Moving the Discussion on Choice Forward

Dana Goldstein wonders why NARAL decided to nominate Obama at a point when his nomination is a) technically contested by Clinton but b) functionally secured. They’ve managed to anger their supporters and because of the Edwards endorsement, their endorsement wasn’t even that big of a news story, or a particularly influential one. I think one important reason why they endorsed Obama, one that they openly stated, was that because the nomination is locked up, and the two candidates are essentially identical as far as being pro-choice goes, we desperately need to move the discussion forward. Because last time I checked, the GOP nominee not only says that he wants Roe v Wade overturned, but also wants to appoint justices in the anti-choice mold of Alito and Roberts. NARAL’s desire to move the discussion is particularly important because the one way that Obama can gain support back from female Clinton supporters is by emphasizing how he’s light years better on choice and reproductive rights.

Also, and fewer people in the pro-choice community probably agree with me on this one, but I think that the Clinton campaign had to be sanctioned by some pro-choice organization for her dishonest attacks on Obama’s voting record in the Illinois State Senate. Repeatably, the campaign went after him for voting “present” on abortion-related legislation. What they didn’t mention, however, was that it was a strategy he thought up with Planned Parenthood t counter the political effect that voting “yes” on these bills could have(it didn’t actually effect any legislation being passed). In short, Clinton was attacking Obama on pro-choice grounds for implementing a strategy that the leading choice organization in America thought up. And NARAL consistently defended Obama from these accusations. I don’t know if that had anything to do with their decision to endorse, but it’s certainly something worth considering.

A Pro-Life Myth

Because of this year’s policy debate topic, I have become pretty well versed in pro-life literature, namely on the question of whether or not abortion is murder. One extrapolation that many pro-life authors make from their belief that abortion is murder is that when we don’t protect the unborn from annihilation(I’m using their language here, so bear with me), it means that we also won’t protect other voiceless members of society, like the disabled, the elderly, the disadvantaged etc. Much of this rhetoric comes from a Catholic perspective, where the Catholic Social Thought-y concern for human dignity and the disadvantaged encompasses fetuses as well as people. A good example of this type of rhetorical move is a passage from the US Bishop’s Conference’s A Gospel of Life: A Challenge for American Catholics:

“23. “Any politics of human life must work to resist the violence of war and the scandal of capital punishment. Any politics of human dignity must seriously address issues of racism, poverty, hunger, employment, education, housing, and health care. Therefore, Catholics should eagerly involve themselves as advocates for the weak and marginalized in all these areas. Catholic public officials are obliged to address each of these issues as they seek to build consistent policies which promote respect for the human person at all stages of life. But being ‘right’ in such matters can never excuse a wrong choice regarding direct attacks on innocent human life. Indeed, the failure to protect and defend life in its most vulnerable stages renders suspect any claims to the ‘rightness’ of positions in other matters affecting the poorest and least powerful of the human community. If we understand the human person as the “temple of the Holy Spirit” — the living house of God — then these latter issues fall logically into place as the crossbeams and walls of that house. All direct attacks on innocent human life, such as abortion and euthanasia, strike at the house’s foundation. These directly and immediately violate the human person’s most fundamental right — the right to life. Neglect of these issues is the equivalent of building our house on sand. Such attacks cannot help but lull the social conscience in ways ultimately destructive of other human rights.”

Take out all refrences about unborn life, and you easily have a statement that could have come from the Green Party of the Peace and Justice Party. But how often does this rhetorical committment to protecting the fetus as part of protecting all the disadvantaged actually show up in policy and politics. Despite Michael Gerson’s protestations, just not very much. The pro-life party is simply not the party of the marginalized, disadvantaged and oppressed. Gerson’s column on the issue - where he calls Obama an abortion extremist - tries to claim that Democrats used to “[speak] about building a beloved community that cared especially for the elderly, the weak, the disadvantaged and the young.” While now they are merely concerned with “the absolute triumph of individualism. The rights and choices of adults have become paramount, even at the expense of other, voiceless members of the community.” Does this mean that Gerson opposed welfare reform, or that he supports expanding the Family Medical Leave Act, or extending and increasing food stamps? Well, Gerson is something of a softie, so he may support all of that, but so does the modern Democratic party. Which, as Gerson notes, is fervently pro-choice. So the notion that being pro-life makes someone, or a political movement, more responsive to the “voiceless” is just empirically false.

This is a great example of what is so common in the abortion debate. Both sides assume that the way they term their justification for whatever position they take — for pro choicers, they ( I should really say we) see it as a matter of reproductive/women’s rights and autonomy; for pro-lifers it’s a matter of protecting the unborn — is the way the other side conceptualizes their position. So pro-choicers claim that pro-lifers simply don’t care about women’s rights, while pro-lifers call pro-choicers baby killers. This is exactly what Gerson does; since he sees his pro-life views as part and parcel of his concern for the powerless, ergo , pro-choicers must not care about the powerless.

This imputation of one’s own model for decision making onto others is not exactly a productive nor proper way to argue about something, as Gerson shows pretty well.

Pro-Baby, Pro-Family, Pro-Choice

Jill of Feministe mentions a new study by the Guttmacher Institute discussing why women actually get abortions. It turns out that it’s not a desire to destroy The Family, make baby Jesus cry or anything like that, instead, it’s because they want to do better for their current and future children, and that an unwanted pregnancy would interfere with better parenting and family conditions.

“We found that consideration of motherhood issues in abortion decision-making falls into two broad areas: responsibilities for existing children and the ‘ideal’ conditions of motherhood,” says Rachel K. Jones, senior researcher with the Guttmacher Institute. “Among those women with children, the most commonly cited reason for choosing to have an abortion was the concern that having another child would compromise the care given to existing children. Women felt that they were already stretched thin financially, emotionally and physically—and they wanted to put the children they already had front and center. Two-thirds of women who gave this answer were at or below the poverty line and received little help from their partners.”

In addition, many of the women surveyed made direct and indirect references to the “ideal” conditions of motherhood, expressing the view that children are entitled to stable and loving families, financial security, and a high level of care and attention. Because the women were unable to provide those conditions at the time, they did not feel they were in a position to have a child or, if they were already mothers, an additional child.

“Many of these women were already raising children in situations that were less than ideal, and when faced with the possibility of bringing another child into this environment, they preferred to wait until they were in a better situation to be good parents,” says Jones. “These women believed that it was more responsible to terminate a pregnancy than to have a child whose health and welfare could be in question.”

What’s really weird is that when abortion is debated, it’s often framed in the most extreme ways. On one hand, we have discussion of abortion as a “species of homicide” or as “exploitation”, while on the other side, we have a type of autonomy uber alles argumentation that leaves many people cold when discussing methods of abortion that pull at the emotional and sub-rational instincts of people, such as late term abortions. The Guttmacher article says that many women get abortions because they’re financially stretched thin, yet we rarely hear of these women or decision making processes when discussing abortion. Instead, in so much as abortion and poverty have intersected in the national discourse, it’s been to prevent women and families who would most benefit from an open abortion access regime — i.e. poor women — from getting government funding through Medicaid.

But let’s get back to the framing issue. The truth is that not very many people are abortion ideologues, on either side; instead most people seem to be basically uncomfortable with abortion but think that an abortion regime that allows a reasonable amount of access to most people is better than the alternatives. And, in people’s personal experience, they see why people get abortions and the conditions in which abortion occurs. But this personal experience is never reflected in the debate, largely because the words “pro-family” or “family values” have been so corrupted and owned by Republicans. Republicans can appeal to voters who think that, for whatever reason, our culture has gone too far. Now, they don’t do this by enacting any actual policies to prevent or arrest this process, instead they try to treat the symptoms of this general feeling of cultural decline and uneasiness by mandating abstinence only sex-ed, parental notification laws, and occasionally putting stickers on video games or movies. But Democrats have children too and also worry about cultural decline and the environment in which their kids are raised. The problem comes because Democrats, and I think this is a good thing, are the party of cultural dynamism and advancement, and can’t really be the party of “wasn’t the culture better before?” And so the pro-family issue and family values gets trapped in a GOP that isn’t really concerned with actual needs of working families.

Getting back to abortion — it’s no surprise that abortion is discussed in a rights-based, autonomy frame. After all, Roe vs Wade was something of the last triumph of rights-based liberalism, and many, correctly, view abortion qua abortion has a pure autonomy issue. But in case you haven’t noticed, rights-based liberalism isn’t exactly a hot commodity these days. William Saletan suggested this alternate way of framing abortion rights:

Maybe there is. The purists have to accept the pragmatists’ means, and the pragmatists have to focus on the purists’ ends. Together, they need a message that is conservative but can undermine the restrictions countenanced by the pro-family, antigovernment argument. Look at the women left out in the cold by that argument: teenagers, poor women of childbearing age, and women with late-term complications. What do these women have in common? They’re all in lousy situations for bearing and raising children. And they’re all likely—or in the case of late-term complications, virtually certain—to want children later, when they’re old enough, healthy enough, or financially stable enough. They don’t want abortions. They want to be moms—when they’re ready.

Now, many abortion rights advocates have been making this argument that more access to abortion means healthier mothers, children and families, but it still hasn’t really resonated. I imagine there are two reasons for this. One, activists see themselves as countering other activists, and in the case of abortion, that means people who think abortion is murder. The abortion-on-demand for healthier families argument will not convince those who view abortion as a species of homicide, and so its best to stick with your guns. The second reason, and this is much more of a guess, is that many abortion rights people are genuinely conflicted as to the value of the two-parent, husband-wife nuclear family as the basis for how we make decisions about social policy, or at least see the political advocacy of “the family” as having been irretrievably tainted by the right.

But the need to emphasize the synergy between abortion and healthy families will only grow. As Saletan points out, America is basically pro-choice, but we have put limits on how pro-choice we can, “choice” and “autonomy” rhetoric can only get us so far. After all, parental notification and the Hyde amendment don’t restrict the negative rights of free adults, the “choice” of teens and poor women is still protected, in a narrow sense.

A thicker explanation of how abortion makes families better and healthier would help people who have general uneasiness about social and cultural decline still see the availability of abortion to teens and the poor as a public good to provide, not just a “choice” to narrowly and inconsistently protect.

 

Take That, Clinton!

Despite Obama’s “present” votes on abortion related bills in the Illinois State Senate, according to Terence Jeffrey, “Obama is the Most Pro-Abortion Candidate Ever.”  While those of us who support reproductive rights might tinker with the wording — we’re pro-choice, not pro-abortion — this headline might get the award for being the most hyperbolic, while at the same time reassuring a large section of the population (of course, these people would be pro-choicers deciding between Clinton and Obama). Jeffrey’s main piece of evidence for saying that Obama loves abortion so much is his present vote on a set of bills to “protect” infants who survive very late term abortions, “On the Illinois Senate floor, Obama was the only senator to speak against the baby-protecting bills. He voted “present” on each, effectively the same as a “no.” So if anti-choicers think that “present” is the same as yes, than maybe Clinton should reconsider being the only interested party to portray Obama’s abortion record as being anything but very pro-choice.

Why Science Doesn’t Matter For Abortion

Ross wonders why Ramesh Ponnuru’s The Party of Death, which to its credit, made a serious scientific/philosophical argument against abortion, did not receive a more serious response from liberals who mostly disregarded it. Ross tries to paper over the most obvious reason - that the book called the Democrats the “Party of Death”. Outside of Lee Edelman, not very many left-of-center folks view that type of framing as an invitation to an open, intellecutally honest and fair debate. Which was too bad, because Ramesh’s arguments, while not convincing to me, were certainly thought provoking - maybe it’s the fact that I’ll never become pregnant that lets me see arguments for radically decreasing women’s autonomy and safety as “thought provoking” the same way say, mereological nihilism is, but I digress.

The point is that there is very little interest in this type of philosophical or scientific reasoning on both sides about when life begins, what constitutes a person, whether an abortion is letting die or active killing or the significance of the fetus’ dependence on the mother. For abortion partisans — so excluding otherwise liberal types like Mario Cuomo who make the rather tenuous argument about how their own moral judgment about abortion is irrelevant to their public policy — abortion is largely a symbol for their larger views. So when you hear, say, Ann Friedman or Amanda Marcotte discuss abortion, they always talk about patriarchy, autonomy and the safety of the women. When you hear those who are strongly pro-life discuss abortion, they talk a good game about baby killing, but it’s hard to think they actually mean it. I mean, if you actually thought 40 million human beings had been killed since 1973, with the protection of the Supreme Court, there’d probably be a lot more abortion related terrorism. Besides Nat Hentoff, it’s very, very rare for there to be a strong pro-life advocate who one can really believe came to that position through a careful reflection of the scientific and philosophical evidence for why an embryo or fetus should receive the legal protections of a full human being. The correlation between conservative social views on female sexuality, marriage and the like and strong pro-life views is just too high for there not to be some very strong connection. So, debates about abortion are oftentimes just devolve into debates about the virtues of social liberalism or feminism versus more conservative or traditional morality — not that those aren’t important and interesting debates, it’s just that because of this dynamic, Ross and Ramesh shouldn’t be all shocked that no pro-choice liberal was all that interested in debating the fine points of a book called the Party of Death.

Quickening Canard

Minipundit points to a Gary Wills Op-Ed where he makes the (good) argument that Jesus didn’t have much to say about abortion or homosexuals and the (bad) argument that because Thomas Aquinas didn’t really know anything about human development, he was relatively open to abortion:

Lacking scriptural guidance, St. Thomas Aquinas worked from Aristotle’s view of the different kinds of animation — the nutritive (vegetable) soul, the sensing (animal) soul and the intellectual soul. Some people used Aristotle to say that humans therefore have three souls. Others said that the intellectual soul is created by human semen.
Aquinas denied both positions. He said that a material cause (semen) cannot cause a spiritual product. The intellectual soul (personhood) is directly created by God “at the end of human generation.” This intellectual soul supplants what had preceded it (nutritive and sensory animation). So Aquinas denied that personhood arose at fertilization by the semen. God directly infuses the soul at the completion of human formation.

This is all well and good for pro-choicers to be able to say “hah! Thomas Aquinas is on our side.” But it’s also pretty intellectually dishonest. Aquinas argument is one made in ignorance of modern medical science, he did not know that a genetically unique individual (not a person, if you ask me) is created at conception. Aquinas was essentially grasping at straws to create a rubric for understanding a process of which he was totally ignorant. What Wills is doing is the functional equivalent of citing Aristotle’s metaphysics, which are rooted in his false physics. If Aquinas were to know medical science now, I’m pretty sure he would take the standard pro-life line of genetically unique individual at conception = person. Peter Singer, in Rethinking Life and Death, has the best explanation of why the Aquinian position on abortion is rather nonsensical:

It is true that the condemnation of abortion form the time of conception as mortal sin is a relatively new doctrine for the church. But the reason for the church’s change in view on the stage of pregnancy at which abortion becomes the killing of a human was surely…a sound one. Once modern biology had shown the actual nature of early human development, the church had little choice but to abandon its support for the unscientific Aristotelian embryology of Thomas Aquinas…After quickening was rejected as the point from which human life was sacrosanct, to embrace any other point in the development of the fetus would have given rise to awkward questions about where to draw the line…Thus the prohibition on abortion at any stage of pregnancy became a necessary part of the church’s teaching on the sanctity of human life.

There are many better arguments for the pro-choice position than the gimmick of trying to convince the world that the most important Catholic theologian in history is one of us.

Abortion Elitism

George Will tells us that what a candidate thinks about abortion doesn’t really matter:

Nevertheless, it is said that if the Republican Party wants to be competitive in California in presidential politics, it must nominate a pro-choice candidate, of which there is only one — Rudy Giuliani. This is almost certainly true. It certainly is irrational because pro-choice Californians have next to nothing to fear — just as pro-life Californians have next to nothing to hope for — from a right-to-life president. The practical consequences of such a president concerning abortion would not differ significantly from Giuliani’s consequences

On the simple manner, the status of Roe vs Wade doesn’t greatly effect California’s abortion laws.  It would take the election of Skeletor to make California ban abortion.  But, when I vote in the 2008 election, I won’t just be thinking about abortion in California.  And even if I was solely concerned with California abortion rights, Minipundit points out that when Congress can ban an abortion procedure nationwide, while Roe vs Wade is supposedely in full effect, maybe abortion rights aren’t so safe - even in California.

Also, the Hyde amendment, which was passed by Congress in the late 1970s to ban federal funding for abortion, is exactly the type of abortion-rights question that is so blithely skipped over by commentators like George Will and Jeffrey Rosen who champion the “federalist solution” to the abortion question. In Will-World, abortion rights have been guaranteed across the land by Supreme fiat.  On the ground, the story is different. It is very difficult for poor women in conservative states that have a raft of technically legal regulations and nuisances intended to minimize access to abortion, such as Kansas, to actually “choose.” So contra Will, at the national and state levels, our elected representatives have a lot of say over abortion access and rights.  It’s just that in a post-Roe world, it’s poor women who are affected most by federal, state and local abortion regulation.

Common Carriers

Verizon is taking heat for rejecting a text message program by NARAL as being too controversial:

Saying it had the right to block “controversial or unsavory” text messages, Verizon Wireless has rejected a request from Naral Pro-Choice America, the abortion rights group, to make Verizon’s mobile network available for a text-message program.

Not surprisingly, net neutrality advocates are using this as just another example of what happens in a non net neutral world.   And it’s true, the spirit of net neutrality regulation would certainly prohibit this type of selective allowance of Verizon’s network.  But the thing is, for voice transmissions, Verizon’s behavior would be illegal — and would have been for decades.  Common voice carriers — like Verizon’s phone service — can’t block voice data they transmit on the basis of its content.  For some reason, this regulatory structure hasn’t caught up with text messaging.   It wouldn’t require some new regulatory apparatus to ensure that Verizon couldn’t engage in this behavior, the government just has to extend the common carrier protection for voice transmission to text, and voila, political groups can use SMS to get their message out.  Pretty simple stuff.

This Is What’s The Matter With Kansas

Whenever you hear pro-choice liberals talk about returning abortion to the states, think of two things. One, why do women get less reproductive freedom depending on where they live and two, if pro-lifers really think abortion is murder, will they stop caring about the issue until abortion is illegal everywhere? The inevitable decline in reproductive freedom greeting a return of abortion to the states is already being presaged in Kansas.

Cara, blogmistress of The Curvature, notes that Kansas has a ridiculous law for late term abortions - it mandates that two doctors, who aren’t involved with the doctor providing the procedure, sign off on any late term abortion. It’s worth noting that Kansas requires this oversight for no other medical procedure. To say that this an absurd burden to place on already burdened women - most late term abortion are due to extreme risks to the woman’s health or severe fetal deformities - doesn’t really capture how inane this law is.

Dr. George Tiller, who is one of the few late term abortion providers in the country, is being prosecuted for having a financial relationship with one of the doctors he got to sign off on one of the abortions he performed. This is what happens when you an impotent pro-choice movement and Democratic party that is all too happy to sacrifice those who need abortions the most (the poor and those who require emergency late-term ones) for those who need them the least (the rich, who can get them early).

Judith Warner on Partial Birth Abortion

I really have nothing to add to her article, she basically nails it on all the reasons that the partial birth abortion ban was incredibly misguided.  It relied on a vague, “that’s icky” emotional response to get otherwise weakly pro-choice people to support it - and then be silent when the court upheld the ban.  And though PBA may be “icky,” the result for the fetus in any other type of abortion is the same.  The only change is that we have unprecedented judicial meddling in the type of procedure a doctor can legally do, meddling that not only infantilizes women and doctors, but also endangers women’s health.

 It criminalized any second trimester abortion that begins with a live fetus and where “the fetal head or the fetal trunk past the navel is outside the body of the mother.”

The big problem with this, doctors say, is that, due to the unpredictability of how women’s bodies react to medical procedures, when you set out to do a legal second trimester abortion, something looking very much like a now-illegal abortion can occur. Once you dilate the cervix — something that must be done sufficiently in order to avoid tears, punctures and infection — a fetus can start to slip out. And if this happens, any witness — a family member, a nurse, anyone in the near vicinity with an ax to grind against a certain physician — can report that the ban has been breached. Bringing on stiff fines, jail time and possible civil lawsuits.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the court’s majority, asserted that prosecution for accidental partial births won’t occur; there has to be “intent” for there to be a crime. But as doctors now understand it, intent could be inferred by the degree of dilation they induce in their patients. What, then, do they do? Dilate the cervix sufficiently and risk prosecution, or dilate less and risk the woman’s health? And if they dilate fully, how do they prove it wasn’t their intent to deliver an intact fetus?

How Much Time Should She Do?

A question that has long riled pro-choicers like myself - if abortion really is the equivalent of murder, then how much time should the woman who gets the abortion do? - has finally been dragged into the spotlight by Anna Quindlen. And the National Review has put together a symposium of pro-lifers to explain their positions. It should be noted that NRO deserves some props for putting this together - these debates are always better when the positions of both sides are actually recorded.

My quick reading of the symposium indicates that none of the people really grapple with the question to its logical extreme. Instead, the symposium is a combination of history on why women traditionally haven’t been considered perpetrators, haranguing about the evils of the “for profit” “abortion industry, and pragmatic concerns about why making women serve time wouldn’t be popular or advance the ends of the pro-life movement. I’m not going to comb through every entry and argue with it - just note that many of the entries directly traffic in the infantilizing rhetoric that so irritates feminists - that the women are the “second victim” of the abortion.

The problem of this entire exercise for us pro choicers, with all the self congratulation of catching pro-lifers at their nadir of illogic and misogyny, is that it’s totally futile. The only people who look at women as being fully culpable in getting an abortion are pro-choice anyway, so being able to go “hah! you’re infantilizing women!” isn’t going to embarrass pro-lifers very much or get them to reconsider their views. Moreover, if they all take the perspective that women are always pressured into abortion by the “abortion industry” and evil doctors, then the argument that women are the “second victim” will not seem at all inconsistent with calling abortion murder. If we could just accept that pro lifers think that abortion is murder, like real murder of people AND many have infantilizing views of the women who actually get abortion - and they don’t view this as inconsistent or illogical, the choice movement would be much better off.

So great, we caught the pro-lifers caught up in their own bullshit, now what?

PS - Tom McCluskey, the PR man for the Family Research Council, clearly doesn’t know his anecdotes:

Anna Quindlen’s smug musings remind me of the befuddled New York socialite who, after Ronald Reagan’s win in 1980 said, “But I don’t know anyone who voted for him!”

I doubt McCluskey actually ever spoke to anyone who meets that profile and said anything like that - so he’s clearly referring to the apocryphal quote traditionally attributed to film critic Pauline Kael after Nixon’s reelection in 1972:

“I can’t understand how Nixon could have won: no one I know voted for him.”

Of course, there’s no record of Kael - or Susan Sontag or Joan Didion or Katherine Graham - ever actually saying this. The closest to the quote was this by Kael, “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.”

Gattacagenics?

Ross backs down from the semantics, but charges forth with the substance on the entire abortion-eugenics-biotechnology-progressivism debate.

  In the case of Gattaccagenics, that’s where the logic of Roe-style reproductive rights will carry progressives, I predict - to open-ended opposition to any attempt to restrict genetically-selective abortion and (eventually) genetic engineering in utero, whether it’s intended to eliminate Down’s Syndrome today, or autism tomorrow, or homosexuality or a predisposition to cancer or what-have-you the day after that.

Two things, its unclear how genetic engineering in utero is really all that objectionable.  From a pro-life standpoint, it should even be preferable to selective abortions, because the fetuses are altered, not destroyed.  Moreover, it seems absurd to object to engineering a fetus with Down syndrome or autism to not have those diseases.  Hell, it would be near unconscionable to not “engineer” the fetus in those situations.  I feel people like Ross should welcome the engineering of fetuses in utero - it allows parents to avoid being saddled with an unfair, random burden while preserving the life of the fetus.  Of course, this engineering is still far off - at least in the way Ross describes.

Another thing - when reading pro-choice “liberal eugenics” opponents like Michael Sandel, or any liberal eugenics skeptics, I can’t shake the feeling that they are being awfully imperious. Their celebration of the wonder and mystery of parenthood doesn’t seem to grapple with the fact that many parents don’t have the resources, desire or energy to raise children with crippling genetic diseases.   Also, Sandel and co. constantly talk about “Promethean ambitions” and “exalted place for human beings in the cosmos” when discussing this whole host of issues.  This annoying vocabulary seems to be a classic case of what happens when philosophers and intellectuals approach an issue like this.  For the people who actually practice liberal eugenics, they do not think of themselves as Prometheus or pursuing some Progressive Historical telos the cosmos, instead it’s the aggregation of many parents individual choices for them and their families.  To ascribe greater notions - just because that’s how philosophers and intellectuals trained to think - is greatly missing the point of the actual reality of the situation.

If we could discuss genetic engineering, enhancement, PHD, eugenics, abortion and the like without the word “Prometheus” being said, or the notion brought up at all, both sides would be much better off.  I think the punishment for the next person to do so should be an eagle eating their liver.

Dana Goldstein…

speaks the truth.   Some days I dream about a Democratic president giving a fiery speech about how bad the Hyde amendment is - something that will never happen if the entire abortion issue is “de-politicized” It should be noted that “de-politicization” is basically a strategy that protects abortion rights for those who need them least - wealthy, older women - while leaving younger, poor women out to dry.

Making it Permanent

This is an issue I’ve had, uhh, very little interaction with - 20 something women getting tubal ligations (ie - getting their tubes tied). Not to surprisingly, many doctors refuse to perform the surgery on women who are under 30. Not too surprisingly, Ann at feministing takes offense:

Is it a medical professional’s job to “protect” women from their own decisions? Is it a pharmacist’s right to make medical and ethical judgments like whether to dispense contraception? If you’re a doctor who’s happy to provide tubal ligations to older women, it seems totally out of sync to deny them to younger women who are equally certain they’ll never want to reproduce.

I am very sympathetic to women’s medical and reproductive autonomy being highly valued, but I’m torn on this issue. Surely Ann would admit that there’s a difference between the type of medicinal paternalism being practiced in the case of Laura Green, the 25 year old graduate student who has been uniformly turned down for tubal ligation, and in the case of procuring an abortion or getting the morning after pill. For starters, getting morning after or an abortion are both time sensitive in a way tubal ligation isn’t. Moreover, tubal ligation also has permanence that abortions and birth control do not.

For feminist activists, it makes sense to immediately blanch at any question of a woman’s reproductive autonomy or her standing to receive certain medical treatment - especially on the Justice Kennedy esque grounds of “we must protect women from their future selves.” There is however a stark difference between abortions and tubal ligation - while the only likely future negative consequence of abortion is some sort of emotional pain (the risks of such are serially overstated by anti-choice groups), tubal ligation makes it impossible for a woman to have her own children if she changes her mind. And yes, while birth control can be inconvenient, it seems prudent for doctors to at least make sure women don’t rush into such a decision. Additionally, there are the standard risks with come any surgery.

And yes, that justification seems awfully paternalistic, but I’d argue that everyone under 30 could use some soft paternalism, and permanent decisions of this nature ought to be extensively thought through, and then thought through some more. Doctors also have extensive personal and collective wisdom on this issue, so when there’s a near unanimous position- even among those doctors who work at organizations that provide abortions - against doing this surgery for women under 30, I feel that there should be stronger arguments against it than claims of agency, especially considering tubal ligation’s elective nature.

I feel it’s well within a doctor’s purview to counsel against elective, dramatically life changing surgery at such a young age. Does this conclusion seemingly rely on common stereotypes of young women being “fickle” and emotionally and intellectually immature? Maybe it does, but just saying that doctors are acting in a possibly stereotypical manner is not a reason to say that the decision of thousands of OB/GYNs is prima facie wrong, just a reason to question it.

Reproductive Justice?

By way of Pandagon, we have Jill Morrison lamenting that fertility clinics and sperm banks require women to go through an interview and only to assist women if they demonstrate emotional maturity and that they have a support structure and financial resources to raise the child.

There are two immediate reactions to this. One is that this process seems discriminatory and unjust, as Jill puts it, if we go down the road of financial security far enough, only Trumps and Hiltons could reproduce. The second reaction is of course fertility clinics should do this. If you’re going to assist a mother becoming pregnant, you should make sure that it’s a good decision for the mother AND potential child. It would be the height of irresponsibility to assist a women in becoming pregnant if you knew that she would not be able to support the child.  Things would be better if all women and couples could fulfill those criteria if they had children.

This entire issue is clearly fraught with emotion and conflicting considerations. Should we require those on welfare to take birth control (we did, and there was the entire Norplant controversy). If poor women could have children while married, at a later age and with some sort of support structure, everyone would be better off, not least the children being born into these situations. The question is how hard we try to optimize the poor’s reproduction. A certain utilitarian logic says that if raising children in deleterious and undesirable situations (poor, single mothers with no support structure for raising them) enacts a social cost on everyone through higher crime, likelihood to require government services and then perpetuating those pathologies onto their children then the government has to act. And especially if those mothers and families are being subsidized by the government through welfare services, then they’d even be obligated to act.

The problem is that the extreme solutions - government and judges mandating that women can’t have children, refusing to support those that to, attaching birth control provisions to welfare - are widely viewed as quasi-eugenic and abhorrent. There will, however, always be a pressure for those types of actions and policies - if the costs of unwanted children and those children born in bad situations is socialized and spread to everyone, then that same “everyone” should be able to enact policies to lower that cost, or at least they’ll want to. The solution is a set of policies that encourage family planning, contraceptive use, having children after marriage, encouraging marriage as well as making abortion more widely available to the poor(ie repeal the Hyde amendment).

I imagine the Morrisons and Marcottes of the world would agree with those policy outcomes, so maybe this all a matter of framing the issue, but protecting the “right” for women who objectively shouldn’t be having children to have children seems to be unwise.  It’s hard to say that there’s a “right” to engage in behavior that is causally connected to worsening conditions for many people, especially those who are most disadvantaged.

Why No One Cares About the Talented Violinist

Dean Barnett via Marcotte:

Because we don’t know where life begins, the only logical thing to do is to err on the side of caution — the side of life. In other words, because an abortion might take an innocent life, it should be avoided. It should also be illegal in most cases.

Barnett, Tonto to Hugh Hewitt’s Lone Ranger, tries to make the case for the secular pro life position. Its sensible enough, we all agree that destroying innocent life is bad, and we don’t‘ know when life begins, it seems reasonable enough to assume it begins at conception, ergo, no abortions!

Amanda, in her typical style, combines intelligent insight with illiberal name-calling that adds nothing to her argument (ed - cmon man, you’re trying to be a liberal blogger, do you really need to bag on Marcotte, you already kissed Larison’s ass, what’s next, linking approvingly to Kaus?!)

Personally, I believe life begins at ejaculation, so to err on the side of caution, we should castrate every man in the country so he can’t ejaculate and murder billions of sperm. Luckily, this program doesn’t have any effects on the rights and lives of actual human beings, so there is no reason to quarrel with it.

Plus, innocent sperm are just like slaves and to be pro-ejaculation is to be pro-racist.

Seriously, I read that thing up and down and he does not mention the existence of women, even once. He seems to think babies come from cabbage patches.

Ok, a few things. Those first two statements, while funny, indicate that either a. Marcotte doesn’t understand Barnett’s argument (unlikely) or b. despite her understanding, she decides to ridicule and caricature his point. She knows that there is a reason a logically minded person would pick conception as life’s starting point, especially instead of ejaculation. I mean, it’s not like the fertilized egg has the genetic identity of the human it could become, or any significant distinction like that. Her overall point, that these discussions of abortion which are singularly fixed on “when life begins” ignore a necessary part of the debate, the fate and rights of the women who get, or don’t get, abortions. She is right about Barnett and she illuminates one of the most interesting aspects of the abortion debate.

In a simplistic analysis, there are two competing rights claims. One, the right to life or protection from wanton destruction by fetus. Two, the right of women to determine their own reproduction, the sovereignty of their bodies etc etc. In this simple world, we would do something like consider if these fetus’ count as “life” and if they were say, like born human life, protecting them from destruction would surely outweighs the women’s claim to reproductive autonomy. It is, of course, more messy than this. One could imagine, a sliding scale of life, where as days after fertilization increases, life increases, and so the obligation to protect that life increases. A woman’s autonomy, however, would also have a certain obligation to project. This system would imply a cut off point, a point where a fetus has enough “life” so that its right to life outweighs the woman’s right to autonomy and privacy. This system, however, sounds barbaric, bizarre and an awful example of the calculative mindset gone too far. However, it is roughly the “abortion is kinda bad, but OK up until the end of the 1st trimester” view that many people hold.

Abortion looks like a question that could be solved philosophically, when does life begin seems like a question that philosophers are qualified to solve. And, not surprisingly, there are serious and well thought out arguments on both sides. Though it may seem like the pro-lifers have a simpler, more intuitive argument, Judith Jarvis Thompson’s famous paper, “A Defense of Abortion” with the canonical violinist analogy certainly scores points for sophistication and elegance philosophically. But even she misses the point. Abortion debates, for the most part, are about conflicting views regarding women’s role in society and the optimal level of socially acceptable sexual freedom and autonomy rather than ‘when life begins’

I don’t want to accuse “philosophical” pro lifers of false consciousness, but it is incredibly rare for someone to advocate the pro-life position and not have a corresponding set of views about sexuality in society. That’s why many think, including me, that Dean Barnett is being disingenuous, he works for Hugh Hewitt, who has generally conservative views about sexual politics and thus we can assume Dean does as well. Usually it is easier to figure out, for example Robert George and Ramesh Ponnuru both make “philosophical” or logical arguments about why abortion is wrong, but they are also both forthcoming about their views on the corresponding issues of sexual freedom and the like. This, in a technical sense, should be unrelated, but we all know it isn’t. The big question is: do those who approach abortion firmly from the feminist or sexual freedom/autonomy view (Marcotte, most feminists) even care about when life begins, do they think about it? Should we even care?