Alright, I suppose that if I’m going to respond to your post, Josh, I should get down to it.
But let me warn others. What is to follow is a fairly long analysis that relies greatly on precision. It is
not an analysis of why it is perfectly proper for a woman to control her reproduction through the use of abortion. This post takes that as an accepted fact. This post also takes it as accepted fact that it is proper for no restrictions to apply when a woman makes her choice regarding reproduction. If you, the reader, do not likewise take these two things a priori, then I cannot see how you will avoid at some point misunderstand something that is about to be said. This post is largely concerned with, as Josh phrased it, the "perfect discipline."
You are, if I may guess, quite still confused at why I would react so vehemently to this. Yes?
Not so much. At this point in your response, it became clear that you are not so much pro-choice as you are pro-abortion. The rest of your post confirmed this. I debated if I should respond, as indicated earlier. Let us take that as an inauspicious opening and move on.
To reiterate my original (and very bold) claims, your stance is effectively oppressive to women, and your justification for the position is quite similar to the stance that Christian Fundamentalists take in regards to science. These specifically seem to flow from you being pro-abortion instead of pro-choice.
First, I suppose I must define the difference between these two terms. They are closely enough related that considering them distinct might seem silly to others, and if you had appreciated the difference between the terms, you wouldn’t have slipped between them so often in your criticism of the article you had linked to.
To be clear, in our present world, to be pro-choice means that one must advocate for the free and easy access to abortions for those who need them.
That, however, does not result in one being “pro-abortion.” As you have pointed out yourself, Josh, abortion is not horrible: it is a medical procedure that has a specific aim and attempts to produce that aim in a manner that is as straightforward and simple as possible. The procedure of abortion is no more “horrible” than, say, chemotherapy. The procedure is, effectively, a tool. It is not horrible, yes, but it is not inherently good either. It is specifically the context in which the procedure is performed that it can be either supported by those who are pro-choice, or opposed by those who are pro-choice.
Consider what it means to be pro-choice compared to pro-abortion. A pro-choicer can always be pro-choice, no matter the situation, since a woman always has the right to control her own reproduction. Indeed, pro-choice is a valid position in part because it is not a sexist concept: no matter the situation, a
human has the right to control his or her own reproduction. It is a right that all humans have and that the pro-choice movement is attempting to secure to the fullest possible extent for women.
In contrast, what does it mean to be pro-abortion? Why, it means that you’ll support abortion. Nothing is said of the context in which the procedure is performed. Nothing is said of the rights of the woman, or the rights of humans. Tush mentioned it, but since you’ve been ignoring him, perhaps you missed this: forced abortions occur. Someone who is pro-choice thus cannot be abstractly pro-abortion: if we support a woman’s right to control her reproduction, then we must support a woman’s access to an abortion if she so chooses to have one, and we must oppose abortions being forced on those who do not desire them.
In sort, the proper pro-choice stance regarding abortion is that we should support abortion insofar as it is used to ensure the rights that are at the heart of the pro-choice movement, oppose it insofar as it is used to oppress those rights, and say nothing insofar as it does neither. Or, more generally speaking, be “pro” for that which is good, “anti” for that which is bad, and neither for that which is neither. Abortion as an abstract procedure is inherently neither.
Consider, then, your own words in opposition to the author’s statement that he is not pro-abortion. The effective meaning of your opposition is that the pro-choice movement’s primary goal is to promote abortion, even when it is in opposition to a woman’s right to choose. That is what a pro-abortion stance necessitates, and that is why the author rejects it, and that is why you should reject a blind pro-abortion stance. Even if all you say is that forced abortions are not tolerable, you are then admitting that abortion is only tolerable within the context of the situation.
This is mostly an error of primacy, but while you may feel that I am harping on you for simply misspeaking (it is ridiculous to suppose that by being pro-abortion ahead of being pro-choice that you’ll start supporting forced abortions), your criticism of anyone who does not give blanket support to a medical procedure has other layers of error.
Your next error is somewhat philosophical in nature, since it gets at the nature of free choice.
Choice must be front and center for the pro-choice camp. The debate is
not as to if abortion will be allowed or outlawed. That is only a corollary, the manifestation of the ideologies that are at war. The real issue is if women will be allowed to express their right to control their reproduction or not.
To make a free choice, one must have access to honest information. Additionally, while it is admitted that one cannot know all potentially relevant factors to a conundrum before him or her, free choice also relies on having as full and complete of information as possible. The reason for this is that malicious characters can use partial information and false information to get an individual to make the “choice” that the malicious character wants them to make. Such behavior injures and suppresses the right of the individual to make a free choice.
The necessity of full and honest information is particularly important in medical procedures, where it takes the name of “Informed Consent.” While patients should indeed listen to the recommendations of their doctors, a doctor must still explain the situation to a patient and be complete honest with all unpleasant details. If there is only a 10% chance that you’ll survive an operation, the doctor is morally obligated to tell you this. If there is a chance that there is a 0.2% chance that you’ll feel queasy for an hour after a medical procedure, the doctor is still morally obligated to tell you that. Patients must be fully informed of their options, the risks associated with each, and the potential outcomes.
The significance of this bit of abstractness in the present discussion is that, in order to be actually pro-choice, one must not only work to maintain a woman’s access to an abortion, if she so chooses to obtain one, but one must also work to ensure that those who are faced with such a choice have access to as honest and as full of information as is possible.
Your error, then, is in not supporting that goal. Indeed, you are opposed to that goal!
2. The right to personhood by the unborn child sets in after conception but before the child is born. This strategy pragmatically attempts to serve everyone by asserting the right to an abortion for part of the pregnancy, but asserting personhood rights for the fetus for the remainder of the pregnancy. The logic behind it uses irrelevant and often arbitrary physical factors such as heartbeat, the ability to feel pain, “viability,” the ability to smile, the presence of certain detectable brain activity, and various “human” behaviors like kicking. This argument is simply not defensible.
Your stated justification for rejecting the position that personhood sets in after conception but before birth is that such a position is not defensible. That is a worthwhile consideration, to be sure, but that is not sufficient to reject such a position. Indefensible or not, if it is true, then it must be held to! To do otherwise is to present a false face to the people making the choices to have abortions, and thus it is to manipulate their choices and undermine their rights.
It is not just that you are saying that this is untrue. You go beyond that to affirm a falsehood as well:
2. Our physical nature provides that an unborn child does not possess personhood at any stage. Personhood, not “life” or “humanity,” is the relevant criterion at issue when it comes to asserting any special rights of the unborn. The absence of personhood is the absence of legal standing. One cannot murder a non-person, nor is the killing of a non-person inherently wrong like murder is.
To be very clear, I am not saying that your falsehoods are contained in the claim that personhood does not begin at conception, nor is your falsehood contained in the claim that personhood begins at birth. Rather, the falsehood comes is asserting as truth that which you do not know to be true.
This is of utmost importance, so I will repeat it: Your error is in making a definitive judgment on a topic that you lack any concrete evidence for. The lie is making a moral quandary appear resolved and simple.
There is as of yet no known specific point in human biological development that grants personhood. We can’t say that on X day after fertilization the thing becomes a person. Since we do not know, we cannot say. Your stance, however, doesn’t even claim that personhood occurs on X day after fertilization. Your stance doesn’t even try to approach rationality: for you, personhood isn’t linked to scientifically observable development but rather physical location.
Since there is no objective observable point where personhood begins, we must refrain from making arguments based on personhood. And, furthermore, we must not pretend that we know that which we do not know. To do so has the potential of negatively influencing a person’s choice and thereby it has the potential to undermine the very rights that are at the heart of the pro-choice movement. Anti-choice advocates spout off the lie that they know when personhood begins. They do not, but neither do we, and therefore we must avoid engaging in anti-choice behaviors.
As I originally noted, my own stance in this regard is incomplete, and thus dangerous. Here we are, then, at the precipice. Even though it is a far more defensible position to say that personhood begins at birth, we must reject it since we cannot truck with misrepresenting the state of our understanding. But where to go from there? I have nothing to offer further along these lines, I have no new citadel to urge you to set up your defenses at, no explanation as to how, exactly, it might be that a woman can still have an abortion when it is unknown as to if the thing inside her has rights of its own. However, so little work has been done in this avenue that I will not yet claim that it is impossible. What I can and will do -- and what I here urge you to do -- is to pursue truth first, a human’s right to choose second, and abortion only as a third. Discarding the fancy that personhood begins at birth puts us on a difficult, perhaps impossible, path. The defense of the position, though, has blinded you as to the soundness (or lack thereof) of the position. Defense of abortion is only our primary concern if abortion itself is our primary concern. If our primary concern is freedom of choice, then we must discard even easily defended positions if they are false. That you judge the matter in terms of defensibility rather than accuracy is part of why you made your error, Josh.
Up until now, I have primarily discussed why your position is ultimately in error and leads to infringements upon the right to freely choose. As I originally noted, even in its error it is still vastly superior to the anti-choice position. If after this explanation you still persist in your error, that will be unfortunate (certainly your mind would be of great use in establishing a defensible yet honest stance) but hardly the worst case scenario: there are far larger and more important enemies to spend my time combating. However, I had two criticisms of your post. The first, that your stance is oppressive, has been explained. The second, that you use Christian Fundamentalist tactics, is next.
Simply put, you are engaging in the same unthinking aversion to compromise that fundamentalists take in relation to science. “Oh, if we admit that any part of our position might be wrong, everything will crumble, people will lose faith, and it will be the end of everything!” The problem with the fundamentalist position, and why I oppose it within Christianity, is that it is doomed to fail. If you package your entire belief system as a single unchangeable world view, then rejection of part of it becomes rejection of all of it. In Fundamentalist circles this leads to a crisis of faith when a Christian finally realizes that something that they always believed is wrong. Specifically, Evolution. They go to college, discover all the evidence supporting Evolution, and they can’t wrap their minds around the fact that there is nothing in Evolution that is in opposition to Christianity. But because they’ve been told again and again that Evolution is inherently anti-Christian, they must either reject scientific data or they must reject religion for what are ultimately mistaken reasons.
Insisting that a complex world view is all or nothing results in a terrible choice. You objection to the author of the article, Josh, is clearly the result of him not adhering to what you perceive as the only legitimate world view. Since you perceiving him erring in anything, even though it is minor, you perceive him as no longer being part of the “faithful.” The problem is, he isn’t the only one. People have and will continue to recognize the lie in your position, but this isn’t a crisis unless you make it one. If people must remain perfectly in-line with your established doctrine to be considered on your side, then you will find that there is a steady flow of those who, though they want to support the pro-choice position, cannot do so if that means adhering to falsehood. Should you construct such a world view in which if people don’t agree with you they then feel like they have to become pro-life?
Within the pro-choice movement, there needs to be room for people who say that personhood begins at conception but that abortion can still be acceptable. There also needs to be room for people who say that personhood begins well after birth and that abortion can still be acceptable. What is critical, what is central to being pro-choice, is if people maintain that women have the right to determine their reproduction.
At this point you are probably thinking that these have been interesting but ultimately unconvincing arguments (particularly, I suspect, on the less important topic of your scare tactics). Allow me to make another stab at displaying how your perspective is pro-abortion instead of pro-choice and how that perspective is flawed. These are essentially supplemental considerations that weren’t warranted by my above arguments but which I am here making in an effort to get past your normal hesitations.
Abortion isn’t a recreational activity or a hobby. I don’t think there’s a single woman on earth who would ever say to a lover, “You know what? Knock me up. I haven’t had a good abortion in at least six months.”
“I presume to judge that there are numerous instances where abortion would be unacceptable, and would attempt to discredit anyone who might defend it in those instances. More to the point, I reject the claim that females have the right to assert control over their bodies in the absence of what I consider to be an adequate reason.”
The effective meaning of your effective meaning is quite clear: you hold that there are no instances where abortion would be unacceptable. This is easily disproven since forced abortions are not acceptable. This, however, gets at the underlying principle of the pro-choice movement: abortions are a tool for preserving the woman’s health and her right to control her reproduction. We can thus infer from such a position that any use of abortion that does not stem either from a medically justifiable reason or a woman’s choice is then not acceptable. Since choice-making is central, we can indeed postulate a good many situations where a woman might ask for an abortion but be denied one based on the grounds of impaired decision making capabilities. This would include coercion (that is, forced abortions), of course, but also other states. I doubt all forms of insanity would sufficiently impair an individual’s ability to make a choice, and thus impair their access to abortion services, but I do not know enough about mental disorders to give a blanket statement that there are none.
For the specific example, that of recreational abortion, I suspect, though do not assert, that such an individual would be in need of therapy, even if they were still with it enough to make a choice.
I’d get rid of the bulk of abortions, if I could...
“My support for female reproductive rights is largely defined by my opposition to it.”
Here you are slipping between what it means to be pro-abortion and what it means to be pro-choice. The actual meaning of the author’s statement is that his support for abortion is limited to his support of reproductive rights: insofar as those rights do not require abortion, he has no opinion for it. It is, in essence, a tool for him to use when needed and put aside when not.
In contrast, the effective meaning of your statement is that your support of abortion exceeds your support of reproduction rights.
I’d also love to pour some money into research to find ways to make embryos and first-trimester fetuses harvestable so they can be implanted in the wombs of people who can’t have their own babies...
“Females should consent to having their bodies invaded and their fetuses stripped out of them before resorting to an abortion. Did I mention I’m pro-choice?”
I return to the article to make sure of this, but the author at no point advocates that woman should pursue this option before resorting to an abortion. That is entirely you.
If one considers the implications of the author’s statement, one will see how it is more “pro-choice” than your rejection of it. Specifically, the author is proposing a new option for women. Expanding their choice, as it were. Currently, if a woman is pregnant, she has two options: keep being pregnant and carry the child to term, or have an abortion. Transferring the fetus would allow a woman to avoid having an abortion while also ceasing to be pregnant. Is that option a bad thing? Certainly not. Like an abortion itself, it would be a medical procedure, good when used for good, bad when not. It is, admittedly, a ridiculously fantastical supposition, and even if a procedure was developed it still might not produce the results that the author is looking for, but the sentiment behind it is clearly pro-choice.
Likewise, the sentiment behind your statement is clearly pro-abortion. It alienates those women who believe that their fetus is a person, and thus do not want to get an abortion, yet do not wish to carry the creature to term. If an option can be developed for them that does not hamper the freedom of other women who disagree, why reject it? The only potential reason is because such an option would probably be promoted over abortion. Pro-lifers already support adoption over abortion, and this procedure would be quite similar in concept to adoption. The number of abortions would probably decline, then. If we care for choice, the author’s pie-in-the-sky sentiments are acceptable. It is only if we care about abortion over choice that those sentiments become troublesome.
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And then, after however long it takes for them to become available, you’ll see abortions dwindle down to nothing and fade away.
“Abortion is horrible and I hope it goes away.”
As has already been discussed, anyone who promotes equality should hope that the events which cause unwanted pregnancies would go away. This would, indeed, necessitate the hope that one day abortions would go away as well, due to lack of demand. That is only an undesirable hope if one supports abortions in opposition to choice. Abortion is a tool: pick it up when it is needed, set it down when it is not.
The author’s sentiment here is also directed at “pro-lifers.” Is urging “pro-lifers” to stop the causes of unwanted pregnancies condemnable? Hardly so!
Your general justification for your position is that it is improper to shift from your position. Never show weakness in the face of an enemy, and all that. To do so would be to slide down a slippery slope until reproduction rights have been eliminated. Alas, slopes have two sides! By avoiding slipping down one, you are slipping down the other. To be pro-choice we must be rational and honest. Your position is neither, and thus is not a valid pro-choice position, regardless of what other merits it might have.
You were right in that there is a choice, and there is a right answer. Unfortunately, you’ve made the wrong choice. Luckily there is nothing preventing you from making the admittedly minor yet necessary course correction. If you don’t, well, little to no actual harm will come from it. But, well, only the most perfect discipline is acceptable for someone of your caliber.
