The Left on abortion

 This is where the left has gone on abortion, and pro-abortion extremism is toxic. 

They are so afraid of people who get abortions being "stigmatized" that they stigmatize people who disapprove of abortion, or refuse to get them in the face of pregnancy difficulties. Newsflash: Being disapproved of is a part of life, and abortion is a serious moral issue.

Here.   

An anti-abortion argument

•1. Infants, however undeveloped, are considered persons whose lives are protected by law.

•2. Fetuses differ from infants in four ways represented by the acromym SLED. The differ in size, in level of development, in their environment, and in their dependency.

•3. Size is not a morally relevant difference when it comes to the right to life. The fact that I am bigger than my wife, but smaller than Shaq, doesn’t affect the right to life that we all possess.

•4. The unborn is less developed than an infant, but I am more developed than an infant. So this can’t be a basis for discrimination with respect to the right to life.

•5. The unborn in a different environment from an infant. It’s inside a womb, and the infant is outside the womb. But this is not a relevant difference. We would consider a law silly that said you can’t kill me inside my house, but you can kill me outside my front door.

•6. Degree of dependency is not a relevant difference. Toddlers are more dependent than adolescents, but does that mean that an adolescent has a greater right to life than does a toddler? An elderly person becomes more dependent with time, but we don’t’ question the right to life of the elderly, do we?

•7. All beginning points for the right to life, except for conception, are matters of degree, of a person having something that you can have more or less of. But that raises the question of how much is enough.  You either are conceived or not conceived, but you can have more or less of the SLED properties. Therefore, conception is the relevant difference that confers a right to life. 

Abortion and stigma

 Supporters of abortion are concerned about women being stigmatized for getting abortions. I wonder if women who refuse abortions and have children under difficult circumstances now run the risk of being themselves stigmatized, i. e., women who choose to carry Down's Syndrome babies to term.

Quite apart from pro-choice, there is a pro-abortion movement that really does encourage people to get abortions. I think pro-lifers put too much emphasis on winning a political battle over abortion laws and even abortion funding. The real abortion battle takes place in the minds and hearts of women making choices about difficult pregnancies. I think the mainstream position at Planned Parenthood is to push the idea that women should never be stigmatized for getting an abortion. In this way they minimize the serious moral decision that has to be made, and I think it's going to have the effect of stigmatizing people who DON'T get abortions when other people think they should. "Well, you had a choice. You knew this was going to be difficult. Why do you go ahead and have the baby?"

This article, by a pro-choice philosopher, illustrates the problem.

What would happen if you vaporized Planned Parenthood?

 Planned Parenthood does more than abort babies. If you defunded it, or vaporized it, would the abortion rate go up or down? I think Hillary Clinton talked about a county in Texas the defunded Planned Parenthood, and the abortion rate went up. 

Of course, these consequential issues remind me of another question. Is the point of murder laws to prevent murder? What if we lived in a possible world in which murder laws actually resulted in there being more murders than there would otherwise be. Should murder be illegal if that were true? 

Is it justifiable homicide if you kill abortion providers? Is abortion itself justifiable homicide?

 Some states—including South Dakota—consider homicide justifiable when it is an act of self-defense or in defense of another person. But HB 1171 would expand the definition of “justifiable homicide” to include homicide that is intended to prevent harm to a fetus in certain circumstances. Abortion is not only legal in this country, but is a constitutionally protected right. As worded, this bill is an invitation to murder those who provide these legal health care services.

Here. 

Is it wrong to kill abortion providers? I would have thought prolifers would want to keep the range of justifiable homicide narrow. 

For an argument that defends abortion as justifiable homicide, see here. 

One kind of pro-choice argument

 In the 2005 article “Most Abortions Are Morally Legitimate,” Bonnie Steinbock puts forward an argument stating that abortion is in fact morally justified in most cases. Steinbock begins by declaring that her belief on the morality of abortion is based on two considerations which are the moral status of the embryo and the fetus and the burdens imposed on women through pregnancy and childbirth. Steinbock also puts forward the interests view, which limits moral status to people who have interests in their future and restricts the possession of interests to people who are conscious of the world around them. Following the logic presented by the interest view, Steinbock argues that fetuses are not conscious enough to understand their interests and that it is not morally wrong to kill a fetus when there is an adequate reason for doing so. Steinbock further discusses the view on abortion possessed by Don Marquis and argues that it is wrong because it attempts to claim that a fetus is a conscious living being and that it would be immoral to kill an unborn child even though they have no awareness of their interests and the outside world.

Abortion: Something to shout about?

 

It seems to me that there are a lot of situations in which a woman might make a decision to get an abortion. They could be doing it because having a baby would compromise their party lifestyle. They might be doing it because they were raped. They might to do it because they don't want to put off their college degree. They might do it because they know they can't afford to care for the child once it's born, or because they won't be able to afford to get the prenatal care they will need to complete the pregnancy. Or they could choose abortion because they don't want to bring a disabled child into the world (implying that disability makes a life not worth living). The only way you can argue that abortion is OK across the board is to maintain that the fetus, prior to birth, is a blob of tissue that has no intrinsic value. Many people who might not be prepared to equate all abortion with murder might nonetheless think that in an abortion you cause the loss of something of considerable value, and that decision to abort, at minimum, should not be taken lightly. (But others actually think abortions are something to shout about). https://shoutyourabortion.com/book/

Abortometrics, or what is the real pro-life goal?

 Is getting abortions as close to zero as possible the pro-life goal, or is it something else?

From the point of what I would call abortometrics, the idea of trying to figure out what policies will produce the most nonabortions, it is not clear to me that the Republicans are any better than the Democrats. Democrats supported the idea that employers don't have the right to fire employees for getting pregnant, allowed for unpaid medical leave in the Family and Medical Leave Act, and try to make sure that everyone, including pregnant women, get health care. They support paid medical leave, and that would give women a reason not to get an abortion. All Republicans try to do to produce nonabortions is to prevent access by reversing Roe and allowing states to ban abortion. In other words, they think the only way to get rid of abortion if to use force to prevent women from having access to abortion. But because we are a nation governed by the people, this would only be possible in a few red states. In other words, the attack the supply side of abortion. On the other hand, they seem contemptuous of any policies that would decrease the number of abortions by decreasing the need for them. Many pro-choice people in the Democratic party strongly dislike abortion (Biden certainly, though I am not so sure about Harris). Historically, abortion rates don't go down any faster under Republicans than under Democrats. The old slogan for Democrats was safe, legal, and rare, although there has been some, to my mind disturbing backing away from this perspective. But, in practical terms, a safe legal and rare strategy might in fact produce fewer abortions that a strict pro-life position, given the impracticality of getting anything close to an across-the-board prohibition of abortion. So, if the goal is to get the abortometrics as close to zero as possible, (a goal shared by pro-lifers and anti-abortion pro-choicers and no, that's NOT an oxymoron.) Now, maybe pro-lifers think that the abortometric approach is the wrong way to approach abortion. I suppose they think that pro-life laws and the supply strategy are more deontologically adequate even if they are infeasible and less effective abortometrically than the demand strategy. But if the goal is to get as close to zero on abortions as is feasible, then it is less that clear which party is really more pro-life.

Is it OK to use deceit in opposing abortion?

 Here is an interesting problem. Working from the point of view of pro-life politics, putting a replacement for Ginsburg on the court with the present President and Senate would be a victory, as was refusing to the nomination of Merrick Garland and leaving the seat open to be filled by Neil Gorsuch.  It could have been done on the basis of straightforward power politics, we have the majority in the Senate, we want a conservative majority that will overturn Roe and do other things we want, so we are leaving the seat open. We will do it because we can.  But they didn't do that. 2016, like 2020, was an election year, and they specifically argued for the Garland refusal by insisting that in an election year the people should decide. They used this rhetoric,  no doubt, to help Republican candidates in tight Senate races look good. And they didn't qualify it, that is what they said. They didn't say it applied only if the President and the Senate majority were of opposite parties. Lindsey Graham said if this happened with a Republican President the same principle would apply, and if he changed his mind, you could use his words against him. Well, he changed his mind, and he is in a re-election race. Or maybe he didn't, maybe it was power politics from the beginning for him, and he was gambling on this never coming up. In any event, Jaime Harrison should be able to use it this to his advantage. 

If we act on principle, the idea of this is that we are going to be willing to employ the principle when it is convenient for us as well as when it is inconvenient. 

But we can also ask this question: If you are a pro-life Christian, should you be happy about the use of deceit to promote the prohibition of abortion? In this context there is also the payment of a huge sum of money to Norma McCorvey, the Roe of Roe v. Wade, who was paid that money because her support for the pro-life cause was thought to be wavering, who really didn't support the pro-life position, and who wrote a book convincing millions of people that she had changed her mind. It was called "Won by Love," but was she really won by money? A committed pro-lifer could say that the deceit involved was a small price to pay considering the fetuses that were (presumably) saved. And they might say that same thing about deceitfully implying that Republicans were following principle, as opposed to practicing power politics, in refusing to allow Merrick Garland's nomination to be considered. 

One response would be to say that people on the other side are deceitful in this or that way, so it's hypocritical to bring this up. But hypocrisy arguments are inherently weak and are often beside the point. But what that suggests is that if a rule is being violated on the other side, it is no longer valid. What you are saying is that deceit in the interests of pro-life is justified, since people on the pro-choice side practice deceit. But does that follow in any sort of logical way?

And this ties in with the whole Trump issue. How many deceits and transgressions of basic Christian values are Christians willing to tolerate because, after all,  he's "pro-life." (This is in scarequotes because I find it impossible to believe he cares about fetuses. This is a transactional deal with the pro-life movement--you scratch by back and I'll scratch yours.) This is a man who straightforwardly mocked the fundamental value of loving and forgiving one's enemies, something the Bible says a lot more about than it says about abortion. 

Some evangelicals, if confronted with the news that Trump had just shot three people to death on Fifth Avenue, would just say "Well, I still support him. At least he's pro-life." 

But let me ask this question as pointedly as I can. If you are pro-life, to what extent is deceit justified in pursuing that goal. If the right to life is a good end, what means are justified in pursuing it?

Will reversing Roe save fetuses? Maybe a couple.

Reversing Roe will NOT outlaw abortion, unless you use legal arguments that say that we can show that fetuses are persons in every relevant sense and that laws permitting abortion are in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. That is what the argument would be if you follow pro-life logic out to its logical conclusion, but that is not the argument that people like Scalia use against Roe. They claim, not that the fetus's right to life was denied by Roe, but rather that a woman's right to privacy is not as absolute as Roe implies that it is. Hence, Scalia says, abortion should be decided by democratic choice. He may be right, but democratic choice in most states is going to be on the side of the pro-choice position, except in some Bible Belt states, and even there I doubt that such strong abortion laws are going last very long.

 I've also found it somewhat puzzling that since 1980, most of the Supreme Court Justices have been nominated by Republican Presidents who have been pro-life, and yet Roe is still going strong, supported in many cases by the decisions of those justices put there by Reagan, the Bushes, and Trump. Even Brett Kavanaugh, who did vote with the dissenters in the Louisiana case, tried to send it back to the lower courts to avoid having to rule on it, which is not the actions of someone eager to overturn Roe. And Roberts, well, he didn't even want to overturn precedent on a ruling he opposed a few months earlier, because of stare decisis. What chance is there that he would overturn Roe? I conclude that maybe if Roe had not happened, fetuses might have been saved, but overturning it now would save two fetuses in the State of Mississippi. The horse is out of the barn and not coming back.

I would add that the abortion rate DROPPED during both the Clinton and the Obama administrations. In real practice, Republicans do worse than Democrats at keeping fetuses from being aborted. 

A woman has the right to do as she pleases with her body, but how far do we push it?

Suppose a whole village of about 1000 tiny people were living in a woman's left arm. Suppose the presence of the village in her arm makes her arm itch and is a mild nuisance. But since it's her body, does she have the right to holocaust the village? 

Beckwith on Biden on abortion

At Maverick Christian, here. 

Abortion and Moral Objectivity

Some people think that the fact that people cannot agree about the issue of abortion is good evidence that moral values are relative or subjective. It is quite true that there are profound differences about moral values that are extraordinarily difficult to resolve when it comes to this issue. It is also true that a lot of the dispute on this issue takes place at what I call the bumper sticker level: "Abortion is murder" "A woman has the right to do as she pleases with her own body," etc.

However, disputants do agree that humans in general have a right to life. No one, (or almost no one) disputes that. There is a very strong consensus about the right to life outside the womb, even amongst pro-choicers, which is challenged in some cases by Australian philosophers taking pro-choice arguments so far as to justify infanticide, but by and large social consensus against infanticide is pretty strong. No one thinks we have the right to knock off a four-year-old just because the four-year-old is annoying us. People also believe in the right of persons, including women to control their own body. Pro-lifers are not inclined to oppose that right except in the case of a pregnancy, where they believe another person's rights to be involved. Pro-lifers and pro-choicers also agree that the quality of life matters a great deal. It is just that pro-lifers think that quality of life concerns have to be set aside in order to protect the right to life of the fetus, the exact argument that a pro-choice person would make on behalf of four-year-olds.

Hence the contemporary debate concerning abortion is a kind of in-house quarrel between people who agree on a range of fundamental principles. Looked at in this way, the dispute about abortion provides an problem for moral subjectivity, not an argument for it.

Ryan v. Biden in Thomist perspective

This is my follow-up to the last redated post.

The difference between Ryan and Biden on abortion is this. For Aquinas, there are four kinds of law: eternal law, divine law, natural law, and human law. Since human law is aimed at human happiness and not salvation, it has to be based on considerations of natural law, not divine law. The claim that the right to life begins at conception, for Biden, is a matter of divine law. It is something that we couldn't discover by ordinary moral reflection apart from the Church's teaching on the matter. So, even though he thinks abortion wrong, he thinks it wrong because the Church teaches that it is wrong, and not because we could discover this on our own. Ryan, on the other hand, not only accept the Church's teaching on abortion, he thinks that human beings reflecting on the matter, could come to the anti-abortion position by natural reason alone. Even though much of our culture denies that abortion is morally wrong, those who do so, by thinking in moral terms, could and should reach the conclusion that abortion is, almost always, homicide without adequate moral justification. As such, he therefore believes it appropriate for government to legislate concerning it.

The Priority of Life-Rights Thesis

One thing that is never clearly stated in the abortion controversy, but underlies a lot of the discussion, is what I would call the Priority of Life-Rights Thesis, or PLT. That is, while some rights can be overriden in order to protect other rights, when a life-right is at stake, that life-right always must be defended by the force of law, and all other rights (quality of life rights, privacy rights, etc), have to take a back seat to life rights. To some people, this is so obvious as to not even need argumentation or defense. Hence, once you call something murder, it is somehow logically incoherent to be against making it illegal. By murder, here, I will waive the question of criminal intent, and simply define it as homicide without adequate moral justification.


As a philosopher, I see this as a loose end in the discussion that bothers me. How should it be defended, or should it?

Does the Constitution Support a Right to Privacy?

Interestingly enough, the legal case for overturning Roe v. Wade (as opposed to the moral case against abortion) doesn't turn on affirming a fetus's constitutional right to life, but instead on denying a woman's absolute right to privacy, which according to Roe's critics, is an invented right which is the product of judicial activism. Here is some information on the debate concerning the right to privacy.

It seems to me there are four possible positions here. You could accept the court's defense of the right to privacy, but still consider abortion to be murder, you could reject the court's defense of the right to privacy and consider abortion to be murder, you could accept the court's defense of the right to privacy and deny that abortion is murder, or you could reject the court's defense of the right to privacy, but deny that abortion is is murder.

The first and fourth positions seem to be, at least consistent, though they put you in a bit of spot reconciling your moral and legal philosophies. In the first place you are stuck saying that abortion is murder, but it has to be legal to protect a woman's privacy. In the second case, you think abortion isn't murder, but there is no legal basis for stopping the government from legislating against it.

Here is a discussion of the legal issue of privacy.

A Question for Frank Beckwith and Other Pro-Lifers

This is another way of posing the question I asked about embryonic stem cell research a few posts back. 

Frank: The abortion issue, of course, spills over into the debate about embryonic stem cell research, and raises a very interesting issue.

The pro-life, or conceptionist position, is that human life, and the right to life, begins at conception. This, of course implies that, once conceived, from its initial state as as zygote to when it dies, the human being possesses certain basic rights, including the right to life. Hence abortion is ruled out except in cases where homicide is justified, and homicide is not justified in the vast majority of abortion cases (danger to the life of the mother being the primary type of case where the requirements of justifiable homicide are met). But this protects not only fetuses, but also frozen embryos, which are created but not implanted. These are persons also, and therefore pro-life arguments extend to them, and it is homicide (and therefore murder if there is no moral justification for homicide) to use those embryos for embryonic stem cell research, since such use destroys the life of the embryos.

The question then arises as to what other rights these embryos have in addition to the right to life. I take it that ordinary fetuses have other rights besides the right to life. If embryos are frozen into the indefinite future, does this do a moral disservice to them? They get to live, but they never get a life, as it were. If life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are basic rights, then do we  not have an obligation to these embryos to give them the opportunity to grow up, be free, and pursue happiness, as opposed to leaving them in a frozen prison.

Or do embryos and fetuses have only the right to life? That strikes me as highly counterintuitive.

Has anyone developed a pro-life analysis of this issue?

Victor

The Pro-Murder Position on Abortion

Most discussion in the abortion debate presupposes that if the pro-life person can establish the claim that abortion is murder, the debate is over and the pro-life position has won. Camille Paglia, somewhat to the consternation of her fellow pro-choicers, actually concedes what pro-lifers consider to be their central argument. The standard pro-choice position denies the claim that abortion is murder, Paglia's view embraces it, but defends the absence of laws against abortion nevertheless.

Let's take a look at her statements:

Let’s take the issue of abortion rights, of which I am a firm supporter. As an atheist and libertarian, I believe that government must stay completely out of the sphere of personal choice. Every individual has an absolute right to control his or her body. (Hence I favor the legalization of drugs, though I do not take them.) ....


Hence I have always frankly admitted that abortion is murder, the extermination of the powerless by the powerful. Liberals for the most part have shrunk from facing the ethical consequences of their embrace of abortion, which results in the annihilation of concrete individuals and not just clumps of insensate tissue. The state in my view has no authority whatever to intervene in the biological processes of any woman’s body, which nature has implanted there before birth and hence before that woman’s entrance into society and citizenship.


It looks as if a logically consistent position can be maintained here, the freedom to do as one chooses with one's own body trumps the genuine right of the fetus to life.  For a lot of people, her position is counterintuitive. Is her position irrational? Well, Hume said "It would not be irrational to prefer the death of a thousand Orientals to the pricking of the little finger." So, how, exactly, does the argument proceed from here? 


Actually this reminds me of an old friend of mine by the name of Bill Patterson, (whom Bob Prokop also knew),  now an archivist for the Heinlein Library, who staunchly opposed abortion on moral grounds. But since he was an anarchist, he opposed legislation against abortion, since he opposed, well, legislation, period. 

Abortion and Relevance

Most people agree that killing a newborn is a criminal act, not a mother's choice, (although there have been a few people who have defended infanticide). The question in the abortion controversy is whether a fetus is relevantly different from a newborn. Of course there are differences (a fetus is in the womb and a newborn is out of the womb), but the big question is whether that difference is a morally relevant difference, a difference that gives us grounds for thinking that while a newborn has a right to life that should be backed up by the protection of the criminal law, a fetus has no such right.

This is mostly by way of trying to spell out the issue clearly.

What is it like to ban abortion

This New York Times magazine article talks about some countries, like El Salvador, that do ban it.