sounds like they mean it. And it could me I'm projecting onto many other people the intolerance of my own youthful and ill-thought-out radicalism. But yes, it does sound a certain way and is thereby alienating at least some people who could otherwise be allies.
57: Does that somehow surprise you? I've been incredibly explicit in every prior instance of the topic on this forum that I am the exact definition of pro-choice.
first, the "routine medical procedure" rationale (she asked me "who gets to decide whether I see the procedure as 'routine'?" a question I fudged but could not adequately answer);
But this isn't what "routine medical procedure" means - it's not routine for me to get my tonsils out. It's routine for the doctor. It typically does not require heavy anaesthetic and does not have much risk of complications: routine.
60: What "routine medical procedure" means is this context is that you do not agonize about what it would have been like to watch your tonsils grow up and become people.
59: What I meant was that your articulation is the mainstream pro-choice position, not some magic Castock formula.
I have yet to encounter a pro-choicer prone to the first two arguments who was able to convincingly defend them when asked these kinds of question. The usual last-ditch response was to default to claiming I was some sort of pro-life troll who was making up fictional pro-choicers,
Huh? I thought you were talking about conversations with actual pro-choice people who were prone to arguing that abortion should always and everywhere be seen as a routine medical procedure. But if that's what you were talking about, I don't see how the accusation that you were 'making up fictional pro-choicers' fits in.
Do you mean that you were running into people who would both argue 'always a R.M.P.', and would also claim that you were making up the existence of anyone who would argue 'always an R.M.P.'? Because that would be maddening.
How could anyone possibly mean that it's routine for the woman?! Castock, I'm pretty sure that's nutty. Nobody gets abortions routinely except in the minds of conservative twats.
I'm being a little disingenuous; I can imagine Doctor trying to calm down Nervous Patient by saying "Relax, it's a routine medical procedure" as if her fears were that there might be medical complications. I think he's pulling a slight of hand, and calming what's not really upsetting her. But the effect is the same.
62: What I meant was that your articulation is the mainstream pro-choice position
It was once, and it should be, but if it is then why do we waste so much time in the modern day slicing up trimesters and arguing about how women ought to experience abortion?
63.1: It fits in because confronted with actual implications of what they are saying that they have not considered, people are often not honest, either with themselves or with their interlocutors.
Further to 59 & above: I'm not disputing your anecdata about pro-choicers who don't follow that line; my anecdata from decades of pro-choice activism, knowing women who've had or considered abortions, reading innumerable articles, listening to innumerable speeches, etc., is that the overwhelming majority do.
67: To clarify, I'm not saying most pro-choicers don't say what's in 46. I'm saying that too often we get pushed or distracted into saying other things -- the arguments over medical procedure are an example -- that aren't to our advantage.
why do we waste so much time in the modern day slicing up trimesters
Huh? "We" didn't start the trimester fetish; that's the basis for most of the compromises legislatures and courts have used -- and isn't actually modern. Since at least the 17th century, "quickening" (early in the 2nd trimester) was the dividing line for legality in many places in Europe and the American colonies.
"We" didn't start the trimester fetish
Eeee-xactly.
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Portland meetup! Me, B, Emerson. Where the hell are the rest of you?
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why do we waste so much time in the modern day slicing up trimesters and arguing about how women ought to experience abortion
There's not really a limit on time to talk about any given topic, so wasting time isn't something I see as an important issue, or as a reason in itself not to talk about anything.
I'm not sure what you're getting at with 'slicing up trimesters' -- obviously any legal discussion is going to get into trimesters because that's the structure of the current legal framework.
And on 'arguing about how women ought to experience abortion' -- anyone telling anyone else that they're wrong to feel the way they do is probably being a jerk. But if you're addressing people sharing their own experiences and feelings, that sort of thing isn't an argument for the permissibility of abortion, but I do think it is valuable support for people making decisions.
Lord Castock seems to be trying to get somebody to start screaming at him.
(Sorry folks, I've gotta duck out and do some IRL stuff for a few hours; to recent/future respondents I am not ignoring you, I will be back to reply.)
73: Nah, this one looks as though it should resolve easily to 'annoying people who argue dishonestly are annoying', and we can all share our individual and therefore incontrovertible experiences of how often we encounter people who argue dishonestly in any given manner. I don't think there's any first-order disagreement about anything.
65: I think he's pulling a slight of hand
"sleight" I think.
Since I don't want to get people mad at me, and my own pro-choice agenda involves machetes, shotguns, grenade launchers, and a women-only haven city in Missouri declared independent of the nation and state, with high walls and minefields...I'll just stay out of this one.
Judge kept the last Miss clinic open for today.
I personally think philosophy-style arguments about abortion are only persuasive to about .0001% of the population (if that), and so the rhetoric of "property rights" vs. "routine medical procedure" vs. violinist hypothetical vs. whatever don't matter much at all, except maybe in online debate forums.
If we're going to make progress on actually persuading people that abortion should be not only legal but routinely available, we need women (and men) to share personal experiences about positive, life-affirming, non-traumatic experiences with abortion. Without, obviously, dismissing or denying the experiences of women (and men) who did have traumatic experiences. That's not exactly reasoned argument, but that's in fact how people get persuaded about real things in the real world. People can bloviate all they want about first principles, but the only thing that actually changes minds are things like sympathizing with a friend who really needed an abortion, improved her life by getting one, and wasn't at all hurt by it.
I remember the title character getting an abortion in Ann Vickers, also on the list linked in 32, but they are fairly subtle in referring to it and some summaries I just saw while searching for the film suggest that there wasn't an abortion. I think the reference might have been too subtle for the summarizers, but it's been a few years since I saw it. I don't remember any negative consequences coming from it. A lot happens in the movie afterwards.
58: And it could me I'm projecting onto many other people the intolerance of my own youthful and ill-thought-out radicalism.
Could be. But I see Castock has left.
The sentiment in 68.last is certainly correct, and this thread demonstrates what's distracting about talking about how women should feel about having an abortion.
Still, I'm not sure why the "clump of cells" perspective is vilified even by our friends on the left. Maybe I should out myself: I had an abortion when I was 21, just out of college, and my reaction was: Whoa, shit, this sucks, I can't believe we fucked up somehow, okay, will check into how to procure an abortion.
I certainly didn't view myself as having been invaded by an alien tumor or something: it was just something that could not be allowed to proceed at that time in my life. I wasn't morally conflicted for one moment; mostly just anxious about going in for a medical procedure.
This from 31 struck me: Back when I was in college, the college paper reported that according to the health services people over the previous decade or so there had been a couple hundred pregnancies and not one of those students had decided to have the kid.
Quite a few of my friends in college had an abortion at one point or another. We held each other's hands and grimaced over it, but there wasn't a lot of soul-wringing. Perhaps times have changed.
I can't tell if times have changed or not, given that I moved Florida, Michigan, Texas. But my guess is that kids at heebie u would wring their hands wildly more than me and my friends, as undergrads.
78: People can bloviate all they want about first principles, but the only thing that actually changes minds are things like sympathizing with a friend who really needed an abortion, improved her life by getting one, and wasn't at all hurt by it.
You know, I understand this sentiment, but the fact is that abortion is legislated and controlled by law, so the legal arguments, what you call rhetoric about property rights, is indeed extremely important. People are disenfranchised through the courts.
I'm not talking about law. Which doesn't really concern itself, in this area, with first principles or reasoning about moral hypotheticals, in any event.
81: The anti-choice crowd is winning the debate in the public imagination in some areas of the country. Obviously.
83: I'm confused. Isn't 46.last or so about the law?
46: It's about whether a woman's body is the property of society, or her own property.
I realize that Roe v. Wade isn't about that specifically either, but are you kvetching about reasoning from first principles because you're an intellectual property rights lawyer, or because you hate philosophical reasoning in general, or what?
46 last is not really what Roe v. Wade is about. I'm kvetching about philosophical arguments about abortion because (a) Castock seemed to be suggesting that the imperative to tell women's stories, a la Will, was a problem because we should be sticking to a purely philosophical property-based theory of abortion, and I think that's wrong; (b) I think, in this area, philosophical arguments about abortion are a black hole when it comes to persuading people of anything, and (c) aren't particularly important for the law, either. I mean, by all means go ahead with the violin hypothetical or whatever -- why not, philosophy has its own value -- but at a minimum we shouldn't be particularly invested in such arguments as actually moving people's belief systems.
27: I think party of 5 did that. It ended with a miscarriage.
Friday Night Lights had a major character get an abortion, after getting a lot of pressure not to, and (apparently) feeling relieved/at peace about the decision.
87: Don't really think the point of the philosophical arguments is persuasion per se. It's clarify the sources of intellectual and emotional ambivalence--in the literal sense of being pulled in different directions by competing values--that a lot of people feel around the issue.
87: I take it you feel that building support for reproductive choice should best proceed along the lines that gradual public acceptance of homosexuality has. And yet I don't think that works the same way in the public imagination.
Differently: all of your areas (a) through (c) are susceptible to libertarian arguments about individual liberty, which is what 46.last essentially is.
Also, Halford, I don't know why you're referring to a 'violin hypothetical'. Where has such a thing come up?
I'm not exceedingly pissed off here, I just don't know what you're complaining about, really.
90 is a good point.
I'm complaining about Castock's idea that women shouldn't tell stories about their experience because everyone should be talking about women's rights over their own bodies. Wrong. One compelling anecdote is worth 10,000 Internet political theory wanks.
I believe the trimester formulation is due to Casey vs. Planned Parenthood.
I think "safe, legal, and rare" is fine, on the assumption that we're implying access to contraception; "safe, legal, and regrettable" really shouldn't be part of it. I'm pro-choice, and more so as I get older and start contemplating/attempting to have kids (the *fuck* the fucking legislature is going to tell me how to manage my health), but I think that the classic liberal privacy-based arguments are less persuasive than, e.g., Sullivan's readers writing in with stories about late-term abortion, or stories about actual women and their reasons.
But there's a belief, probably justified, that stories that aren't tragic or heartfelt or involve a lot of torturous reasoning aren't going to seem serious enough in political discourse.
94.2: I may not have been following along closely enough. I didn't notice that Castock was saying that. Probably he can speak for himself when and if he comes back, if he's inclined.
You have no idea how annoying the phrase "Internet political theory wanks" is. Or maybe you do.
Okay, I'm back for a quick drive0by. And Halford is complaining about something Castok did not actually say:
I'm complaining about Castock's idea that women shouldn't tell stories about their experience
Actually, what I said is that the pro-choice movement should not be about selectively promoting a certain type of woman's story for political reasons, because this creates the impression that it disapproves or has something to fear from acknowledging the full breadth of possible experiences. Or more basically (among people with actual lived experience of stories the pro-choice movement will not tell) it creates an impression of the movement's being populated by liars or anglers.
I am not being entirely speculative about this: we have seen what happens when the pro-choice movement attempts this over a span of decades. The current state of affairs is what happens.
My idea is also that the primary focus should be more on the basic crux of choice and self-ownership than on jousting with the anti-choice movement over which form of abortion narrative is more representative. The notion that this is some sort of abstract philosophical wankery is utterly bizarre to me: it as as personal and visceral as arguments get, or at the very least it can certainly be made so.
(Gimme another half an hour and I can explain myself yet more fully, and with fewer typos.)
25
You'd think people in Hollywood would take the "Based on my own moral beliefs I am compelled to ignore these assholes, because to give in to their pressure would be a betrayal of my own principles" approach, like they've done with gay rights, but apparently not.
It's hard to make a compelling drama about a routine medical procedure. You want to make proabortion propaganda show a woman who should have an abortion but doesn't and ruins her life for no good reason.
I'm picturing a rom-com with a time-travelling twist. Botch my abortion once, shame on you!
Or maybe that should be the show - a reality show called Botch My Abortion, like Pimp My Ride. A big reveal at the end of every episode!
Maybe a new season of Quantum Leap. Sam's only guide on these journies is Al, an abortionist who appears in the form of a hologram that only Sam can see or hear. Sam has to make right what once went wrong.
Cheaper By The Dozen...Abortions!
No one has really marketed the softer, cuddlier side of abortions. What about a lovable alien who lives with a seemingly normal family? A really fertile alien who needs a helping hand most weeks?
107: They already had that in a movie. Species.
Moby seems to have an idiosyncratic definition for "lovable."
"Scre-each!"
"Yes, Kelly kapowski?"
"Don't tell me you're saving up for an abortion again!"
"You know me, I'm accident-prone!"
Cue laugh track.
99, I meant that Hollywood shouldn't act as if abortions don't exist in a normal person's universe. They've stopped acting as if gay people don't exist.
They didn't just stop acting like gay people don't exist all at once. There was a multi-decade period of stereotypes slowly becoming less offensive/absurd.
I had forgotten that Friday Night Lights thing. Both because I can't stand that character and because I'm mostly obsessed with seasons 1 and 5.
We're finally watching season five right now. We fell way behind.
I think Halford has a point. If you look at abortion laws in most Western European countries, they're much stricter than ours, however given social opinion is generally in favor of availability of abortion, practically its much easier to get an abortion there, as it can be performed for next to nothing by OBGYNs in most hospitals. If extra-legal tactics make it practically impossible to operate abortion clinics and/or abortions are too costly for many women, then legality isn't all that important. Obviously I'd prefer to live in a place where abortion is legal and easy to obtain, but if given a choice, I'd rather live in a place where abortion is technically illegal but actually widely available under the state-healthcare plan than where it's technically legal but costs over a thousand dollars and requires a 10 hour drive and a multi-night hotel stay.
Lord C:
I am in the belly of these issues. I cannot recall a single instance where someone has dismissed an individual's experience. That was my point back in 18/19. Even though the vast majority of women do not suffer any lingering mental trauma, some do. And they should be supported. (We barely discuss the lingering mental issues with live births, but they certainly exist.)
As far as the routine part, that refers to the technical procedure. It is safer than pregnancy, and safer that many plastic surgerical procedures.
As far as NARAL and PP, I am frustrated with them. They are often far too apologetic for my tastes. I will repeat what I said upthread: women have always terminated pregnancies, and they always will. I am tired of hearing about the three kinds of acceptable abortions: rape, incest, and my own.
There's no good reason for this except peevishness, but I always argue with the people who want "rape or incest" provisions because either the incest is in fact rape or you just love eugenics, you horrible person. Where's the fucking logic? I don't quite say it like that, but it's close.
I think the actual categories in people's heads are 'adult rape or teen/child molestation'. Phrasing it as rape or incest is a way of dancing around whether 'rape' includes statutory rape or whether it only includes statutory rape where there are circumstances that makes the speaker not want to attribute responsibility to the teenage girl involved: so, statutory rape justifies abortion if the teenager was molested by a family member or authority figure, but not if the speaker thinks she really consented.
It's bullshit, but I do think there is a thought process going on there.
the lingering mental issues with live births, but they certainly exist
Yes, I'd say my wife had a bit of PTSD after the harrowing birth of our first. It came up when she faced the choice around VBAC with our second.
Re: Parsimon's concern about a pledge:
Far too many politicians and people are vaguely for women's rights with regarding to reproductive issues. As a result, the right has been reducing reproductive rights steadily. A line in the sand needs to be clearly drawn.
120:
Birth (and being responsible for a child) is a scary freaking thing. Not to be flippant, but I can vividly remember the first night home with our daughter. I was scared silly.
AS a society, we are barely talking about depression after birth now.
119: Well, yeah, it's tied up in how the culture at large and some of those same people don't want to think about rape and I think that's worth challenging too.
I'm trying to think about whether it was a prior Fourth of July when Lee thought she could change my Catholic dad's mind about abortion even though she doesn't actually pay attention to any of the philosophical arguments or anything. I wanted them both to explode for talking annoyingly and endlessly about "but what about someone who's been raped?" when they knew they were in the room with someone who had been raped and my parents don't support any exemptions anyway.
99
It's hard to make a compelling drama about a routine medical procedure. You want to make proabortion propaganda show a woman who should have an abortion but doesn't and ruins her life for no good reason.
Disingenuous phrasing aside, I actually like this idea. It's not hard to imagine a very good script vaguely along the lines of Sliding Doors. It is very hard for me to imagine it getting made into a mainstream movie with the essential bits intact, though.
I was thinking that k-sky and I could collaborate on a reality show about an abortion clinic.
I am in the belly of these issues.
Well, I'd say between my being "the exact definition of pro-choice" and your being "in the belly of these issues" we have all the bases pretty much covered. I should also like observers to note that will is aware of all Internet traditions, whereas for yours truly, impossible is nothing.
Seriously, though, I think there's a lot of difference between what people say about abortion and the kind of narratives they prefer, and how they react in the face of actual abortion. I have no doubt that in the latter circumstance most people (who aren't abortion clinic protesters, anyway) are respectful.
Actually, people who support exceptions for rape and incest are showing they actually think rape is about controlling women's bodies. If you genuinely believe abortion is murder, you would not allow a child to be murdered based on the crimes of the parents, much like we wouldn't approve of murdering the already born child of a serial killer. The logically consistent response to the woman would be, "wow I'm sorry your life sucks, but that is not the fault of the child you are carrying." (Life of the mother is different, because then you're making a choice to save one life over the other, or very possibly one life over neither lives, depending on the problem). If you admit it's ok to murder babies if their parents are terrible people, then 1) you don't really care that much about the sanctity of life, and your problem with abortion in most circumstances is that it allows slutty mcslut women to not let unplanned children derail their lives, and abortion should be a reward for 'good girls' who don't put out of their own volition or 2) you support (as someone pointed out above) eugenics, not only for related individuals, but also criminals, whose 'inferior' genes can be weeded out of the gene pool.
Slightly related to the eugenics issue is the lament I've heard from some evangelicals about how hard it is to adopt healthy white infants these days. I wouldn't be surprised if a not insignificant people who oppose abortion long for the days when middle class white girls were forced to have babies they didn't want to put up for adoption.
Ok, I'll keep up the multiple posting, but another issue with the narrative around abortion is who gets one. The idea is the woman is always unmarried, and either a desperate teen or a selfish single career woman. Actually, many if not most women who get abortions (according to a friend who worked at PP) are married and already have children. Adoption is an easier suggestion when it's seen a a no strings attached pregnancy of someone young, but a lot harder when one is already embedded in family networks. How do you explain to your kids why little brother was given away at birth? What sort of damage does that do to your current family unit? ("Don't misbehave or you'll go the way of junior") Given how hard the adoption decision can already be, how much harder does it get when one has a husband, parents, and other children who would all have conflicting feelings? I was married and in my late 20s when I got pregnant, a time in life when most women are assumed to want children. Since pregnancies are not easy to hide in these days, it would have been a very difficult nine months around our families and adoption may have been effectively emotionally impossible.
I am in the belly uterus of these issues.
Since pregnancies are not easy to hide in these days
Time to bring back hoop skirts?
There used to be pro-abortion people who weren't really pro-choice and were kind of awful. I don't think that my Dad was quite on board with Roe v. Wade when it came out. He was talking to someone about it and expressing his misgivings. (I think that this came in part from his experiences working in a women's prison where there were women who had committed infanticide and didn't understand why it was different.) Anyway, this man he was talking to said something like, 'Well, how else are we going to keep the numbers of those people in the ghetto under control?" My Dad was horrified.
Cicero definitely thought abortion control was about control of women's bodies:
I remember a case that came up when I was in Asia. A woman of Miletus was condemned to death because, after accepting a bribe from her late husband's secondary heirs, she had taken drugs to procure an abortion. Her condemnation was entirely justified, because she had deprived the father of his hopes for the future, prevented him from perpetuating his name, dashed away the support on which his family relied, cheated his house of its expected heir, robbed the state of a citizen.
131
There used to be pro-abortion people who weren't really pro-choice and were kind of awful. ...
Used to be?
127
... If you genuinely believe abortion is murder, you would not allow a child to be murdered based on the crimes of the parents, much like we wouldn't approve of murdering the already born child of a serial killer. ...
So where do you stand on executing pregnant women?
Murder is whatever it suits society to define as muder.
Late to the thread, but:
Far too many politicians and people are vaguely for women's rights with regarding to reproductive issues.
In what may be one of the only political shifts I can actually attribute to the Internet, I met a candidate at a garden party [!] recently who is a Democrat running in a district with a super-conservative Republican male representative.
I doubt very much that she will win, but after our lengthy conversation, in which she detailed her volunteer work with Planned Parenthood,* I did go so far as to go online that night and give her a $50 donation. And send her business card to my grandfather's widow, the only person I know who lives in her district and might actually vote for her.
I certainly never gave money to politicians before the Internet, and extra doubly triply not to people whose districts I don't live in and who probably aren't going to win. If it hadn't been for umpteen abortion threads here** I would not have seen the value of donating to her either.
*It didn't hurt that she is also a former librarian.
**I am with heebie in 8. I think that was very unfortunate phrasing, Halford.
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Following up on 26: There's a baby, and everything seems good. Public details here.
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Sorry. Not really applicable here.
I can see my naming strategy (one name from the Weasley family and one from Thomas the Tank Engine) was followed.
Yay! Congratulations Nathan and family!
Woo-hoo! Welcome baby! From one six-pounder to another, you're going to do juuuuust fine.
136: Oh come on, they couldn't manage to get an extra .2 ounces on there? Leave another inch of umbilical cord on or something?
Congratulations!
It's sad, though, that the baby had to be born into a world with no mystery left in it, now that physicists have found the Higgs boson.