This first appeared a while back on Splice Today.
Abortion is an act of violence. There’s not really any way to get around that. Therefore, if you oppose violence, you should oppose abortion — or so Ross Douthat argues in his column a bit back at the New York Times.
Douthat focuses specifically on the recent media flurry around Kermit Gosnell, a doctor in Philadelphia who specialized in gory, late term, unsafe abortions. The left wing and feminist media had covered Gosnell extensively, arguing that he was a horrible, bloody example of the results of Pennsylvania’s tight restrictions on late-term termination of pregnancy. Mainstream meida, however, had been less interested in covering the case. In Douthat’s view, this was because the mainstream media knew that its viewers would be horrified and disturbed by the details. Douthat argues that feminist and committed pro-choice advocates have made their peace with the violence of abortion. Others, though are more conflicted. For those in the “mushy middle” as Douthat says, the revelation of the brutality of abortion is off-putting — and so the mushily pro-choice mainstream media avoided the story.
Or, as Douthat sums up his argument:
To respond effectively to the doubts about abortion that fetal snipping summons up, pro-choice advocates would need arguments that (to rephrase Senior’s language) acknowledge and come to terms with the goriness of third-trimester abortions while simultaneously persuading the conflicted and uncommitted of their validity, and that somehow take ownership of the “violence” and “gruesomeness” of abortion (to borrow Harris’s words) without giving aid and comfort to the pro-life cause. And in the absence of such arguments, the pro-choice response to Gosnell feels either evasive and euphemistic, or else logically consistent in ways that tend to horrify the unconvinced — and in either case, inadequate to the challenge his case presents to the cause of abortion rights.
I think Douthat’s argument is right as far as it goes. Gosnell highlights the violence of abortion, and when people see that violence, they are repulsed.
What Douthat fails to note, though, is that restricting abortion is also violent — and sometime gruesomely so. Pregnancy is an intimate and difficult process; birth, as even men are aware, is extremely painful. To force someone to carry a baby to term and give birth against their will is to subject them to months of coercion ending in terrible physical pain. In extreme cases, as when the mother’s life is endangered by the pregnancy, refusal to allow abortions can be a death sentence. In cases of rape or incest, the outlawing of abortion can consign a woman to hideous, inhuman psychological trauma. This is why Todd Akins and his ilk try to deny that abortion from rape can occur — because, if they once admit that it can, the cruelty and violence of the radical pro-life position becomes painfully clear.
Douthat suggests that the mushy middle would be moved to oppose abortion, or at least late term abortion, if it only understood how hideous and violent the pro-choice position is. One might argue, on the contrary, that if the mushy middle really thought about cases of rape or incest or where the mother’s life is threatened, they would see how hideous and violent the pro-life position is. But the truth is that the abortion debate has been going on for a really long time; pro-life groups have fully publicized the violence and gruesomeness of late term abortions; pro-choice groups have fully publicized the violence and cruelty of denying abortion in cases of rape or when the mother’s life is threatened.
The mushy middle remains the mushy middle not because people don’t understand the violence, but rather because they understand that, on this issue, there is no escape from violence. On the one hand, there are dead fetuses; on the other, there are tortured women. Douthat suggests we can have clean hands if we step away from the first…but that’s only because he’s ignoring the second. Those in the mushy middle may not have thought about the issue as much as he has, but their confusion and ambivalence seems considerably more honest.
This is why, now, as ever, the best approach to abortion is to make it, wherever possible, unnecessary — by making contraception easily available, by providing sex ed, by improving social services so that raising children is not such an economic burden. Once a woman is pregnant with a child she does not want, your only option is to use state force to inflict violence against an actual human in the name of preventing violence to a potential human. I’m pro-choice in pretty much all circumstances, but I understand why some people come down in a different place. Douthat, in his column, quotes several pro-choice writers acknowledging the violence of their position. I wish Douthat was honest enough to acknowledge the violence of his.
Like most discussions of violence, it’s usually the case that one kind of violence is justified by another kind of violence. And it’s harder because both violences (rape and labor, prenatal death) are ubiquitous and (with the exception of rape) natural and semi-inevitable. And then one gets connected to the Ten Commandments and the other to gender equality. Those are hard to hold in your head all at the same time.
Douthat is one of those guys who wants to stop government interference. Except when he wants the government to interfere.
Ayo Bert, do you think that “natural” is really a helpful category to use here? With contraception and all that the way that it is, I don’t think that “natural” is really very interesting to use when talking about rich people childbirth in the richest countries, except if some smiling parent is talking about the awe n natural beauty of seein their child born which is a stupid use of “natural” but o well. But anyway you grouped up natural with semi-inevitable and ubiquitous so I get what you were gesturin at I just don’t think that those words are very helpful to use when talkin about rich people reproduction. The only place where those words really come out in talking about pregnancy etc. is with poor people transnationally. You feel that? We technologized our way out of natural/semi-inevitable/ubiquitous labor/prenatal death (statistically, o course, we ain’t making any total claims).
Noah, I agree that we should do everything possible to improve options other than abortion. As another example, I would point out the National Council for Adoption (https://www.adoptioncouncil.org/), which has worked for decades to make adoption easier and more economically feasible for both birth parents and adoptive families. There are also agencies (religious and secular, government and private) that provide financial and emotional support and counseling for women with unplanned pregnancies. But I think you’re creating a false equivalency by comparing the violence of abortion and the violence of labor and delivery, or even the threat of state violence implied by a law. Of those, only one ends in death.
I don’t think a fetus has the same moral status as a human, so I don’t think it’s exactly right to say one ends in the death of a human being.
Okay. What makes the fetus non-human?
Well, all of these distinctions are somewhat arbitrary, obviously, but I don’t think a potential human is necessarily a human for all purposes.
I don’t think it’s cut and dried or anything, and obviously different people will have different takes.
I also don’t think it’s true that murder is always or in every case the most violent of all possible things to do to someone. Nine months of psychological torture followed by excruciating pain seems pretty excessively violent in any context.
I think psychological torture is an exaggeration, and the pain, while excruciating, is temporary.
I agree that without a commonly agreed standard for human life, we are making arbitrary calls. Still, fetuses share DNA and overall form with people we would both agree are human. They sleep and learn and move In response to stimuli, as though they were making themselves more comfortable. I think that is certainly “alive,” and it tips my scale for intuitively human. I’ve heard counterarguments, but never a convincing one, and never one that didn’t sound like the same sophistry used to rationalize violence against other so-called sub-humans. People I care about have had abortions, and I understand the pressure to “make the problem go away,” but I still think it’s wrong.
Just about all pain is temporary, including torture. It’s still torture.
Pregnancy is often very uncomfortable; it involves thoroughgoing changes to your body. I think if the state forced someone to undergo extensive hormone therapy, for example, that would be considered psychological torture. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that forcing someone to undergo pregnancy is very violent, and in the case of rape or incest especially I’d be very comfortable calling it psychological torture.
But you’re not limiting your position to rape or incest. You’re “pro-choice in pretty much all circumstances.” And billions of people with no taste for torture voluntarily get pregnant. Millions recklessly risk unwanted pregnancy, even after carrying a previous unwanted pregnancy to term. I don’t think we can logically call their experience “torture.”
Others in different circumstances have a much more difficult time. Some of them would probably rather go through torture than the shame or alienation from family or sheer panic over their future that they go through. It hurts me to know that they experience that, and I think we should do everything we can to help them through it, but I don’t think that should include killing an innocent bystander to make the pain stop.
I think there’s a pretty strong line between “killing an innocent bystander” and abortion. Do you have the right to demand that a woman give her body to support this life? That’s a rather different question than whether you have the right to shoot someone standing over there.
My point in the article was that extreme cases underline the violence inherent in the system. Do you really think day after pills when the possible fetus is a couple of cells constitute murdering a person?
To answer your second question first — I don’t know, and I don’t know if we can know, so in a question of life and death, I’d rather err on the side of caution.
Regarding your first question, I think the woman has a moral responsibility to protect the child, because she’s the only one who can. I believe she has a legal responsibility to care for the child also, the same as she would the second it was born. The fact that the child is resident within her body makes the situation more poignant, but it doesn’t change that responsibility.
That’s not a position I’m emotionally 100% comfortable with. I wish the mother had more options during the pregnancy. But I’m even less comfortable with every other position, and this is the one that I think is most logically defensible.
Re: caution. Saying it’s a matter of life and death seems to me to be a statement that you’re trying to err on the side of nonviolence. But there is no nonviolent option. Trying to minimize the violence of the option you don’t like is what Douthat is doing, and it’s why I’m criticizing him.
” I think the woman has a moral responsibility to protect the child, because she’s the only one who can.”
Saying she has a moral responisbility in your view is somewhat different than forcing her to deal with that moral responsibility in the way you proscribe. It puts her moral responsibility not to use force above your moral responsibility not to use force. Forcing other people to be nonviolent as a moral statement is deeply problematic.
I’d say I’m trying to err on the side of minimizing violence.
Isn’t forcing other people to be nonviolent as a moral statement exactly what the law does with every statute against violent crime? Isn’t that what the state’s monopoly on violence is for?
It is to some extent, sure. That’s why Christian alliance with the state is really problematic.
I think there’s also a question of whether the issue with state sanctions is really morality, or whether it’s a more practical maintenance of order. I also think that you run into extremely difficult territory when you start setting moral standards that only apply to one extensively discriminated against class of people.
Thanksgiving with in-laws that don’t like one another is problematic. Jefferson and de Tocqueville and I (and probably you) all agree that Christian alliance with the state, or even particular political parties, is beyond problematic. It does little good for the state and it’s toxic for the church.
But we’re talking about legalized abortion on-demand, which many Christians, some Jews, some atheists, and most Muslims and Buddhists are against, and some Christians and many others are for.
I think the law has to reflect the most commonly held standards of morality in a society to be effective at maintaining order. Laws that are stricter than those standards breed rampant scofflaws, as in the Prohibition era, and laws that are not strict enough breed vigilantes. Both are symptoms of the law’s loss of legitimacy. That need to reflect common standards is why so much criminal legislation is still left up to the states in this country. It’s also why laws in many states are so incoherent regarding abortion. They reflect the populace’s conflicted thinking. (The incoherence I’m talking about is the fact that many states regard killing a fetus as a result of committing battery to be homicide, but abortion is not.)
The moral standard of responsibility for the child applies to both parents. The fact that the standard affects one gender far more intimately than the other is an unavoidable circumstance of biology. I would still be pro-life if men got pregnant, but then I was raised to believe the man should marry the woman and be a proper husband and father. And the class that is most extensively discriminated against in this conversation is comprised of the unborn children, which includes people of both sexes.
“The fact that the standard affects one gender far more intimately than the other is an unavoidable circumstance of biology”
It’s not unavoidable though, is the issue. Technology changes things a lot. Giving women power over pregnancy is a big part of making it possible for women to be equal. Insisting that it’s biologically natural to put the good of the (not quite yet) child over the good of the woman is just inscribing gender difference through law while claiming some sort of transcendent natural basis for that law.
That’s part of why pro-choice folks can be so adamant about this. When I posted the link on twitter, an activist and (I believe) abortion doctor insisted that abortion was basically never violent, and implied I had no right to suggest otherwise since I’m a guy (or at least, that seemed to be where she was coming from; these things are a little difficult to parse on twitter.)
I’m actually not much interested in what’s biologically natural. I think a lot of morality, and a lot of civilization for that matter, is about resisting what’s natural — like the impulse for revenge, for example. And I think both women and men should have power over pregnancy before the fact, with contraception. I don’t think either should have the power to kill a fetus.
I understand what you’re saying about the cognitive dissonance of the adamantly pro-choice. Tell me what I get wrong here: You believe that a fetus is less than fully human, and therefore a lower priority than the legitimate needs of the mother. I don’t think you’ve made that case, but that’s what you believe. You ackowledge that the fetus is alive and that there is a moral dimension to this, however. You believe the legal ability for the woman to abort the fetus is so important that you’re willing to legally mandate access to abortion in pretty much all circumstances, even for women who want abortions for relatively frivolous reasons that you might find morally objectionable. The woman may make the wrong decision, but she’s the adult closest to the problem, and it’s a murky enough moral ground that you don’t want law enforcement or the judiciary making the decision. That makes sense to me. If I believed what you did about the fetus, I might feel the same way.
The type of pro-choice advocate who responded to your tweet, however, is different. She maintains, contrary to all evidence, that the fetus that sleeps, flips over, sucks its thumb, and reacts when it hears a familiar voice, is just tissue. Because she’s afraid that if she accepts the obvious fact that the fetus is a living thing, her rationalizations would slide down a precipitous, slippery slope and break into pieces at the bottom. I find it more difficult to respect that position.
Like I said, twitter is tricky; she didn’t really go into what exactly her thinking was. I suspect activists feel very much under siege though (literally, considering the way abortion providers can be targeted for violence.) So I assume that’s part of where she’s coming from.
But yes, you’ve got my position about right.
I also think in general that practically speaking focusing on birth control and education and resources for folks who have children is a much better way to reduce loss of life due to abortion, however defined. There is a long, long history or abortion and infanticide across cultures; it isn’t something that you’re going to eliminate by outlawing it, because the stakes for women (their bodies, their entire futures) are just too high.
My interlocutor on twitter was also angry at the suggestion that we should try to reduce abortions, or that abortions were a necessary evil.
Yeah, I know I was extrapolating a lot from your description of that response.
I acknowledge that outlawing actions doesn’t eliminate them, but it’s still a good idea sometimes. To extrapolate from my own argument about the law and morality above, though, we pro-lifers may be more effective at preventing abortion when we work to change everyday people’s minds about it and provide other options than we are when we lobby lawmakers and judges.
Abortion is used to dominate women, too. One of the women I know who told me about her abortion was pressured and manipulated by her boyfriend to do it. “Choice” implies a freedom she may have had, but certainly didn’t feel.
Yeah. Andrea Dworkin actually talks about abortion being used against woman a good deal in her book “Right Wing Women.”