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November 15, 2006
Abortion Musings
I tend to buy the idea that abortion is an agonizing choice and the Democratic response should be empathetic and tolerant, not blase and laissez-faire. But my friend Julian Sanchez makes a compelling case in the opposite direction:
Treating fetuses as persons has harmful consequences, even if we simultaneously insist that their interests are trumped by women’s right to control their bodies. For one, it means endorsing the notion that the one-third of American women who will have an abortion will be killing a child. And in the political realm, how uneasy we are about abortion will determine what measures short of an outright ban we are willing to entertain as means of ensuring that abortion remains "rare." Hillary Clinton, for instance, has suggested that because "religious and moral values" are strong predictors of abstinence, we should "support programs that reinforce the idea that abstinence at a young age is not just the smart thing to do, it is the right thing to do." But if there is nothing seriously immoral about abortion, then this sort of unseemly government-sponsored religious indoctrination would gain little of importance even if it were effective.[...]
When enough people self-consciously move to the political "center," it ceases to be the center and becomes a new pole. A "mainstream" of political discourse defined by the shared assumption that all abortion is morally suspect should be regarded by all advocates of reproductive freedom as a rough beast, slouching toward 2008 to be born.
I'm very comfortable with choice and profoundly uncomfortable with abortion, though not for any reasons that strike me as intellectually coherent. Instead, my discomfort stems from a fuzzy impression that the act is morally ambiguous, albeit not actually wrong. But that view, on consideration, is weak. Indeed, I fear I hold it in no small part because others like me hold it, and so the impression that abortion kills something recognizably childish has snowballed, and I'm now part of the avalanche of unfocused moral opprobrium. Which is bad, both from a political perspective, and because it causes women making a choice I agree with to suffer unnecessary personal anguish.
November 15, 2006 | Permalink
Comments
I, for one, have never really understood what's so bad about "abortion on demand." That just speaks of freedom (and it's not like I or anyone I know supports the Kang/Kodos platform of "abortions for all.") Also, I tend to think the abortion debate, such as it is, just greatly ignores the "facts on the ground." The fact is, lots of people have abortions in this country--LOTS. And, the other fact is that LOTS of parents want their daughters to be able to have said abortions. Which, really, is why the South Dakota ban fell. Then again, even now you can't get an abortion in South Dakota--I think there's only one clinic in the whole state on an Indian reservation.
anyway, this ends this schizophrenic post. The point remains that I'm with Julian that it's a very bad thing to think of abortion as a bad or icky thing.
Posted by: Goldberg | Nov 15, 2006 5:38:41 PM
Yeah, I always cringe when pro-choicers bust out the ol' "I personally would never get an abortion, but I think women should have the right to decide for themselves." Gee, thanks for not standing in the way of our irresponsible whoring. So do you want to literally kneecap us, or is metaphorically good enough for now?
Posted by: clarke | Nov 15, 2006 5:44:25 PM
I don't know, I think abortion is icky. I'm supposed to pretend that I don't think that so women will feel better about themselves? I'm not an asshole(and I pro-choice after all) so I'm willing to play along, but it seems kind of silly.
Posted by: tim | Nov 15, 2006 5:51:20 PM
I guess it's icky, but so is a heart transplant. And, of course, I don't mind that Tim thinks it's icky, or even morally problematic. But I think it's a very bad message to send someone who had a abortion that what she did was wrong. She's already dealing with enough emotional issues that feeling like society condemns her decision is not another one she needs.
Posted by: Goldberg | Nov 15, 2006 5:55:23 PM
This is really muddled Ezra - I really don't know what point you're trying to make...
...which is why I agree that your discomfort and "fuzzy impressions" are something you may want to refine a bit.
I decided a long time ago - when I really started thinking about the vagueness of "pro-choice" - that I am actually pro-abortion. I am in favor of women having the right to seek an abortion. It is a necessary, difficult part of the options for birth control. I don't want something vague like "choice", and I think "safe, legal and rare" is lovely rhetoric but not really a position - anti-abortion forces don't really care if it's 1, 100 or 10,000 (and it's far more than that, each year).
For each of us, I think, our take on this is driven by experience, and mine was formed early when a good friend in high school got pregnant at 16 by a first-time boyfriend and decided to have an abortion (and, as was her right at the time, didn't tell her parents). I knew she was doing the right thing then, I still think it was the right thing now, and it's why I know that the decision to have an abortion is an individual decision that belongs to the woman who makes it. It isn't easy, and it is certainly almost always a painful decision, but sometimes it is simply necessary.
I think a lot of people sit on various fences about abortion - it seems icky; it's uncomfortable to realize that a potential human life will be given up; it would be nice if a woman didn't wind up in the position of having to have one. Unfortunately, there are women who do have to make the decision, icky or not, about ending a pregnancy. I don't want to be part of the problem. And limiting, inhibiting or legally stopping a woman from getting the medical care she needs is just unconscionable to me. So I am pro-abortion. You may need to figure out, at some point, Ezra, where you fall on this with more clarity - just a suggestion.
Posted by: weboy | Nov 15, 2006 6:03:41 PM
Aren't you making a few logical leaps there, Ezra? It seems to me that saying "abortion is an agonizing choice" is not equivalent to "treating fetuses as humans" and saying that abortion is "killing a child". Abortion can be viewed as something that should be avoided without being viewed as murder, and earlier abortions can be viewed as better than later ones. The world is not binary.
Posted by: KCinDC | Nov 15, 2006 6:03:57 PM
Tim, the point is, why do you think that? I'm not saying the position's indefensible, just that I was on the "icky" side of the argument until I took some knee de-jerker and realized that I'm actually value-neutral about abortion.
As far as pretending that you feel otherwise, well, no, you should feel free to speak your mind, but I would think that in a one-on-one with a woman who's undergone the procedure, maybe that would be one of those better-part-of-valor type situations.
And I must vigorously disagree with your assertion that being pro-choice and being an asshole are mutually exclusive. I contain multitudes!
Posted by: clarke | Nov 15, 2006 6:08:59 PM
She's already dealing with enough emotional issues that feeling like society condemns her decision is not another one she needs.
This seems right to me on a personal level, but it strikes me as odd that we're supposed to decide how we express our beliefs based on whether or not it's going to hurt someone's feelings. It seems like abortion is the only issue where people want this standard applied, which is particularly amusing in the blogosphere, where everything else is fair game.
Posted by: tim | Nov 15, 2006 6:11:16 PM
I, for one, think you're embarking on a very mature process, Ezra. Mulling over our assumptions to determine whether they have a rational basis or not is always good -- and no assumption should be immune from the process. By identifying your feelings about abortion, and discovering that they are to some extent not intellectually coherent, you've made an important step as a moral actor. Question all the assumptions, starting with the assumption that abortion is (or should be) an "agonizing" choice. Perhaps in some instances it should be. But I can think of many others in which it shouldn't be agonizing at all. Indeed, weboy's example fits the bill, and I'm amazed that weboy felt constrained to describe the decision as "certainly almost always painful" while at the same time acknowledging that it was absolutely the right decision for his friend to make. If she had spontaneously aborted or miscarried, which happens to a lot of pregnancies, would we consider that a "painful" experience for her as well, or would it have been an unqualified good? And if we draw a distinction when the outcome is the same, why is that?
Posted by: nolo | Nov 15, 2006 6:25:59 PM
Much the same point as Julian's can be made about killing people in war, that it's best not to treat it as morally fraught because that makes it harder to do, makes trauma to soldiers more likely, and so on. Does it follow from such a concern that killing in war isn't morally a heavy act, or shouldn't be treated that way? (I've also heard a similar point made about rape, that if we didn't treat it as so traumatic it wouldn't traumatize so many people.)
What I'm saying here doesn't assume that killing a fetus is equivalent to killing an adult. It's just a comment on the kind of argument Julian uses.
Weboy, I don't think Ezra's view is as muddled as it seems to you, or at least no more than yours, which I think he agrees with.
"Icky" isn't an apt descriptor here. Jell-O on the floor is icky.
I think "safe, legal and rare" is lovely rhetoric but not really a position - anti-abortion forces don't really care if it's 1, 100 or 10,000 (and it's far more than that, each year).
Whether it's a distinct position doesn't depend on what pro-life people think. The position seems clear enough to me. It's the position that Julian is opposing, and that you seem to edge toward more than Julian wants you to, that abortion is a serious, difficult matter (the part you seem to agree with to a degree) that should be prevented as much as possible (not sure what you think about that) while not removing the right of women to choose it without legal or practical encumbrance (something Julian, you, Ezra I assume, Clinton and I all agree on).
Posted by: Sanpete | Nov 15, 2006 6:30:10 PM
I don't think it's so simple as being either the fetus is alive and thus abortion is murder, or the fetus is not alive so its the same thing as an appendectomy.
I don't think a fetus is "alive", per se. I don't think it has the same rights as a full human being. On the other hand, if you leave it alone, it will be alive in a matter of months. And that's not nothing. If a woman is pregnant and loses the fetus through a miscarriage, she (and her partner) don't just shrug it off and say "Hey! Maybe next time." We're never going to be able to treat fetuses like nothing because they AREN'T nothing. They are a meaningful thing, with great and imminent potential for life.
Abortion is a sad but sometimes necessary procedure, and suggesting (as Julian does) that we should pretend that it has no emotional or moral implications is silly. And frankly, it's a bit disrespectful of life. I favor a woman's right to choose, and if I was in a situation where my girlfriend/wife and I decided we couldn't raise a child, I wouldn't refuse to make that decision. But it would a tough and emotionally trying decision, because the fetus in there CAN be a human being, and that's something Julian needs to remember.
Posted by: b. schac | Nov 15, 2006 6:36:15 PM
I want to throw out a mea culpa, I guess I'm just being a contrarian since I agree with the sentiment in this thread. My only real gripe is the double standard that exists.
I read liberal blogs like this every day, and I've never noticed a great concern about how one's opinions will make other people feel, except for when it comes to abortion.
With everything thing else, it's full speed ahead, but with abortion, everyone wants to break out the kid gloves (sorry).
And I must vigorously disagree with your assertion that being pro-choice and being an asshole are mutually exclusive. I contain multitudes!
hee!
Posted by: tim | Nov 15, 2006 6:36:42 PM
I don't think a fetus is "alive", per se. I don't think it has the same rights as a full human being. On the other hand, if you leave it alone, it will be alive in a matter of months. And that's not nothing. If a woman is pregnant and loses the fetus through a miscarriage, she (and her partner) don't just shrug it off and say "Hey! Maybe next time." We're never going to be able to treat fetuses like nothing because they AREN'T nothing. They are a meaningful thing, with great and imminent potential for life.
If I were thoughtful and articulate, this is what I would have said instead of "icky".
Posted by: tim | Nov 15, 2006 6:39:16 PM
I have rather strong feelings against abortion. I am definitively pro-choice because I think that a woman has a right to maintain control over her own body. I also think that neither the woman or child should be punished for mistakes or circumstances outside her control. But at the same time I have serious distaste for abortion and will not apologise for it.
I understand that this is a painfull and difficult thing for many women to deal with, I don't shove my attitude about it into anyones face and have even been supportive of friends who have had them. That doesn't make it unhealthy or more foolish, politicaly dangerous for me to feel the way I do about it. It is action not feelings that impact the political landscape.
I am not a fan of abortion for a multitude of reasons, not the least of which being that one of my partners, many years ago, got pregnant and then mis-carried. Neither of us was in the best position to have and raise a child at the time, but it was still very hard for both of us.
I also have serious issues with people having irresponsable sex. It is not just abortion, VDs are prolific and often deadly. I realize and sympathise that mistakes happen - I also think abortion should be legal. But I will not try to claim I believe anything but they should be legal and rare. Just as I would love to see other negative consequences of sex become rare - such as AIDS. In fact I look forward to the day when abortion and all VDs are an odd historical footnote.
But until that day, I will not pretend that I am a fan of abortion, though I will vote and fight for it to be legal.
Posted by: DuWayne | Nov 15, 2006 6:58:30 PM
As an actual woman who has had an actual abortion in 1990 (I was 44, my youngest was under two, no health insurance, no wish to have another, and fertilization under something less than complete consent) please let me join this conversation which is apparently occuring among mostly menfolk. You don't know, you just don't know.
Actually, a surgical abortion is absolutely no ickier than a gynecological exam, only thing is the anesthesia is a little better.
I don't regret it for a moment. It was the right thing for me to do at the time and I was damn grateful that it was legal. When I was in college I knew several girls who had had illegal abortions, pre 1973. Some of their experiences were truly horrifying, like being forced into the floor of the back seat of a car, covered with a blanket, to some rural, literal "kitchen table" with god knows who sticking god knows what into her. This was my good friend. A girl on my floor in the dorm was hospitalized with septic fever after one of these abortions, she could have died.
It's a RIGHT, to have a CHOICE. And it's the WOMAN's choice.
End of discussion.
Posted by: A boomer Woman | Nov 15, 2006 6:59:00 PM
Abortion is a medical proceedure, it's always best to prevent needing one but if you need one it's best to have it be as safe as possible. It also, like all invasive medical proceedures carries some risk. I've never known a woman who was happy about needing to have an abortion but they were happy to have it available. When that became possible.
I also knew women who had them before safe, legal abortions were possible in the United States, that was infinitely worse.
The only way the issue should be argued is to contrast if abortions are going to be safe and legal or unsafe and illegal, abortions are going to continue under either circumstance. The "no abortions" argument is a fantasy that serious people should have called fraud to in the beginning.
Women own their bodies, if they don't then someone else does. The anti-choice side think womens' bodies belong to them.
Posted by: olvlzl | Nov 15, 2006 7:00:20 PM
You don't know, you just don't know.
It's a RIGHT, to have a CHOICE. And it's the WOMAN's choice.
Thank you, A boomer Woman, for the pointless bad attitude. Apparently you didn't notice that everyone in this thread is committed to the pro-choice position.
Unfortunately, in order to keep this a WOMAN'S choice, we need to make sure that the laws are not changed. So it might offend you or whatever to see men discussing this, but abortion as a CHOICE and a RIGHT for WOMEN is under ATTACK by MEN and WOMEN. So quit jerking around with all the people who SUPPORT your RIGHT to have had that ABORTION and are only trying to work out the best way to SAFEGUARD that RIGHT for all WOMEN.
And the discussion is disappointingly NOT over, and never will be, which is why we discuss and fight for this.
Posted by: Stephen | Nov 15, 2006 7:08:15 PM
Fetuses are alive - what a fetus is not is that it is not a person. After 9 months, possibly less, you will have a person, but at conception and at least for the first three months, you do not have a person who could survive outside a mother's womb. I think we should try to be accurate in our terminology, because I think the one fair criticism that comes from anti-abortion folks is that muddy language is sometimes employed by pro-choice folks to minimize what an abortion actually is.
Second, sanpete, I don't worry about whether abortion will be "rare" or not, because I think the term has little relevant meaning in this context - are x number of abortions okay? What about x+1? or x*100? What is the upper limit of "rare" where we start to have a problem?
I guess my point is I'm not conflicted at all here - a woman who needs to have an abortion should be able to get one. It should be safe. I think it is legal (no "should be"), and I have no use for "rare," really. I think as rhetoric the phrasing helps introduce the notion that abortions can be reduced, in some measure, by increasing access to birth control (and the point is that abortion is a form of birth control, and part and parcel of that larger discussion); but ultimately, women will still have abortions.
I think abortion is "difficult" because we are talking about ending (see above) a potential human life, and that decision is fraught with emotional and moral implications that I think few women are cavalier about. I don't think we should try (or not try) to make it harder for a woman emotionally - but to me, this isn't about emotions, at least not as a policy or political matter. What would I do for a woman I knew? I'd try to be there for her emotionally, help her think through the issues, and support whatever decision she made. I hope that answers the question, because I'm really not fuzzy on this.
Best - Wesley
Posted by: weboy | Nov 15, 2006 7:10:11 PM
The argument that abortion should be "rare" need not depend on any moral squimishness. I think appendectomies should be rare. I'd support efforts to make appendectomies more rare.
That having been said, I'm more and more convinced that "conception" doesn't make a child, a woman's body makes a child. A zygote or young fetus is not all that different from a sperm. Both only have the potential to become a full human if a woman's body does all the work. So relatively early abortions or abortions where there's a threat to the health of the mother (and essentially all abortions fall into one of those two categories), thus present no moral dilemma. A woman should not be forced to make a child.
Posted by: Noah | Nov 15, 2006 7:50:53 PM
I have a lot of sympathy for "A boomer woman" because...well, she's right. Sorry if Stephen feels that all the symapthetic guys wrestling with their feelings about someone else's problem should get lots and lots more attention. I never offer my opinions on other people's operations. No one asks me if I think its "icky" that their father in law had open heart surgery at 81. No one asks me if I think insurance should pay for heart transplants or liver transplants for people who have abused their bodies while refusing to cover children with pre-existing conditions. And quite properly no one cares what I think. If I were to clutter up a thread about other people's operations with my own masturbatory accounts of how bad I felt because I had a relative who didn't get open heart surgery, or because I never needed to use my insurance to get it, or some other personal story--well, I wouldn't be surprised if people got ticked off.
I find DuWayne's bizarre comment that his and his partner's miscarriage somehow informs his opinions about abortion and its rightness just, frankly, downright bizarre. I had a sister who died when I was eight and she was six--does that give me the right to decide (or even, frankly, to feel strongly) that all little girls should be given sisters? That every single child is really suffering because her parents are too selfish to give her siblings? Women have abortions. Wow! Sometimes they have them because the fetus is anencephalic, suffering from a terminal condition that would doom them to unimaginable pain and torment post birth, deformed, brainless, dying, you name it. What on earth does duwayne's partner's miscarriage have to do with that?
Sometimes a woman who has had hard labor decides her body can't take it any more. Sometimes she decides her family can't take another mouth and that she doesn't think that the duwayne's of the world are going to step up and take her mixed race, unhealthy, difficult, unknown genetic, wrong sex whatever fetus off her hands. How does duwayne's partner's miscarriage figure into the public debate about this? I'm picking on duwayne because I've heard this line before from infertile women who seem to think they are owed a child because of their miscarriages.
No one takes responsibility for the fetus but the mother (and sometimes the father). No one is legally responsible for its care, no one is physically responsible for its care, and no one can determine whether that burden is too great but the woman involved. I'm sorry if that makes all the boy-talk irrelevant, but it does.
Thanks for all the support, though! And I mean that (truly) especially to weboy. Its not that its not a difficult issue--for men as well as women. But its just that when you have been pregnant and born children (and I have), known women who've been raped or abandoned who've chosen abortion (and I have), seen women carry fetuses to term who were doomed to die post birth (and I have) all this hypothetical talk just seems insultingly young, and distant, and ultimately self indulgent in a way that no adult woman can really relate to. Ezra is young, of course, so he's just doing what comes naturally and I appreciate his sincerity.
aimai
Posted by: aimai | Nov 15, 2006 7:57:47 PM
Weboy (I've wondered where the name came from), I wasn't intending to imply your view is fuzzy (or not), only that if Ezra's is, yours is too, because I think they're essentially the same. You speak of abortion as "difficult," he as "morally ambiguous," but it seems to me you're both thinking about the same kind of complexities. Maybe not.
Your objection to saying abortion should be rare applies to all uses of words like "rare," not only this use. I think the meaning is clear enough.
I think as rhetoric the phrasing helps introduce the notion that abortions can be reduced, in some measure, by increasing access to birth control (and the point is that abortion is a form of birth control, and part and parcel of that larger discussion); but ultimately, women will still have abortions.
The rhetoric typically means more than that, but aren't you at least in favor of that much? I don't see why should object to this rhetoric to describe a view like yours, given what you've said so far. Maybe there's more involved.
Posted by: Sanpete | Nov 15, 2006 8:01:24 PM
I have a little different reason for being pro-choice. I am an adoptee, born in the mid-1970s to a teenaged mother in a relatively provincial place. Did my biological mother have me because she got pregnant and wanted to -- for whatever reason -- have a baby (that she couldn't keep), or was she forced to have me? Could she have gotten an abortion if she had wanted one? Were they available there, then? I don't know. If abortion was available, did she not have one because friends, family, her boyfriend, a paternalistic doctor, the government, whomever, shamed her, guilted her, stonewalled her, or otherwise forced her into childbearing?
I find the prospect that I could be the actual physical product of coercion to be horrifying. It's really disturbing, and that knowledge will stay with me for the rest of my life. It also isn't an abstract. It oftentimes has real-world consequenses (blogwhore to a post where I write about them). I don't know what the situation was, but I can think of any number of scenarios. I'd really rather not, and I'd really rather not have to.
Posted by: Interrobang | Nov 15, 2006 8:05:51 PM
aimai -
My expierience is what actually made me more open and supportive of legal abortion, even as it contributes to my distaste for them. My entire desire to see less abortion rests on my desire to see people have more responsible sex. I do not want people to have abortions or get HIV/AIDS. I am not against sex. I am not against a woman's right to choose, should she find herself pregnant for whatever reason. Ultimately, I find abortion moraly questionable only when precautions aren't taken to prevent the pregnancy in the first place.
What exactly is bizzare about finding abortion disturbing after having expierienced the loss of a fetus? I don't really see her expierience as relevant to the debate of whether or not abortion should be legal, but I do think it is relevant in a discussion about how we are supposed to feel about abortion - as it shaped both my old partner's and my feelings about abortion. But I am not remotely saying or implying that abortion should be illegal - just that I would love to see it decline. As I would like to see the incidence of HIV/AIDS and every other VD decline.
My whole point is that it makes not a whit of difference whether I approve of abortion or not. It is my actrions and votes for politicians that won't attack that right that count. On a cutural level, I would say that my actions in lending my support to friends who are having an abortion that count. I just don't see why I should be expected to say or try to make myself feel that abortion is just great - I don't and won't - just as I really think AIDS sux and would love to see less of my friends and aquaintences getting it.
Posted by: DuWayne | Nov 15, 2006 8:13:06 PM
Aimai, you complain when DuWayne refers to the experience of himself and his companion, yet you seem to think that the experience of yourself and those you've known really matters. I can't really follow what you're getting at, whether you just don't like men or those younger than you to take a position on abortion, or what. I take your experience seriously, and that DuWayne speaks of too. And I do think it legitimate and even my responsibility to have a view on this, based not only on hypotheticals, which do matter, but also on the experiences of others.
Posted by: Sanpete | Nov 15, 2006 8:18:37 PM
lest anyone forget, Roe is a disgusting compromise. no woman shld have to be restricted at any point in her pregnancy. the entire 9 months shld be free of government interference
Posted by: dick mulliken | Nov 15, 2006 8:34:51 PM
Dick - I appreciate your absolutism, but I think the reason Roe has worked as long as it has is that it is a carefully resoned decision based on existing science. It says a woman has a right to consult with her doctor, in private, about a medical procedure, free from the state's interference. It says that as a fetus reaches viability, the state's interest in preserving a life is different from the early stages of pregnancy when viability is not an issue (it's worth keeping in mind that extreme anti-abortion types do not always understand that viability remains around 12-13 weeks, and has not gone lower - and that at 12-13 weeks, there will be significant problems). And it says in any case that a woman's life and health should always be paramount. Do I agreee with subsequent decisions, such as Casey? No - I think "reasonable burden" is a dreadful standard. But Roe itself is not necessarily a terrible framework.
As long as I am here - sanpete, I'm not sure how to answer you, because I thought I was clear - I support a woman's right to have an abortion. I am absolutely in favor of greater access to other forms of birth control. I do not make it a priority to make abortion "rare," I simply want it be available as an option. What a woman does after that is ultimately her decision.
Posted by: weboy | Nov 15, 2006 8:52:15 PM
Weboy, you were clear on your support of abortion rights, and so was Ezra.
I agree with you about Roe. A very judicious ruling.
Posted by: Sanpete | Nov 15, 2006 9:19:53 PM
I've got to line up with Boomer woman. There isn't much that's agonizing about abortion. Most women that I've talked to are relieved. Occasionally I've met a woman who is upset but generally because they feel like they shouldn't have had sex, their religion prohibits abortion, or they want a child and the partner doesn't -- no one has ever said to me that she thought the fetus was a human. On more than one occasion I've had a woman thank me for not being judgemental when they had to come to me, the primary care doc, for the paperwork. They aren't as worried about abortion as they are about how other people will respond to their need for one.
Holding a cute, pink, smelly infant is way different that experiencing the nausea and mild crampiness of early pregnancy and trying to equate the two is ridiculous.
Posted by: J Bean | Nov 15, 2006 9:39:29 PM
As a middle aged man who has known dozens of women who have had abortions, I find the continued hand wringing over this issue by pro-choicers to be distressing. For most of these women, the decision to have an abortion was not agonizing or particularly fraught with angst. It was simply the choice dictated by the time of their lives or the circumstances by which they became pregnant. It is preposterous to contend that these women were murderers or anything like that.
People on the pro-choice side need to buck up and state unashamely that this is a matter of personal decision making that should not be trod upon by the state. The sooner we stop the Will Saletan "abortion gives me the vapors" crap, the better off we will all be.
Forced child bearing is wrong.
And no more crap about the consequences of ill considered sex. That's just puritanical clap trap miles away from any reverence for life.
Don't like abortion -- don't have one. Otherwise, STFU.
Posted by: Pro Choice Guy | Nov 15, 2006 9:48:45 PM
What exactly is bizzare about finding abortion disturbing after having expierienced the loss of a fetus?
I don't know if it's bizarre, but the critical point is that it's irrelevant-- it's no more meaningful as a window into others' experiences than a converted Baptist's testimony to a crowd of Buddhists is likely to be. I appreciate the fact that Ezra is questioning his assumptions and reactions on the subject, because that sort of self-examination is rare even among navel-gazing liberals, but I would much rather see a large swath of the population admit that their feelings about abortion are simply of no value to anyone but themselves instead of trying to change those feelings. And by the same token, if they do want to change their feelings, they should understand that it's more a matter of their own comfort than for anyone else's... no one else, especially a pregnant woman, really owes the general public any consideration on this topic.
Sometimes I'm amazed by the extent to which liberalism has become rather, well, conservative in being more about sucking things up and dealing with the world as it is, not as we wish it was or would like to force it to be. That, more than anything, is a testimony to the long-term success of liberalism, since emotionalism and bullying-- the tools of the insecure-- have become the right's favorite tactics.
Posted by: latts | Nov 15, 2006 9:52:32 PM
Oh, hell yeah, I agree. Those opinions that have no relevance to anyone's actual lives are so full of shit. Sincere thanks to latts for laying it out. Just get the fuck off of our backs already, thank you very much.
Kind of like, BITE ME, okay?
Sorry for the rant. It's a subject that really sets me off. Because these male folks really don't have a dog in this fight, or a clue, already. So, just step off, okay?
So, a woman or girl is pregnant. THis is immediately her problem, and she has to deal with it, whether or not there is a male person (willing) involved, and odds are he won't be. Give her the lead on this: She's the one who has to soldier on, pregnancy or not-pregnancy. Just step aside and let her make her decisions. If she continues, she needs to get prenatal care. Or, if she doesn't want to continue, she has to affirmatively and proactively stop the locomotive. I trust women and girls to assess their lives and make their own decisions. How frickin' hard is that to comprehend? Whatever her circumstances, it's her life she's deciding about. Who could possibly say it isn't? It's nobody else's business, all right?
Posted by: A boomer Woman | Nov 15, 2006 10:15:33 PM
Latts said -
I don't know if it's bizarre, but the critical point is that it's irrelevant-- it's no more meaningful as a window into others' experiences than a converted Baptist's testimony to a crowd of Buddhists is likely to be.
I have not begun to claim that it is relevant to the political debate. In fact my whole point is that my, or anyone elses personal feelings about abortion are irrelevant to the political debate. I take exception to the assurtion that I should feel or express that I feel a particular way about abortion to be political correct or support keeping abortion legal. I don't feel that way about it - nor will I. That doesn't somehow make me an evil person or anti-choice. It doesn't feed any rightwingnuts ability to fuel attempts to undermine abortion rights.
I mention it because this is a conversation about how we feel about abortion and that was very formative for me. In fact it made me feel more strongly about legal abortion because it was a crushing sort of feeling of helplessness. How much more crushing that weight would have felt if abortion were not an option to consider, I can't know - but I believe it would have been much worse. At the same time, it also formulated my feelings for the fetus. It wasn't human but it could have become my child had things happened differently. Is it relevant to political debate - no. But it is relevant to this discussion.
I also think that allowing emotion to run our political views is much akin to allowing our religious beliefs to influence our politics. While our emotions can be based on the rational, they are not, of themselves Rational. Feelings are important, but basing legislation on how we feel is criminal - no different than saying, "the bible prohibits se out of marriage, therfore sex out of wedlock should be criminalised."
I don't think that liberals or conservatives are inherently more or less inclined to allow their emotions to cloud their political judgements, I think some people are more thus inclined - regardless of political affilation. I think it seems more prevelant from the right lately, because of the power that was given the religious right - who definately have a tendency towards emo decision making.
Posted by: DuWayne | Nov 15, 2006 10:20:26 PM
I think that some of the questions about abortion are not so much moral as empirical. At what point in gestation does a fetus start to feel anything? After it has started feeling, how much does it feel at what point?* These are obviously questions that can't be answered by arguing about them on blogs: the answers are in scientific disciplines like neurology. The good news: the answers exist, and are probably unambiguous and straightforward. The bad news: actually finding the answers requires real research.
*Judith Jarvis Thompson-type arguments are successful in asserting that, regardless of issues such as what a fetus's experiences, women have a right to choose. They don't make any claims, however, about how comfortable such a choice should be.
Posted by: Julian Elson | Nov 15, 2006 10:28:50 PM
People on the pro-choice side need to buck up and state unashamely that this is a matter of personal decision making that should not be trod upon by the state.
Isn't that what "pro-choice" means?
And no more crap about the consequences of ill considered sex. That's just puritanical clap trap miles away from any reverence for life.
Do you have some reason for saying this, besides not liking such talk? Do you not believe that sex can have important unintended consequences?
I don't know if it's bizarre, but the critical point is that it's irrelevant-- it's no more meaningful as a window into others' experiences than a converted Baptist's testimony to a crowd of Buddhists is likely to be.
Do you suppose people to have so little in common that the experience of any particular person is irrelevant to everyone else?
I would much rather see a large swath of the population admit that their feelings about abortion are simply of no value to anyone but themselves instead of trying to change those feelings.
So you'd prefer them to feel about this as you do, that it's just a matter of personal choice? Why is what you're saying here relevant to anyone else?
Posted by: Sanpete | Nov 15, 2006 10:29:43 PM
Emo decision making...hmmmnn. So if emo is good, we should make decisions favoring the weak, the poor, the powerless, the disenfranchised, the homeless, etc. And then we should act compassionately towards them? Um, I think that was Jesus who said those things.
Oh, that's not Republican values, right?
Posted by: A boomer Woman | Nov 15, 2006 10:31:30 PM
Thanks for the honest post. I think a lot of people feel the way you do, and one way around it is for women who have had abortions to tell their stories. It's a strange thing; the abstract idea of abortion makes people feel weird, but when it's someone they know and they know her life and cherish it, it suddenly becomes clear that the moral choice is abortion. Enough stories, enough realizations that most women who get abortions are making the best, most moral choice, and that dread really dries up.
To me, not having children is a moral imperative. I'd be a terrible mother. Everyone who knows me knows this. Or really, I'd be a fine mother but unhappy with it, which would be bad. The moral choice is the one where children born are children welcomed.
Posted by: Amanda Marcotte | Nov 15, 2006 10:32:02 PM
Amanda, I totally respect your viewpoint. But from my own experience, I think that I was dealt enough bad cards from my own parenting that I was able to consciously overcome that badness and be a way better mom than I had. Dad? Well, the dad my kids experienced was both better, and worse, than the dad I had. (Very long story). I just do think that you can bring your lessons learned from your childhood into being a better parent, so don't let that be your only reason for not having a kid, or kids. It's really worth it to make your amends to your kids for what your parents did to you.
Posted by: A boomer Woman | Nov 15, 2006 10:38:56 PM
DuWayne, I don't think we disagree on any of the major points, although per my last paragraph about liberalism becoming a bit more restrained, I do think that there is some small but cumulative harm in self-expression that counters one's official position. I'm just not convinced that throwing that sort of personal information out there, but denying it as a relevant bit of political dialogue, is all that useful-- I've certainly done the same thing, but the in the time I've spent debating these issues it's become reasonably clear that I'd better be willing to defend those feelings/opinions/positions as pertinent to the topic at hand, and that it's better not to introduce them if they're not up for debate.
Regarding emotionalism in political debate, my original point was that the right uses it as a debate tool or evasive tactic more than the left does, not that they are necessarily more emotional (although I actually think they are)... strangely enough, I don't think that it's necessarily wrong to use emotional appeals this way, but as a cover for ignorance or dishonesty it's a particularly offensive tendency. So at least on the abortion issue, we have the right furiously manipulating every emotion, every cultural and gender assumption they can to divert attention from the fact they want to claim public authority over the most private of decisions, while on the left the rational claims are rather dry & timid and the obligatory personal disclaimers muddy the waters further-- is it any wonder they've been gaining ground while we lose it?
Posted by: latts | Nov 15, 2006 10:40:36 PM
I trust women and girls to assess their lives and make their own decisions. How frickin' hard is that to comprehend? Whatever her circumstances, it's her life she's deciding about. Who could possibly say it isn't? It's nobody else's business, all right?
Has anyone here actually said she shouldn't?
If somehow I have managed to make like I am trying to usurp anyones choice I apologize - I have no such inclination. I don't even wish to change anyones attitude or feelings about abortion, I just take exception to being told what mine should be and that it is somehow polticaly relevant.
As for being relevant to this discussion, I geuss I failed to make clear - reading over my comments. That pregnancy was also an abortion decision My partner didn't want to abort, but needed a commitment on my part for her not to. She wouldn't have gotten much if any, help from her family. To keep the child, she needed mine. That being part of the assesing the situation - don't think I am claiming the decision to have an abortion or not was mine. Just that my commitment was a big part of her decision.
Posted by: DuWayne | Nov 15, 2006 10:40:53 PM
Do you suppose people to have so little in common that the experience of any particular person is irrelevant to everyone else?
It's only relevant when welcomed or requested; basic decency (old fashioned notion that it may be) requires that outsiders offer only support or neutrality. Anything else is selfish and disrespectful.
So you'd prefer them to feel about this as you do, that it's just a matter of personal choice? Why is what you're saying here relevant to anyone else?
You could take this further and ask why anyone bothers to express anything at all, of course. However, given a choice between a bunch of silly disclaimers about the evils of abortion-- while supporting it as a matter of form, of course-- and some good old-fashioned WASPy minding of one's own business, respectable, rational people will come down on the side of the latter. And yes, that's a judgment call on my part.
Posted by: latts | Nov 15, 2006 10:49:58 PM
I'd add that the pro-choicers who admit that abortion is an agonizing thing need to be more clear about why. Nobody is happy about getting an abortion, but it's not because of some dread that it's a baby. As an adamantly pro-choice blogger, I have the benefit of having a lot of women feel free to tell me about their abortions, which is rare. (Most people know a lot more women who have than they think.) And from knowing a lot of women's stories, the majority of the angst comes from having an unplanned pregnancy. You feel stupid. Like you screwed up and you didn't have to. You find yourself wondering if the guy who got you pregnant is someone you want to go there with. Of all the women I know who've had abortions, only one felt weird about the fetus thing and even then, I know for a fact that she was in love with her boyfriend and knew he was checking out mentally and I think she got attached to this thing they'd made together. On the whole, she didn't really care.
Women I know who go through this process and then have it suffer way more, even if it was the best decision, because they often feel like they kind of got into something big with only half a commitment. If you abort and you later decide that this is the guy and yes you want the babies, you always have the choice to try again. But if you have the baby and it's the wrong guy, you're stuck.
Posted by: Amanda Marcotte | Nov 15, 2006 10:50:00 PM
Judith Jarvis Thompson-type arguments are successful in asserting that, regardless of issues such as what a fetus's experiences, women have a right to choose.
Julian, whether they're successful is a matter of controversy. Even if we answer the kind of empirical questions you have in mind, that won't by itself settle the question of abortion. The view that the right to life begins at conception doesn't rely on when feeling begins, for example.
Posted by: Sanpete | Nov 15, 2006 10:50:59 PM
Oh, DuWayne, dear. So many times, not, perhaps, in your situation, it just isn't the man-male in the equation that matters. The woman's own assessment of her situation is what matters. Why do you think it's YOUR approval or support that makes the difference? You might be King Kong or Harry Potter, but if she doesn't want to have this particular baby, why should she? She's the one who has this pregnancy thing happening to her. She has a lifetime thing going forward that she has to make a judgement about. Your involvement has already been done, with your sperm, give or take your "commitment", for what it's worth. Or there may be no commitment at all. She may suspect the level of commitment, she may discount it entirely--either way, she has to be the judge of what the future holds for her. And if completing this particular pregnancy, for her, seems to be too dicey, she ought to be able to curtail it before it drags her life down, as pregnancy sometimes does.
Posted by: A boomer Woman | Nov 15, 2006 10:57:11 PM
Something for Pro-choicers to concider...
If conception is NOT when life begins,and a clump of cells is just that and not a living human being.
Then at least concider this-
Soon after you were conceived you were no more than a clump of cells.
This clump of cells was you at your earliest stage, you had plenty of growing to do but this clump of cells was you none the less. Think about it.
Aren't you glad you were left unhindered to develope further.
Safe inside your mother's womb until you were born.
Posted by: bruce | Nov 15, 2006 11:03:15 PM
Latts -
I know the right has been using it a lot more since the Reagan years - I think this is due to the power the GOP gave to the religious right. I just don't really think it was nearly as prevalent pre-Clinton.
I should be more clear on emotions influencing political discourse. Many of my political beliefs have roots in my emotions. But I can justify those beliefs outside the realm of emotions - if that is not possible, it doesn't belong in public policy.
I believe in unoversal healthcare and have very socialist leanings when it comes to the welfare state. I have obvious emotional motivations towards those beliefs, but I also can justify it with my belief that a certain minimal standard of living for everyone lends itself to a far more stable society - making it well worth the cost. Believing that an important function of government is to encourage social stability, I can justify my support of a strong wefare state without emotional appeals.
I honestly don't see my personal opinion being contrary to my political position. I support a womans right to choose, without reservation. I just don't like abortion. I look at it much the way I view VDs, as something unpleasant, that hopefully will someday no longer be a problem. My objections to abortion are the same as my objections to VDs. I want to see an end to rape and I want people to be more responsible when screwing - improved profilactics would also be keen.
I realize that putting that out there was probably a mistake. I was trying to justify my feelings on abortion and did a poor job of it. I don't mind debating my feelings, I just mentioned them in the first place because they are the very feelings that Julian Sanchez says that I shouldn't have. I take exception to being told I shouldn't feel that way adn I object to the idea that it is relevant to the political debate.
Boomer woman -
Emo decision making...hmmmnn. So if emo is good, we should make decisions favoring the weak, the poor, the powerless, the disenfranchised, the homeless, etc. And then we should act compassionately towards them? Um, I think that was Jesus who said those things.
Oh, that's not Republican values, right?
It sounds like you think I support emo decision making, at least in a political context, I really am making the opposite point. And I definately don't support repub values or begin to understand them from a biblical perspective. I really do believe that for many religious righties, fetus comes first, theocracy comes second and conservative values come third. The actual teachings of Christ are far from their minds.
Posted by: DuWayne | Nov 15, 2006 11:05:42 PM
Well, Sanpete, it's true that a lot of people view this matter radically differently than I do (such as holding the view that life begins at conception (which I kinda agree with), and that life per se has intrinsic moral value (which I don't agree with)), but I think that such people are wrong, so I suppose I forgot to caveat my post with "this is my opinion," although actually that could be said to be written in hidden text above and below every blog post and every comment.
Posted by: Julian Elson | Nov 15, 2006 11:09:19 PM
Boomer woman -
Why do you think it's YOUR approval or support that makes the difference?
Because she damned well told me that she wanted to have the baby but would not if I didn't make a commtiment to be a father and help support it. She already wanted to have the child but would not carry it if it wouldn't have a father and the help I would bring in. I am not saying that this is the case in all or even most abortion decisions - just that one.
Posted by: DuWayne | Nov 15, 2006 11:10:14 PM
Yes, Bruce, that is fine, and I'm glad I was born to a married couple who had been married for four years before I was born. Thank you. If I'd been conceived in some way less fortunate circumstances, e.g., mom was fifteen, no responsible father, no livelihood, addictions abounding, poverty, whatever, I might not be so happy about it. There have been some people who haven't been too happy about their lives, I think.
Posted by: A boomer Woman | Nov 15, 2006 11:10:22 PM
Boomer woman -
Why are you acting as though I appose abortion? I most decidedly do not. The fact that I don't like it has nothing to do with my support or lackthereof. I don't like AIDS either. I don't care for any of the bad things that can result from sex - I would like to see them decline or dissapeer. I would think that I have been clear that I am all for a womans right to choose.
Posted by: DuWayne | Nov 15, 2006 11:15:48 PM
Amanda, I don't think you can rightly infer that the women who post where you do are representative of women in general. My experience (not from blogging) is that many women do have concerns about the fetus, in a variety of ways.
Julian, saying without any qualification that an argument is successful seems to me to mean more than that you agree with it. Sorry I misunderstood.
It's only relevant when welcomed or requested; basic decency (old fashioned notion that it may be) requires that outsiders offer only support or neutrality. Anything else is selfish and disrespectful.
Latts, are we still talking about this discussion and ones like it? Maybe you're thinking of some other context, but what you originally said was that DuWayne's experience was irrelevant to understanding the experience of others.
You could take this further and ask why anyone bothers to express anything at all, of course.
That's the point. What you said about others not expressing their views would apply to you too. You would have to give some reason to show that the disclaimers here have been silly; just saying so doesn't really advance anything. You seem to think it's just bad manners to discuss this topic. I hardly know what to make of that idea.
Posted by: Sanpete | Nov 15, 2006 11:30:10 PM
Amanda said -
I'd add that the pro-choicers who admit that abortion is an agonizing thing need to be more clear about why.
Two reasons. The first and more compelling for me is that most abortions are the result of unsafe sex. It is not the abortion that bothers me as much as the fact that person could just as easily been afflicted with HIV. I am involved in a support network for HIV/AIDS victims and the numbers continue to climb. Seeing 14 year old children, who are dealing with disease that will forshorten their lives and seriously destroy their quality of life has made me near militantly pro-safe-sex.
The second is that I do see a fetus as a potential human. I have regard for that potential human - I just don't believe that it has any precedent over a womans right to decide not to carry it to humanity.
Posted by: DuWayne | Nov 15, 2006 11:32:24 PM
Bruce, that is the most fatuous argument that anti-abortion polemicists have come up with.
If the zygote that became me had been aborted (or failed to implant, or had miscarried), I might never have existed at all! Oh no!
And if my mother and my father hadn't met, would the miraculous me that is here typing these words have ever graced the earth?
This sentimental cliché appeals solely to childish narcissism. It is wonderful to live and to be conscious of living; had I not lived, had I never been conscious of living, I would not exist to know what I missed. I think there's a beauty in coming to terms with that, but if your worldview is unable to appreciate a universe without yourself in it, that is your business.
Posted by: Jackmormon | Nov 15, 2006 11:37:40 PM
I like abortions too. I live near an abortion clinic. The janitor sells me some of the fetues.
They're tasty on a hoagie roll.
Yum.
Posted by: Michael Moore | Nov 15, 2006 11:40:55 PM
Sanpete: Amanda's sample may be self-selecting, but I'm a primary care physician and I have had exactly the same experience with women in my practice. Abortion is not "agonizing" for most women. If I needed one (at my age that would be a miracle...), I'd feel like an idiot for screwing up, but it wouldn't bother me to have one.
Posted by: J Bean | Nov 15, 2006 11:42:22 PM
Okay, y'all. It's not my intent to antagonize folks, that's not my style. I just want my POV to be out there when you are discussing things that are near and dear, you know. Pro-choice, pro-individual choice-making. It's just nobody's bizness but my own.
Peace out, babes.
Posted by: A boomer Woman | Nov 15, 2006 11:44:31 PM
J Bean, I assume you mean that your patients seldom reveal any concern for the fetus, and that they don't appear conflicted about it. This is interesting and may be significant, but I'm not sure I would expect women to discuss this or show their entire feeling about it in a doctor's office. Maybe you ask them about it. What you and Amanda say doesn't match my own experience from talking with women in the classroom about this, and it doesn't seem consistent with polling about such things, which shows a large part of even the pro-choice population attributes some significance to fetuses, especially after the first trimester.
Posted by: Sanpete | Nov 16, 2006 12:14:55 AM
Sanpete, when it comes to public policy-- which is usually the end point of political debate-- using one's feelings to bludgeon others is generally a bad idea. Since you seem to be trying to move the goalposts and invalidate all arguments as being merely emotional-- another rightwing tactic-- I'll just say that if it's my feelings, instead of my rational mind, that tell me to mind my own goddamned business when it comes to others' reproductive lives, then my feelings must just be better, a bit nobler, than ones that are used to elicit guilt. IOW, I do think it's bad-- or at least questionable-- manners to discuss the personal when it distracts from the political, given that the political is the acknowledged focus here.
Hell, look at that stupid little diatribe by bruce above... my official response is "so what?- I wouldn't exist & the fabric of the universe would be slightly different." My emotional (and factual) response is that I wouldn't be here if it weren't for my parents' first pregnancy ending in a stillbirth anyway, and I know full well that had they been given a choice beforehand they would have wanted that first child instead. That's life, and I wouldn't blame them a bit for wanting to be spared that pain and their subsequent anxiety during my gestation. But for the purposes of this debate, all the bruces of the world really need to know is that we exist as accidents of fate, and they're just not going to make any headway with those ridiculous hypotheticals.
Posted by: latts | Nov 16, 2006 12:16:29 AM
Stephen feels that all the symapthetic guys wrestling with their feelings about someone else's problem should get lots and lots more attention.
Because these male folks really don't have a dog in this fight, or a clue, already. So, just step off, okay?
What unbelievably stupid comments. Where did I say that I think guys should ge "lots and lots more attention?" And I agree with DuWayne, if the mom says that the dad "has a dog in this fight," then no one, not even some bitter boomer woman can say otherwise. Part of this all being about a woman's right to choose is that each woman can choose to involve as many people as she wants, even if some of them happen to be guys.
I understand that the issue here is what happens to a woman's body. I understand that there are men who think they have control over women's bodies. Those men are not here. The men who are here, in this thread, are pro-choice, passionately so, and are just discussing an issue.
Let me say again that if we are to protect a woman's right to choose in this country, then women and men are going to have to work together. Or, I don't know, maybe boomer woman and others like her can go ahead and have her way, and exclude all men from this issue in all ways. We won't perform abortions, we wont support the women we know, we won't talk about for damned sure we won't vote on it. Next time there's a ballot issue in my state about abortion, I'll be sure to not send any money or spend any time helping out the pro-choice side, and I'll just leave that part of my ballot blank.
Sure would hate to express an opinion about something that simply doesn't concern me, never mind that I'm married and I have a daughter and want to protect their right to choose. Oops. Sorry, there I go making this all about me again, right?
Quit acting like assholes.
Posted by: Stephen | Nov 16, 2006 12:28:02 AM
Boomer Woman -
I do not feel antagonized, I just want to be clear that I do not dissagree with you - or your point of view. I do think that we seem to disagree with the notion that some women take the man who contributed their sperm's commitment to the potential child into account when deciding whether to abort or not. But that has no relevance to the larger agreement that the man hasn't the right to stop a woman from aborting "his" child - or that a woman should even consult him.
Posted by: DuWayne | Nov 16, 2006 12:28:18 AM
Oh, and abortion is a tragic, life-altering experience for some. For others it is the biggest relief in the world. For others it's no big deal at all.
And there's a lot of other feelings and thoughts that women have when having an abortion. Recognizing that for some it's not so great doesn't make a claim that it sucks for everyone. So people shouldn't make the claim that it's all peaches and cream for every woman that has one.
If this is about women, then this is about all women, not just the ones that have experiences and feelings about this that most closely match our expectations.
Dammit, there I go again with making this all about men.
Posted by: Stephen | Nov 16, 2006 12:31:09 AM
World estimations of the number of terminations carried out each year is somewhere between 20 and 88 million.
3,500 per day / 1.3 million per year in America alone.
50% of that 1.3 million claimed failed birth control was to blame.
A further 48% had failed to use any birth control at all.
And 2% had medical reasons.
That means a stagering 98% may have been avoided had an effective birth control been used.
People have to stop using abortion as birth control.
I'd like to see effective birth control made available to all who can't afford it.
Take note - There are a lot of changes comming your way very soon.
The Dems have many humanists in their ranks and will have a more moderate solution to abortion.
My sources tell me there will be little more than 2% of todays figures allowed...............
Posted by: ausblog | Nov 16, 2006 12:55:41 AM
Latts, I didn't notice DuWayne doing any bludgeoning.
I'm hardly moving the goal posts or treating all arguments as emotional. You gave no argument for the assertion that I pointed back at you.
I don't know how guilt came up in your mind here. DuWayne hasn't done anything calculated to make others feel guilty about their choices. You seem to be looking well past what he actually said to some arguments you must have had with someone else, or thought you had.
You're just wrong to think the personal isn't relevant to the political. The political is made up of a lot of the personal. You're also wrong if you think that Ezra's post, which set the topic, was purely political, when it was clearly also personal.
That Bruce's hypothetical doesn't settle things the way he intended doesn't make it silly. It's worth thinking through that kind of thing.
Really, it's OK to talk about these things. Very well mannered people do it.
Posted by: Sanpete | Nov 16, 2006 2:15:46 AM
I was always pro-choice, even went with a friend to a clinic when she had hers. And I used to talk about balancing and ickiness and guilt and wrongness--until my happpily married friends started getting pregnant on purpose and having kids.
The sacrifice that goes into it is unreal. There is a reason that until this century nearly one in 10 women died because of pregnancy or childbirth. It is nothing short of an ordeal, it is profoundly dangerous, it is terrifying. It goes on for 9 long months, and your body is never the same after. Think about this--it is the closest most women come to death until they actually get the disease that ends up killing them.
That's why it's terrifying to see a narrative build that suggests women should feel permanently guilty about not going through this ordeal, for WHATEVER reason. Because the closer you get to pregnancy and childbirth, the scarier it is. This isn't giving somebody bone marrow, this isn't donating blood--that shit grows bac
Posted by: anonymous | Nov 16, 2006 2:31:50 AM
I didn't mean to post and run--had to go deal with my children--but I do want to come back and post again. I tried to read through everyone's interations and reinterpretations of their posts but I think we are all talking past each other and only reading the parts of each other's posts that leap out at us.
I continue to be struck by duwayne's insistence that he is personally pro choice (thank you, duwayne) and that he believes that most abortions are the result of unplanned or careless sex which he is opposed to because of his work with HIV positive people.
Duwayne also has had the very uncomfortable experience of realizing that "he" was pregnant, through the medium of his girlfriend, and was not willing to become a parent (how careless of him to have had sex at all, one might say) so that he was relieved when she had a miscarriage. That's a whole lot of guilt to be carrying around, admittedly.
I have a lot of very strong feelings about duwayne's story, and how it has affected his views of abortion and specifically other people's abortions, but I'm not sure its relevant. I certainly don't think its relevant to our public policy debate on the subject, and duwayne has (I think) admitted as much by carefully separating his feelings about his own situation from his pro choice policy position.
So I simply want to take issue with the assertion that many, if not most, abortions are for convenience or because of careless sex. I think there is simply no way to know that--I don't think anyone collects reliable statistics on this and duwayne's anecdotal experience isn't any more valid than anyone else's. It may have escaped his attention but women become pregnant on all kinsd of birth control. They become pregnant when they don't have a choice about when or where or with whom to have sex all the time. They become pregnant when they don't have enough money or insurance or luxury to have or sucessfully use birth control, or when their partners refuse. And they become pregnant wanting to become pregnant but not intending an ectopic pregnancy, a fatal pregnancy, a damaged pregnancy or before a life changing event like widowhood, divorce, job loss or the diagnosis of another child with a difficult disease. Read the blog posts from biting beaver if you want to read a heartbreaking story of the impact of poverty, poor medical care, abusive medical providers, religious sanctimony, failed birth control, and necessary abortion.
I just don't think insisting that some abortions are immoral by labeling them "For convenience" or "the result of careless sex" or whatever other rhetorical trope you chose advances the rights of women to self determination. I definitely don't think it is borne out by the data. Abortions go up when the economy goes down. Abortions go up under republicans and down under democrats. Are we to believe that sex becomes more careless when the economy goes down? That sex becomes more careless when republicans are in power? That is absurd.
Something else is going on here and several posters have pointed it out. This "pro-choice but anti abortion" stance is really strikingly annoying to a lot of seriously pro choice people. It seems to spring from some desire to be on the side of freedom and self determination for women (yay) while also arrogating to the holder the right to some kind of illusory moral superiority or moral high ground based on the (equally illusory) view that the pc/anti abortion person is somehow outside, above, or different from the person getting the abortion. They have the right to judge, they are saying, someone else's situation rather than, as I might say, the luxury of arrogating to themselves the pleasure of judging others without the responsiblity of the other person's situation.
Duwayne's personal history is relevant here because it seems to be forming his belief that a significant number of abortions are not meritorious because they are the result of casual, unthinking sex and because it would be preferable if all people having sex were fully prepared for accidentally getting pregnant and signing on for a lifetime of parenting as a result.
Oddly enough, Duwayne himself apparently was one of those people. Because Duwayne, by his own description (painfully honest) was essentially in the position of a woman who gets pregnant unwillingly and refuses to go through with it. Because what separates duwayne from a woman getting an abortion is only a few things: one, he wasn't the woman in the relationship, two, a miscarriage intervened before he encouraged or forced her to terminate the pregnancy. Morally, duwayne is no different than any woman who ever got pregnant and decided to have an abortion for convenience--in fact, he explicitly stated that he, at that time, simply preferred not to be a father. You can't get any more casual about sex than that.
I don't like to be lectured about the morality of abortion by men not because I think their arguments are emotional, or because mine are, but because I think that the very different social and physical situations surrounding pregnancy, childbirth, and child rearing mean that a man's relationship to all these things is simply too pale a version to matter. Sure, it matters politically--I'm happilly married to a pro choice guy and we have two children and an active sex life--and sure it matters socially. But I don't take lectures on the morality of something that, if men needed it, as gloria steinem said about menstruation, it would be a sacrament.
And of course the flip side of abortion has always been infanticide or murder of the pregnant woman a right that was and remains enshrined in custom in many patriarchal societies. All the handwringing about abortion strikes me as very late to the fair when it comes to morality. Husbands, fathers, and grandfathers have been killing off actual women and children for mere convenience and economic value for literally thousands of years. I'm not speaking hyperbolically or on the basis of feminist history--just factually about practices enshrined in greek and roman law, and culturally in social practices in places as varied as Nepal and Afghanistan.
aimai
Posted by: aimai | Nov 16, 2006 3:52:00 AM
JBean said, "I'm a primary care physician and I have had exactly the same experience with women in my practice. Abortion is not "agonizing" for most women."
My observation is the same: for many women abortion is not an excruciating moral decision. In fact it is not a primarily "moral" decision at all (any more than a great many decisions in life can be said to be have a moral component). It is a practical decision.
I have had some very close relatives and friends get abortions over the years - probably for a somewhat representative sampling of reasons:
Professional married woman, two children under two years old (fifteen months apart), got pregnant a third time when the youngest was six months old - got an abortion, no agonizing, no regrets.
Professional married woman (a doctor herself), four children, pregnant with a very much desired fifth. More than halfway through her pregnancy it was discovered that the baby had a very severe birth defect, incompatible with life outside the womb. Had an abortion (I think it was a 'partial-birth' procedure although I'm not positive. It was a very late abortion.) No agonizing. Went on to have a healthy fifth child.
Single college girl, careless with birth control - had an abortion, no agonizing, no regrets.
Single professional woman in her thirties - birth control failure, had an abortion, no agonizing, no regrets.
I don't personally know a single woman who regrets having gotten an abortion or who had a hard time making the decision to get one.
I have had three intentional, desired pregnancies. Two resulted in children, one was an early miscarriage. While I was sad about the miscarriage, for me (I know other women have different reactions), it was not a tragic loss of a "baby". It was a disappointing failure of a biological process that, statistically, fails very often.
I honestly don't understand the romanticization of a cluster of cells that has less sentience than an earthworm. Just look at the numbers: are the millions and millions of American women who have had abortions immoral heartless monsters? Millions and millions of those same women don't lie, cheat, steal, or assault other human beings. So whether they articulate it or not, they obviously feel that an abortion does not fall in some "immoral" category.
Posted by: SE | Nov 16, 2006 11:06:42 AM
I'm probably not adding much to the debate, but here I go anyway.
There's a big difference between losing a wanted pregnancy and ending an unwanted pregnancy. That's one reason (among the many others discussed above) why DuWayne's experience is irrelevant to the issue of whether abortion is or should be an "agonizing" decision.
Lots of women, apart from feeling stupid about having gotten pregnant in the first place (thank you Amanda for discussing that aspect of the whole thing), feel nothing but relief over their abortion decision. If you automatically assume that the decision should be inherently "agonizing," you've just assumed that all those women are, as SE put it, "immoral heartless monsters," which as SE also noted is an untenable assumption.
This doesn't mean there aren't women who experience the decision as agonizing or stressful. But assuming the decision is agonizing by its very nature doesn't explain these womens' experiences in any meaningful way from any perspective whatsoever.
Posted by: nolo | Nov 16, 2006 11:35:52 AM
Aimai, let me begin by warning you that I'm a male, and you may therefore not want to read what I'll say.
I don't understand your analysis of the reasons for abortion. Some of the causes of unplanned pregnancy you cite, forced sex and failed birth control in particular, are broadly understood by those who track these things to be unusual causes of pregnancies that result in abortion. (It's interesting to see liberals and conservatives switch sides on the effectiveness of birth control, depending on the context. In arguments over abstinence liberals typically argue that properly used contraception is very effective.) Not being able to afford birth control at all, while a valid concern, is also not that common.
Your point that abortions vary with the economy doesn't show what you apparently take it to. This phenomenon is usually understood to be due not to more unplanned pregnancies but to more people choosing not to carry out unplanned pregnancies in harder economic times, since having children is expensive. It's not because there are more medical complications, or more failed birth control, or even for lack of funds for birth control, in most cases.
This "pro-choice but anti abortion" stance is really strikingly annoying to a lot of seriously pro choice people. It seems to spring from some desire to be on the side of freedom and self determination for women (yay) while also arrogating to the holder the right to some kind of illusory moral superiority or moral high ground based on the (equally illusory) view that the pc/anti abortion person is somehow outside, above, or different from the person getting the abortion. They have the right to judge, they are saying, someone else's situation rather than, as I might say, the luxury of arrogating to themselves the pleasure of judging others without the responsiblity of the other person's situation.
Why do you believe that the view you judge here is due to arrogance and the pleasure of judging others?
I don't like to be lectured about the morality of abortion by men not because I think their arguments are emotional, or because mine are, but because I think that the very different social and physical situations surrounding pregnancy, childbirth, and child rearing mean that a man's relationship to all these things is simply too pale a version to matter.
This does strike me as arrogant and judgmental. It appears that to you it's not the content of the view that matters, but who says it that matters. You judge in advance that men just can't understand what's relevant, not based on what they say but who they are.
I'm sure you know that some of the key points concerning the morality of abortion are based on concerns about the fetus. That isn't something that only affects women, not least because fetuses are of both sexes.
All the handwringing about abortion strikes me as very late to the fair when it comes to morality. Husbands, fathers, and grandfathers have been killing off actual women and children for mere convenience and economic value for literally thousands of years.
People who oppose abortion typically oppose those things too. The ancient precedents you cite are from cultures where women were oppressed and slavery was accepted. So what's you point? That our ancestors' views disqualify us from having different views now?
Posted by: Sanpete | Nov 16, 2006 12:12:01 PM
There's an interesting division of experience regarding whether women (and men) attach any significance to the fetus in an abortion. It appears that in pro-choice forums the dominant experience of posters and their acquaintances is that it matters not at all. I've visited pro-life forums, and there it's very much the opposite.
There's a big difference between losing a wanted pregnancy and ending an unwanted pregnancy. That's one reason (among the many others discussed above) why DuWayne's experience is irrelevant to the issue of whether abortion is or should be an "agonizing" decision.
I think there is a big difference, but I disagree that the one is irrelevant to the other. SE is dismissive of the value some people attach to the fetus, but it's quite natural and logical for those who are trying to have children to value the fetus highly at every stage. And, for some of the same reasons that apply there, the fetus can have significance for those contemplating abortion. The fetus is the same kind of being in both cases. This is apart from more abstract arguments about the moral status of the fetus, which also apply for some.
It's a false dichotomy that people either don't care about the fetus or that their concern implies that others are heartless monsters. One can regard the fetus as important and not judge those who disagree that way.
Posted by: Sanpete | Nov 16, 2006 12:36:41 PM
Oh sanpete, I should have realized it was you. You are correct that I am "judging what [men] say about abortion based not on what they say,but who they are." That strikes me as pretty reasonable--I only go to experts on a topic and not to amateurs. I take as meaningful the opinions of people with experience of an issue, and not the opinions of people who are performing thought experiments with other people's lives.
Your concerns about the fetus are not relevant to the discussion here, which has not dealt with the rights or otherwise of the fetus. And I'm not interested in your views.
"People who oppose abortion" do not typically oppose infanticide or homicide of pregnant women--the Nazis are one example of groups that actively opposed abortion (for aryan women) while engaging in mass infanticide and homicide of children and pregnant women. Today's modern christian nationalists are another group that nominally oppose abortion and infanticide *for members of their own community* but who have, in effect, actively promoted it in third world countries and through the current war in Iraq where, for some reason, they appear to think no fetuses, children, or pregnant women will be aborted through our weaponry.
But we are ranging fairly far afield. I'm not afraid of appearing judgemental--you must have me confused with some kind of straw-feminist (as amanda would say). I have my opinions, based on personal experience and the data as I understand it. If you don't agree--well--go right ahead. You are really only proving my point. You have no sympathy for women and their real lives, you don't seem to know any of the actual women who've had abortions that SE talks about, and your entire project here is to introduce some religion based notion of the sanctity of the fetus when the thread is focused (and rightly) one women and what they think about pregnancy and their bodies. Its a thought experiment for you, one in which you imagine yourself championing the fetus when others--far closer to that being in time, space, blood, and concern--have a different idea of their rights and duties towards it. If that is hard to unpack, perform this thought experiment
I'm alone on a wildnerness trek, having left my children and husband at home. A rockfall traps my good right arm and I have two choices--to stay and die or to cut off my arm and live and return to my other duties as a wife and mother. Which should I chose? Who should chose for me? There are people (I am not one of them) who think that mutilating your body for whatever reason would be a sin. There are others who think that cutting off my arm might mean I don't get into heaven. I happen to think that although my arm was good, and human, and a part of me for many years I'd rather sacrifice it to the task of perpetuating my life. And I think my husband and children might think the same thing. I don't know what you'd think but the important thing is that I don't have to ask you for permission to save my own life. I don't have to ask you or the government for permission to decide on what medical care is appropriate for me. I've got the sole responsibility for my life, my children's lives, my families life as a family. That is something that I take very seriously and it involves a lot of balancing. To me, the clump of cells or the early fetus, or even a late fetus, is something that does not take precedence over my already existing life and those other duties.
To conclude where I began--I've been pregnant, and I've had children, and I'm still fertile. My husband, my family, and I, prefer to make our decisions about our family--who's in, who's out, how we live, how big the family is without obstacles being placed in our way by strangers or the government. Taking that right away from us once a clump of cells is fertilized is no better than taking that right away from us prior to conception. Its forced pregnancy--and it would affect literally millions of women (and the men they have sex with). I object to that--on many grounds. Some of which I've alluded to here and some of which I haven't.
aimai
Posted by: aimai | Nov 16, 2006 12:46:59 PM
Anmai said -
Duwayne also has had the very uncomfortable experience of realizing that "he" was pregnant, through the medium of his girlfriend, and was not willing to become a parent (how careless of him to have had sex at all, one might say) so that he was relieved when she had a miscarriage. That's a whole lot of guilt to be carrying around, admittedly.
Actually, at the time, I was not filled with relief - I had accepted it and even wanted it. Far from relief, I went way off the deep end when she misscarried - spent the subsequent three years wandering the country as a vagrant, druggie. I think now, that it was the best result. That is because I was seventeen and my partner was sixteen. It is the reason that I dropped out of highschool and got a job.
Duwayne's personal history is relevant here because it seems to be forming his belief that a significant number of abortions are not meritorious because they are the result of casual, unthinking sex and because it would be preferable if all people having sex were fully prepared for accidentally getting pregnant and signing on for a lifetime of parenting as a result.
I thought I was being clear that I do not believe people should stop having casual sex. I just want them to use protection and take care when using it. If it is used properly, the odds of pregnancy or disease are nearly zero.
So I simply want to take issue with the assertion that many, if not most, abortions are for convenience or because of careless sex. I think there is simply no way to know that--I don't think anyone collects reliable statistics on this and duwayne's anecdotal experience isn't any more valid than anyone else's.
I doubt very many are the result of "convienience." But I think that many of them are the result of, not so much carelessness, but ignorance. Especialy the younger people. That is based on my personal expierience dealing with HIV/AIDS victims and knowing the expierience of a lot of folks who work in public health. Just as most people who get VDs, get it from unsafe sex, the majority of unplanned pregnancies result from unsafe sex. While both of those catagories are padded with people who's contraception failed, in spite of being used properly - the majority are people who either didn't use protection or used it wrong.
Education and income also play a signifigant role. My old boss back in Michigan, is married to a nurse practitioner, who works for Planned Parenthood. She works in two offices, one that primarily treats low education/low income women in Lansing and one that primarily treats college students in East Lansing. In the Lansing office, they spend a lot more time educating young women about birth-control and profilactics. They have to spend a lot more time dealing with stigma and plain BS to convince many of them that not using protection is gambling with their life.
In the EL office, they spend far more time making sure that condoms are being used correctly, filling birth control scripts.
I geuss that in the face of very little statistical data, hard to get while keeping patient privacy paramount, I depend on vast amounts of anecdotal data to formulate the belief that the majority of abortion is due to unsafe sex.
I should also be clear that the expierience that probably would have been best left un-described, happened when I was very young and was the result of ignorance on our part. We had a condom fail because they break down in hot tubs. At seventeen, my only knowlege of safe sex came from two, short periods in health class. I have learned and changed a lot in the intervening fourteen years.
I geuss I haven't been clear enough that my entire take is - I want to see people having responsible sex - i.e. I want them to have safe sex. In support of that, I believe in comprehensive sex ed. More than that, it is a problem of breaking through the notion that STDs and unwanted pregnancies are things that only happen to other people - making it clear that they can happen to anyone who has unsafe sex - a tough notion to break.
Posted by: DuWayne | Nov 16, 2006 1:07:48 PM
Duwayne,
I apologize for misunderstanding your point, and mis-representing your personal experience. I do, of course, agree that great sex education, comprehensive contraception, and a host of other medical and social interventions are necessary to preent dangerous STDs, unwanted pregnancies, and unwanted abortions and unwanted births. Like all pro-choice people, of course, I take for granted that we should want these things, and that we should strive for these things. I think we can get to those things by really trying to value the lives of the boys and girls, men and women, who are *already here* and without reference to abortion and whether its icky or not (to use Ezra's original locution).
I'm not addressing this to you, I'm just piggy backing it on my own comment. I, personally, think the whole right wing/fundamentalist focus on abortions, on the fetus, and on the demonization and infantilization of women who chose abortions to be simply a cover for a very different agenda--one which makes universal sex education, extensive contraceptive coverage, good pre-natal health care etc...hard to get. When we allow our children's bodies to become a moral battleground, and when we allow the far right to insist that medical care (and health education) come with a morals clause, we are setting our children up for ignorance, failed contraception, unwanted pregnancies.
I happen to personally think sex is a very sacred part of adult relationships. I also think it creates many potential health hazards that need to be managed thoughtfully. I think the *exact same thing* about cooking with chicken for a sabbath dinner. When my eight year old helps me cook in the kitchen its part of good parenting to teach her about kitchen hygiene. The same goes (though obviously at some remove) for sex education and health care issues. My child has a right to know what she needs to know to keep herself healthy, wealthy, and wise.
But imagine how enraged the anti-abortion crowd is at that analogy? Because their focus is on the fetus (until birth) and their focus is on the wrongfullness of sexual activity and of adult women chosing not to become mothers. You can see that in everything they refuse to do in terms of taxes, health care, and education. These people, like sanpete I daresay, turn out in droves to punish people at the polls, but do little or nothing to help them when they are in need. and they not only do nothing to help children achieve a safe, secure, sexual adulthood they do everything they can to prevent it by continually cutting funding for sex education, refusing to fund comprehensive childhood health care policies, refusing to fund family leave and etc...
By their works you shall know them. Pro choice means pro-bodily integrity, pro education, pro health care.
aimai
Posted by: aimai | Nov 16, 2006 1:29:44 PM
aimai -
I would take your point about the importance of the sex life in healthy adult relationships further. I also think that sex play, can be a healthy thing for young people too. I have the fundamental belief that shame of one's body and sexuality is a terrible thing. I think this is drasticly reduced when kids engage in games of "show me yours, I'll show you mine" and the like. Gaining the understanding that it is natural - that the body is totaly natural and nothing to be ashamed about, is important in the process of developing a healthy sex life as an adult.
Posted by: DuWayne | Nov 16, 2006 1:46:01 PM
Aimai, you're confused on several points.
You're beyond judgmental about how men's views fit in here. The idea that you have to be a woman to understand the experience of women in a significant and meaningful way is manifestly false, as is plain to anyone who gives it some clear thought. Empathy and communication are powerful things that you greatly underestimate the power of. If you were presented with a series of views about the experience of women, you'd often be unable to tell which were written by which sex, and for good reason. (I know of at least one cases of feminist writing from a woman very highly acclaimed for her insight into the feminine experience and condition, only it turned out to have been written by a man.) You offer no evidence or argument on this point that can stand even slight scrutiny.
Your concerns about the fetus are not relevant to the discussion here, which has not dealt with the rights or otherwise of the fetus. And I'm not interested in your views.
I've said nothing about my concerns about the fetus. I've spoken about the concerns of others, which are in fact directly relevant to the discussion. Read Ezra's post and the ones I was responding to. I don't doubt your lack of interest, though.
You have no sympathy for women and their real lives, you don't seem to know any of the actual women who've had abortions that SE talks about, and your entire project here is to introduce some religion based notion of the sanctity of the fetus when the thread is focused (and rightly) one women and what they think about pregnancy and their bodies.
Utterly confused. I do know women, and am sympathetic to their real lives, based in large part on what they tell me themselves. Not all women agree with you. My "project" here is to discuss the issues that are relevant, including views other than my own. I'm not religious; I'm an atheist.
There are others who think that cutting off my arm might mean I don't get into heaven.
What planet do you live on? I've never heard such a thing. Your views about those you disagree with are unreal and unfair.
Your analogy is fine as long as you assume that the fetus is just a lump of cells.
You seem to imagine me to be opposed to abortion. Wrong again.
"People who oppose abortion" do not typically oppose infanticide or homicide of pregnant women--the Nazis are one example of groups that actively opposed abortion (for aryan women) while engaging in mass infanticide and homicide of children and pregnant women. Today's modern christian nationalists are another group that nominally oppose abortion and infanticide *for members of their own community* but who have, in effect, actively promoted it in third world countries and through the current war in Iraq where, for some reason, they appear to think no fetuses, children, or pregnant women will be aborted through our weaponry.
This is astonishing. In determining what is typical for people who oppose abortion you cite the Nazis and some strained interpretation of what "Christian nationalists" supposedly must believe about fetuses because they support the war in Iraq.
You obviously have very strong feelings about this, which is good, but you're letting them cloud your thinking on almost every point, which isn't so good.
By the way, Ezra doesn't call abortion "icky."
Posted by: Sanpete | Nov 16, 2006 1:58:10 PM
Yeah, I always cringe when pro-choicers bust out the ol' "I personally would never get an abortion, but I think women should have the right to decide for themselves."
Whats so wrong about that as a personal position? As it translates to a political one, its completely pro-choice. If some don't consider it an agonizing decision, well thats great and I won't judge you for it. But it would to me. I'm sorry that Julian thinks my position that abortion isn't morally ambiguous hurts her feelings or the cause, but you can't ignore that a great many Americans, including Ezra apparantly, feel the same way.
The way I justify my position is to say that personal morality must not be legistlated by the state. Which is why its rather easy for me to say that laws protecting choice are perfectly reasonable.
The whole rarity thing for me, as a politically pro-choice / personally pro-life person, is a canard. Responsible sex, a societal good for a variety of reasons, is something best learned through good education and good parenting. Good parenting is best come about by financial security and a decent and just society, and of course good education. I'm pretty sure DuWayne, others and myself pretty much agree on those above. And those things are good enough on their own that I don't need to take a political position on abortion 'rarity' to justify them.
Posted by: Adrock | Nov 16, 2006 1:58:49 PM
Sanpete, the whole reason why losing a wanted pregnancy is irrelevant to the question of whether ending an unwanted pregnancy is an "agonizing" decision is because it really tells us nothing about the issue you're raising -- i.e., whether the fetus has an intrinsic value independent of a woman's desire to bear a child, and whether that value ought to play a role in a woman's decision to end an unwanted pregnancy.
Posted by: nolo | Nov 16, 2006 2:05:45 PM
An embryo, which is a cluster still differentiating cells, is just tissue. I don't have much sense that abortion at this stage is morally ambiguous - my thumb is a bunch of cells, too, but if it gets amputated we don't give it full rights of personhood.
When you are talking about a fetus, then I think there is more ambiguity, especially when it could survive if born prematurely (and some premies even younger than 26 weeks are surviving with modern technology). But then we are talking about "late-term" abortions, and the usual circumstances there are either a severe fetal defect or that the woman's life would be put in danger in carrying the pregnancy to term.
This whole debate is a battleground over the control of women's bodies and sexuality, and who gets to exercise it.
And finally, I really wish this whole "icky" stupidity would go away. Women could not care less about "icky", they are concerned with the right to bodily integrity and control of their bodily processes. It would be like telling men they can only crap in the public square, in full public view, after first being forced to take lots of laxative (in order to make it more entertaining for us, and more humiliating for you, you can't control your bodily processes either, ha ha!).
Posted by: Tlazolteotl | Nov 16, 2006 2:24:52 PM
it really tells us nothing about the issue you're raising -- i.e., whether the fetus has an intrinsic value independent of a woman's desire to bear a child, and whether that value ought to play a role in a woman's decision to end an unwanted pregnancy.
Nolo, what I said is about how prospective parents regard the fetus, not about intrinsic value. How you regard the same object can vary according to context, but it can also carry over from one context to another. Consider our feelings about animals that we keep as pets, for example. Some people are quite capable of having dogs as pets and eating them too. Others find such a practice psychologically impossible. To them, a dog is an object of love and value, whether you're hungry or not. Losing a pregnancy does have an effect on how some people regard a fetus when considering abortion, and quite rationally so. Others aren't affected that way, and that has its rationality too, but that doesn't make the connection irrelevant in general.
This whole debate is a battleground over the control of women's bodies and sexuality, and who gets to exercise it.
Except when it's about the fetus, Tl. Your view about the fetus doesn't settle the issue. Neither side on this issue is very good at acknowledging that the other side has a legitimate concern.
Posted by: Sanpete | Nov 16, 2006 2:40:22 PM
There is no form of contraception that is 100% effective. I have seen pregnancies result in spite of vasectomy and tubal ligation, much less oral contraceptives, Depo Provera, IUD, diaphragm, etc. (Ask my mom about diaphragms (me) and IUDs (my sister).) Ausblog is incorrect when he or she states that 98% of unwanted pregnancies are avoidable. Unless you only have sex for the purpose of procreation or during pregnancy and after menopause, you are at risk of unintended pregnancy.
Women have a different understanding of reproduction than men. They are very aware of a constantly changing cycle of hormones with a monthly reminder of their failure to reproduce. It's a lot more mysterious for men and I think that they tend to romanticize it more. Really, most women that I've met are pretty matter of fact about abortion. Embarrassed, yes, but agonized, no.
Posted by: J Bean | Nov 16, 2006 3:19:44 PM
Despite Sanpete's insistence that there are two and only two sides on this issue, and that "neither side is very good at acknowledging tht the other has a legitimate concern" this is simply false. For one thing, there are clearly more than two sides to the abortion issue:
1) there are people who think the fetus is fully human, but the woman is not
2) there are people who think the fetus is something less than human, but the woman is not
3) there are people who think the fetus is something less than human, but the woman is
4) there are people who think the fetus is fully human, and the woman is too
5) there are people who don't care but oppose abortion anyway
6) there are people who don't care, but support abortion anyway
7) there are people who have very strong feelings against abortion *for other people* but who,when it comes to their own lives, actually get abortions
8) there are people who are very strongly pro choice who, when faced with difficult choices, choose not to undergo abortion.
There are eight distinct possibilities, at least, on the fetus's identity, the woman's rights, and the situational ethics of abortion. None of these possibilities absolutely *requires* that the individual translate their feelings, desires, or religious beliefs into public policy. In fact, there are many areas where it would simply never occur to the individual to impose their idiosyncratic or collective ideology on society as a whole. Some baptists, for example, are extremely anti-dancing. It is rare for them to attempt to legislate this. Many communities are against drinking or gambling--they do not always treat these issues as of supreme importance.
The notion that this issue, abortion, rises to the level of public policy (as other than a health care matter) is wholly tied up with other political issues and you can see that if you look at other countries where abortion is controversial, or not controversial. Countries that oppress women politically (places sanpete seems to think are purely historical wheras, when I referenced Afghanistan and Nepal (though I could have thrown in lots of other places as well) I was talking specifically about modern day places) tend to outlaw abortion unless it is at the behest of the woman's family or her husband. Countries where women have full rights as citizens tend to have liberal abortion laws. This is why tlazeolteotl pointed out, uncontroversially, as have I that the battleground is primarily over control of women's bodies and sexualities.
But lets get personal, lets talk about the only "other side" that sanpete recognizes in this debate. I'll spot him a great one: my beloved republican christian sister in law who had many miscarriages, then two children by in vitro fertilization, then she lost her beloved daughter to an early death. She is, of course, opposed to abortion because she (says) she believes that the fetus is fully human and should have full rights the equivalent of the mother. And she "believes" it, in some sense. But she hasn't acted on those beliefs. she did not name or bury the miscarriages. She did not name or bury the little blastocysts she and her husband discarded when they selected the two that were to become actual children. And, in a sad twist, when she joined a grief group after the death of my niece no one could have been more offended than she at the parents who had the nerve to show up after a "mere" miscarriage. Because there is something different--intrinsically different--even to people who pretend otherwise for political and cultural reasons between a wanted, loved, living, post birth child and a fetus.
The Japanese call them "water babies" I believe, and (until the rise of a hard right, nationalist, fundamentalist style politics) took the attitude that terminated pregnancies were simply people who were not to be born *yet.* If people actually believed in a soul, of course, this makes sense. Technical birth into one life, or technical birth into another, birth at one time or birth at another, its a small difference.
aimai
Posted by: aimai | Nov 16, 2006 3:20:03 PM
Sanpete, if all you're saying is that different people have different feelings based on their experiences, I can't disagree. But that doesn't tell me anything I didn't already know. I also think you're also confusing the concept of "rational" with "explainable." Just because an explanation exists for how a person's experience in one context may be coloring their feelings in another doesn't mean the association is rational. I could, for instance, have a fear of clowns because of an unfortunate experience at a fifth-year birthday party. There's an explanation for my fear (in that I can point to a situation that caused it), and the fear may be "real" (in that I truly feel it), but that doesn't make my fear rational, nor does it make my experience at the party a rational basis for the fear.
That being said, you seem to want to have your cake and eat it too. You want to say, on the one hand, that people who put the value of the fetus first in the abortion debate have a legitimate concern that ought to be respected by those of us who put the women's autonomy first. On the other hand, though, you're not telling me why the concern is legitimate, or why I should respect it, aside from telling me that people may have personal feelings on the issue. If the value assigned to the fetus is just a matter of personal feelings, you haven't explained why I should take those feelings seriously in a moral debate (let alone in setting legislative policies on the matter). And you also haven't come anywhere near the question I think Ezra raised initially, which is whether it is rational (as opposed to simply explainable) to feel queasy or "icky" about abortion independent of context.
Posted by: nolo | Nov 16, 2006 3:21:20 PM
P.S. -- aimai's sad and ironic story about her sister kinda makes a good deal of my point for me.
Posted by: nolo | Nov 16, 2006 3:31:09 PM
Aimai, you're showing quite a tendency to misunderstand. I think most people understand both that there are broadly two sides in the abortion debate, called pro-life and pro-choice, and that there are also variations on and within those categories. My point was clear enough, as you show implicitly when you finally get around to addressing it.
You're right that some people who oppose abortion personally don't see it as a matter for legal prohibition. That doesn't mean that others are wrong to seek that prohibition. If people are being killed (as they believe), that's generally considered a proper matter for legal prohibition.
Countries where women have full rights as citizens tend to have liberal abortion laws. This is why tlazeolteotl pointed out, uncontroversially, as have I that the battleground is primarily over control of women's bodies and sexualities.
This doesn't follow, not even close. You're reasoning very loosely again.
What Tl said is obviously controversial. Do you imagine somehow that most pro-lifers