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the inevitable abortion post
Monday night, both of my laptop's PCMCIA card slots stopped working, so until I get around to fixing that, I won't have 'net access on the laptop. I get to see how long I can last without being on lj every single waking hour!
The universally positive reaction to my last post surprised me. There are many things which would keep me from making headway in politics. My myriad personality flaws are one of them. My actual political positions are another. So I thought perhaps I'd elucidate one of them, as an example. Although it's probably not the best idea to post this when I won't be online full time to get comments, I will anyway, since my sister said I should.
Recent discussion about abortion rights on several fronts (and the fact that I'm apparently ovulating, since I've been dreaming I'm pregnant for the last few nights) has finally inspired to type up my own views on abortion. I warn you that a) this is insanely long and digressive, b) like my rant about gay marriage from several years ago, it is in the nature of a tertium quid, guaranteed to offend everybody regardless of their position on the subject, and c) it contains Bible slash.
Okay, my thoughts on abortion. Note that this is a discussion of ethics and morals; as to discussions of individual laws and court decisions, I don't know enough to debate it, and I don't really care. Roe v. Wade is probably not defensible under anything resembling constructionism, but then, activist judges are the main safety valve which keeps this country from going the way of the Roman Republic, and that's all I've got to say about that. Now, as for ethics:
I don't believe that abortion is necessarily murder. This is irrelevant to my opinion as to whether fetuses are human beings or not. In fact, I'm willing to accept that infanticide/exposure of newborns isn't necessarily murder, either. Because murder is a much more complicated concept than just killing a human being.
Murder is the intentional killing of someone who is a member of your in-group. Forget the question of whether it's a human being, or whether it's people; is it us, or is it them? Killing one of them isn't murder, because murder is distinguished from other types of homicide by being a betrayal, a breach of promise. A violation of the social contract. We, as participants in a society, have a reasonable right to the expectation that other members of that society will not kill us. That's why murder is so very very bad. People who were never a part of that society, like enemy foreigners, and people who have broken the social contract, like criminals, do not have a right to that same expectation. Killing them is bad, maybe, but it's not a betrayal, it's not murder.
Of course, this may have something to do with the fact that my ethics are very much Biblical, right out of the Old Testament. God tells us there, in the lawgivings that are still the basis for so much of Western society's ethical framework, that murder is bad. However, killing an adulteress or a traitor or the hoodlums who were making fun of your hair, no problem. Slaughtering all of the Amalekites, even after they have surrendered and lain down their arms, killing them down to the last pregnant woman and the smallest child, is perfectly A-OK, and in fact makes God-the-lawgiver happy. Killing the King of the Amalekites after you have promised him his life in return for his subjection, however, *is* murder, because you have, however marginally, taken him into the protection of your tribe - he is now one of yours. Of course, in that last case, you're screwed either way, because you weren't supposed to be negotiating with the filthy idolaters in the first place, so now you're stuck between your promise to God to kill them all and your promise to him that you'll grant him sanctuary, and it's left toyour boyfriend the Prophet of the Lord to kill him for you, taking the sin of murder on his own soul, so that your people can be reconciled with God without the King of Israel having to dishonor himself any further. Of course, as a result the Prophet breaks up with you won't speak to you anymore, and it's all very doomed and desperate and ends with you dying miserable and alone after your own son steals your new boy-toy, and really the moral here is never get involved in a land war in the Middle East, and ...
... and, um, possibly some of that is influenced by my fangirlish appreciation for Saul and Samuel's true and tragic love. Er, where was I? Right, abortion.
It's more than just the ancient Hebrews who had a concept of murder that only included members-in-good-standing of their tribe. It's a fundamental concept through all human cultures and histories. Even in societies that practiced state-sponsored human sacrifice of their own citizens, there was usually, first, some ritual that ceremonially declared the sacrificial victim to be other, no longer one of us. Lately, there's been a real push to be true Christians and define all human beings as 'us', to celebrate difference while erasing the category of 'other'. But it's pretty freaking obvious we're not there yet; every time a criminal is executed, every time an enemy national is killed, every time a boatload of political refugees is turned back - for that matter, every time somebody is offered 'justifiable homicide' with a slap on the wrist rather than a murder conviction, every time the headlines scream about American citizens being killed in a terrorist attack while the ones that don't involve American are on page 12c - we're acknowledging the fact that it's more okay to kill some people than others.
Fine, you say, we've had a lovely discussion of murder, but what does this have to do with abortion specifically? Well, put in these terms, the ethicality of abortion no longer becomes an argument about when a few cells become a human being; it's an argument about when a few cells become a member of our society.
It doesn't really make the decision any easier, but by reframing things in those terms, I think it's easier to keep an eye on the gray areas, and it keeps the discussion on an ethical foundation rather than descending to abstruse embryological facts. Anti-choice people will, of course, say that of course the baby falls under the social contract, because it's no criminal, it's never done anything wrong. Iraqi children and starving North Koreans are often innocent, too, and yet, we-as-a-society (regardless of how individuals, morally, might feel - we're talking about a culture's ethical standards here, not individual moralities) are able to justify letting them die.
I don't automatically accept that I owe anything to a baby - a baby I never asked for, have never given any promises to, or offered even an implicit guarantee of safety - just because it happens to share some genes with me and has set up a squatter's camp in my innards. Human sexuality has adapted so that we have comparatively little natural control over our fertility, and babies frequently show up where they're not needed or wanted.4 Uninvited colonists moving in on your territory are rarely considered automatically a part of the social contract, even if they don't intend any harm; unplanned children, to me, fall into the same category. New babies are not automatically an 'us'.
This is, in fact, a pretty widespread view in human cultures; you can see this in both cultures that have a very high natural infant death rate and cultures for whom infanticide is the only available means of population control. A child often does not count as an 'us' until it is officially welcomed into the tribe - usually by giving it a name. At that point, it's a part of the social contract, and given all the rights of any other member, and to kill it would be murder. Before that, though - and the time-before-naming can be anything from less than a day, when infanticide is at issue, to a full year - is a probationary period, where the child is not quite yet a full member of the tribe or the family, and will not be officially mourned if it dies. It sounds terribly harsh, but perhaps it's not so harsh as feeling in full the death of one tiny beloved family member after another, and names on little graves to hang over the surviving children. Whether a newborn in a culture is an 'us' or not can usually be traced back to hard pragmatic factors that have to do primarily with what the population necessities and natural causes of death are.
(The book I'm currently reading has a section on the syncretic Yoruba religion in Latin America which in this country is most commonly called Candomblé. It mentions the term 'abiku', which I had seen discussed in other places, in a Roman Catholic context, as the souls of unbaptized infants, vengefully roaming the earth and drinking the blood of the living. In Candomblé, apparently, abiku are rather odd souls which enjoy moving through the cycle of birth and death, but find the living part in the middle there to be terribly tedious, so they choose to die as infants, over and over again, so they can just do the fun parts. I have no idea if it's true - this author has used dubious sources before - but I find it beautiful, as a way of reconciling with a high infant mortality rate. In cultures that prize high fertility above all, the old Catholic way of sending them to Hell perhaps also makes sense, as a way of ensuring that everything possible is done to keep them alive; but this is no longer by any means a society that prizes high fertility.)
So. As a legal and ethical issue, is an unborn child an 'us'? It's certainly not a universal assumption across all human cultures, and therefore I don't accept the claim that it's a moral absolute independent of cultural factors. So it becomes a question of whether our society, in general, thinks that an early-term fetus is owed the full rights of a member of our society, and that, as a result, to kill it is a basic betrayal of trust and order. It's pretty clear simply by the existence of this debate that as a society we've found no consensus on that question, and therefore, I cannot support a law that takes away an individual's ability to make her own moral choice.
(And lest I be accused of politics by poll numbers - no, I personally do not believe that an early-term fetus should have 'us' status. If nothing else, the rates of spontaneous natural abortion are so high in the first few weeks after implantation that if we fully believed each death had the same value as an adult's, we'd be endlessly attending funerals for blastocysts. Early-term abortion should most certainly be legal for pretty much any reason, and without any permission from anyone but the person whose uterus it is. She shouldn't have to get a death certificate every time she has a suspiciously early and heavy period, either1.)
*shakes the dust off her sandals* Okay, great, now that I've succeeded in offending all anti-choice people and 75% percent of pro-choice people, time to set out and piss off everybody who's left!
Because I don't like abortion. I have serious moral problems with it, many of the same moral problems that I have with wars over oil and the execution of criminals. And, from the opposite direction, some of the same problems that I have with plastic surgery and widespread legal drug use. And then there's my fundamental objections to a society which constantly tries to sell the belief that the only happy, healthy adult is a sexually active one. I hope that I would never get an abortion except in very special circumstances2, and I don't think I'd ever encourage anyone else to get one, either, although I don't have any problem supporting that choice if somebody else makes it.
But above and beyond all that, I simply find it unacceptable that in a country such as the US, we have such high abortion numbers in the first place. There is no excuse for that. There is no excuse for so many women in a wealthy, industrialized, supposedly enlightened country, one with a shortage of babies available for adoption, one which has made pregnancy safer for the mother than driving to work on the highway every day, to have to make such a hard choice in the first place. (And it is almost always a hard choice, even for a woman who is theoretically in favor of abortion.) If we spent one quarter of the effort we waste in arguing about abortion on making it unnecessary instead, we shouldn't even need to have this debate.
There's the obvious - Make sure women have a choice about when and how they have sex. Make sure they understand their bodies and they have access to birth control (including the morning-after pill), and know how to use it properly, instead of doing your best to restrict their access3 and give them no options except abortion. Fix our screwed-up welfare and medical systems so that women aren't faced with the possibility of seeing their children die on the streets, and so that they have a guarantee of proper prenatal and postnatal care. Fix our family law system so that men have more of a stake in the children they father, and parents in general have a more reliable and equitable support system, and children have a fair chance of being parented by somebody who will do it competently. (While we're at it, end the programs that encourage women to have children that they can't afford or care for.) Fix the adoption process so that it becomes a better and more visible option, and we stop importing foreign orphans while aborting our own.
The last thing, though, is that, along with giving women the right to not be pregnant, we need to make sure they have the right to be pregnant, even if - especially if - they don't plan to raise the child themselves.
This was pointed up to me about a year or so ago, when somebody had linked me to a thread where women who had had abortions and were proud of it were asked to post their stories. It was an amazing and thought-provoking thread, and people at all ends of the spectrum managed to share their ideas without any widespread stupidity happening. (Unfortunately, there's about a 0% chance that I'll ever find that link again.)
I noticed a pattern, though, with several responses. A woman would post and say that she'd had an abortion because she got pregnant unexpectedly, and simply did not want to raise a child just then, and she didn't regret this decision at all. And somebody else would ask, (politely and rationally - remember, this is the miracle thread where abortion discussion didn't devolve into name-calling and rhetoric) 'well, if that was the only factor, why didn't you decide to have the kid and put it up for adoption?'
Now, there are plenty of answers to that question which I would be fine with. Couldn't have handled the stress and disruption of a pregnancy, either emotionally or physically or both. Don't think you could ever put a child of your own flesh into the hands of the adoption system. Even just 'didn't want to quit smoking' would be perfectly okay. Or how about 'It's my body, and I didn't want to!' I have no problem with that argument, if that's the woman's belief.
But instead, the posters invariably got highly defensive, and said something along the lines of "Because if I had chosen to do that, I would have had to put up with endless discrimination and harassment at my place of work / elsewhere in my life / from my family and friends."
Does anyone other than me see the contradiction here?
Note that the women here are all self-identified feminists, acting as spokespeople for reproductive rights, reclaiming their abortions as empowering, feminist acts.
See, while hopefully it will never come up, I could see myself making the same decision for the same reasons in the same circumstances, but if I did it I wouldn't think of it as an empowering act. I would think of it as taking the easy way out and caving in to the demands of the patriarchy. Women's rights should not just be about the right to act as equals in Man's World; they should also be about the right to be women and do the things women do, in a women's world. Like being pregnant, and making decisions about that pregnancy, without facing institutionalized discrimination, or being constantly hassled by everyone in line-of-sight of your belly.
But if the educated, upper-middle-class, activist women who still form the vital core of the reproductive rights movement simply accept discrimination against pregnant women as the way things are; if they 'take the easy way out' and don't speak up, if they keep shaping pregnancy as as degrading, painful, deadly, and pathological; if they continue to avoid the issue because they have allowed the anti-choice movement to appropriate the concept of 'the right to be pregnant'; those things will never change. And as long as a woman faces less hassle from society in getting an abortion than in having the child and giving it up, there will be women getting abortions who aren't entirely sure that they want them. There will be teenage girls in South Dakota, staring despondently at a coathanger because they have no other choice which allows them to see a future for themselves. There will be well-off married career women who want children someday soon, but get the abortion anyway, because they know that if they're pregnant, they have no chance of getting the promotion. And in between, there will be the great mass of women who feel bad about killing their baby, but who don't think they have anyone in their lives who will be unconditionally supportive if they choose adoption, and at least with the abortion, nobody has to know.
(And if you think that making abortion illegal will suddenly make it harder to have an abortion than to be pregnant, you're living in a dream world. We'll just go back to the place where the urban poor die bleeding in alleys and the rural poor from drinking pennyroyal tea, senators' wives fly to Europe, and secretaries pass sympathetic doctors' phone numbers to each other secretly under the desk.8 Well, no, I suppose these days they'd text-message them instead.)
The women's movement has made great strides in giving women the right to be openly sexual beings, and to control their own sexuality. It's also made great strides (despite current setbacks) in giving women the right to control their own fertility. Now we need to give women the right to be openly fertile beings. And focusing on things done behind closed doors is not the way to fix that.
Yes, there's been some progress made very recently, working on in-office day care, and allowing women to nurse where they need to, and paternity leave, and similar things, but there's a lot still that needs to be done, when women who think of themselves as empowered are getting abortions solely because they're afraid to be pregnant.
On the other hand, fix all that stuff, and I'd gladly support a ban on all second- and third- term abortions, possibly even all abortions past the sixth week, except when someone else's life is at stake. For that matter, legalize and make widely available some reasonably safe abortion drugs, and make sure insurance covers them, and I'd even support a ban on all non-chemical abortions.
That's not to say that adoption will ever be the easy answer either, because it never is: either way, this is a woman giving up her child, and that will never be an easy thing5. But fix all the other things I mentioned, particularly the 'educating' and 'making available' parts, and most women should be capable of making their choice by the time they've missed one or two menstrual periods. Especially if we've ended the stigmas connected to pregnancy and abortion which make women hesitate to test early and often, and hesitate to make a choice.
Within a reasonable time of finding out about the pregnancy, if a women could have ended it with no harm to herself, and hasn't, then I believe that she has made an implicit promise of clanship to the kid, and killing it is a betrayal of trust. Like squatter's rights, if you know they've moved in and you don't do anything to stop it, you've given them reason to believe that they can stay. And in our ideal, egalitarian, enlightened, and probably socialist society, it wouldn't be an undue hardship on her to make her grin and bear it. But even right now in our far-from-perfect country, the vast majority of elective abortions are early in the first trimester, because most women are capable of making that decision.
So, yes. Abortion isn't murder, early-term abortion *definitely* isn't murder, and banning abortion is not a good idea either way until we've made a better attempt to fix the things that make it necessary.
1I've found that the best way to get an anti-reproductive-rights proselytizer to go away is to start talking loudly, and in detail, about menstruation, particularly if you get personal, and use plenty of vivid hand motions. Generally they'll be long gone even before you start wondering aloud if the weird stringy white things that sometimes get tangled in your pubic hair have any significance. You wouldn't think this would be a problem for people so interested in monitoring women's reproductive lives, but for some reason, it works. And just about equally well on females as males. I don't think it's ever changed anyone's mind, but personally, I find it very satisfying.6
2Although it is reassuring to know that if I were to concieve as a result of brutal sodomitic rape, Senator Bill Napoli7 of South Dakota would personally approve my abortion. Although, y'know, I hadn't realized that it was possible in this universe to get pregnant as a result of sodomy. In fact, is it unworthy of me to suspect that if the eminent senator were correct, and it was possible to get knocked up the backdoor, quite a few of these homophobic male conservatives would suddenly be all about universal reproductive rights?
3The only reason to restrict access to birth control is in order to keep women from owning their own bodies. I have never heard an even halfway compelling moral, practical, or ethical argument for doing anything else. And the only story in the Bible which I know of which could be seen as anti-birth control is the story of Onan and Tamar, and that story can be re-read (and in fact makes more sense if read in such a way) so that it actually supports giving control of reproductive choice to women rather than to men, since God appeared to agree with Tamar that her in-laws obviously weren't competent to make decisions about it.
4(Careful or you'll blink, but I'm going to actually use things I learned in college classes!) The natural state of an adult, healthy, sexually active human female is either 'nursing' or 'pregnant'; in non-technological tribal societies that have a menstrual hut or equivalent, fertile married women go there once every two or three years at most. By contrast, if women are given real access to birth control (that is, they can get possession of it, they have the power and knowledge to choose it, and they won't face abuse or be ostracized for using it) the birth rate very rapidly drops below replacement levels. Giving women reproductive choice is the only method that works to halt population growth, and it always works, regardless of other economic and cultural factors. With that in mind, it's hard to blame the unborn for trying sneak across the borders whenever they see a chance. Doesn't mean we have to let them stay, though.
5I really need a Stephanie Brown icon to use with this post. Because Batman and Robin never kill, regardless of how far outside the social contract somebody is; that's a central defining part of what makes Bats Bats, and that is why Steph is not Jay ... and I suppose I really shouldn't let this post devolve into a discussion of Robins and morality, no matter how much I want to. So I probably also shouldn't talk about why I find this such a wonderful and appropriate ending, while the prospect of Selina having a baby for Bruce just makes me grind my teeth ...
6Note: I reserve the right to test this method on anyone who comments on this post who is not willing to engage in rational discussion. Other people are welcome to use it as well. I'm sure people who don't menstruate have some equivalent topic that they could bring up.
7And may I just point out here the fundamental silliness of creating a googlebomb that gets filtered out by SafeSearch? I'd think that kind of obviates the purpose of having one in the first place.
8The only book by Michael Crichton that I have ever read is A Case of Need, his first published novel. It's a murder mystery/medical thriller involving abortionists and set pre-Roe vs. Wade, it doesn't let the politics overtake the story, and I recommend it to anyone who thinks that recriminalizing abortion is a good idea.
The universally positive reaction to my last post surprised me. There are many things which would keep me from making headway in politics. My myriad personality flaws are one of them. My actual political positions are another. So I thought perhaps I'd elucidate one of them, as an example. Although it's probably not the best idea to post this when I won't be online full time to get comments, I will anyway, since my sister said I should.
Recent discussion about abortion rights on several fronts (and the fact that I'm apparently ovulating, since I've been dreaming I'm pregnant for the last few nights) has finally inspired to type up my own views on abortion. I warn you that a) this is insanely long and digressive, b) like my rant about gay marriage from several years ago, it is in the nature of a tertium quid, guaranteed to offend everybody regardless of their position on the subject, and c) it contains Bible slash.
Okay, my thoughts on abortion. Note that this is a discussion of ethics and morals; as to discussions of individual laws and court decisions, I don't know enough to debate it, and I don't really care. Roe v. Wade is probably not defensible under anything resembling constructionism, but then, activist judges are the main safety valve which keeps this country from going the way of the Roman Republic, and that's all I've got to say about that. Now, as for ethics:
I don't believe that abortion is necessarily murder. This is irrelevant to my opinion as to whether fetuses are human beings or not. In fact, I'm willing to accept that infanticide/exposure of newborns isn't necessarily murder, either. Because murder is a much more complicated concept than just killing a human being.
Murder is the intentional killing of someone who is a member of your in-group. Forget the question of whether it's a human being, or whether it's people; is it us, or is it them? Killing one of them isn't murder, because murder is distinguished from other types of homicide by being a betrayal, a breach of promise. A violation of the social contract. We, as participants in a society, have a reasonable right to the expectation that other members of that society will not kill us. That's why murder is so very very bad. People who were never a part of that society, like enemy foreigners, and people who have broken the social contract, like criminals, do not have a right to that same expectation. Killing them is bad, maybe, but it's not a betrayal, it's not murder.
Of course, this may have something to do with the fact that my ethics are very much Biblical, right out of the Old Testament. God tells us there, in the lawgivings that are still the basis for so much of Western society's ethical framework, that murder is bad. However, killing an adulteress or a traitor or the hoodlums who were making fun of your hair, no problem. Slaughtering all of the Amalekites, even after they have surrendered and lain down their arms, killing them down to the last pregnant woman and the smallest child, is perfectly A-OK, and in fact makes God-the-lawgiver happy. Killing the King of the Amalekites after you have promised him his life in return for his subjection, however, *is* murder, because you have, however marginally, taken him into the protection of your tribe - he is now one of yours. Of course, in that last case, you're screwed either way, because you weren't supposed to be negotiating with the filthy idolaters in the first place, so now you're stuck between your promise to God to kill them all and your promise to him that you'll grant him sanctuary, and it's left to
... and, um, possibly some of that is influenced by my fangirlish appreciation for Saul and Samuel's true and tragic love. Er, where was I? Right, abortion.
It's more than just the ancient Hebrews who had a concept of murder that only included members-in-good-standing of their tribe. It's a fundamental concept through all human cultures and histories. Even in societies that practiced state-sponsored human sacrifice of their own citizens, there was usually, first, some ritual that ceremonially declared the sacrificial victim to be other, no longer one of us. Lately, there's been a real push to be true Christians and define all human beings as 'us', to celebrate difference while erasing the category of 'other'. But it's pretty freaking obvious we're not there yet; every time a criminal is executed, every time an enemy national is killed, every time a boatload of political refugees is turned back - for that matter, every time somebody is offered 'justifiable homicide' with a slap on the wrist rather than a murder conviction, every time the headlines scream about American citizens being killed in a terrorist attack while the ones that don't involve American are on page 12c - we're acknowledging the fact that it's more okay to kill some people than others.
Fine, you say, we've had a lovely discussion of murder, but what does this have to do with abortion specifically? Well, put in these terms, the ethicality of abortion no longer becomes an argument about when a few cells become a human being; it's an argument about when a few cells become a member of our society.
It doesn't really make the decision any easier, but by reframing things in those terms, I think it's easier to keep an eye on the gray areas, and it keeps the discussion on an ethical foundation rather than descending to abstruse embryological facts. Anti-choice people will, of course, say that of course the baby falls under the social contract, because it's no criminal, it's never done anything wrong. Iraqi children and starving North Koreans are often innocent, too, and yet, we-as-a-society (regardless of how individuals, morally, might feel - we're talking about a culture's ethical standards here, not individual moralities) are able to justify letting them die.
I don't automatically accept that I owe anything to a baby - a baby I never asked for, have never given any promises to, or offered even an implicit guarantee of safety - just because it happens to share some genes with me and has set up a squatter's camp in my innards. Human sexuality has adapted so that we have comparatively little natural control over our fertility, and babies frequently show up where they're not needed or wanted.4 Uninvited colonists moving in on your territory are rarely considered automatically a part of the social contract, even if they don't intend any harm; unplanned children, to me, fall into the same category. New babies are not automatically an 'us'.
This is, in fact, a pretty widespread view in human cultures; you can see this in both cultures that have a very high natural infant death rate and cultures for whom infanticide is the only available means of population control. A child often does not count as an 'us' until it is officially welcomed into the tribe - usually by giving it a name. At that point, it's a part of the social contract, and given all the rights of any other member, and to kill it would be murder. Before that, though - and the time-before-naming can be anything from less than a day, when infanticide is at issue, to a full year - is a probationary period, where the child is not quite yet a full member of the tribe or the family, and will not be officially mourned if it dies. It sounds terribly harsh, but perhaps it's not so harsh as feeling in full the death of one tiny beloved family member after another, and names on little graves to hang over the surviving children. Whether a newborn in a culture is an 'us' or not can usually be traced back to hard pragmatic factors that have to do primarily with what the population necessities and natural causes of death are.
(The book I'm currently reading has a section on the syncretic Yoruba religion in Latin America which in this country is most commonly called Candomblé. It mentions the term 'abiku', which I had seen discussed in other places, in a Roman Catholic context, as the souls of unbaptized infants, vengefully roaming the earth and drinking the blood of the living. In Candomblé, apparently, abiku are rather odd souls which enjoy moving through the cycle of birth and death, but find the living part in the middle there to be terribly tedious, so they choose to die as infants, over and over again, so they can just do the fun parts. I have no idea if it's true - this author has used dubious sources before - but I find it beautiful, as a way of reconciling with a high infant mortality rate. In cultures that prize high fertility above all, the old Catholic way of sending them to Hell perhaps also makes sense, as a way of ensuring that everything possible is done to keep them alive; but this is no longer by any means a society that prizes high fertility.)
So. As a legal and ethical issue, is an unborn child an 'us'? It's certainly not a universal assumption across all human cultures, and therefore I don't accept the claim that it's a moral absolute independent of cultural factors. So it becomes a question of whether our society, in general, thinks that an early-term fetus is owed the full rights of a member of our society, and that, as a result, to kill it is a basic betrayal of trust and order. It's pretty clear simply by the existence of this debate that as a society we've found no consensus on that question, and therefore, I cannot support a law that takes away an individual's ability to make her own moral choice.
(And lest I be accused of politics by poll numbers - no, I personally do not believe that an early-term fetus should have 'us' status. If nothing else, the rates of spontaneous natural abortion are so high in the first few weeks after implantation that if we fully believed each death had the same value as an adult's, we'd be endlessly attending funerals for blastocysts. Early-term abortion should most certainly be legal for pretty much any reason, and without any permission from anyone but the person whose uterus it is. She shouldn't have to get a death certificate every time she has a suspiciously early and heavy period, either1.)
*shakes the dust off her sandals* Okay, great, now that I've succeeded in offending all anti-choice people and 75% percent of pro-choice people, time to set out and piss off everybody who's left!
Because I don't like abortion. I have serious moral problems with it, many of the same moral problems that I have with wars over oil and the execution of criminals. And, from the opposite direction, some of the same problems that I have with plastic surgery and widespread legal drug use. And then there's my fundamental objections to a society which constantly tries to sell the belief that the only happy, healthy adult is a sexually active one. I hope that I would never get an abortion except in very special circumstances2, and I don't think I'd ever encourage anyone else to get one, either, although I don't have any problem supporting that choice if somebody else makes it.
But above and beyond all that, I simply find it unacceptable that in a country such as the US, we have such high abortion numbers in the first place. There is no excuse for that. There is no excuse for so many women in a wealthy, industrialized, supposedly enlightened country, one with a shortage of babies available for adoption, one which has made pregnancy safer for the mother than driving to work on the highway every day, to have to make such a hard choice in the first place. (And it is almost always a hard choice, even for a woman who is theoretically in favor of abortion.) If we spent one quarter of the effort we waste in arguing about abortion on making it unnecessary instead, we shouldn't even need to have this debate.
There's the obvious - Make sure women have a choice about when and how they have sex. Make sure they understand their bodies and they have access to birth control (including the morning-after pill), and know how to use it properly, instead of doing your best to restrict their access3 and give them no options except abortion. Fix our screwed-up welfare and medical systems so that women aren't faced with the possibility of seeing their children die on the streets, and so that they have a guarantee of proper prenatal and postnatal care. Fix our family law system so that men have more of a stake in the children they father, and parents in general have a more reliable and equitable support system, and children have a fair chance of being parented by somebody who will do it competently. (While we're at it, end the programs that encourage women to have children that they can't afford or care for.) Fix the adoption process so that it becomes a better and more visible option, and we stop importing foreign orphans while aborting our own.
The last thing, though, is that, along with giving women the right to not be pregnant, we need to make sure they have the right to be pregnant, even if - especially if - they don't plan to raise the child themselves.
This was pointed up to me about a year or so ago, when somebody had linked me to a thread where women who had had abortions and were proud of it were asked to post their stories. It was an amazing and thought-provoking thread, and people at all ends of the spectrum managed to share their ideas without any widespread stupidity happening. (Unfortunately, there's about a 0% chance that I'll ever find that link again.)
I noticed a pattern, though, with several responses. A woman would post and say that she'd had an abortion because she got pregnant unexpectedly, and simply did not want to raise a child just then, and she didn't regret this decision at all. And somebody else would ask, (politely and rationally - remember, this is the miracle thread where abortion discussion didn't devolve into name-calling and rhetoric) 'well, if that was the only factor, why didn't you decide to have the kid and put it up for adoption?'
Now, there are plenty of answers to that question which I would be fine with. Couldn't have handled the stress and disruption of a pregnancy, either emotionally or physically or both. Don't think you could ever put a child of your own flesh into the hands of the adoption system. Even just 'didn't want to quit smoking' would be perfectly okay. Or how about 'It's my body, and I didn't want to!' I have no problem with that argument, if that's the woman's belief.
But instead, the posters invariably got highly defensive, and said something along the lines of "Because if I had chosen to do that, I would have had to put up with endless discrimination and harassment at my place of work / elsewhere in my life / from my family and friends."
Does anyone other than me see the contradiction here?
Note that the women here are all self-identified feminists, acting as spokespeople for reproductive rights, reclaiming their abortions as empowering, feminist acts.
See, while hopefully it will never come up, I could see myself making the same decision for the same reasons in the same circumstances, but if I did it I wouldn't think of it as an empowering act. I would think of it as taking the easy way out and caving in to the demands of the patriarchy. Women's rights should not just be about the right to act as equals in Man's World; they should also be about the right to be women and do the things women do, in a women's world. Like being pregnant, and making decisions about that pregnancy, without facing institutionalized discrimination, or being constantly hassled by everyone in line-of-sight of your belly.
But if the educated, upper-middle-class, activist women who still form the vital core of the reproductive rights movement simply accept discrimination against pregnant women as the way things are; if they 'take the easy way out' and don't speak up, if they keep shaping pregnancy as as degrading, painful, deadly, and pathological; if they continue to avoid the issue because they have allowed the anti-choice movement to appropriate the concept of 'the right to be pregnant'; those things will never change. And as long as a woman faces less hassle from society in getting an abortion than in having the child and giving it up, there will be women getting abortions who aren't entirely sure that they want them. There will be teenage girls in South Dakota, staring despondently at a coathanger because they have no other choice which allows them to see a future for themselves. There will be well-off married career women who want children someday soon, but get the abortion anyway, because they know that if they're pregnant, they have no chance of getting the promotion. And in between, there will be the great mass of women who feel bad about killing their baby, but who don't think they have anyone in their lives who will be unconditionally supportive if they choose adoption, and at least with the abortion, nobody has to know.
(And if you think that making abortion illegal will suddenly make it harder to have an abortion than to be pregnant, you're living in a dream world. We'll just go back to the place where the urban poor die bleeding in alleys and the rural poor from drinking pennyroyal tea, senators' wives fly to Europe, and secretaries pass sympathetic doctors' phone numbers to each other secretly under the desk.8 Well, no, I suppose these days they'd text-message them instead.)
The women's movement has made great strides in giving women the right to be openly sexual beings, and to control their own sexuality. It's also made great strides (despite current setbacks) in giving women the right to control their own fertility. Now we need to give women the right to be openly fertile beings. And focusing on things done behind closed doors is not the way to fix that.
Yes, there's been some progress made very recently, working on in-office day care, and allowing women to nurse where they need to, and paternity leave, and similar things, but there's a lot still that needs to be done, when women who think of themselves as empowered are getting abortions solely because they're afraid to be pregnant.
On the other hand, fix all that stuff, and I'd gladly support a ban on all second- and third- term abortions, possibly even all abortions past the sixth week, except when someone else's life is at stake. For that matter, legalize and make widely available some reasonably safe abortion drugs, and make sure insurance covers them, and I'd even support a ban on all non-chemical abortions.
That's not to say that adoption will ever be the easy answer either, because it never is: either way, this is a woman giving up her child, and that will never be an easy thing5. But fix all the other things I mentioned, particularly the 'educating' and 'making available' parts, and most women should be capable of making their choice by the time they've missed one or two menstrual periods. Especially if we've ended the stigmas connected to pregnancy and abortion which make women hesitate to test early and often, and hesitate to make a choice.
Within a reasonable time of finding out about the pregnancy, if a women could have ended it with no harm to herself, and hasn't, then I believe that she has made an implicit promise of clanship to the kid, and killing it is a betrayal of trust. Like squatter's rights, if you know they've moved in and you don't do anything to stop it, you've given them reason to believe that they can stay. And in our ideal, egalitarian, enlightened, and probably socialist society, it wouldn't be an undue hardship on her to make her grin and bear it. But even right now in our far-from-perfect country, the vast majority of elective abortions are early in the first trimester, because most women are capable of making that decision.
So, yes. Abortion isn't murder, early-term abortion *definitely* isn't murder, and banning abortion is not a good idea either way until we've made a better attempt to fix the things that make it necessary.
1I've found that the best way to get an anti-reproductive-rights proselytizer to go away is to start talking loudly, and in detail, about menstruation, particularly if you get personal, and use plenty of vivid hand motions. Generally they'll be long gone even before you start wondering aloud if the weird stringy white things that sometimes get tangled in your pubic hair have any significance. You wouldn't think this would be a problem for people so interested in monitoring women's reproductive lives, but for some reason, it works. And just about equally well on females as males. I don't think it's ever changed anyone's mind, but personally, I find it very satisfying.6
2Although it is reassuring to know that if I were to concieve as a result of brutal sodomitic rape, Senator Bill Napoli7 of South Dakota would personally approve my abortion. Although, y'know, I hadn't realized that it was possible in this universe to get pregnant as a result of sodomy. In fact, is it unworthy of me to suspect that if the eminent senator were correct, and it was possible to get knocked up the backdoor, quite a few of these homophobic male conservatives would suddenly be all about universal reproductive rights?
3The only reason to restrict access to birth control is in order to keep women from owning their own bodies. I have never heard an even halfway compelling moral, practical, or ethical argument for doing anything else. And the only story in the Bible which I know of which could be seen as anti-birth control is the story of Onan and Tamar, and that story can be re-read (and in fact makes more sense if read in such a way) so that it actually supports giving control of reproductive choice to women rather than to men, since God appeared to agree with Tamar that her in-laws obviously weren't competent to make decisions about it.
4(Careful or you'll blink, but I'm going to actually use things I learned in college classes!) The natural state of an adult, healthy, sexually active human female is either 'nursing' or 'pregnant'; in non-technological tribal societies that have a menstrual hut or equivalent, fertile married women go there once every two or three years at most. By contrast, if women are given real access to birth control (that is, they can get possession of it, they have the power and knowledge to choose it, and they won't face abuse or be ostracized for using it) the birth rate very rapidly drops below replacement levels. Giving women reproductive choice is the only method that works to halt population growth, and it always works, regardless of other economic and cultural factors. With that in mind, it's hard to blame the unborn for trying sneak across the borders whenever they see a chance. Doesn't mean we have to let them stay, though.
5I really need a Stephanie Brown icon to use with this post. Because Batman and Robin never kill, regardless of how far outside the social contract somebody is; that's a central defining part of what makes Bats Bats, and that is why Steph is not Jay ... and I suppose I really shouldn't let this post devolve into a discussion of Robins and morality, no matter how much I want to. So I probably also shouldn't talk about why I find this such a wonderful and appropriate ending, while the prospect of Selina having a baby for Bruce just makes me grind my teeth ...
6Note: I reserve the right to test this method on anyone who comments on this post who is not willing to engage in rational discussion. Other people are welcome to use it as well. I'm sure people who don't menstruate have some equivalent topic that they could bring up.
7And may I just point out here the fundamental silliness of creating a googlebomb that gets filtered out by SafeSearch? I'd think that kind of obviates the purpose of having one in the first place.
8The only book by Michael Crichton that I have ever read is A Case of Need, his first published novel. It's a murder mystery/medical thriller involving abortionists and set pre-Roe vs. Wade, it doesn't let the politics overtake the story, and I recommend it to anyone who thinks that recriminalizing abortion is a good idea.
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*Why* do you think this makes you a poor candidate for office? This is a well-thought-out, detailed, supported, extremely readable argument. You'd kick everyone else's asses with a prepared speech like this! Srsly.
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But it would be nearly as long and silly as this one was, and I wanted to keep this in the language of women's reproductive rights, so I decided to quit while I was ahead.
(just assume that for the purposes of this post, all the fathers are either completely absent or unconditionally supportive.)
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Tempting to offer irrational comment to test this theory since graphic description of menstruation just frustrates me in the irony of being denied something I can certainly do without but hating the lack as symbolic of my exclusion from a group I otherwise find myself rationally belonging to.
Then I come back to the problem my opinion of your opinion of me is too high to be decieved into believing any irrational comment was serious, if it's not so obfuscated by spurrious logic as to be believable thereby defeating the ploy before it began through an act of sheer ego (to disguise the intuition that the horse is dead and bludgeoning it further won't help.)
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#1
It's a fundamental concept through all human cultures and histories. Even in societies that practiced state-sponsored human sacrifice of their own citizens, there was usually, first, some ritual that ceremonially declared the sacrificial victim to be other, no longer one of us.
You seem to be invoking "the noble savage," if inadvertently, by limiting "all human cultures and histories" to mostly primitive societies and tribes1. Regardless of whether the ancient Hebrews or yet undiscovered tribes in the Pacific have such-and-such conception of murder, *we*, after three thousand years of Western civilization, have a different one. Similarly,
Lately, there's been a real push to be true Christians and define all human beings as 'us', to celebrate difference while erasing the category of 'other'.
If you define "lately" as "anytime after the ancient Achaeans," okay. Ethics can't just be based off circumstantial necessity and human instinct - *reason* 'created' ethics, at least in the only sense that we can debate them, and reason (employed by everyone from Plato to Thomas Aquinas) is what provides for that wider "us."2 If you're just talking about how people define "us and them" based on emotions or instinct (and I give you that, possibly, the average woman walks around thinking of a fetus as an 'invader,' and the majority of modern Americans may not accept an unborn baby as a part of "us"), then you just let a huge cat out of the bag that is going to eat Cincinatti. (Wait, I'm massacring metaphors there. It's late.)
Becaaause, who defines the "other," and is it a legitimate legal basis? More on my next comment.
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Of course, I look at it from a more philosophical than ethical lense. Even if I *did* accept that murder is only "killing of the other" (I'd probably have to redefine that until it lost it's meaning), it's still open to interpretation just as much as before. I classify a fetus as an "us," because I think a definition of membership in society which rejects it is utilitarian. A fetus is one of us by virtue of its humanness (substance/nature) and the location and societal lodging of its parents (accidental). A baby is not a space alien implanted in our wombs (
although for SOME OF US it is!!), it is an organic outgrowth of the great tree of humanity! To put it poetically. Our consciousness is very odd and *thinks* we're out of place [accounts for this vary :D], but really, we aren't. If they say you must contribute to gain membership, we can execute all the handicapped and elderly. If they say you must be rational, then the argument is no longer ethical/pragmatic, but philosophical/metaphysical.Curiously, Aquinas differs from most current pro-lifers (and probably most of the Western world, given the Enlightenment) by saying that a child "belongs" to his parents in a very real sense, like an ox or a mule. He's "no different than an irrational animal" until he's old enough to have reason, and "indistinct" from his mother when he's in the womb. Of course, this understanding still forbids abortion, because an infant/child has potency (so it must be treated in the manner befitting a man, not an ox) and is still intrinsically human. Furthermore, if the baby is "indistinct," it's not that it has-yet-to-become a member of society; it already *is* "us."
[2] It's pretty clear simply by the existence of this debate that as a society we've found no consensus on that question, and therefore, I cannot support a law that takes away an individual's ability to make her own moral choice.
I can't accept that, because social consensus is too fluid and unreliable. Maybe *today* we aren't at a consensus, but fifty years ago, and two hundred years ago, we weren't at a consensus about whether black Americans were members of our society, and the only reasons we are now at a consensus are 1) reason, and 2) they were able to generate a political and social force to take action (both physical and philosophical) on their behalf. Cultural norms (oh, and the tobacco trade), not reason, wrote that 3/5 clause in the Constitution; it was "ethically legal," to the extent that it aligned with societal consensus, until the society changed, by great effort. By the same effort, anti-choice advocates (zat would be me!) are trying to change society, philosophically and legally.
Hopefully this is coherent! I reserve the right to restate anything I said that I didn't mean to say. :P
P.S. I admire your argument much more than most I've heard, but you're right, it isn't something you can take on the campaign trail. I hereby declare you Unelectable! Congrats; only the good ones are.
P.P.S. Geez, I haven't had to split up comments in probably more than a year! My discussion joints are creaking!
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Sorry, I meant "killing of someone in the in-group"
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That is an extremely well thought out post. I don't agree with it completely, but it did make me think. A lot. Like since I read it at work seven hours ago.
That said, I do agree with a good amount of it. Thanks for putting this out there.
Side note: any chance of you expanding on that "Batman and Robin never kill" statement? :) One of these days, I'm going to post to s_d about the story where Superman became a murderer and how wrong it was.
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What brought it to mind here, really, was thinking about the only woman I know very well, fictional or otherwise, who gave her unplanned kid up for adoption: Stephanie Brown. And how that always seemed right to me, even though it gives me chronology headaches something fierce.
And then I though about the just-finished Jason storyline, and an AU fanfic I read long ago where Jason was Batman and took Steph on as Batgirl and she had an abortion instead, and how *that* felt right in that story, and why.
Because Batman *never* kills, and never acquiesces to murder (unless maybe it's somebody he loves, like Diana or Clark or Jason or Jim, and even then he angsts about it *hard*) which is why Dick was having so much trouble with the Tarantula and Blockbuster thing, because he knows what Bats would have done in that situation, even if Bruce is willing to let him find his own way ... anyway. Which is why he saves Joker's life over and over, and why Steph, as a student of Batman, had to choose to have the baby, because to Batman, every death is a murder. (Well, every death is his parents' death, because Batman is ... not terribly well-adjusted, but we knew that.)
But post-Crisis Jason believes that there are people who need killing. When he (before SuperEmoBoy timepunched him insane, anyway) refrained from taking out the bad guys, it was because it would be breaking the rules, not because it would be *wrong*.
(I have no idea how articulate that was. But. I never said I'd thought it through.)
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*applauds*
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1No, really.2
2Especially nested footnotes.
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1. that this is a very interesting, thought-provoking, and well-thought-out and -presented essay/argument/post;
2. that I still disagree with you on half of it;
3. but that I hardcore agree with the other half, and want to shout it from the rooftops and print it out and paste it over those ire-provoking secondlook.org posters on my bus.
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And word about the constitutional law. Buh? Have they SEEN the kind of people ride my bus?
Also, I hate hate hate the dead-eyed minority women on the posters.
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And OMG, the zombie women! What are they trying to say? Is it "If you get an abortion you will be dead inside!" or is it "Pro-lifers are emotionless automatons with no brains of their own! RESISTANCE IS USELESS!" I can't decide.
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