I tried to respond to Publius and Hilzoy at their place, but the comments system wouldn't let me. So I'll have to carry the debate on here.
Why the analogy to slavery, or Hitler? It's inflammatory, and rarely advances the debate. Such analogies too often degenerate into "Hitler was a vegetarian too, you tofu-eating Nazi!!!*"
But in this case, I think the analogy to slavery is important, for two reasons. First of all, it was the last time we had an extended, society-wide debate about personhood. And second of all, as now, there were structural political reasons that it was much harder--nearly impossible--to change slavery through the existing political process.
Listening to the debates about abortion, it seems to me that really broad swathes of the pro-choice movement seem to genuinely not understand that this is a debate about personhood, which is why you get moronic statements like "If you think abortions are wrong, don't have one!" If you think a fetus is a person, it is not useful to be told that you, personally, are not required to commit murder, as long as you leave the neighbors alone while they do it.
Conversely, if Africans are not people, then slavery is not wrong. Or at least it's arguably not wrong--if Africans occupy some intermediate status between persons and animals**, then there is at least a legitimate argument for treating them like animals, rather than people.
The difference between our reaction to the two is that now we know Africans are people. It seems ridiculous to think that anyone ever thought they might not be people. They meet all the relevant criteria for personhood in twenty-first century America.
But of course, those criteria are socially constructed. The definition of personhood (and, related, of citizenship) changes over time. It generally expands--as we get richer, we can, or at least do, grant full personhood to wider categories. Except in the case of fetuses. We expanded "persons" to include fetuses in the 19th century, as we learned more about gestation. Then in the late 1960s, for the first time I can think of, western civilization started to contract the group "persons" in order to exclude fetuses.
But that conception was not universally shared. And rather than leave it to the political process, the Supreme Court essentially put it beyond that process. Congress, the President, the justices themselves, have been fighting a thirty-five year guerilla war over court seats. Presidents try to appoint candidates who will support their theory of Roe, Congress strategically blocks change, and the justices refuse to retire until they know they will be replaced by someone who supports their side. To change the outcome, a pro-life political coalition would have to gain a supermajority in Congress for twenty years--long enough for a few liberal justices to die in office.
It is theoretically possible that this could happen, just as it was theoretically possible to come to some political accomodation over slavery. But a combination of supreme court rulings and the peculiar federalist structure of American meant that the only way for either side to gain decisive results was violence. At every turn, the pro-slavery forces no doubt slyly congratulated themselves on their political acumen, while also solemnly and sincerely believing that they preserved an important right. But they made war inevitable.
If you interpret this murder as a political act, rather than that of a lone whacko, than this should be a troubling sign that the political system has failed. So why do so many people think that the obvious answer is simply to more firmly entrench laws that are rightly intolerable to someone who thinks that a late term fetus is a person?
I am accused, in the comments of Hilzoy's post, of loving violence and terror. Well, call me a terrorist sympathizer, but I believe that most terrorists do what they do because they, at least, genuinely believe that there is no other way to seek justice. Indeed, they are usually right, for all that I radically dissent from both their idea of justice, and their right to seek it through violence. But I am also humble enough to recognize that my own morality on a topic like abortion is constructed in context of two important facts: virtually all my friends are pro-choice, as is the social milieu in which I was raised, and a lack of access to abortion would significantly restrict women's autonomy.
These are not bad arguments in favor of abortion--I think modern America is more right than not about most moral questions, and the right to bodily integrity is important. On the other hand, in the face of fetal personhood, they are not very good arguments either. My parents significantly restrict my autonomy by continuing to be alive--if they died, I would inherit some money, which would increase my choices. But I still shouldn't be allowed to kill them in order to collect my inheritance--a moral insight which seems to be much more obvious and fundamental, I might add, than the wrongness of slavery or the rightness of abortion. Every society I know of forbids slaughtering your parents.
(Not that I want to, I hasten to point out. Hi, Dad! We're pricing out a nice GPS for father's day!)
I am aware that I have constructed my beliefs about personhood in the face of these things--like any good undergrad, I know the answer I need to reason to in order to ensure both social comfort and maximum personal freedom. I like to think that I am too rigorous a thinker to be seduced by such ephemera. But I am also aware that a lot of very fine thinkers were seduced into reasoning that Africans weren't people. Whatever evidence they thought they had, we're pretty sure how they arrived at their conclusions: African personhood would have caused enormous personal and social upheaval. Thousands of their friends and family would have personally suffered enormously without their slave wealth. Ergo, slaves weren't people!
And if I look at my own reasoning, well, frankly, it's not even reasoning. I've never sat down and thought, "how do I know that Africans are human beings?" I know. And I'm enough of a Chestertonian to be okay with that way of knowing. But presumably if I'd been raised in 1840 Alabama, I'd know just as certainly that they weren't.
Perhaps I find the certainty of the pro-choice side so disturbing because it feels a lot like the certainty of the warbloggers in the run up to the Iraq invasion. As some of Hilzoy's commenters point out, I was myself too caught up in it, which makes me cautious of getting caught up again. The pro-choicers seem to be acting as if people who shoot abortion doctors are some weird species of moral alien, whose actions can only be understood in Satantic terms, and who cannot and should not be negotiated with, because they only understand raw displays of power. Yet it seems to me that if I were in a society that believed fervently in the personhood of a fetus, I would very possibly agree, and view Tiller's murderer the way I'd view someone who, say, assassinated Mengele.
I realize that this opens many other questions, like "What does it mean to have access to the political process?" and what constitutes personhood. But I remain stuck with a fundemantal problem: I can understand their moral logic. When someone whose moral logic I can understand, even endorse (without endorsing the underlying judgement about the personhood of the fetus) is driven by that moral logic to kill, I think there may be a problem that society needs to solve. When more than one kills for the same cause, I assume that there's a structural problem in the political process that needs to be fixed. I'm not saying the violence is okay--I think Tiller's murderer needs to go to jail. But like many contributors to Obsidian Wings, I can understand the structural forces that contribute to Palestinian terrorism without believing the terrorism is legitimate. Unlike them, apparently, I don't find it all that hard to transfer that understanding to the fringes of our own democratic system.
* Sadly, I'm not even joking--see my old vegan threads
** Go ahead. I triple-dog-dare you to quote me out of context
Copyright © 2010 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
Your previous entry produced an average of one post every two minutes for six hours. Is there a round of drinks hanging on the outcome of this one back at the The Atlantic offices?
You know, I'm fairly pro-life myself, largely because most of the pro-choice arguments are complete crap (and because I've seen that little heartbeat at 7 weeks), but I confess to a certain doubling-down tendency of my own when confronted with terrorism of any kind. I mean, screw you pal, who died and made you God?
Exceptionally well said.
Not really. She kept on evading putting the pregnant woman in the picture. Whatever a fetus is, it is a "parasite" in a host body. I fail to see how one can discuss its status independent of the host. If one day we discover the tapeworms in Megan's body to have certain intelligence will it then be okay to call her doctor a murderer for giving her drugs to kill the parasites?
More realistically if one day a robot doctor is invented to perform abortion, will the woman who uses the robot's service be the murderer?
And a child is a parasite in the house - a baby produces nothing but smelly diapers, but just try performing a fifth-trimester abortion and see where that gets you. If we mandate that parents have a legal responsibility to care for their children, and a very strong responsibility at that, surely we can similarly mandate that a mother has a legal responsibility to care for(i.e., not actively attempt to kill) a fetus if we as a society determine that the fetus has the right to life. It's a similar obligation under similar circumstances, and I see no reason why it would be considered unreasonable, unless you favour legalized infanticide.
(And no, that last line is not intended to be inflammatory. I know a philosopher who actually does believe that parental abandonment should be legal, and I'd let him use the argument that abortion should be legal even if it is murder without claims of hypocrisy. But for all the sane folk, their belief in one parental obligation implies that they ought to accept the other)
First of all, infants aren't life threatening. A fetus is. Secondly, you can transfer responsibility with an infant (give it up for adoption, say), but you can't with a fetus.
Actually, fun thought experiment for pro-choicers: if there was a way to transfer a fetus to a new womb, with less of a health risk to the mother than birth, would you still be pro-choice? I don't know if I would be. Probably the details would matter - for example, exactly how much of a health risk such a procedure would be to the mother (it would have to be surgery of some kind, after all). I wonder how long it'll take to get this technology.
There is an enormous gray area between a mandate that a mother has a legal responsibility to care for a fetus and a mandate to not actively attempt to kill a fetus. Vicarious liablity laws are evolving to better define parental responsibilities and obligations where there seems to be doubt. Be wary of extending special rights to children. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child has precipitated a formidible nanny state situation and completely destroyed the ability of the schools to enforce any educational standards or codes of behaviour. A complete quagmire. Personhood may seem to you a means to achieve a desired end, but do be careful what you wish for.
No matter how many times I have been involved in conversations about abortion and have considered and reconsidered my views, it is the concept of compulsory pregnancy that I find unacceptable.
As a side, before we start extending rights to the unborn, perhaps we should insure that all post-natal citizens in the USA have equal rights and equal protection from discrimination. Personhood for fetuses is a legal concept that would be very dangerous to women.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3X4_p3yAC8
James,
A) Of course infants are life-threatening (at least as much as fetuses are). They are incubators of all sorts of diseases that are reportedly more severe in adulthood.
B) In seven months or less, a fetus is guaranteed to be divorced from its mother. FS condemned McArdle for not putting the pregnant woman in the picture. But, your response also takes her out of the picture since at least 90% of women seeking an abortion willingly engaged in a practice in which they new a pregnancy was a possible result.
It doesn't change things enough in this case to be relevant if you start by assuming the fetus to be a person. Tiller was one of the very few doctors who performed abortions after 21 weeks—that is, after the age where the fetus can survive in the extrauterine environment.
If we assume the fetus is a person, under the same moral logic that is used everywhere else in our society, we might reluctantly conclude the woman could could demand that the person dependent on her be removed from her womb. But we clearly would not allow that person to be killed before removal simply because that makes the removal process easier. Instead, it would be the doctors' job to make an effort to preserve the life of the person during and after removal, even if the during part posed somewhat higher risks to the health of the woman.
That may well be true. But the point is that the focus on abortion clinic and doctors is merely expediency since the real decision maker here is the woman seeking abortion. There is a conflict of interest between the pregnant woman and the fetus that is difficult to resolve. Evading that difficulty and focusing on the doctors (analogizing with Nazi or slavery) is wrong headed and leads to unforgivable actions.
It is possible that one day death penalty will be considered cruel and unusual punishment and be outlawed. However that won't turn an activist who kills a juror or a judge that hands out death penalties now into a hero.
(Except in cases of rape) If the fetus is dependent on and drawing from the mother, it does so because he or she was put in that position by the actions of the mother.
If the fetus is considered a total non-person, than the fact that the mother created this dependent situation doesn't matter much.
If the fetus is considered a person, than it matters a lot. Yes they would be feeding off the the mother but the mother can't reasonably claim self-defense when they take from her, when she created the dependent situation, just as it would be unreasonable for you to try to get me prosecuted as a thief if you locked me in your house and I grabbed some food from your fridge so I wouldn't starve.
" ... this should be a ... sign that the political system ... failed..."
Well, there you have it. The political system DID fail! If Americans back in 1970 (or whenever it was) had wanted to create a brand new constitutional right, there should have been an Amendment proposed and ratified by 3/4 of the State Legislatures. Instead, the whims of 5 old men over-ruled the wishes of 200 million people.
Even if you believe (as I do) that abortion is not always such a terrible thing and might even -- in rare cases -- be a positive good thing, morally; the fact still remains that Roe v. Wade is an abomination on purely legal & constitutional grounds. As long as Roe v. Wade remains on the books, the Constitution is not worth the paper that it's printed on.
The constitution enumerates powers of the federal government and reserves all the rest to the people. For the federal government to regulate abortion it will have to find it in the constitution therefore it is perfectly within the court's purview to disallow that without a constitutional amendment. I would be more sympathetic to the view that the court may have overstepped to keep states from regulating abortion on their own. But the overstepping is only incremental and in the tradition of the court (a la Miranda or using interstate commerce clause in expansion of federal power). So singling out Roe v. Wade is more political than legalistic.
FS,
The fact that the country is MORE polarized and exorcised about this issue 35 years later is evidence that the Court's step was not incremental. The Court made a very big boo-boo that has not only distorted the political process but has also distorted the process by which justices are appointed. Even supporters of Roe recognize that the case fundamentally moved the bar on how free justices are to create policy based on their own sense of justice disconnected from actual law.
James,
The issue is itself polarizing as it boils down to the irreconcilable conflict of interest between the fetus and the woman seeking abortion. If the court ruled the other way the issue would have still remained polarizing. Yes the court itself may have been spared some of the polarization but that shouldn't be the reason to rule the other way. The court has traditionally taken an expansive view of individual right against governmental intrusion so in that sense I don't think Roe was particularly out of bound w.r.t the court tradition.
BTW since the court itself does not appoint justices it can hardly be blamed for the process by which they are appointed.
"FS: If the court ruled the other way the issue would have still remained polarizing."
Umm...no. Because the pro-choicers could still campaign for liberalization of abortion laws at the state and municipal level...which they did before with significant success. Pro-lifers can expect their incrimental legislative victories to be reversed by the court. McArdle already addressed this issue.
"FS: since the court itself does not appoint justices it can hardly be blamed for the process by which they are appointed"
Don't be silly. Since 1973, the fight over every candidate is a stalking horse for the abortion debate. The Court invented this climate.
Megan,
If you haven't yet please read Judith Thomson's "A Defense of Abortion."
http://spot.colorado.edu/~heathwoo/Phil160,Fall02/thomson.htm
In it Thomson argues that "we shall probably have to agree that the fetus has already become a human person well before birth."
Then she gives a series of thought experiments that grants a right to abortion to all states up to and including the 1st trimester.
Best
E
Eric:
As an undergrad philosophy major in an ethics course, it was Judith Thomson's essay (read in conjunction with others, taking other sides) that convinced me to change from being pro-choice to pro-life. I just didn't agree that her premises implied her conclusions, but her argument is very intellectually honest and well structured.
The historical argument involving slavery is faulty. Slavery long predated any arguments about the personhood of anyone. The "inferiority" of blacks was invented to maintain slavery in the South in the face of increasing general anti-slavery beliefs.
With your theory of expanding personhood, should we expect you to become a PETA whacko next.
Was wondering when that angle would come up. Can anyone figure out why vegetarians aren't unanimously pro-lifers? I can see a coherent argument for the personhood of a fetus and the nonpersonhood of a cow, but I have yet to figure out anything but the most flagrantly cliche-based simultaneous defence of a pig's right to life and a woman's right to abortion.
I'm a vegetarian pro-choicer. There are two main reasons: The animals vegetarians most care about (pigs and such) are more self-aware developed than and cognitively developed than even newborns. As far as I'm concerned, righthe mother is t to life is a consequence of higher brain functions which fetuses do not have until well into the second trimester.
The other (libertarian) argument is that regardless of personhood, by general principles of freedom, no woman can be forced to undergo a pregnancy. Since animals and infants are able to survive without the support of specific humans, this does not apply to them.
Unless you're talking rape/incest, where is the "forced pregnancy"? Abortion laws restrict, to varying degrees, the right to eliminate the fetus, but no one is proposing laws that require pregnancy. This argument would be more persuasive if very, very effective contraceptives were not widely available to the general public.
Further, even strict libertarians believe in negative rights. Your contention is circular if a fetus is a person, because all persons in a libertarian framework have the right not to be deprived of life, property, etc., by force. Further, if you believe the mother is "more" of a person (a proposition that has some intuitive appeal), you also must concede that the mother's right is less significant than the fetus's right, i.e., the right to be free from having to continue a pregnancy (which is physically restraining) against the right not to be killed.
Finally, do adults who are in a temporary, reversible coma have rights? They are not "able to survive without the support of specific humans." What about newborns that need two weeks of ICU, but after that we *know* (hypothetically) they will live full lives? While in ICU, they are not "able to survive without the support of specific humans."
What about a two week old baby that is completely normal? They don't feed themselves, you know. Indeed, my two year old daughter wouldn't last a full day without "the support of specific humans."
Yes, slavery predated the 'arguments' about personhood. But slavery requires acceptance that one being, person or not, is entitled to absolute authority over another. And that is the point.
http://lhote.blogspot.com/2008/11/enough-of-godwins-law.html
great post megan...
i feel we pro-choice people dance around this issue all the time because "deep down inside in places we don't like to talk about at cocktail parties" we understand it to be fundamentally true. a developing fetus is life. and we are to afraid to admit for ourselves that up to a certain point... we care more about ourselves then about that life.
but while i think abortion is not a good option, i cannot bring myself to outlaw it and I cannot bring myself to align with a group of people that will not look the issue in the face squarely and say we have a problem with the way we teach our children about sex. to outlaw abortion is to put certain women at greater risk than they already are.
birth control, education at a young age, and marketing is the only way to attack this problem.
as for the supreme court. yes it overrides the political process sometimes to the chagrin of the minority but it exists to protect those minority rights in the face of unjust laws. that is its essence. we look to old supreme court decisions that did not back up the minority of the time with derision. Roe v. wade may have changed the political gain, but it was protecting an individuals right against the majority (even if that individual disagrees with the decision now).
again great post.
I see it as setting one individual's right (the 'right' not to spend 9 months carrying a child) over another individual's right (the 'right' to a lifetime).
You define "we" a little too broadly. Speaking for myself, I don't believe that a fetus is life (in the sense that you intend) until fairly late in the pregnancy - yes, it is a unique life form, no, it does not have rights any more than a blade of grass does. I fall into a view of rights being based, broadly speaking, on the intelligence of the creature, and as such an embryo has none. As such, you can do really anything you want with it, including killing, without concern for its rights.
I don't talk about it at cocktail parties, because the shouting tends to ruin the evening, but it's not some deep dark secret I hide from myself what I think. A mother who gets an abortion is killing her child, but to do so is within her rights. That's not to say it's a good thing, but there's plenty of bad things that violate no rights. It should no more be illegal to perform an early-term abortion than it should be illegal to talk back to your parents or flip off your neighbours.
Alsadius:
Do you have more significant and robust rights than a functioning adult with downs syndrome?
I believe there are cogent and persuasive pro-choice arguments out there. But a rights framework based on "the intelligence of the creature" is not one of them.
I'm going to duck this one, mostly because I don't know enough about Downs to answer it sensibly. That said, I'll say this, as an example. If an adult human loses their mental faculties permanently, due to brain damage or what have you, I would argue that they have no inherent right to life. I don't really have the ability to draw a clear line, but it is certainly possible for an adult human to be on the wrong side of it. Similarly, things that are not human can be on the right side of it - I think that, for example, the treatment of intelligent robots in a lot of sci-fi is outright racism and not even remotely justifiable.
Agreed on every point, pb. Thanks
Why do you think that this post would "make virtually all [your] readers very angry at [you]?" Despite my disagreement with some of your views and logic, it's honesty and humility like this that keeps me reading your blog.
Seconding this. If your readers were going to lose their heads over you taking a well-considered but disagreeable stance, they wouldn't still be your readers. It's not like this is the first time you've done something like this - I'm just glad to say that you do it well.
The problem with using the personhood argument of a fetus is that it doesn't matter*. The issue with pregnancy is that every pregnancy, every time, puts the mothers life at risk. Not a single court in the country has ever ruled that someone must be compelled to donate anything from their body (kidneys, bone marrow, blood, skin), ever, even to save the life of someone who would die without the donation, so why the same rules don't apply to donating the use of and materials from your body I don't get.
.
..Your allowing your parents to live does not put your life at risk.
..Your keeping a slave does not put your life at risk.
..Your being pregnant puts your life at risk. Only you can determine whether or not that life is worth the risk of your own.
.
When abortion providers (women's rights and health advocates) are terrorized, women lack resources, doctors lack training, they lack safe facilities, and women can and do die as a result of lack of abortions or lack of access to safe abortions. So whose life are you saving if both mother and baby die? Whose life are you saving if a mother who is forced to carry a problem pregnancy becomes sterile as a result and thus can't have the 4 kids she wanted?
.
I would never insist someone get an abortion. But to say that NO ONE should says we value the unknown life of the baby over the known life of the mother and that the woman's life is disposable.
.
*to clarify "doesn't matter". It matters a great deal to the person making the decision, if a baby weren't a person, there would be no objection to start with.
"The issue with pregnancy is that every pregnancy, every time, puts the mothers life at risk. "
That's ridiculous. Driving a car, using a gas stove, crossing the street all put our lives at risk, and yet, we seem to manage. Pregnancy isn't an abnormal condition.
Pregnancy isn't abnormal, but the physical risks of later pregnancy and especially birth are much higher than driving a car.
1 in 20 women will develop preeclampsia, which is life-threatening -- it's one of the major causes of first-world maternal mortality, and there is no cure except immediate delivery of the baby. As for birth itself, about 1% of normal deliveries, and almost 3% of C-sections, result in serious maternal morbidity (hemorrhage requiring hysterectomy or transfusion, cardiac arrest, serious postpartum infection, uterine rupture, kidney failure, etc). And that's in *low-risk* women, meaning that higher-risk women have significantly higher rates of major complications.
Personally, I had three separate potentially life-threatening complications in my two pregnancies (ovarian hyperstimulation, hyperemesis gravidarum, and postpartum infection), plus a hemorrhage during my first birth which nearly required transfusion. The infection seriously damaged my reproductive system to the point that I probably couldn't have any more children, required another surgery to resolve, and left me with some permanent complications. Without a whole lot of medical care, which costs a whole lot of money, I could easily have died.
For something that's not "an abnormal condition", pregnancy can and does turn lethal, in a way that nothing else does. Women still do die, and lose their fertility, every day -- it's not just a 19th-century thing. Modern pregnancy and childbirth is much safer, but it's still the most dangerous normal bodily function.
Risk of maternal death in North America is 1 in 3700.
Death from car accidents at around 16 per 100,000 crashes
Cranky Otter:
Well put. But there are two issues here. One is the debate about the ethics/morality of abortion itself. The other debate is about how that polity known as the United States deals with this ethical/moral issue.
For the reasons you cite, criminalizing most abortions is a pretty untenable prospect in said polity. There are other factors arguing against prohibition/criminalization, as well, including -- quite powerfully in my opinion -- arguments about efficacy. Just how effective would an abortion ban be, and what are the prospects of such a ban being realistically enforced? In a non-police state, I reckon they're pretty remote, which makes me strongly suspect the best way to save the lives of fetuses -- if that is one's goal -- is to engage in things like education, or supporting adoption services (or what have you).
Still, what we've arrived at in America is a pretty extreme version of the right to choose an abortion. Clearly (at least I think it's clear) no civilized person believes that, say, a seven month old fetus ought to be killed absent a compelling medical reason. In other words, does the woman's right to reduce the very real medical risks you cite have no limits? What about at eight months?
My point is not to construct an absurdist argument: I'm well aware only a vanishingly small number of third trimester abortions are performed in the US -- and nearly all of these involve health crises for either the woman or child. My point is only that the legal framework of Roe allows for virtually no balancing of rights. What would be the harm in allowing the very widespread ethical concerns about abortion to have some manifestation in the law -- even (or maybe especially) if this manifestation doesn't substantively reduce the incidence of abortion? One could imagine a policy that, say, permits wide access to first trimester (or somewhat longer) abortion, but allows for a continuum of protections for the unborn at later stages of gestation. Perhaps federalism could be invoked to allow for the safety valve of regional standards. My guess is we'd see far less violence and extremism of the variety the country was subjected to this past weekend.
Roe was a heavy-handed decision. At this same interval after Brown (1991 or thereabouts) hardly any serious national political figures -- never mind millions and millions of ordinary citizens -- were calling for the decision's reversal. I think compelling reasons for the termination of pregnancies will always be with us. I'm not so sure -- even in this sunny afternoon of liberalism -- the same things can be said about Roe.
This has been interesting reading for me. Being raised by a mother who was forced to give birth as a young teen to her first child before RvW, I had little idea that RvW was considered heavy handed - for her it was a relief. I didn't know about my older half-sibling until I was a full adult. I do know that my mom was too rich to know where the back alley providers were and too poor to travel to where it was legal. A decade later she chose to have me and my brother then flatlined during his birth from a complication. She was revived and is still around and healthy (and annoying in the way well intentioned moms are :) but all three births forever changed her and not always in good ways.
.
Jasper asks: "What would be the harm in allowing the very widespread ethical concerns about abortion to have some manifestation in the law -- even (or maybe especially) if this manifestation doesn't substantively reduce the incidence of abortion? One could imagine a policy that, say, permits wide access to first trimester (or somewhat longer) abortion, but allows for a continuum of protections for the unborn at later stages of gestation."
.
First, I know of no woman who goes out to get pregnant for the joy of having an abortion, late term or otherwise. (But if there were, would we want her raising a child? sorry. off topic there. Just wanted to get that out of the way.) But my mom knew of the complication with my brother at 7 months. She chose to keep him at the risk of both their lives and they both made it - just barely. (Thanks again to the docs at Dartmouth in the early 70s who turned my brother from blue to pink.) But it was a legal option for her to not make that choice. The fact that it was a choice is the important part of the family legacy.
.
Second, check out Miranda's post below. Things come up later in pregnancy which are not predicted early. When late term abortions are highly restricted, it means training to do the procedures is highly restricted, as are safe venues and payment for services. What convinced me was a woman whose child died in utero at 7 months. She was a mother of 3. Letting the child abort naturally had a 15% risk of long term problems/death. Getting a removal procedure which is an abortion technique carried a 7% risk. Half the risk. And the longer she carried the dead child, the higher the chance of sepsis. She lived on the east coast where abortions were legal in the '90s. It took her a week to find a doctor who had _been trained_ to do the safest procedure and to find a hospital that would allow it. This woman walked around with a known dead child inside her for a week because of late-term abortion restrictions, even though they didn't apply to her. If this woman didn't have money, her chance of death and long term disability doubled. As a middle class woman, she had a notion of how to work within the system and it was still a horror at a time when she was repainting her nursery. Because there was so much stigma with the procedure that it could not easily be done in cases where there was no longer any moral question. The risk? That women will be disabled or die and their other children will be left motherless. Because we find the procedure distasteful.
.
Third. So even if it's not just the procedure which is distasteful, but the result... check out the accounts posted by Andrew Sullivan of people who have made this choice. Late term abortions are generally the least bad of awful choices, not something that people are seeking out. They're late term because the mother wants the baby until they find out that they're dooming a kid to a life of misery, or spending time gestating a child that will not live in any eventuality - something which does not become evident until later in the pregnancy. To force women to carry severely defective children to the point of stillbirth is a waste of resources at minimum and cruel at worst. Fatally deformed fetuses living to late term may be rare, but they exist and we need safe ways to deal with them.
.
I'm not trying to argue that individual stories are data. But in all cases of abortion, there is the individual story of the woman whose body, life, and even just lifestyle is at risk. Childbirth is natural, it is not easy. The opposite of having an abortion is not going about your life as normal, it is 9 months of gestation and the bearing of a child and almost always the legal responsibility to then care for it. Women have abortions because they don't want to or cannot bear a child or raise the child afterward. Some women are kind enough to give children up for adoption, but they do so at cost to self. The fact that childbirth is common and necessary does not mean that there is no cost to it.
.
Going even further when I know I shouldn't. To say "well, just give birth when the baby is viable instead of aborting" means someone has to pay for it. A colleague of mine incurred a $5 million dollar charge for his premature, 2 pound, desperately wanted infant. Who pays when it's not a wanted infant or the mom doesn't have health insurance? At what cost is it "ok" to start making women go just another few days when she wants no part of it? At what cost do we just let the baby die?
.
As to being heavy handed, think about the fact that all main (non-religious) health insurance companies only started providing birth control to women after it was pointed out that they ALL covered viagra, and then talk to me about fair fights.
---
achk! and I go on. I actually agree with Megan that there are times when people with no power and no voice use terrorism to gain a voice. I don't like it, but I understand that sometimes we're terrible to each other and people see that as their best option. In this case, I see women's rights being eroded daily - every time I turn around RvW is being eroded, so to argue that it means all abortions are allowed all the time is provably not true. People are working to tweak it all the time, much to my horror on this issue. I do not think the system is failing for the anti-abortionists in this case - a system exists for this to be addresses as several others have clearly pointed out. I think the right wing has decided that their method of dealing with things when they don't have the majority vote in congress is to engage in the very rhetoric they complain bitterly about when it's turned on them, knowing absolutely that saying "WE SHOULD not KILL THESE PEOPLE" will be heard without the not by enough people that someone will take action. I think the culpability lies with those shouting fire in the theater they packed to capacity in addition to the someone who decided that murder was the way to get his murder-is-bad message to the masses.
I preview and preview and still, the instant I hit submit, I realize I haven't made my point.
.
The woman with the dead fetus? She was told that if the procedure hadn't been restricted by the legislature, it would still be taught to doctors. As it was, it was removed from the curriculum and most doctors weren't even given book learning on it, let alone actually performed one. And had it been any other procedure necessary, she would have had it within 24 hours - heart attack, stroke, blood clot, these could all be treated immediately - but removal of an already dead baby would require the legal department to review the matter because of late trimester anti-abortion laws. So we didn't just lose Tiller's life. We lost his knowledge of how to keep women alive and safe at one of the worst times of their lives. And I find that the least forgivable thing.
.
I do not know how to reconcile my need/right to be secure in my person from those who insist that I do not have this right on the chance I wind up pregnant. I can only say, and mean, that if you don't approve of abortion, don't have one. Just like I can't force you to donate a kidney to your brother, you don't get to approve or disprove of mine decision to donate my body to a child or not.
I would argue that while Roe may be very unilateral ("You must allow abortion. Period."), if we start allowing limitations, it gets shaved away to nothing. "Not after six months" for example, is a problem for me because a common tactic of anti-abortion politicians is to regulate abortion providers out of existence. Women in very red states must literally travel for hours and THEN stay overnight for a 'Waiting period' at the only provider available. If you don't have resources, or find out about the pregnancy late (not every women starts throwing up after a couple of months), six months can fly by quickly.
You are missing the point. Her post isn't about abortion per se it's about how one views about abortion could coherently justify murder (in one's own mind).
If a person viewed abortion as murder and witnessed some person committing murder hundreds and thousands of times with the government sitting idly by - wouldn't the person be obligated to take that person out?
Its a classic moral dilemma - is it OK to murder someone if it saves the lives of thousands of people?
The exercise isn't meant to even speak about abortion, but to understand the rationale of the individual in question - whether you agree with it or not.
I don't believe I'm missing the point. If all murder is wrong, then it's also wrong to murder murderers. If only *some* murder is wrong, and you just happen to think that a legal abortion is wrong, you have, and ought to have, a right to make your claim. And people will disagree on what is justifiable. You do NOT have the right to have everyone believe you or agree with you on your definition of justifiable. So you go shoot them? No.
Not a single court in the country has ever ruled that someone must be compelled to donate anything from their body (kidneys, bone marrow, blood, skin), ever, even to save the life of someone who would die without the donation, so why the same rules don't apply to donating the use of and materials from your body I don't get.
Arguably, once the pregnancy occurs, the woman has already donated the use of materials from her body to the fetus. I'm not aware of any law that allows someone to take back a kidney if they change their mind post-op.
"Arguably, once the pregnancy occurs, the woman has already donated the use of materials from her body to the fetus."
.
Not true. The fetus has claimed space and resources that it may or may not have consent to use. Even all but the most pro-fetus pro-lifers agree that a 12 year old girl raped by her stepfather (who has to then learn how to navigate the judicial system within 12 weeks -or rather the few weeks she knows for sure she's preganant- in order to avoid getting a consent form signed by said rapist for the abortion lest she be beaten into miscarrying...) should not be forced to carry a child to term because she didn't consent to sex.
.
My point is
Consent to sex is not consent to pregnancy. Some people don't agree with that statement, but it's an extremely important distinction. Sex lasts minutes or hours. If you say no, someone else can presumably fill the void. Pregnancy lasts 9 months, and no one else can step in to fill the void. Children last the rest of your life, barring catastrophe, and someone can but is not compelled to step in and fill that void. It is also the case that men can consent to all the sex they ever want and never be compelled to live with the consequent children - women cannot escape the consequent children except thru abortion or adoption.
.
Consent to donate the kidney is given before the donation. Consent to pregnancy may happen after conception.
It seems that broad swatches of the pro-life crowd seem not to genuinely understand that they've got to be consistent. So you get moronic comments like, 'the fetus really, really, really is person', or 'killing is immoral'.
You believe that a fetus is a person? Then act like it. Stop the posturing and the inconsistency.
How about clearly stating and justifying your own opinions for a change? It's cowardly to criticize the arguments of others without offering an alternative.
Wow, a SoV post I can actually mostly agree with. Problem being, of course, that if they acted like they meant it there'd be a lot more dead abortionists, but aside from that I'll certainly agree that both sides spout vapid nonsense on a regular basis.
I fail to see where the political process has failed. Stick with me for a second. The tried and true response by reasonable folks sympathetic to the Roe minority has always been that Roe going the other way would have left a patchwork of states with different laws. Federalism in action.
Sound familiar? Sounds like, um, slavery in 1860 where different states get to make their own choices about personhood. If this really is about personhood, I don't see how Roe's coinflip coming out the other way wouldn't still be inspiring people who feel fervently about personhood to take rash actions to protect the unborn in California or New York, or in the number of other states which would still be allowing abortions in any event.
No, what you really mean is that these people feel powerless in light of their inability to pass a human life Amendment to the Constitution. That's not a process failure, it's a process working but one side losing. Blaming any part of this on Roe short-circuiting politics is just constitutionally flawed reasoning. Unless you are arguing this small minority of people who accept violence as a valid method of forcing social change would be satisfied with a small minority of states which respected their views.
jcsnotes: I think the easy way to test your idea would be to investigate what the situation was prior to the 1973 decision. Was there the same level of vituperative debate in 1972? Did the issue engage the same level of passions? Was there more or less violence? Were doctors being murdered? I frankly have no idea. Well, scratch that -- my guess would be that the abortion issue held a less prominent place in national politics in those days, and was a far less potent fundraising tool for either left or right, and mostly didn't inspire domestic terrorists to the same degree as in our current era. But admittedly that's only a guess, and I've never looked into it.
Actually, I'm not sure we had the same sort of vituperative debate in 1974 or 1975. Something happened during the latter part of the 1980's and I'm not sure what. It's actually a very good question.
I think that the reasonableness of this post becomes a lot less convincing when you ask yourself: "Okay, what if we actually got rid of the political roadblocks that anti-abortion folks face? What if we actually subjected the question to the democratic process?"
My sense is that, if the American people seriously engaged on the matter, the outcome would be very, very different from the one the anti-abortion camp desires. After all, the position most in line with belief in fetal personhood - banning all abortion except possibly in cases of risk to the mother's life - is the least popular with the American people.
So, there's good reason to believe that, when the political process had freely worked itself out, pro-lifers would be faced with a nation still committing, in their view, mass murder. Unless we decided to give democracy up on the issue and adopt a political system in which they got exactly what they want, the situation would very likely remain just as objectionable to them as before.
And are we really supposed to believe that, in those circumstances, they'd stop shooting people?
My sense is that, if the American people seriously engaged on the matter, the outcome would be very, very different from the one the anti-abortion camp desires. After all, the position most in line with belief in fetal personhood - banning all abortion except possibly in cases of risk to the mother's life - is the least popular with the American people.
It is only marginally less popular than the post-Roe "no restrictions at all" status quo, though. The majority American position is that abortion should be restricted to cases of rape, incest, or genuine medical necessity (i.e., saving the mother's life). Only a small fraction of abortions are performed for any of those reasons.
This is nonsensical. I don't mean to pick you out, the same could be said of most of the other comments here against putting this question before the people and letting them decide.
Your argument seems to boil down to that you're reasonably sure the pro-choice people would win a vote on this (a national referendum or just in NY/Cali?), but we shouldn't do it because some people might not like the outcome and a small fringe of them might engage in violence? Do I have that right? Do you realize, if one extended this argument, to, say, just about anything, you get absurd results?
Do we blame the anti-war movement for today's shooting of a soldier at an Arkansas Army recruiting station? The killer was one of them, after all, and he targeted his victim based on his anti-war ideology. Do we then bypass the democratic process on issues of war and peace? Unless we decide to give democracy up on the issue and adopt a political system in which the anti-war people got exactly what they want, the situation would very likely remain just as objectionable to them as before.
And are we really supposed to believe that, in those circumstances, they'd stop shooting people?
No, actually, that's not my argument at all.
My point, rather, was simply that Megan's thesis doesn't provide a good argument for subjecting the abortion issue to the democratic process. There may be a good argument for doing so, but hers isn't it.
Her argument, as I read it, runs like this:
1) Belief in fetal personhood is, in some sense, reasonable.
2) Such belief implies that abortion is morally abhorrent.
3) But structural features of the present, American political scene make it nigh-impossible for abortion to be restricted, driving some pro-life extremists to violence.
4) Because reasonable, moral beliefs shouldn't drive anyone to violence, the aforementioned structural features should be relaxed and abortion policy should be subject to the democratic process.
Assume that all four points are true. My argument, then, is:
1) One can be almost certain that, if abortion rights were subjected to the democratic process, at least some states would maintain legalized abortion in some form broader than would be acceptable to someone with a belief in fetal personhood.
2) Therefore, parts of the country would still be engaging in actions that the pro-lifers in question in Megan's argument would find morally abhorrent.
3) Unless we assume without grounds that they would be able to affect a seismic shift in voters' opinions on the issue in many areas, they would have virtually no hope of politically changing this situation. This is the same condition that led some to resort to violence in Megan's argument.
4) Ergo, it is reasonable to assume that some would continue to resort to violence on the basis of the same belief in fetal personhood.
But, in that case, the very thing that we sought to get rid of by subjecting abortion rights to the democratic process - violence motivated by reasonable, moral beliefs and driven by political impotence - is still present even after we've done so. If Megan's argument were correct and such violence were a good reason to reject a state of political affairs, we ought to reject democracy as well and substitute some alternative system even more likely to give extreme pro-lifers their favored policy.
Which is to say that Megan's argument is a bad one, unless you're okay with scrapping democracy.
(By the way, I actually think that my point is just as applicable to your war protestor comparison. If someone were saying that such violence by anti-war folks was an indication that issues of war and peace should be more open to democratic pressure, my argument would be a perfectly good reason to reject that claim.)
N.Allen, there are two problems with your reasoning.
First, if abortion was left to the democratic process it would not be a binary choice of banning it v. having no regulations at all. In reality, the democratic process would almost certainly ban 2nd and 3rd trimester abortions unless the life of the mother was at grave risk and would most likely keep 1st trimester abortions essentially unregulated. A big chunk of the pro-life side would be perfectly content with this and the rest would be a lot less unhappy than they are now.
Second, even if, just as a thought experiment, we posited an up/down vote like that--this would calm the pro-life side even if they lost. Here is why. Reaching 50% someday is reasonable. As it is now, not one iota of change can happen unless conservatives own the Senate and Presidency for a couple of decades without interruption, or more fancifully, muster the super-majorities to amend the constitution.
One has to consider, though, that there's a huge gap between that "big chunk of the pro-life side" and the folks we're talking about here. The people at issue in the original post - people so strongly devoted to the idea of fetal personhood that some are willing to resort to violence - aren't in the mainstream of the pro-life movement.
Assuming that they would be pacified by piecemeal regulations or by restrictions on 2nd and 3rd trimester abortions alone is refusing to take their moral views seriously. Why should they care how late into the game the fetus is being killed, if it's a person? It's very hard to imagine that there have been any anti-abortion terrorists who would sit down and tell you that they only shot so-and-so because he killed babies in the THIRD trimester.
The point of the original post seems to have been that there are people whose earnest, moral reasoning is driving them to violence because the political process stifles their hopes of success. My point is that, if we really believe they're that earnest, it's difficult to imagine a democratically legitimate process that wouldn't.
Obviously, the hopes and goals of the mainstream pro-life movement are quite different - but, since that mainstream isn't violent, Megan's argument doesn't apply to it to start with.
It's very hard to imagine that there have been any anti-abortion terrorists who would sit down and tell you that they only shot so-and-so because he killed babies in the THIRD trimester.
On the other hand, it's perfectly reasonable to conclude that going out an committing murder is not usually a purely rational decision but an emotionally-motivated one, that late-term abortions have much greater emotional impact than first, and that banning killing of fetuses after the point of extrauterine viability could well cool the passions on the fringe.
Indeed, the specific outrage directed at Tiller and the fact that he specifically was murdered constitutes evidence that late-term abortion is emotionally more likely to provoke a reaction than early-term abortion.
People tend to deal at least somewhat better with a democratic loss rather than to a judicial loss. Ruling a popularly held position out of order for the entire political process is a sure way to provoke bitterness among people who hold to that position. That doesn't make it wrong, but it is one of the unintended consequences.
If the law had been handled by the political process, Tiller either would not have been performing abortions past the 21st week of gestation, or he'd have been put in prison long ago for doing so.
Hell, if the law were constituted under Roe v. Wade, without the extremely broad "health exception" of Doe v. Balton, the same would be true.
Just because the political process failed doesn't mean that a set of circumstances could be constructed so that it would succeed.
The pro-slavery folks undertook violent actions for a century, in large part because the political process failed. It took a large majority of society to marginalize such efforts (e.g. see Superman & the KKK) to really put a drastic end to it.
Now, anti-abortion violence isn't nearly as prevalent as that type of racism so maybe murder is anathema enough that it doesn't really matter.
Same thing with 'terrorists' of another stripe. Al Qaeda and 911? They had legitimate beefs that weren't being addressed by the system. Need I go any further with the idiocy of this sort of argument?
Who ever claimed that these beliefs, and more importantly the violent acts based on them, were legitimate?
Is there something inherently wrong with attempting to gain an understanding of what motivates people? And how murder, in this specific case, in internally consistent with being pro-life?
From the other side, consider the Very Bad Decision made by the Supremes back in 2000. Note that in fact Gore received more legal votes than Bush in Florida, and the fact that there were no 'terrorists' out on the streets seeking redress in the only way left open to them and the restraint of 'liberals' and Democrats, heck, anybody who voted for Gore is doubly impressive.
Would anyone be surprised to find that the people who are fanatically 'pro-life' were also the ones telling Gore supporters to 'get over it'? This has been yet another complete demolishing of an argument by special pleading.
Would anyone be surprised to find that the people who are fanatically 'pro-life' were also the ones telling Gore supporters to 'get over it'? This has been yet another complete demolishing of an argument by special pleading.
This is a valid point. I think Megan is extremely naive to think that "a valid political process" makes the losers feel much more inclined to just give in and focus their efforts on reform through said process. A little more inclined, perhaps, but certainly not "much more"; extremists don't really respect the rule of law when it runs contrary to their heart-felt beliefs.
Well the difference there was that Al Gore, or at least another Democrat, could run for the presidency again in 4 years time. So an Al Gore supporter could simultaneously be furious and also confidently await a coming election where their beliefs would triumph.
Yes, it was Roe v. Wade that ultimately led to this.
I was explaining to my kids why there was so much violence in Iraq and Palestine, and why politics in the Middle East and the Third World are so violent. Obviously, there are a lot of reasons, but one that I kept coming back to was the invalid nature of the political process.
I know a professor of criminal law who studies this kind of thing a lot, who tells me that a stable society is one where everyone has (by whatever method) bought into a way of losing. When there's a conflict between two groups, one is going to win and one will lose. In the USA, we have accepted the idea that if you put it up for a vote, you have to go along with the results. It's why we (generally) don't plant bombs and kill people when we lose a political fight: hey, we put it up for a vote, and you lost. That's how it goes. People accept this.
But if you take a highly contentious issue like abortion, and arbitrarily impose an answer, people are bound to get upset - it goes completely against what we've been taught is right.
When you see law after law, passed by democratic process, struck down due to a very arbitrary ruling from, in P.J. O'Rouke's classic phrase, Nine Old Farts in Black Mumus, you can easily start to believe that you've been cheated. I sincerely believe that if Roe v. Wade had never been decided, abortion today would still be legal almost everywhere in the US, and the anti-abortion movement wouldn't be a fanatical as they are today. Sure, it's easier to just impose the right answer (and I do agree with the result of Roe), but you will pay the price for the abuse of process. Not legal process, but cultural process. Anthropologists agree that breaking the written laws in a culture will get you in trouble, but breaking the unwritten laws will get you killed. You're now seeing the result of decades of pure frustration of people denied any valid outlet for their political efforts. The fact that I disagree with them doesn't make their frustration any less real or understandable.
It would have been far more effective to let the issue of abortion play out democratically. Would have taken longer, but the results would be far more likely to stick.
Remember that the legality of abortion in Italy is determined by a popular vote. When put up for a vote, it always wins by about a 2/3 majority. And they're ALL Catholic.
Megan, I understand your reasoning, but compare the actions of this individual to the nonviolent struggles waged by Martin Luther King, Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. The influence of these individuals over the political process was more limited than the influence of pro-life movement today. We do, after all, elect pro-life politicians. Nevertheless, their non-violent movements achieved their political goals because the American, British and South African systems, systems that institutionalized racism, were not irredeemably evil. At the very least, they had either a sense of shame or a capacity to change. It is difficult to imagine a Gandhi emerging in Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, systems so illegitimate, so irredeemably broken, that the only way to remedy injustice was through the use of force and the abolition of the government.
So the question is, is the United States today, however imperfect, more like the America that allowed the civil rights movement or like the Soviet Union of 1956? Most pro-lifers want an end to abortion, but not at the cost of our system of government.
As I say, I'm not legitimizing the *tactic*. I also think that if the Palestinians had a Gandhi, they would both be morally superior, and already have a state. But the fact that I abhor Palestinian terrorism doesn't mean that, say, our natural response should be to build more settlements.
I agree with you on both points, and vehemently disagree with folks like Ezra Klein. I was just making the point that, given our political context, I have much less "understanding" of how their moral logic leads them to kill. I don't mean to imply that you think the tactic legitimate.
Great post, Megan. Nicely reasoned.
You mean contentious issues like presidential elections, and Bush vs Gore? That kind of arbitrary imposition? The one a lot of us were told to 'get over' eight years ago?
I'd also note that Roe vs Wade was a compromise . . . but one side wasn't having any.
You mean contentious issues like presidential elections, and Bush vs Gore? That kind of arbitrary imposition? The one a lot of us were told to 'get over' eight years ago?
Even if it were true that Bush vs. Gore was wrongly decided, the worst you could say about that is that democracy was thwarted for four years. Bush won '04 handily, and of course Gore won in '08.
If Roe vs. Wade had banned democratic decision-making from the abortion issue for a mere four years instead of thirty-five, we wouldn't be having to argue about it every darn election.
That should be "of course Obama won in '08". :)
Actually, not to get too off topic, but Bush v. Gore was, in my opinion and the opinion of a lot of people I know (most of them lefty) simply an admission of what was bound to happen eventually. There is no way that the election would have been settled by the time the Electoral College met (look at Coleman vs Franken, still in the air), which means that it would have either been thrown to the Florida legislature (Republican) or the House of Representatives (Republican) and, voila, Dubya's in office.
A very lefty law professor I know describes it thusly: "The Florida Supreme Court tried to steal the election for Gore, and the US Supreme Court wouldn't let them."
Look, I voted for Gore, I know how you feel. BUT, this wasn't anywhere near the same thing as Roe v. Wade. Mathematically, the 2000 election was a tie, people were willing to accept that something screwy was going to have to be done to fix it.
Roe v. Wade invented a new constitutional right out of thin air, or rather "penumbras". It's the most lamely reasoned opinion I've ever seen come out of the USSC. Sure, it settled a contentious issue, but my argument is that the process can be far more important than the content. It's important that a political decision be accepted by the losers as legitimate. Not everyone accepts the result of Bush v. Gore, but hey, they got another shot four years later. And you can campaign for Representatives and Senators to keep the President in check. There are things you can do that have an effect.
If you don't accept Roe v. Wade, you are effectively (as Megan points out) shit out of luck, forever. People don't like that, and I believe they shouldn't.
Of course, Bush's win would have been more acceptable if the court had simply referred the matter to the House. To this day, I still don't know why they didn't do this- it certainly wasn't a question of getting the desired outcome.
Probably because such issues are supposed to be decided in at least a nominally non-partisan way. Of course, the American political system is astonishingly bad at being non-partisan(cf. gerrymandering, to name one of many), but still.
Under what scenario does Gore win? The Miami Herald & USA Today completed the recount and Bush won all but the most generous of conditions.
If late term abortions were done on healthy viable fetuses, your personhood argument might make some sense. The people who want to restrict women’s rights would have you believe there are some women who go through many months of a pregnancy and then decide they want out. Those women find doctors who say “Sure, no problem. I can fix that,” and perform an abortion. It’s a straw man argument.
Dr. Tiller’s clinic had strict admission criteria. His patients were in dire situations coming to difficult, heart-wrenching conclusions. I have know idea what I would do under those circumstances and guess neither do you. But I surely do know that I would want to be able to make that horrendous decision myself and not have a law or lack of provider force me into an outcome someone else thought best.
His strict admission criteria might not have been quite so strict. The "mental health of the mother" was wide open. He never reported his underage patients (some reportedly as young as 9) to law enforcement as victims of rape, statutory or other wise.
Yes, many of his patients were in dire situations. But the dirty little secret of late term abortion is that some women changed their minds, or got a divorce, or just figured things out late. It's not all sad yuppies with babies with spinal bifida.
You need evidence for this claim. The only charges brought against Dr Tiller was that he had paid consulting fees to another Physician for a second opinion.
Secret indeed if these women can't be found, there is no evidence, and there is no accusation from anywhere but the OR folks.
That's not true. For example, around 2/3rds of his abortions in 2007 were of viable, healthy babies.
Source? Come on, you can't just say something like that.
So is the argument morphing yet again? Where before it was just 'an arbitrary imposition' that was the show-stopper, now it's okay, as long as it only lasts four years? That seems awfully arbitrary; in fact, if I didn't know better, I'd think you made it up on the spot ;-)
Your 'only four years' is wrong, of course; we're still dealing with the fallout of 'electing' that incredibly incompetent man, and will probably still be doing so decades from now(no 9/11 for starters, and even granting for the sake of argument 9/11, no idiotic war costing trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives. That's just the cost of one of his screwups.)
So is the argument morphing yet again? Where before it was just 'an arbitrary imposition' that was the show-stopper, now it's okay, as long as it only lasts four years?
I said nothing of the kind, of course. But it should be obvious that if a four-year arbitrary imposition is bad, a thirty-five year arbitrary imposition is worse. Moreover, while we do not own a time machine and cannot undo Bush vs. Gore, we could end Roe tomorrow.
You are welcome to argue that two wrongs make a right, and that the existence of Bush vs. Gore cancels out the existence of Roe vs. Wade. But that's pretty childish reasoning, in my humble opinion.
Are you seriously arguing that 9/11 happened because Bush was elected? You're aware that they had been planning it since Clinton's first term, right?
I think you're largely missing the point. From a crackdown standpoint, I think it's better to regard it as trying to stop tension from escalating to this point in the first place. As someone who used to be very pro-life, I went to a clinic protest once, and it was deeply disturbing. There were people shouting all kinds of insults at the people going into the clinic (even though abortion was hardly the only thing the clinic serviced, and given that it wasn't a very big town, I wouldn't be surprised if none of those people were having abortions), there were signs and shouting about how all of these people were going to hell, God was going to extract his "vengeance," etc. And, ultimately, there was nothing political about it. No one talked about Roe or state level restrictions on obtaining abortion services, none of the signs advocated overturning Roe, it was all about harrassment and intimidation.
And when you read stories about how this escalates, how it goes from harrassing patients and employees at the the clinic, to following employees home and harrassing them in their neighborhoods, to threatening to harass local businesses that service them, tospreading their personal information on the internet, where it's easily accessible to people like Roeper, then it's only a matter of time before it escalates to overt, extreme, violence.
You mean because that one particular group of rascals - the same one the Coleman's affiliated with actually - were using every legal stratagem they could think of (don't forget Bush is the one who went to the courts to block a recount.)
No, actually you don't. For me, it's not about the politics. They screwed with the numbers.
See, here's the irony: if they had gone with the four-county recount that Gore proposed, Bush would have won. The only reason we know that Gore actually received more legal votes is because this sparked off the NORC tabulation. And needless to say, I disagree with your interpretation of what would have happened.
More lamely reasoned than Bush vs Gore? I don't think anyone but the stone partisans are buying that one.
And this is simply not true. There are legal mechanisms in place, and they have been used before, for example, a woman's right to vote, Prohibition (and it's appeal!) When you start using weasel words like 'effectively' in this context, it usually means "I don't have enough votes to get what I want". Hardly the same thing. In any event this new-found time-limit argument certainly didn't exist until a few minutes ago. Certainly that's not what was happening eight years ago when a certain large group was told to just 'get over it'.
I think you can quite easily make a credible moral/utilitarian argument for killing abortion doctors if you really, really hate abortion. The only defense against the power of the argument is to make sure that killing abortion doctors (or flying planes into buildings, or blowing up the Prime Minister of India) doesn't accomplish anything besides the elimination of the proximate target(s) of the attack. Eventually (and pretty quickly) you'll get down to the very hard core of terrorists who believe in terrorism purely as punishment, without any hope of bringing about wider change, but that's going to be a small group indeed.
Excellent post Megan.
I think you're missing one reason why liberals might be reacting the way they are, either to the murder yesterday or to your posts. For many liberals, it's so utterly absurd to believe that a fetus is a person that they can never get to the point of empathizing with someone who believes otherwise (oh yes, I brought out the e-word). For such liberals, believing that a fetus is a person can only be the product of crazy, religious, fundamentalist beliefs that are akin to denying evolution or global warming. So your entire premise is flawed to begin with, not because the act of killing in the name of your beliefs (to protect human life) is wrong if done outside of the law, but because believing that a fetus is a human life in the first place is ridiculous.
Now, you might respond that people living in 1840 Alabama would think the same of people who think African Americans were people, i.e., believing African Americans are people is simply absurd. To which liberals would either respond no, the person living in 1840 Alabama who denied the personhood of an African American was the one akin to believing a fetus is a person, or believing in creationism, or believing that global warming is a fraud. And then our liberal friends wouldn't go any further and would never possibily consider that you have a point. Perhaps it would do some good if they read Abraham Lincoln (who conceded that if he were a southernor and raised in southern culture and beliefs, he probably would've been pro-slavery).
At the end of the day, there's one simple way to look at this debate, as you alluded to (sort of): those who can empathize with abortion doctor killers think it's quack to empathize with Palestinian terrorists, and those who can empathize with Palestinian terrorists think it's quack to empathize with abortion doctor killers. I.e., it's more about the close-minded, single-minded, narrow-minded nature of the human mind than about logic or reasoning.
Janice:
I'm an atheist. And I believe a fetus is a person. And I don't know exactly where the line is drawn, but I think that line drawing should be based on science.
A big part of the problem here (again) is group-think. Many "liberals" I know (and love) are reflexively pro-choice, because that's what "liberals" are supposed to believe. And many "conservatives" are pro-life for identical reasons, or for equally ill-considered reasons (Bible), as you point out.
My instinct is that if you think believing a fetus is a human life is "ridiculous," you are not very well-acquainted with the science, and you certainly haven't had kids, been to an ultrasound, etc.
Uh-huh. Well, yes, that's exactly what you said. Further, you are misinterpreting me. I'm pointing out that the crowd who are up in arms about Roe vs. Wade have a huge intersection with the crowd who said 'get over it' wrt Bush vs Gore. Which kind of undercuts the argument that they are upset with the process; clearly, it was the decision that had them up in arms. Otherwise, they would have been protesting Bush vs Gore as 'improper' as well. Somehow, I missed all the hullaballoo around that one.
Your last sentence doesn't seem to have any logical connection to anything that I can see.
"I'm pointing out that the crowd who are up in arms about Roe vs. Wade have a huge intersection with the crowd who said 'get over it' wrt Bush vs Gore. Which kind of undercuts the argument that they are upset with the process; clearly, it was the decision that had them up in arms."
Actually, Scent, it does nothing at all to undercut the argument about process because your observation is just an ad hominem--an attack on credibility.
Does a human fetus have any right to life? Should we even care?
If the mother's life is NOT in danger, does a fetus have a right to live? One way we can know is to ask people that were once fetuses if they want to live and if they were glad that they were not aborted.
Which is - again - a total crock. Many 'liberals' do think that the fetus is a person and/or they would not get an abortion in the case of an unexpected pregnancy.
They just think that they shouldn't impose their personal beliefs on others. That's why they call themselves 'Pro-Choice'.
Me? Unless you believe that a woman who has an abortion should go to jail for a good long stretch, say, eight to ten, then I don't buy your personhood feelings for the fetus. In fact, I am repulsed and sickened by them. The lack of consistency on such a serious matter can be described as nothing short of pathological.
They just think that they shouldn't impose their personal beliefs on others. That's why they call themselves 'Pro-Choice'.
This is a pathetic argument. Let's say I enjoy raping and mutilating animals; if you object to my behavior, you are "[imposing your] personal beliefs on others".
That is the equivalent of saying that abortion is a victimless crime.
Derek
If you believe abortion is murder, then allowing it to happen isn't being pro-choice, it's complicity in an atrocity. I have nothing but contempt for the politicians who claim to be pro-life in terms of personal belief and pro-choice in terms of politics - there is no sane set of opinions that can lead to that conclusion.
"The lack of consistency on such a serious matter can be described as nothing short of pathological."
You're kind of like a cartoon character. Why so angry? You've posted six or seven times picking fights with people who fundamentally agree with you.
And, just to be clear:
You think its "consistent" to hold the following views:
1. A fetus is a person.
2. Others believe a fetus is not a person.
2. The law should permit killing a fetus, because others might believe that a fetus is not a person.
Are you a moral relativist?
Here - Here. I agree whole heartedly with the notion that Tiller's murder more than likely was acting righteously. I say this as someone who is not only pro-choice but pro-abortion. I tend to think there are far too many people bringing babies to turn who have no business doing so.
While I recognize that a fetus is alive, I don't really think of it as having personhood. I don't think of infants as having personhood either though. Infanticide does bother me on a gut level though I can appreciate why it should probably be discouraged. The best I can tell personhood seems to arrive sometime around 6 - 12 months after birth.
Before that you really just have a particular genetic combination. A person needs to have a distinct personality that goes beyond simple genetics. Perhaps, someone can show me identical twins of less than 6 months who have distinct personalities and I will change my mind.
However, beyond that the obsession with life seems misguided to me. Not least because life is inherently fleeting. If someone doesn't understand that they are about to die, is unafraid of it, feels no pain, has no dreams or aspirations left unfulfilled and leaves behind no distraught loved ones then I am not really sure what the harm is in killing them.
They are not going to mind now that they are dead and this is the state they will occupy for the vast, vast, vast majority of time anyway. Its the fulfillment of hopes and dreams that we want to promote. Its needless pain, fear and suffering that we want to avoid. Not death. Death is inevitable.
I should really edit better. Infanticide DOESN'T bother me on a gut level I mean to say. There are many other typos but that one is most likely to confuse.
Megan writes that "To change the outcome, a pro-life political coalition would have to gain a supermajority in Congress for twenty years--long enough for a few liberal justices to die in office."
It seems to me that a supermajority in Congress, the executive and most state houses could accomplish a reversal of Roe very quickly, by Constitutional amendment. It's unlikely to happen, but not because, as in antebellum South, a substantial had an economic stake in the status quo, but because either a majority, or a significant minority (depending on what poll you believe), doesn't want to see a dramatic change in the law.
Even if Roe hadn't happened, abortion would likely be legal in the Northeast, the West coast and to varying degrees in the Midwest. Assuming those state laws were firmly in place, wouldn't that cause anger and frustration among those who share of the passions of the murderer of Dr. Tiller?
To SOV: Whatever. If you are this much in need of an argument, why don't you go over to PowerLine? Besides, we're not allowed to argue here unless you've paid....
Megan, thank you for bringing this up in an actually rational fashion. It's good to read your stuff on this and the great comments.
I don't think there's anything to get really angry about. If I thought that fetuses were plausibly the moral equivalent of their adult human mothers, then we'd be in a really tough position where it wasn't obvious if there was any reason to respect the rule of law or the state's monopoly on violence. Similarly, we would probably have to accept that vegan hardliners aren't crazy to be shooting people who eat meat (murder) or dairy (rape). Basically, when we start getting into ideologically-driven definitional extremes, the fabric of social peace gets torn asunder. Ultrasounds and animal ethology in combination with Enlightenment-era ideas about rights have both resulted in a lot of equivalency arguments, as if traditional moral agreements could be indefinitely extended through some simple modular logic. Intuition tends to be too strong, however, and I really don't think that antebellum Southern people could easily maintain the feeling that Africans were not people. In fact, they literally equated black slaves and animals comparatively rarely in pro-slavery rhetoric, primarily in response to the dire necessity of preserving their moral self-image and entrenched aristocratic delineations. Just because the very extreme positions into which a few people have argued themselves are logically-tenable does not mean that we should afford those positions any intellectual or moral respect. And, traditionally, we don't. Despite that almost every offered exegesis of our revulsion at this murder is weak in some respect or other - only what we should expect given that most of us engage in first-principles moral and epistemological argument every February 29th or so - I think most people sense that these people could have no good excuse for their crazy actions.
PeterM wrote:
Even if Roe hadn't happened, abortion would likely be legal in the Northeast, the West coast and to varying degrees in the Midwest. Assuming those state laws were firmly in place, wouldn't that cause anger and frustration among those who share of the passions of the murderer of Dr. Tiller?
I would say generally not, because they would have somewhere to direct their energies: namely, the democratic process. Campaign for people who support you. Push for laws to be passed in your favor. Raise money for political activism. Get initiatives on the ballot. After Roe v. Wade, you could do this for years, and even win, only to have a judge throw out your victory every single time. Democratic action became futile on this issue after Roe. That's the source of the frustration. It didn't do any good to campaign, so why bother? If you take democracy away from us, we'll find another way....
I don't agree with any of this, but I easily feel where they're coming from. To continue SOV's complaint, let's say the USSC somehow put the GOP in power indefinitely, so that you would have to amend the Constitution to get the Democrats in power (I don't know how they could do this, it's a thought experiment. Assume it happened). How long before people like SOV, but more fanatical, start muttering cleaning their guns?
Again, I'm missing why the Democratic process is futile here. Folks could be pushing these same initiatives in states. Get 3/4ths of the states to agree and you can exclude Congress entirely from the Amendment process. No judge can throw out a proposed Constitutional Amendment.
I'm not arguing that this is easy, I'm simply arguing that anyone who argues that the democratic process is closed off to them simply is ignoring Article V of the Constitution. It's very available. I'll concede that Roe might have made it harder than simply being able to pass laws by majority vote in the states but if the issue is truly personhood, I am convinced that a Constitutional Amendment would inevitably be the only way to go in states which make up a significant proportion of the population. As it was with slavery.
Okay, right, but that was also true of slavery, except that the American federal structure made it impossible to outlaw slavery until we'd violently subjugated many states and denied them the vote. Should we just have waited quietly until that happy day when we could do it with the full cooperation of the Southern states?
By the time you need a constitutional amendment, you don't have access to the normal political process.
The "normal" political process crafted two major compromises on slavery twice after the signing of Constitution. Both times the politicans thought they had successfully addressed the problem and heading off war. They were fine with a nation that saw blacks as people in New York and property in Alabama. Absolutists on both sides kept pushing the debate to the margins.
I think PeterM is right about what abortion laws would look like in the absence of Roe. But do you really think people who see abortion as murder would be OK with abortion being legal in New York? And do you think the pro-choice sides would accept what they see as an abridgment of a civil right in Alabama?
No, although the elimination of slavery was the beneficial effect of the Civil War, not the goal of it. Lincoln would have been more than happy to tolerate slavery in the Southern states in 1860.
Put another way, the abolitionists didn't start the Civil War, they simply prospered as a result of it. This is why I don't like the analogy of abolitionists to the folks we are discussing here.
It would seem that the reason it came to a war in 1960 was because the South could see that matters were going against them. Since it looked more and more certain that the anti-slavery side would eventually win through containment, they seceded.
@nato - again, the point is that the abolitionists actually did wait. Which is why the analogy fails. As it does with civil rights and pretty much every other social change movement.
It's interesting, there's a great book which came out 10 or so years ago (wish I could be home with my library, I'd find the author/title) about John Quincy Adams' post-Presidential career in Congress. People forget that it was the South which held the advantage in the House in the post-Jeffersonian era and given the Rules of the House at the time, it was against the rules to even discuss a bill to outlaw slavery in federally-controlled territory. That's right, there was a gag rule on the topic of slavery in the U.S. House of Representatives. Any speech on the subject could be immediately ruled out of order. The book is all about Adams' efforts to overturn the ban, fascinating stuff. So, again, those people analogizing it to slavery have the cops and robbers mixed up. It was the pro-slavery factions who, for decades, bottled up the democratic process. Yet, it was they who started the war.
Or a shorter version of my above: It's so intuitively obvious that there's a lot of gray area that if you're shooting people under the idea that there isn't any, your moral culpability for the murder is in no way defrayed by the apparent logical tenability of your position.
Well, I know how I know people of African descent are human beings, and it's not just because I just "know" in some spiritual way. I can have a conversation with them, and they'll tell me. I've never had a conversation with a fetus. Anyhow, if abortion is just like slavery, where's the three-fifths body count that gets you extra representatives in Congress? Even our founding fathers knew the slaves were people, they just didn't feel like treating them that way.
(come to think of it then, BTW why don't we give all child-bearing-age women the right to two votes -- one whole vote for themselves and another three-fifths of a vote if they can prove they're between the ages of 15 and 45 and willing to state to the voting booth officials that they're pregnant? What would this do to our national politics?)
The problem everyone has with these debates is that properly speaking life doesn't begin at any point -- the cells involved are always alive. There is no Dr. Frankenstein moment when dead flesh becomes infused with life, however much we would like that to happen. So the question is, at what point are the cells in a woman's body *separately* alive? Personally it seems to me that this debate has more to do with how we view the woman than how we view the fetus.
But if it's at conception, as the right-to-lifers seem to believe, why target a third-trimester abortion provider, whose services come into play only for medical disasters? Why not start shooting up the pharmacists who sell the morning-after pill?
"But if it's at conception, as the right-to-lifers seem to believe, why target a third-trimester abortion provider, whose services come into play only for medical disasters? Why not start shooting up the pharmacists who sell the morning-after pill?"
Careful, Diana, or you may find yourself in the next DHS report.
That's a silly argument.
I've tried to communicate with infants many times, and they've never responded with 'Well Dad, as far as I can tell, *I* am the prettiest and happiest and cutest and messiest baby in the whole world'.
But (and here's the interesting part) eventually they were able to respond, and affirm their humanity.
Consider two babies. One is in NICU, warm, and cared for, 8 months after conception. The other has spent 8 months in his mother's womb standing next to the NICU baby.
Chop the NICU baby up with forceps and you're in jail for life. Chop the baby in the womb up and you're apparently a "hero" for women's rights.
That's simply a morally and ethically absurd result. Personhood simply cannot be based on whether one baby is a foot away from another.
What a strawman. Most people don't support abortions at 8 months without significant health risks to the mother (I include myself in that number). I don't think there's ever a significant health risk to an NICU.
You do realize that Tiller routinely carried out these abortions as an elective procedure, right?
We do realize, that you're making substantial, inflammatory claims with no evidence, though.
I am pro-life, and I see Tiller's murder as an example of both an unhinged person and two societal failures. One is the one Megan mentions. The other is that bodily integrity is really an excuse made for "I don't want to have to care about other people's children--they are inconvenient to me, too." That is, pro choice is the way to say "I'd rather she killed her baby and pretended there wasn't one than I have to deal with the consequences of having to care for that mother and baby, of acknowledging her child didn't fit "the plan" for young adulthood, that this child inconvenienced her and us, etc. Our society likes to avert its eyes. That we cannot welcome a baby into the world because it would upset our apple cart is a societal failure.
Yes, PeterM, Pro lifers are not going to be *happy* with the cheer of States' Rights, anymore than abolitionists were happy with missouri compromises, or Dred Scott. But Roe poisons every political act it touches and prevents the small game changes that could help change the bigger outcome.
Someday, we'll win, and babies in the womb will be seen as people with equal rights the way that we now see Blacks as of-course-equal to any other race. If we are lucky, pastors in the street shouting for civil rights will manage it, with a pastor giving a speech that fills the Mall of DC. If we are unlucky, we will need a war to manage it.
And I thought I didn't like Megan McArdle...
Yes! Roe v. Wade short-circuited the political process, leaving pro-lifers with no good options to win their point through the system. This breeds frustration and resentment, and has brought out murder in some unhinged personalities.
If Roe v. Wade did not exist we would live in a different nation. Some states would have quite liberal laws, others would ban it absolutely. Abortion might be marginally more or less available than it is now, but it would be available. People would acccept the mess because the issue was settled democratically. Similarly there are plenty of dry counties in the Bible Belt. A lot of people find it ridiculous but no one is all that offended because the locals wanted it that way. The same goes for the porn industry in the San Fernando valley. Most European nations do not have deep splits on abortion because the issue was decided democratically, and if you assume that all European nations are just amoral pro-choicers you would be wrong. As I recall in Germany a woman has to justify an abortion to the authorities, who will say ixnay if they are not satisfied the reasons are good enough. Some nations are quite strict when it comes to a second abortion. Why did those secular humanistic Euros come up with laws that are to the right of the US? Because they hammered out a social agreement democratically, and that required COMPROMISE.
In the US the pro-choice side won by judicial fiat, and consequently they have shown no gift for compromise. Whey should they? They won! Ah, but that's the rub. They didn't win democratically.
Roe v. Wade was a terrible decision, and I say this as an abortion moderate who generally favors legal abortion. It was terrible for our social fabric, terrible for our democracy, terrible for the Democrats who gave the Republicans an issue they could really run with. And run they have. No Roe v. Wade = no GWB.
Sigh.....
No one, of course read Thomson, so lets give her first argument. It an analogy. Lets start with the question of is abortion in the case of rape wrong. Furthermore lets give a fetus the compete right to life as much as you have....
Imaging that tomorrow morning you wake up in the hospital hooked up to another person, they have arranged to have you kidnaped because they need your body for the next 9 months in order to live. Your the only one that can perform this act. After the 9 months, you can go on your way. Must you remain attached?
Now read the rest of Thomson,
http://spot.colorado.edu/~heathwoo/Phil160,Fall02/thomson.htm
Eric:
See my reply to you, above. I read it. It is a good essay. It isn't as revealing as 2+2=4, and therefore I don't think it's worthy of *sighing*.
Many people read Thomson's essay and conclude that the answer is "yes."
One can pick nits with the analogy--after all, while preganancy is inconvenient, it doesn't usually involve mandatory hospitalization and bed rest for nine months. But, overall, I think the essay sets up a useful structure. And while the involuntary kidnapping example is where Thomson is on firmest ground, when the analogy gets closer to voluntary sexual activity without availing yourself of contraceptive options, her position weakens significantly. Thoughts?
The key phrase is here, "the right to life consists not in the right not to be killed, but rather in the right not to be killed unjustly."
Now grant that a fetus have personhood, as much as you and I. That still does not mean that killing it in an abortion is always unjust, the calculus of rights to determine what a just killing would be is the heart of Thomson's paper. But the scope of these are the realms of just and unjust killings, often guided by our innate intuitions and as such examinable.
What is useful in Thomson's arguments is that she deflates a core point of contention of both sides, prochoice say it is not a human thus no foul, pro-life saying it is. It seems to be the case that one can argue for full personhood and still grant that most abortions are not unjust, and so do not violate the "right to life."
So @ Megan, have a look over her paper, personhood of the fetus is not really as much of a problem as you might think.
No mind, no rights.
Can't find a good place to draw the line?
Try birth. It isn't ambiguous, and honestly late term(3rd trimester) abortions are not people who suddenly decided that babies just weren't for them.
Stop trying to risk the lives and well-being of real actual people who have real actual minds for your lame philosophical constructs.
"honestly late term(3rd trimester) abortions are not people who suddenly decided that babies just weren't for them."
Unproven assertion.
The mind of the child exists long before birth.
"The mind of the child exists long before birth."
Unproven assertion.
No. The child sucks ita thumb, turns towards sounds, and reacts to stimuli in other ways.
Many plant species react to stimuli in similar ways (for example, turn towards the sun). Does this mean that plants have minds?
Excellent post, Megan.
I think Megan should address Moth's points as well as some of the stories on Andrew Sullivan's site. How would she account for women seeking late-term abortions because of severe genetic anomalies? Can we just say sucks to be you to these women and force them to carry these children to term? That seems like a huge intervention by the state, in my opinion. Should these parents be forced by the state to take care of children with severe defects that they are not financially, physically, or psychologically able to? Should parents be forced by the state to watch their children live only for a few weeks in pain and suffering? If no late-term abortions are allowed, could parents turn these children over to be wards of the state (because nothing celebrates life or personhood like warehousing children with severe genetic defects in some kind of state facility)? These cases present complicated situations frought with all kinds of ethical quandries--and the libertarian here is telling me the best person to resolve these issues are not the parents in consultation with the doctor but the state?
Although the country's opinions on abortion are mixed at best (the exclusion for rape and incest are very popular but not consistant with the idea that the fetus is a person), I would suggest that the real number to look at is the number of people who decide to abort after learning their child will have a genetic defect. That number is 90%. When you really get down to it and look at the hard cases, 90% of people choose to abort.
I also don't understand why Megan is bothered so much by pro-choicers' certainty but not by pro-lifers' certainty (they are definitely a certain bunch), especially, say, their certainty that pro-lifers, women who abort, and doctors are going to hell.
I would also add that there are other consequences to limiting late-term abortions that need to be considered beyond the fetus and the mother. I can personally attest to the need to have a dilation and evacuation to remove the dead child from my body before I spontaneously aborted it. I was lucky to have a doctor and hospital that were able to perform this procedure. If I had had to wait for weeks to find a provider or travel, I would have been more of a psychological mess than I already was due to the miscarriage. Limitations on late-term abortions and harrassment by anti-abortion groups have definitely reduced the number of doctors who are able to perform this procedure. See this story about the need for d and e's to resolve miscarriages. http://www.msmagazine.com/summer2004/womanandherdoctor.asp
Oops--I meant "their certainty that pro-choicers, women who abort, and doctors are going to hell"--Miranda
bmiller makes a key point above about nonviolent struggles. Without getting too whoo-hoo-hippie-dippie, I think it's not unreasonable to say that, generally speaking, peacefulness really does beget peace and violence begets violence. It's not a scientific law, obviously; it's just kind of tautologically true.
And the PR aspect of it, as it were, is essential. Imagine, for example, how much more seriously folks would have taken the opposition to the Iraq War if the peace protesters had been organized, unified, respectful -- gosh, peaceful. It's really easy for Fox News to make a bunch of boneheads yelling about animal rights and waving "Buck Fush" signs look like boneheads; at the one rally I attended, an enraged man was given a megaphone and allowed to scream at the police, who were standing quietly across the street videotaping the proceedings*, for fifteen full minutes. He seemed like a lunatic. Not an effective way to change people's minds. Imagine if instead the hundred folks who showed up had confined themselves to marching quietly, holding signs with the same message, maybe singing? Everybody could have worn a white T-shirt?
And it's the same thing with the abortion protesters. How many hours have been wasted outside clinics screaming at people already going through one of the most difficult days of their lives? How much hatred have they spewed? And when it's all done under the purview of Christianity, whose fundamental tenets hang on a belief in grace, forgiveness, and love of one's enemies, it just destroys their credibility in an incredibly complicated argument.
That's why I have trouble buying Megan's point. It disturbs me that anyone, on either side, considers the question of when life begins either simple or settled. By all means, decide for yourself, but don't kid yourself that the answer ought to be obvious to anyone else; to do so bespeaks the sort of black-and-white view of the world that was empirically demonstrated yesterday to be lethally unhealthy. The "moral logic" behind a decision like Scott Roeder's rests on axioms unacceptably flimsy to anyone genuinely interested in a serious debate. And before you undertake to kill another person, I think you owe it to them and yourself and your moral code to be genuinely interested in the debate.
*The implications are admittedly disturbing. Still, it was a public street. Entirely legal.
I feel this needs to be emphasized. The reason why Megan's point (that Roe v Wade is wrong because she can understand the reasoning that would lead to someone committing terrorism over it) is because she apparently can't follow the whole thought process through. If she HAD been raised in circumstances wherein she thought abortion was murder, presumably she (or any other thoughtful person) would be able to realize that they could be wrong. And anyone who has any uncertainty whatsoever over whether a fetus is a person would presumably not kill an abortion provider.
Quite frankly, all the pro-life people that I respect would NEVER go so far as Megan does in this post. She only expects doubt and introspection from pro-choicers. Silly. It reduces those who are generally pro-life to caricature.
*genuinely pro-life, not generally. Now I'm the one who's silly :P
Miranda,
Did you read the article? I don't think Megan disagrees with you; I certainly don't. But you're asking her to defend positions she hasn't taken. This isn't about the legality of abortion, this is about understanding the mindset of those who disagree with you. Being open minded and all that. Understanding their point of view doesn't mean you agree with it. That this is a sticky problem with no clear solution is fairly well understood.
I personally believe there should be a government funded clinic offering abortions on every fifth street corner. But I also understand the frustration and rage of those who believe, in their hearts, that abortion is murder. I don't agree with it, but I understand it. I think understanding your enemy is the first step to solving the problem.
Ma'am, in my shy and diffident way,
I've been trying to hint at this,
without much success,
so let me be more direct:
People are _rationalizing_ animals;
An emotional conviction wells up
from somewhere deep inside, trumps
reason, and produces a sort of
hysterical blindness which hides
from them the fallacy of assuming
that running an emotional assumption
through a logical argument produces a
rational result. There is no point in
trying to discuss these issues.
Example: Resolved, that human life has
no intrinsic value. Arguments Pro/Con ?
Megan,
I've been reticent to read your columns. I have no rational reason why - they just didn't have anything compelling to share, in my very small opinion.
However, today, I read your entire column. And I wholeheartedly disagree with your analogy. On its surface, your argument is completely valid on both points (personhood argument and the political machinations being slow to adopt). You had me on these points.
After reading a bit, though, one prong of your argument completely needled me: why even compare it to the personhood of slaves? Replying to the dumb retort "If you don't like abortions then don't have one" within the context of your post really, really diluted what was originally a great argument. I have no idea why the two posters you were responding to chose to use such polarizing examples in an argument for pro-life (oh, it's the ratings, or page-views, stupid), but to seize on one of their examples for a post?
It's getting rather old comparing the pro-life movement to some sort of neophyte 13th Amendment movement. On one hand, these people honestly believe a fetus is a human. On the other hand, millions of people who were already born, who already were cognizant of their humanity, were forcibly removed from their country and brought here. It's just not an apples-to-apples argument. And this comparison should cease completely: pro-lifers should be bold enough to admit these types of questions have not been fully brought to bear before and should create their own movement's history. Which, unfortunately , has blood on its hands.
It is not a debate about personhood, but about which persons may be killed. A good percentage of people who are against killing a fetus are in favour of killing some criminals. Pretty much everyone agrees that some people may be killed, namely enemy soldiers and people who are will kill or seriously harm us if not killed first.
Slavery was not a debate about personhood either, but about whether some people may be owned.
In both cases the personhood debate is used for a smokescreen for an uncomfortable moral issue when there is really no doubt about the true nature of the debate.
It is wrong to say that the murder of an abortionist shows there is a problem to be solved. Lots of laws are objectionable to at least some people but the law does not become right or wrong depending on the depth of the antipathy some people hold. Rather, a law is right when it has majority support and is not unconstitutional and wrong if either of those conditions is not satisfied.
Pregnancy isn't an abnormal condition.
Perhaps I could get you to persuade my health insurance company to that.
I can have a conversation with them, and they'll tell me. I've never had a conversation with a fetus.
You've never had a conversation with a nine month old baby either.
Rather, a law is right when it has majority support and is not unconstitutional and wrong if either of those conditions is not satisfied.
So if the majority of Americans thought that it should be legal to murder black people, and the courts agreed, then it would be right to murder black people and wrong to kill someone who was murderering black people? That appears to be your position. I don't think you realize that the Constitution is a legal document, not a moral treatise.
Somewhere above 30 abortions occur for every 100 live births.
Abortion is not an issue in isolation. Sexual revolution, redefinition of marriage, liberal divorce laws, equality of women, the fading away of the institutionalized churches as political elements in their own right, (any american who thinks they live in a theocracy should see what Quebec was like pre 70's), etc.
I'm not that old, but the changes in social mores and the roles and expectations of the sexes in my lifetime have been mind boggling. The seeds of change were sown in the trenches in Europe, and finalized in the bloodshed of WW2. And seemingly a generation has tossed out almost every assumption of past generations.
And we wonder why people get shot.
A liberal Democrat of 40 years ago would be a right wing fanatic today. And he would not be the one who changed.
Personally I hate when government is involved in any way in my life, and to have some bureaucrat decide what a woman does is as repugnant as a bureaucrat telling me what I can say.
Yet we are responsible for the choices we make as free people. I find equally repugnant that men in the most prosperous time in history refuse to take responsibility for the offspring they sire. And repugnant that a woman would choose to kill her offspring because it is annoying or impractical.
Previous generations had blood on their hands defending empire, destroying threatening ideologies, building a nation, whatever. Blood nonetheless. This generation has blood on their hands in pursuit of frivolous pleasure. And in the end, no one to pass on the wonderful world they built, and it will be taken by others without the finely tuned appreciation for relative rights.
Derek
That's not a great argument, Megan. In more than one way, but most of all in the "shut out of the system" point. First of all, there are political ways to overturn Roe v. Wade; either by appointing one more pro-life Supreme Court Justice (if McCain had won, this would probably have happened, so it's not like this was impossibly difficult), or by constitutional amendment (admittedly, more difficult). Simply because changing the system is hard doesn't mean that you get to take what seems like an easier way out and kill your opponents to prevent what is, in your mind, a greater evil. It was far more difficult for participants in the civil rights struggle, who were commonly beaten/arrested/murdered. When was the last time an anti-abortion activist was in serious physical danger?
Secondly, even if Roe v. Wade were untouchable, one could still work to convince people not to have abortions. This is where the Nazi analogy, for instance, breaks down completely. The Nazis were rounding up and murdering Jews; the US government is not forcing people to have abortions! If you were an ordinary German who opposed Nazi crimes, you couldn't "persuade Jews not to be killed" (meaningless idea), nor could you convince the government that Jews should not be harmed, and since post-1933 Germany was officially a one-party state, you couldn't persuade your fellow citizens to vote the Nazis out of power. That's a situation where one is politically helpless to prevent or mitigate a moral evil. Here and now, even with Roe v. Wade as law, pro-lifers could convince individual women not to have abortions, make contraception more widely available, promote adoption, etc. These have the effect of decreasing the number of "murders". So even if you give up on overturning Roe v. Wade because it is actually politically impossible for you to do so, the right response is not to decrease abortions by killing Dr. Tiller, but to decrease abortions in any of these other ways! The pro-life movement is indeed doing many of these things (increasing contraceptive use being a notable exception); the only "advantage" murdering Tiller has is shock value and terror.
I can, to some extent, understand and empathize with those who feel driven to use violence to stop a greater evil because of a genuine lack of other options (though I might disagree with them); in the case of Tiller, though, other options did exist, and it even seems unclear that the murderer felt driven in this way.
As an aside, I'd like to note that this is an extremely unChristian thing to do. The suspect seems to be Christian, but no reasonable understanding of the faith could condone such a murder.
IT is about personhood, of the fetus and the mother. The reality of valuing personhood is that in our society, when one person threatens the agency or personhood of another the threatened person is allowed to respond. There are cases or pregnancy that threaten and undermine the person hood of the woman who became pregnant. Everyone recognizes this. This is the basis of the consensus rape incest and life of the mother exceptions. The argument against is that the woman chose to have sex and this is just a consequence. I do not accept that a woman having sex should relegate her status as a person.
Even more problematic in the case of abortion is that the fetus has ambiguous personhood. Everyone recognizes that the likelihood of personhood grows with the fetus, so the issue is not person vs person, but rather determining the ambiguous status of the fetus. Who gets to do that? We have seen the macabre tragedy when the state makes a determination over the wishes of the family in the Terry Shaivo case. The pro life partisans rightly connected the issue to abortion, and tried to use the power of the state to resolve by fiat an ambiguous situation.
Abortion is usually immoral. Having the state make the call rather than the mother is even more hideous and distorted. Roe v Wade is an attempt at a compromise that reflects the ambiguous nature of the personhood of the fetus, and is only marginally successful
Megan, people killed in the name of preserving Jim Crow. I don't think that meant the Supreme Court erred in supporting Brown v. Board of Education. And as far as the argument that you can understand their logic if you begin with their premises goes, well, there have been some superbly well reasoned racists through the centuries. (Hegel, after all, is the one who said Africa had no history). The reason we think of them as wrong, now, is that we reject their premises.
The question you brush aside -- what does it mean to have access to the political process? -- is the key one. The vast majority of America, 60 percent, belive abortion should be generally available or only somewhat limited. Roughly another third think it should be available in the doomsday scenarios -- rape, incest, save the life of a mother (Which, by the way, is what late term abortions are often for). Less than 10 percent think they should never be available. As it turns out, our current abortion laws match those sentiments relatively well. Roe v. Wade hasn't made abortions at all stages of pregnancy an inviolate right. The government is free to outlaw "partial birth abortions," for instance. The anti-abortion crowd responsible for Dr. Tiller's death are not for simply limiting abortions. They're part of that lonely 10 % fringe. Giving them "more access" to the political process isn't going to placate them, because their views are not likely to ever win out save a sea change in public opinion.
I also don't buy the idea that making abortion a states rights issue would somehow tone down the tenor of the debate. Yes, the right got angry after Roe v. Wade, but the Women's rights movement was energized and pissed off about abortion well before. The difference is that for most of the time abortion was illegal.
Great article, thanks. As usual, the comments can be pretty frustrating.
Question: Skip the cases where the mother's life is in danger, or the baby is congenitally ill. Do commenters agree that most other abortions, women killing near-babies for their own convenience, are immoral? Not illegal. Immoral. After all, when human life begins is a subtle question, right? Even if it's not murder, it's kinda like murder, right? - and gets more so as the pregnancy progresses. We don't have to outlaw it to disapprove of it, just as we disapprove of adultery.
If pro-choice people have lost sight of this pretty obvious fact, it seems to me that they have let the thrill of battle blind their moral vision.
Personally, I think 3rd trimester abortions probably are murder in most cases, but then, on the other hand, I decided to vivisect my dog because my circumstances changed and I was tired of him living parasitically off of me.
Of course, it's illegal to vivisect my dog.
One can argue that abortion is justifiable homicide rather than murder. Whether or not the pregnancy shows any sign of killing the mother, it is always a non-negligible risk up through several days weeks after delivery. (My mother did die and was fortunately for us revived during my brother's birth.) If one has a right to kill someone threatening them with both grave and immediate harm, and we sometimes legally do, the it is not inconsistent to allow a woman to save her own life by harming the one who depends on her.
.
I think one also tends to forget that the default of having a baby is you're now a parent. So to force, as you see them, the 'most immoral' (who would abort a child for any reason, even one you consider kinda flighty) to have children seems counter intuitive if you want your community to become more moral.
.
JB, check out your local animal shelter, duh. You're not nurturing your dog from inside your bowels. He's a separate entity that can be remanded into the care of others who are not you, not a fully dependent entity you object to and trying to remove through a small hole.
Megan's posts are probably the most intelligent writing I have ever read on the abortion issue. In Megan's earlier post, she cited to an Izra Klein post that was, predictably, juvenile in comparison to Megan's thoughtful writing.
The politics and arguments about abortion in America are a dreadful mess, significantly caused by a terrible Roe v. Wade decision by a justice who thought that he was protecting doctors and did not realize he was creating abortion on demand.
There is no immediate hope for the situation to improve. Pro-choice politicians are in control of Congress and, in turn, they are totally controlled by pro-abortion interest groups that will not allow any movement.
Roe v. Wade is not only poorly done as a matter of constitutional interpretation, it also was so unnecessarily extreme. In recent years, there has been disclosure of internal court memoranda between Blackman and Douglas and Brennan (I think that is the three) "debating" whether the cut off point should have been first trimester or second trimester. There is no constitutional premise to their discussion; just some old men debating what rule they should impose. And what they actually imposed, with the "health of the mother" exception, effectively allows abortion virtually up to the time of birth.
In addition to the moral and constitutional shortcomings of the Roe opinion, Blackmum was so clueless that he wanted to issue a press release on the day the opinion was handed down announcing the holding was not abortion on demand. Burger was so clueless he concurred in the opinion claiming it was something less than abortion on demand.
I always thought a pro-life presidential candidate could swing some votes by arguing in a debate that the pro-choice candidate supported abortion on demand for any reason, including the gender of the child or a scheduled vacation on the beach. Probably 75% of the American public do not realize that current law is so broad. But thus far, no pro-life candidate has had the courage to make the argument.
I was probably conservative in estimating that 75% of Americans do not realize a mother can abort a child based on gender or vacation plans. It probably is an even higher number.
Unlike African slaves, the child requires support from the mother. I've always understood legal 1st trimester abortion as a balance of rights between the child and the mother. Upon finding herself pregnant, a woman has a short-lived right to decline the relationship and, yes, kill the child. After the child is born, it is a crime. In between there is the gray area that, I think, should allow abortion where medically justified.
It's a side issue, but I'd like to quibble over the idea that terrorists tend to believe that violence is their only available medium. The vast bulk of terrorist organisations advance on multiple fronts. Hamas run a country(ish), media operations, and terrorist groups. The IRA run political parties, media groups, drugs gangs, and terrorist cells. Al-Qaida, the LTTE, the PKK... all of these groups work within as well as without the political and legal system.
One gets the impression that the murderer in this instance spent time with pro-lifers, who do not tend to believe that the courts are not worth bothering with, or that marches are worthless, or that hassling your representatives and heckling the other side are activities for chumps. When Instapundit grumbles about how x or y group of people would be listened to more if they acted like Al-Qaeda, he doesn't mean that they would give up the CAIR equivalents. Terrorism done well supplements and enhances activism elsewhere, rather than being an alternative to it. I don't know enough about the impact that this will have on abortion provision in the US generally, or Kansas in particular, to know if this was incompetent as well as evil. Still, the terrorist as persecuted victim rather than privileged git is one of the weakest of liberal platitudes and should not be allowed to besmirch the writings of thinkers of your calibre.
I should have been clearer about Instapundit's views. Obviously he doesn't mean that voucher advocates or whoever should become terrorists, but that the incentives in place are awful. Anyway, the incentives come from the good cop/ bad cop routine. Terrorist movements are rarely all bad cop.
Thank you so much for writing something thoughtful on this subject instead of just taking the easy way out and spouting the partisan party line of one side or the other. The first step towards peace in any conflict is for both sides to understand the point of view of the other side, and you have made an effort to promote understanding.
If one day we discover the tapeworms in Megan's body to have certain intelligence will it then be okay to call her doctor a murderer for giving her drugs to kill the parasites?
I have to admit - the more I pay in taxes, the more I like the sound of that "parasite" defense....
I'm not so sure this act was "terrorism" per se. Was his goal primarily to convince other abortion doctors to give up performing abortions or was he killing this abortion doctor to stop him form performing abortions? If it's the latter, then the murder was a pragmatic act intended to stop killing, not terrorism. Though shooting him in his church may indicate an attempt to create fear (or just be a sign that the shooter was unstable and didn't really plan his act out very carefully).
Terrorists attack innocent people and try to create fear. This man killed the "guilty" party in order to stop him.
Where this metaphor (slavery and abortion) falls apart is that slavery was intended to make an agrarian society viable in the face of industrialization. Abortion, or some form of contraception that renders abortion unnecessary, is needed to sustain our post-industrial society. Modern economies rely on highly skilled individuals to maintain their standards of living. That means we must be able to allocate fairly long periods of youth and training while they develop their skills.
I'm not in favor of abortion. I'm in favor of first world standards of health and education. We can't achieve those if women are required to stop what they are doing and have children when they become pregnant.
The anti-abortion movement has some valid arguments, but those arguments are undercut by their unwillingness to explore any solution but a sort of American Wahibism. Don't have premarital sex. If you have sex, God will punish you with a baby (and possibly STDs). Don't abort the baby. The arguments are further undercut by the almost complete disinterest in what happens to the baby once its born. Abortion in the first trimester= bad. Abortion in the 62nd trimester, when the child is now a screwed up adult causing problems = maybe.
Well, there's nothing wrong with trying to understand what motivates these people. Your problem here is that they are in fact not being consistent. If they were consistent, they'd be outraged at other Supreme Court decisions, like Bush vs Gore. If they were consistent, they'd be murdering women who had abortions as well. If they were consistent, they'd be all for hard jail for women who have abortions.
Needless to say, they haven't been and they aren't. That's what ticks a few people off.
Er, really? No, I'm not particularly angry. Disgusted at the immaturity would be the closest you could get to what I feel. Believe it or not, grownups think consistency is kind of a big deal.
Stop right there. That is not the case. Stop trying to smuggle this talking point in. Some people believe the fetus is a person, for their own personal reasons. Then we have your (2):
Since the law has nothing to say about the personhood - and rightly so, I might add - each person gets to decide for themselves.
SOV:
I believe Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided. I believe Bush v. Gore was wrongly decided. I believe a fetus is, at some point in time that is difficult to define with precision, a person deserving of rights such that abortion is morally impermissible. I think virtually no one would argue that a completely healthy, viable, 9 month old fetus in utero may be aborted for any reason at all. The farther from that hypothetical we move, the more difficult the question becomes.
As to your "deconstruction" of everyone's arguments, you should realize that you make little, if any, sense at all. Here's what happened:
You argued: "Many 'liberals' do think that the fetus is a person and/or they would not get an abortion in the case of an unexpected pregnancy. They just think that they shouldn't impose their personal beliefs on others. That's why they call themselves 'Pro-Choice'."
My question is whether you think it is consistent for the "Many 'liberals'" who, according to you, "do think that the fetus is a person" to believe:
1. A fetus is a person (this is not a talking point; YOU said "many liberals" believe this).
BUT BECAUSE
2. Others believe a fetus is not a person; THEN
3. We (i.e., the "liberals" you describe who "believe a fetus is a person") "shouldn't impose our personal beliefs on others."
Expand your reasoning:
Many liberals believe that african-americans are persons deserving of rights, and/or they would not own slaves personally. They just think they shouldn't impose their personal beliefs on others. That's why they're pro-choice on slavery."
The point of this hypo is not to equate abortion to slavery, it is to show you that your "imposing beliefs on others" line is question-begging, unless you are a moral relativist. If abortion is the wrongful taking of life, it should be illegal. If abortion is the permissible taking of life, it should be legal. Your position seems to be that each person decides for him or herself whether abortion is permissible or impermissible; hence my (unanswered) question: Are you a relativist? If the answer is yes, fine; you aren't the only one.
Many here paint those who disagree with too broad a brush.
The killer of Dr. Tiller was a man with a history of mental illness. I don't think there has been a murder of an abortion provider in about 15 years, so his behavior is not in any way generally representative of those who are pro-life.
As an example, quixOte makes an interesting obervation about the slavery/abortion metaphor related to economics. I don't agree with it, because most abortion supporters primarily focus upon the personal rights of the woman and, at least publicly, not on the economic "benefits" of abortion. I think support of slavery was largely, but not entirely, economic. Regardless, quixOte's post is a thoughtful comment.
But then quixOte goes on to ascribe to "the anti-abortion movement" in extreme liberal characterjure [sp?]:
An "unwillingness to explore any solution but a sort of American Wahibism. Don't have premarital sex. If you have sex, God will punish you with a baby (and possibly STDs). Don't abort the baby. The arguments are further undercut by the almost complete disinterest in what happens to the baby once its born. Abortion in the first trimester= bad. Abortion in the 62nd trimester, when the child is now a screwed up adult causing problems = maybe."
If the internet was around then, I wonder what the blogs would be saying about John Brown?
Very comparable things, don't you think?
The best analysis of the issue I've ever read.
But there is another path to resolution other than the political or violence, and without the use of the courts playing a pivotal role. And it's what I think Obama wants.
Slavery dissipated in the Northern States without fighting primarily because it became irrelevant; conditions were such that it didn't pay off economically enough for it to be a socially threatening issue. Likewise, if unwanted pregnancies were reduced to the point where abortion were no longer a family planning tool -- via education and available, effective contraception -- the conditions setting up the struggle would no longer exist. I'm sure it would still be controversial among some religious groups, like blood transfusions are today, but no longer stressing the integrity of our political and judicial structures.
I don't think Obama wants anything other than to keep his pro-choice support in tact and appear moderate to everyone else, even though he has always supported the most extreme of the pro-choice views. He would be delighted it the issue went away, or got smaller, but he won't waste his time or political capital on trying to accomplish it.
I think the pro life argument eventually will win, helped along considerably by medical advancements that somehow allow a baby to live outside the womb in the early stages of pregnancy.
Alright, I'm enough of a geek that I may be the only post dealing the with the historical slavery issue.
It is a narrow perspective, although the most common one, to say there was no political solution to slavery in the U.S. The slaveholding state's departure solved the problem -- there was no longer slavery in the United States. It was only the (then) Republicans quasi-religious belief in union that prevented that political solution from holding. Consider applying the same principal in relationships: you want to leave me, but I believe in marriage forever, so if you leave I'll kill you. Not so progressive, is it?
Compare it to other national divisions that worked, at least in the end -- East Pakistan becomes Bangladesh, Singapore becomes independent, East Timor becomes independent, Uraguay separates from Brazil and Argentina -- and in each of these cases the bloodshed was caused by people resisting change and believing in union.
So there was a political solution, but Lincoln (an otherwise amazing man) refused to embrace it.
(This is not, of course, an endorsement of slavery. I expect it would have ended in the South as it ended everywhere, but with less bloodshed than what occurred.)
True, except I don't get the marriage analogy.
Some of the great, and largely ignored, questions of American History are what would have happened if the south had been allowed to succeed and whether the North's resort to military action to preserve the union was good political judgment. On the later issue, in view of the 600,000 plus deaths and other devastation of the Civil War, it seems that a good argument could be made that Lincoln and company were wrong, but I seldom hear it.
Megan
Probably your best non-economic post, especially here: "broad swathes of the pro-choice movement seem to genuinely not understand that this is a debate about personhood".
Too many, including commenters on this post, seem to think the baby's reliance on the mother negates all other issues. It is true that forcing a mother to go through pregnancy is short term servitude. But if the fetus is a baby the choice is a short-term servitude, virtually always caused by the willing action of the mother, versus murder. This isn't a tough choice, and it's why the issue is whether / when the fetus becomes a baby.
Your comments on the political side are dead on as well. Roe v Wade is something a legislature might enact and I would find acceptable, given that it attempts to deal with the true issue. As a judicial decision it's both a travesty and proof liberal judges simply desire to legislate from the bench.
Agree completely.
In addition to the poor legal analysis, the poor judgment by those six surpreme court justices in their social activism has produced a national political and moral nightmare.
I made the point earlier that Blackmun was bascially clueless in writing an opinion that he thought was protecting the medical profession (with whom he had been aligned prior to his career as a judge) and that he did not realize was creating abortion on demand. The interoffice memoranda between Blackmun and Douglas and Brennan (I think) were preposterous in discussing whether the "cut off" for abortion should be the first trimester or the second trimester - an example of judicial legislation at its very worst. And they wrote an opinon that did not even establish an effective cut off to abortion on demand.
I'm not mad.
It seems to me that the guys who go out and kill doctors that perform abortions are the only truly "Pro-Lifer's" out there. If you believe that life begins at conception, then Tiller is not the only baby killer out there. So is your pharmacist.
And if you object to "state funded abortions", and your taxpayer dollars going to fund abortions in foreign countries, then what about the dollars spent at your local WalMart? Don't they have a pharmacy?
I fail to see how the Pro-Life position is truly tenable, by anyone but the Scott Roeder's of the world.
CharlesB,
Come on. The laws of the land say abortion are legal. Being a "Pro-lifer" does not mean you advocate your political/legal/moral position by killing people.
Kansas City, if the laws of the land said that you were allowed to kill me for being too tall and I wasn't permitted to defend myself, I would defend myself anyway. Laws are made by men and can be wrong. While it is immoral to casually break the law as that would lead to total chaos, it is not immoral to break a truly immoral law. The problem, though, comes when there is a deep disagreement on what is moral and immoral.
You can't prove that an extreme pro-lifer is wrong in his belief...
KC,
"Being a "Pro-lifer" does not mean you advocate your political/legal/moral position by killing people."
That's why I have no problem with people being personally opposed to abortion. But when the Pro-Life community tries to say that abortion is murder, tries to legislate it as such, and uses epithets like "Tiller the Baby Killer", then I think it is fair to draw out their argument to it's logical conclusion.
If life begins at conception, then what is the difference between a pharmacist and a doctor like Tiller?
The sooner that the Pro-Life community quits trotting out the "murder" rhetoric, the sooner we can work together to try and reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies and abortions.
So "life" doesn't begin at conception, and abortion isn't "murder." Fine. When does "life" begin, and when is (and isn't) abortion morally permissible, and why?
Strangling isn't drowning isn't death by stoning. Killing someone while driving drunk isn't the same as pulling a Jeffrey Dahmer, isn't the same as a drive-by shooting.
CharlesB, you've blown down a gigantic straw man. Well done.
Andy,
I believe that life begins at birth. I like how you change the argument from legality to morality. I'm saying that abortion should not be illegal. I'm saying nothing about the morality of it. I hope we can agree that there are lots of things that are immoral that shouldn't be illegal.
The only point that I'm trying to make, Andy, is that pro-life rhetoric doesn't match pro-life actions. I fail to see how "life begins at conception" and "abortion is murder" constitute a straw man, in that those are the views of a majority of conservatives.
The entire point of this series of posts is how the moral position implicates the political/legal process.
Yes, lots of things that are *immoral* should be legal. If you missed it above, I'm an atheist and thus not much of a moralist.
But the moral/ethical argument matters whether you want it to or not.
As to your straw man: whatever the majority of "conservatives" believe, the overwhelming majority of Americans do not believe that "life begins at birth." Neither do they believe that "life begins at conception," if by "life" you mean "a person with rights, such that the state may permissibly restrict or ban abortions." Arguing about whether hypothetical nutjobs have to murder people to preserve their consistency is a facile way to avoid the question presented by the vast gray areas, as is distinguishing between law and morality.
To illustrate: You take the position that, while you can understand my view that punching people in the face is wrong, you disagree. You argue that punching people in the face should be a legal option, but that I am free to disagree with it, and not punch people in the face if I so choose. When I point out that punching people in the face is wrong, you say: there are lots of things that are immoral that shouldn't be illegal.
Point being: Explain WHY all/some/no abortions should be legal/illegal.
Question: Since you believe life begins at birth, when does "birth" occur? Seriously. Before the umbillical cord is cut? Is it your position that a baby 5 minutes from birth may be aborted without implicating any moral considerations whatsoever?
First of all, Megan has the slavery/personhood thing backwards. Slavery is the oldest of human institutions, long predating any justification that slaves were not persons. Slavery in America only at its latter stages came up with this notion that slaves aren't fully human, that they are some kind of animal hybrid, purely as an after-the-fact rationalization necessary only because the injustice of it was getting so obvious. But it's obvious that slaves were human persons, it was merely thought that they were inferior persons.
With abortion, it's never been the case in human history that unborn fetuses have been consider members of society - persons. They have never been considered citizens, and have never been proposed as such. They did not "become persons" in the 19th century, and then get that status revoked. They are not mentioned as citizens in any legal rulings or laws of that time, or any other time for that matter.
So it's just malarkey that the pro-choice movement has taken a step backwards in terms of human rights. THere's no comparison between a tiny clump of cells that pro-lifers want to call a person, and a slave. The slave might be considered inferior, but he's fully capable of all basic human functions. The fetus has no such status at all. Abortion isn't about personhood, it represents a dilemma for a mother who has to decide whether she wants to bring a child into this world. The woman isn't sitting there trying to decide whether her fetus is a person or not, and making her decision based on that abstract concept. It's about as personal a decision is there gets. For some it's easy, for others not so much. In fact, the real issue for the woman isn't, "is this a person", but "do I want this thing inside me to grow into a person"? We attach this abstract notion of "personhood" to whatever it is we have affection and empathy for. If that is present towards the fetus, in our imagination it can already be a person to us. If not, it won't. It's a concept that comes after the decision is made to have the baby, not before.
Andy,
Sorry, there's not a "Reply" option on your last post.
This may be one of the first dialogues between a pro-life atheist and a pro-choice Christian.
I disagree with the premise of your illustration, as the debate is not whether it should be legal to harm another person, but rather whether a fetus IS a person. It's a false analogy, and not particularly revealing, as it assumes you're right at the outset.
As to why abortion should be legal: because of the ramifications of making it illegal. Because I don't think the law is particularly adept at saying "ok, it's legal up to 180 days, but illegal on day 181. And it's legal if your brother raped you, but not if some random guy did." Because there absolutely are shades of gray to the morality of abortion, not only nine months of gray, but situational gray areas as well. I just don't think that you can draw a legal line anywhere between conception and birth, between justifiable and not. There will always be individual cases that give lie to the standard that has been set. Where would you draw the line, Andy? On what day does life begin?
As to when birth occurs, birth is defined as "the emergence of a new individual from the body of its parent", so I'll go with that. But let's not put words in my mouth about "a baby 5 minutes from birth may be aborted without implicating any moral considerations whatsoever". I think that the moral implications begin at conception, and become graver and graver for nine months. I just don't think that those implications should be legislated.
CharlesB - So you believe that an abortion five minutes before birth should have no legal implications. It may be immoral but you would have it be completely legal under any circumstances?
Earnest,
I would have it be legal. Why? Because I don't believe that anyone would do it for frivolous reasons. And anyone immoral enough to do so certainly isn't inhibited by laws to the contrary.
If you can find me a doctor who says "yes, I would perform an abortion 5 minutes before a baby is to be born, if it interfered with the mother's vacation plans, if only it were legal" and a pregnant woman who says "yes, I would like to have an abortion after carrying a pregnancy for 9 months because I don't want a girl, if only it were legal" then I'd be forced to change my mind.
CharlesB - You have a higher opinion of people than I do, apparently. I'm certain that there would be people who would do just that (or something equivalent) if it were legal. There is the woman who had one of her triplets aborted because she couldn't see herself as one of those Costco shoppers... not because she feared the complications of delivering triplets (at least according to the article she wrote).
Earnest,
Perhaps that's it. I think people are pretty stupid a great deal of the time, however. I am just leery of legislating morality. The little Vin diagram of Libertarian, Conservative, and Liberal on issues like this is fascinating. Everyone's in such a rush to contradict themselves.
Personally, I think birth control should be handed out like breath mints, starting at puberty. We could even make them look like Flintstone's vitamins.
Pregnancy is a dangerous thing? Therefore we should have the option to end it, based upon its dangerousness? This is ridiculous, totally backwards to reality, and simply shows the degree of inanity in the pro-choice arguments that led me to part ways, a decade ago, on this issue with my fellow progressives/liberals/democrats.
Without pregnancy, there absolutely would be no one around. Lack of pregnancy would be a problem. I don't see how we can say pregnancy is the great danger.
As a scientist, I can't see the notion that an early embryo, lacking a functioning brain, should be regarded as a "person" as anything but irrational. So compelling a person against their will to carry an embryo to term seems very close to slavery. I suppose that one could say that an embryo is a potential person (although probably about half of them are defective and have no actual prospect of ever being a baby), but so was the sperm and the egg, yet hardly anybody considers it to be a crime to abort that potential by preventing their union.
But I think that the question of how far personal responsibility extends is also valid. That is, even if the embryo or fetus is regarded as a person, how far does the prospective mother's responsibility extend? Pregnancy seems to be the only circumstance in which one person can be compelled to place her own life at risk to aid another. Even if I cause injury to another person, even if it is through gross negligence, I cannot be legally compelled to place my own life at risk to aid them. I don't have to give them my kidney, or even my blood, no matter how great their need.
I don't understand how people can not see that pregnancy is an exceptional event and not just like breaking a leg or catching a disease or caring for your elderly mother. People have sex and then get pregnant and the fetus is going to be a new person who did not exist before. My ex-wife and I would look at our kids and just be amazed that her body took our genetic material and grew a person.
And it's not like pregnancies just happen to women. So when a woman conceives* a child, she is responsible for that child. That is not some crazy, made up concept, for many people it's a biological imperative. Apparently not for all people, though.
As a scientist, why are you even addressing the question of "personhood" since it's not a scientific question? Rights and duties are not scientific and a scientific analisys of them makes as much sense as an ethical analysis of the chemical properties of sodium.
*Yes, rape or trickery are exceptions to this. But even birth control has a failure rate. And yes, the father is also responsible and should be held accountable for the child's care.
Since all matters of fact can be addressed by science, when you say that "personhood is not a scientific question," you are effectively asserting that it is an arbitrary personal preference with no relationship to reality. In other words, if enough people decide that rocks are "persons," then it should be acceptable to punish people for harming rocks.
On the other hand, if you believe that what we legally define as a "person" must have some grounding in fact, and in particular, some relationship to those features that are characteristic of persons--possession of a "personality," for example--then science is highly relevant. Since we know from neuroscience that a "personality" is a function of the brain, defining something without a brain as a person is irrational.
But I agree that criminalizing abortion does indeed define pregnancy as an exceptional event, and confer on the supposed "person"--or "pre-person" or whatever it is--rights that no other person under any other circumstances is ever awarded (at least since the abolition of slavery), even in cases of extreme and flagrant negligence, namely a right over another person's body.
I recommend Lee Silver's book CHALLENGING NATURE for a deeply thoughtful look at the complications of defining when personhood starts, it's an exceptionally difficult question and one McArdle glosses over in accepting the validity of the extremist moral argument. (An adult woman, on the other hand, is unambiguously a person, which I think is a good reason for current law to favor her rights.)
Also I disagree strongly with the idea that terrorists are driven to murder out of lack of options. Violence is always an individual choice, all the more so in an open democratic society.
Why is it I seldom hear anti-abortion rights supporters discuss the fate of unwanted personhoods? How many of the morally indignant are willing to practice what they preach by taking in the children of those who have thought long and hard about ending a pregnancy?
Deciding to terminate the potential for life is never an easy decision for a woman, and I'm sure there are many men who spend their lives second guessing themselves too. Why is it assumed to be an easy way out?
An early term abortion is the ending of a potential. Pregnancies end naturally as well. Not at all like the taking of a life in combat, which is condoned by many Pro-Lifers.
Corporations are considered "natural persons" under American law--have been for almost 125 years, on what is legally a very flimsy basis, even shakier than that of Roe v. Wade. So Dow Chemical, or Halliburton, or cigarette manufacturers, to take just a few examples, have more rights in our legal system than does a fetus. This seems perverse somehow. Pro-lifers, who are mostly Republican, could help clarify the abortion issue by supporting the judicial purging of the rolls of legal "persons" that obviously do not belong there. This might help create some common ground between people who now tend to be political foes, thus advancing the cause of actual human personhood in all its forms.