Pro Abortion People Are Not Monsters

I'm writing this post for two reasons. First, because I, like others, am sick and tired of the vilification and extremism on both sides of the abortion debate. It's gone on for too long and, from my point of view, the pro-life extremists are at least partially responsible for the ongoing legality of abortion because their words and actions have galvanized many people who might otherwise be brought around to see the other side and maybe even change their minds, which is what we all want.

Even many pro abortion folks--even our supposed "most pro-abortion president ever"--have explicitly said that they want abortion to be rare, so that is something to build on. Clearly they acknowledge it is not a desirable solution--they recognize there is something sinister in it if they want to make it rare, so the argumentation needs to revolve around discussing if it isn't even more sinister than they recognize it to be--so sinister that we just can't allow it to remain legal any more than other forms of taking human life are legal.

The second reason is to elaborate and respond to some friends who are pro abortion and I've recently discussing the issue with in bits (e.g., on twitter).

So, I'll try to elaborate some rationale supporting abortion w/o simply vilifying or caricaturing in hopes of helping my anti abortion friends understand and empathize with the thinking a bit more, and I'll consequently respond to each position and explain why I can't see it as viable. Doubtless I'll do an imperfect job at both, so I ask for some indulgence and understanding. I know that I, too, am biased despite my attempts at being fair and deliberate.

As I see it currently in my thinking, the abortion debate boils down to basically two issues.

1) When does human life begin?

-or-

2) Does all human life have equal dignity and correspondingly demand equal protection?

This is why phrasing the debate in terms of pro life and pro choice is a terrible mistake and has only led to further galvanize irrational people on both sides. So-called "pro choice" people are no more consciously anti-life than "pro life" people are anti choice. We really should just say pro/anti abortion.

Only a true monster would prioritize a mother's whim over the life of an innocent, defenseless human being in her womb. So, pro abortion folks have to believe that it is not a human life in question. I think this applies to the majority of people who'd classify themselves as pro choice.

The reply to this position is surprisingly simple. The consensus in biology tells us that at conception, a new organism is created that, left uninhibited and given natural nourishment, will divide and develop into a recognizable human body, be born, and mature into adulthood. It has all the genetic information that will make it up, so genetically speaking, once conceived, it is fully its own human life. (Would like to highlight that this has absolutely ZERO to do with religion--we're talking about hardcore science.)

For those who think this through and are attached to the pro abortion position, they must fall back on the second issue--a definition of when life deserves to be protected, i.e., what life is worth living and, correspondingly, worth protecting. Put another way, at what point does a human life gain human rights such as the right to life?

Leaving this delineation up for debate is, in my opinion, a truly frightening proposition, for a number of reasons:

1) For a life in the womb, the judgment of whether or not the life is worth living is based on conjecture. Will the parents have the money, time, or even psychological or social capacity to raise the child well? Will the child become a "productive member of society"? And so on.. even if you buy into the idea that some life is not worth living (which is a very debatable idea), to make that judgment on conjecture about the future is dangerous to say the least. The future simply cannot be predicted--to gamble someone else's life on a future prediction is unconscionable. It's no different from those parents who go crazy because they lost everything in some financial disaster and then kill their whole families because they can't imagine how they can continue to provide for them.

2) Even if we could reliably predict the future, it's axiomatic that perspective is everything. Some people can live in and through the most terrible circumstances and still be joyful, content people, while the wealthiest celebrities seem to have a knack for self destruction. Even if an externally dire life situation were likely, that's no indicator at all as to how happy or fulfilled an individual person might be living it. It's just not right to prevent someone even having the chance to have what they'd consider to be a satisfactory or even happy life.

3) We also know that except for a small minority, people tend to have a very strong urge for self-preservation, so given the choice, most people won't kill themselves, even if they are unhappy. So if the vast majority of people won't choose to kill themselves, who are we to kill them preemptively? Seems obvious that we should assume they will, like most people, want to live, even in unfortunate circumstances.

4) - It all boils down to an essentially completely arbitrary line in the sand as to what constitutes a human life worth protecting, and when you make that line movable based on non-objective criteria, you open yourself up for tragedy like was seen in the 20th century with the many genocides that occurred under the Nazis, the Communists, Rwanda, and elsewhere. And anti abortion folks would indeed also say that the lives taken through abortion is genocide on the grandest scale ever.

In all genocides, someone decides that these certain criteria mean that those who meet that criteria are not fully human and so they can be treated like animals or worse and killed at whim. Under current law that allows abortion on demand, we are saying that we think that parents, sometimes even teenagers, can set those criteria for their children (but only in the womb and usually only to a certain term, oddly enough).

We don't let teenagers vote or drink, but we can let them set criteria for human life worth protecting? We insist that parents educate their children and restrict their choice in regards to their children on a host of other matters (like wearing bike helmets), but we let them decide in the first place if their child's life is worth living? How does that make sense?

Freedom in general and freedom to choose in particular are always constrained in a civilized society. Phrasing the debate in terms of choice is disingenuous; phrasing it in terms of "women's [reproductive] rights" is even more so. It's not about a black and white matter of freedom or choice but whether or not parents should be able to choose if the life of their child is worth living, and given the considerations above--even granting that some human life is not worth life (which for the record I reject)--any reasonable person should see that arbitrarily drawing a line in the sand is an unacceptable option when considering human life and the rights it entails. We have to fix human rights to something more objective, and as noted, that objective thing is biology--we know a human life is genetically fully itself once conceived, and any point after that is an arbitrary judgment related to quality of life, which is simply unacceptable.

So no, pro abortion people are not monsters. I have to believe they just aren't clear thinkers because the reasoning against abortion is simply too strong. I admit it ultimately does boil down to a judgment call considering the various rationales; I just don't see how the other conclusion is viable in the end. To accept the pro abortion position, you have to accept too many unacceptable implications and risk something that is entirely too valuable--human life.

Honest and Fair Public Square

About a week ago, Stanley Fish published "Are There Secular Reasons?" in the NYT op ed section. I read it and tweeted something to the effect that I probably couldn't have said it better, but it assumes that contemporary folks care about being philosophically consistent.

A few days later, one of my buddies on Twitter, Christof Jans pointed me to this response by a fella down under, saying it was an intelligent response, and I just got around to reading that. So enough of the prologue; here's the deal, as I see it.

Not surprisingly, I still think Fish's point stands. In fact, it seems like Mr. Blackford missed the point entirely, or if he didn't he's being disingenuous in his response. First, he starts out by trying to paint Fish as some devious rhetorician, pointing out his use of "apartheid" and "'real' in quotes" as if it's wrong for him to do so. Blackford then goes on to bandy about the ever present propaganda about how when religion is in charge, everything goes badly, tossing out the usual suspects.

He goes off on this tangent, but he still rightly identifies that it was a particular historical backdrop that John Locke and his ilk were coming out of. He also rightly identifies something that he seems to not fully understand the implications of--that deriving policy--the how we ought to live and, consequently, govern ourselves--requires humans to imbue facts and assertions with value, regardless of if those facts and assertions are presented by religion, science, or ideology.

Blackford then returns to the tired assertion that when government tries to enforce a particular religion, it always does badly, conveniently forgetting or ignoring that the greatest atrocities in history were committed under intentionally irreligious. Look back on the 20th century where we have the Nazi atrocities, the Communist atrocities, the purely political great (and small) wars, the socio-political genocides of the 90s, and so on. Compared to these, even the extremely caricatured popular misconceptions of the inquisitions, Crusades, and so-called religious wars of the early modern period pale.

Of course, I'm not going to suggest that the reality of the Crusades, the abuses of the inquisitions, or the wars that took place in the name of religion are justifiable--my point here is just that any assertion that a religiously-based government is inherently worse than a purely secular one is baldly false by any honest historical measure.

All that said, this discussion is a red herring, as far as what Fish was trying to say. His point had no hint of what Blackford puts on his lips: "He needs ... an argument as to why we now live in an era when it is wise to trust the state to decide which religion is correct, and then legislate accordingly." In other words, Blackford, in his apparent anti-religious paranoia that is common among the atheistic élite, dodges Fish's argument and instead attacks the straw man that Fish (or those who agree with him) are proposing a return to theocracy.

We're not. We're merely calling out the ignorance, the dishonesty, or the unfairness of the modern liberals who advocate that religion must be purely a private matter that has no influence in the political arena. The crux of Fish's argument is exactly what, as I said, Blackford admits to but seems not to understand the implications of--that assigning value to facts and propositions must come from a metaphysical foundation.

To say that "everyone doesn't want to die or be raped" or to rely on other "obvious" (or as the Enlightenment thinkers might say, "self-evident") values still requires imbuing those propositions with value and assenting to that value. If those truths are not founded upon some objective metaphysical foundation (e.g., natural law), all they are is wishful thinking, the current popular opinion, or, might makes right. Stripped of such metaphysical foundations, legislating and enforcing these "obvious" values is nothing more than mob rule all gussied up in the pretty clothes of our much lauded democratic republic.

And in fact, we see the realities of this mob rule coming to fruition on critically important social issues like abortion, euthanasia, and the meaning of marriage. The dogma of Progress tells us that we must believe that these changes are for the better, that these are on par with the abolition of slavery, that whatever further "liberties" we gain are inherently good. This is wishful thinking on a grand scale; any student of history knows that history ebbs and flows in terms of good times and bad times.

But I digress, my point in calling this out is not to predict our own civilization's downfall but merely to highlight that history teaches us that not all changes in our society and government should blindly be accepted as "progress," i.e., something good/to be embraced. We need to judge proposed changes to our law by something more substantial than current popular ethos/culture/opinion.

To make such judgments, we are forced to draw on substantive values that, as Fish points out, cannot come from mere scientific, secular investigation or discourse. The truth is, as Blackford does admit, that we do draw on such values with or without recourse to religion. The difference between, say, me, a Catholic, and a contemporary materialist/empiricist/secularist/average Westerner is that I can be philosophically consistent in drawing on these metaphysical foundations while they, as Fish and the author he reviews point out, have to smuggle these values in and try by appeal to the bogeymen of the Enlightenment period and to popular sentiment to assert them as self evident or "obvious."

Now I might agree that, in general, the values of life, liberty, and equality are good values (because I derive them both from natural law and my religion, though not unqualifiedly), even if they are smuggling them in, and if we left it at that, we'd be fine. The objection motivating this critique is not to suggest that we should abandon the secular, pluralistic state or these smuggled values. The objection lies in what Fish calls out through his flowery language--that the secularists need to, first, ensure they're aware they are smuggling, second, that they be honest about it, and third, that they be fair and equitable as a result, realizing that the values they smuggle in are inherently no more or less valuable in a truly secular, pluralistic state than the values explicitly founded in religion.

The fact that my values may be religiously informed does not inherently make them less valuable than values others derive from whatever basis they use to inform their values, and in fact, we're suggesting that whether they want to admit it or not, their values are also ultimately, truly derived from some metaphysical source--we're just being honest about ours.

To put it another way, we are all appealing to certain metaphysical foundation based on our personal beliefs, regardless of if they are overtly religious or based on these implicit metaphysical foundations that secularists "smuggle" in. The consequences of such honesty and fairness is that those who advocate the "naked" public square, who advocate that religion be a purely private matter and be banished from public debate, cannot tenably advocate that--if they are being honest and fair.

A pluralist, free society doesn't mean a society that is free of religion but one in which all religions and non-religious ideologies can freely advocate their values. Otherwise, we end up in a situation no different from a state religion, where a particular ideology is established and others, solely because they are religiously informed, are outlawed. This is precisely the situation that our forefathers fled from. This is freedom from religion, not freedom of religion. It is not honest; it is not fair; it is not free.