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Nice! And I hadn’t heard about the Colorado study. So nice and substantive!
Two quibbles:
1. “Four times less likely”? I suspect you mean “a fourth as likely.”
2. It would have added comic unity for the final bubble to echo the initial bubble: “We have to bring down the abortion rate! I want to hear some new ideas, people…” This would emphasize the conclusion that these pro-lifers are impervious to new ideas.
They’re not really impervious to new ideas, though. Just to new ideas that aren’t about punishing women for having abortions. I’m sure that whenever someone comes up with a new way to force women to have unwanted babies they’re all ears.
If you treat non-consequentialists as if they’re consequentialists then their ethical positions make no sense.
Imagine a hypothetical world where there was good, objectively true evidence from well designed and unbiased studies that through some weird chain of oddball interactions the rate of sexual assaults could be halved permanently overnight if every feminist agreed to shut down all feminist organizations and publicly took some position that repulsed them. Say, wear a T-shirt reading “Up with the patriarchy”.
of course that’s absurd in this universe but it’s a hypothetical to make a point.
So, in that universe:
What are the chances of getting many feminists on board?
What are the chances of them believing that the evidence is simply faked by their ideological opponents no matter how good it really is?
And then imagine the ASJ people started screaming that that means they don’t really care about sexual assault.
I think that Murphy has a point. I think that most people, including a lot of rank-and-file pro-lifers, are less sharply divided into consequentialist vs non-consequentialist, and making consequentialist arguments to them could be effective–and relatedly, I think a lot of the rank-and-file is more pro-birth-control than the leaders of pro-life organizations–but I think a lot of the leadership is heavily influenced by Natural Law and such. But they don’t want to put those beliefs front and center, because those are less broadly agreed upon among the broader pro-life coalition.
So, I have an analog example to this that exists. I don’t think your example does quite work as a hypothetical because it would require showing a few other things, like that other feminist issues would not be made worse, because then that would have to be weighed against the halving of sexual assaults. But it’s still a useful point. So:
Laws against female circumcision that have been in some way pushed by colonial powers tend to backfire, leading to more dangerous, and sometimes even increased numbers of, mutilation. The actual technique that works is grassroots education, particularly of women, and allowing women in the affected areas to lead the movement against circumcision in their countries because they best know the actual situation on the ground (people from other places can and should give them support! But we’re not the ideal strategists).
Therefore, I oppose colonially dictated (overtly or less so) colonial laws about female circumcision. From a consequentialist viewpoint, they make no sense. It makes people outside the culture feel better, but if it makes people inside the culture suffer more? Fuck that. Saying “I oppose those laws” is something people will use to suggest someone doesn’t care about female circumcision.
However, I have a more direct analog to the verbal aspect of saying things that you dislike saying because they have (or potentialy have) positive effects. In this case, at the time I was studying it, using the accurate term female genital mutilation, or FGM, as someone white from a semi-colonial power, could harm one’s ability to do effective activism or reach out to affected women. It could be alienating to them, condescending, seem part and parcel with the dismissal of their cultures on the whole as “barbaric,” and things like that. (The term has a different connotation if used by in-group people, and in some other contexts.) But if it’s possible to help ameliorate the problem by saying “female circumcision” instead of FGM — even though the latter is by my lights more specific and accurate — then fuck yeah, I’ll use the vocabulary.
I will note my information is about twelve years old at this point, because that’s when I was studying relevant anthropology. The situation I describe for this example may have changed. But it was a problem that did exist, and you could sometimes take crap for taking the consequentialist view.
But it was worth it, because consequences goddamn matter. For conservatives, liberals, or small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri. Non-consequentialism is immoral.
But you’re right, this definitely wouldn’t appeal to non-consequentialists, and I agree with your broader point and all.
Some pro-life people don’t want to really control women; they think that a living being and potential human being is being killed. Some believe that and are nevertheless pro-choice.
I don’t really understand the drive to demonize people like that by putting words in their mouth.
Giggi: So if anyone in the pro-life movement is sincere (and you’re right, many pro-lifers are), then satire about the strategies the pro-life movement chooses (or chooses to ignore) is out of bounds?
With this cartoon, I made a conscious choice to make it clear that the people depicted were the pro-choice leaders – the people who set the higher-level strategies – and not the ordinary ground-level pro-lifers. I’m honestly unsure what more I could have done, other than never making fun of pro-life positions, that you would have found satisfactory.
I had no clue who the “leaders” were. In any case, they don’t seem to be very effective since states have not been permitted to outlaw abortion since the early 1970s.
So I googled them. I see American Life League President Judie Brown. Life Action president Lila Rose. Pro-Life Action League Executive Director Eric Scheidler. Marjorie Dannenelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List.
Sounds like a lot of women are pro-life leaders. If you quickly look, lots of them also sound sincere in their positions. In your cartoon, there was a sensible pro-choice woman and only male pro-life “leaders”. If that were advertising, it would probably be categorized as misleading.
Are you sure that the “leadership” just wants to control and humiliate women? Where did you get that idea from?
Edited to add: I do see one woman in the cartoon asking a question, but not necessarily taking a position. At the end, though, the sensible pro-choice woman is physically thrown out on her back, and the male leader proclaims, “Okay Gentlemen, …”
I don’t really understand the motivation here.
With all due respect, I’m not sure you understand political cartooning. You seem to think that I’m claiming this cartoon is a documentary, and that these people are speaking the way I believe real-life pro-life leaders do. (ETA: Well, I assume you don’t think that. But your criticisms nonetheless seemed based in the assumption that political cartoons should have a high degree of fidelity to how actual pro-life people talk.)
But the cartoon is obviously not real, nor do I believe it is real, nor do I believe typical readers would take this for a documentary. Political cartoons often work by highlighting a ridiculous aspect of reality by making fictional people speak more straightforwardly than they ever would in real life.
In this case, the ridiculous thing I’m highlighting is that there is an available policy idea that would decrease abortion by enormous amounts, without needing to use coercive approaches at all. And because pro-choicers wouldn’t object to it, getting it passed into law would be easy, if only pro-lifers wanted it.
But the fact is, at the leadership level, no major pro-life organizations or national politicians support reducing abortion by making long-term birth control available for free. Not one. Even though studies have shown that this is an incredibly effective way of reducing abortion.
The fact that pro-life leadership is so completely uninterested in a noncoercive method that’s been proven to bring huge reductions in the abortion rate, while remaining all-in on coercive methods that are both less effective and face more opposition, is something worth highlighting and making fun of. And that’s what this cartoon is about.
Giggi, one of the pro-life leaders in the cartoon is a woman.
There is a premise in the cartoon, though, that there are no moral or societial issues with the Federal government providing free birth control to teens.
I would actually be fine with pairing vastly increased birth control with much stricter mid-late term abortion laws. A large majority of Americans agree. But we’ve been dominated by both extremes on the issue for ever. It is a systemic curse.
Ron, it’s not that I think there are no issues there. It’s that I don’t buy that those issues are so completely catastrophic and overwhelming that there’s no need to even discuss it – not when what’s on the other side of the scale is millions of babies dying. Which is what pro-lifers claim they believe abortion to be.
When it comes to women’s heath and freedom, pro-lifers are all like “well, we just have to compromise on those things, because millions of baby deaths are at issue.” But suddenly compromise is unthinkable when it comes to the horrible specter of effective birth control.
I guess they’d rather see millions of “babies” die than agree that teens are, in fact, going to have sex and might as well have fewer consequences for the sex they’re going to have anyway.
Sebastian – So you’re saying preventing millions of abortions is only acceptable to you if it’s pared with forcing a few more women to give birth against their wills? Gee, how moderate of you.
Pragmatically, no compromise like this is ever possible, because no legislation is ever final, and the two disagreeing sides aren’t going to give up. If pro-lifers (leadership and base) want to support vastly decreasing abortion prevalence through supporting free long-term birth control, they could do that tomorrow and no one would stop them. Since the only actual opposition to that policy comes from pro-lifers, that would be sustainable. It would never change as long as pro-lifers kept on valuing reducing abortion over their anti-welfare, anti-birth-control priorities.
But no Congress has an absolute power to tie the hands of future Congresses. In our system, I don’t think it’s practically possible to reach a deal such as you describe, because the two laws you suggest aren’t intrinsically linked, and I can’t imagine any reasonable way to prevent future congresses from continuing to wrangle over what the laws would be.
But if pro-lifers actually thought preventing millions of abortions was worth going along with free long-term birth control, they could make it stick. No one would push back against them. And that they don’t says a lot about their priorities, imo.
Or perhaps, as Murphy’s comment suggests to me, they’re simply unable to acknowledge reality.
I agree with Amp’s point. But let me quibble with the phrasing:
No, there aren’t two disagreeing sides. Rather, there are people. People who hold a variety of views on abortion. But more to the point, people who hold a variety of views on things other than abortion, and thus would hold a variety of views on which package of policies they favor.
Some people who oppose abortion might well support government subsidies for birth control. Others (say, orthodox Roman Catholics) might oppose both birth control and abortion. Conversely, others (say, Zero Population Growth folks) might oppose restrictions on abortions and support government subsidies on birth control. And still others (say, libertarians) might oppose restrictions on abortion but oppose government-subsidized birth control.
This complexity does not undermine Amp’s point; rather, it amplifies it. It’s hard to talk about striking a social bargain because there really aren’t organized sides to bargain with. No one acts as a spokesperson for either “side” with the power to compromise on behalf of others.
I raise this point mostly because I want to avoid Us vs. Them thinking.
RonF,
Phrasing it as a Federal government action so that you can object to it on Federalist grounds is a neat trick. There is nothing stopping you and other pro-lifers in Illinois from getting the Illinois state government to hand out free long term birth control. Since it costs very little up front and has immediate financial pay-offs in decreased costs, there isn’t even a good “I don’t wanna pay more taxes” argument against it, or a “but Illinois is bankrupt” argument.
If the major pro-life organizations split with the Catholic Church on this and demanded this at a state level in every state, it would be national policy without any Federal government action very quickly.
There’s been remarkable success with curtailing unwanted pregnancies in Colorado using this method (free-to-the-user long term birth control.) Virginia is attempting a similar method but you’ll never guess who’s blocking it in the legislature.
“Sebastian – So you’re saying preventing millions of abortions is only acceptable to you if it’s pared with forcing a few more women to give birth against their wills? Gee, how moderate of you.”
Weird, I didn’t say that at all. I mentioned the two of them together because both were mentioned in the cartoon and the pairing of ideas was considered unlikely in the thread.
“Pragmatically, no compromise like this is ever possible, because no legislation is ever final, and the two disagreeing sides aren’t going to give up.”
Yes. As I said, we’ve stupidly let both extremist sides dominate the issue and frustrate much better and widely more popular laws on the issue.
From an emotional/political issue I suspect a lot of it has to do with a relatively silly but in reality powerful distinction between stages of prevention. Intuitively huge numbers of people all across the spectrum (essentially everyone not on the NARAL or Operation Rescue sides) understand that there is a scale of ‘personhood’ we are talking about in the abortion battles. The zygote stage isn’t a person for most people’s understanding. The eight month fetus definitely is. The scale slides in between there with a very large majority of people settling on the fourth or fifth month.
So as far as highly charged, political-tribe-valent, abortion battles go, birth control doesn’t seem like much of an abortion battle because it really is talking about the pre-zygote stage where almost everyone agrees. So it gets put in some other related-but-not-the-same-bucket.
Which is why your cartoon is interesting and strong. Because it juxtaposes two buckets of thought that don’t really get put together very often. Its target audience is obviously liberals, because of the mockery involved. Some other pro-life cartoonist might make a powerful one that could reach pro-lifers in a similar concept with a different tone.
I feel like the abortion debate in the US is framed as if there are two extremists groups, but there aren’t really. There’s a centrist group (abortions only for people who want them) and an extremist group (no abortions for anyone, with enforced criminal penalties).
The other side (mandatory abortions) are not strongly represented in US politics, and although we certainly have our share of anti-population-growthers and eugenicists in the US, they’re not really a meaningful part of any political coalition or any political debate. In other countries (say, Mainland China) they are much more strongly represented in terms of law, policy, and practice.
Inasmuch as there are forced-abortion proponents in the US pro-choice movement, I abhor them. They’re horrible people and have horrible politics and if their beliefs were put into practice it would cause a lot of misery and suffering.
“Sebastian – So you’re saying preventing millions of abortions is only acceptable to you if it’s pared with forcing a few more women to give birth against their wills? Gee, how moderate of you.”
I regret writing this, it was needlessly mean.
But I stand by the rest of my comment; I think our system is structured in a way that makes lasting grand bargains pretty much impossible, unless the two parts of the deal are intrinsically related.
Birth control and late-term abortions are separate issues, except insofar as more of the former will presumably lead to less of the latter.
I wonder about this. I’d guess that the Pro-Life movement doesn’t embrace birth control for more pragmatic reasons. First, such a policy would drive a wedge between those who really only care about bringing zygotes to term and those who care about the sacredness of sex (e.g., orthodox Roman Catholics). Second, I also wonder that the people who rise to the top of Pro-Life organizations aren’t more likely to be people to really care about policing sex. I wonder if there’s any way to test this hypothesis.
For what it’s worth, polls show that lay Catholics aren’t that hung up about government-subsidized birth control—but fundamentalist Protestants are. I vaguely recall Mitt Romney’s camp getting into some rough water here because he couldn’t be seen as taking a moderate position on birth control, a topic that a lot of Republican voters care about, even though no one was proposing to limit access to birth control.
Yes, although the Republicans in Colorado voted to defund it. They managed to get enough funding to continue at a reduced rate, and then enough Republicans crossed the line to join Democrats in re-funding it.
Actually, I don’t think this is really the case. More access to birth control will reduce the overall abortion rate. But, late term abortions are really, really rare. They almost always happen when a wanted pregnancy goes horribly, horribly wrong.
Good point, Kate, thanks.
I think you missed a positions in there between what you call a centrist position and the enforced abortions position. Namely, I have seen people argue that people should be able to get free government funded abortions at anytime during a pregnancy. Don’t know how widespread that viewpoint is, but I have seen it. Not that it changes anything but thought I’d point it out.
There are a lot of positions on the spectrum that are between the two extremes. I don’t know why naming one is relevant.
Charles S. @ 16:
It wasn’t a “neat trick”. There was no trickery or deceptive intent involved. It was a direct response to the wording used by the character in the cartoon who proposed that “the US”, not “the States”, provide free long-term birth control. Do you commonly start your debate responses with derogatory remarks on someone’s motives?
As far as the States providing it as opposed to the Federal government doing so, I’d say that it doesn’t really make a substantial difference to my point. The moral issue of whether or not birth control should be supplied by a governmental body isn’t a function of whether or not it’s the Federal government, a State government or a municipal government. The fact that a problem is perceived does not automatically mean that it is the government’s job to solve it.
The fact that a problem is perceived does not automatically mean that it is the government’s job to solve it.
That is certainly a position that many people hold in many different contexts, but it’s definitionally not a position that pro-life activists hold about abortion.
Also, on a somewhat related note, I think the degree to which pro-life activists reject consequentialism is being pretty heavily overstated, both as a matter of rhetoric and policy. The ongoing enthusiasm for TRAP laws are hard to square with anything but consequentialism, for one.
I’m not familiar with what you mean by “TRAP laws”.
Well, no. Just because government should not be automatically assumed to be the solution to a problem does not mean that it should never be used. Preventing killing people has long been considered within the purview of government.
@RonF:
Your argument seems to literally be, “Just because pro-lifers want to use the government to prevent abortion it shouldn’t be assumed that they think government is the solution to the problem of preventing abortion.”
I mean, people who aren’t pro-life can reasonably take the position that abortion isn’t a problem the government should be taking steps to prevent, but they aren’t at issue here.
TRAP laws are regulations that are nominally about other things (usually safety or informed consent), but really about just making it harder to get an abortion or provide an abortion, pushed by pro-life activists at the state level. They’re pretty open about just trying to prevent abortions, and using the other rationales as pretexts to pass Constitutional muster. It’s… very consequentialist, no matter what else you think of it.
RonF wrote:
I’ve said this before, but an awful lot of people—for sound religious/spiritual reasons (for example)—do not believe that embryos and fetuses are fully individuated people with the same rights as you or me. Why should the government be in the business of deciding which set of religious beliefs gets privileged when it comes to this?
“I’ve said this before, but an awful lot of people—for sound religious/spiritual reasons (for example)—do not believe that embryos and fetuses are fully individuated people with the same rights as you or me.”
People disagree on all sorts of things, that is almost all of what politics is about.
“Why should the government be in the business of deciding which set of religious beliefs gets privileged when it comes to this?”
Moral decisions always inform the law. You don’t get to discriminate against religious people by saying they can’t participate in the political system because you don’t like how to derive their morals insights.
Sebastian, I’m pretty sure this is the opposite of what Richard is saying. Emphasis mine:
So the point is, given the fact that religions disagree on this, why should the government pick one particular viewpoint?
***
That being said, Richard, I’m not entirely sure I agree with that. After all, we did come to a legal consensus on gay marriage, even though that was against some people’s religious viewpoints and in concordance with others’. (Along with many other previous moral quandaries, including some relating to personhood itself, say w/r/t slavery–but I know less about that, and feel less comfortable talking about it in detail.) Clearly, we do pick sides that align with some religious sides against others, based either on what we consider to be more fundamental principles, or based on a moral consensus shared among most but not all people.
I don’t mind the chain of logic that says that anti-abortion folks feel abortion is murder, and therefore they’d like the government to try to stop it. I think they’re wrong, but I don’t think there’s something hypocritical about that reasoning. (To be clear, there are many, many things I object to from anti-abortion activists…just not that thing in particular.)
***
As a more general note, I dislike that we use “big government” and “small government” to refer solely to economic matters. Conservatives in general would like a big government when it comes to the military and to criminalization of some types of personal behavior, and liberals in general would like a big government when it comes to economic support programs, and each side would like less government action on the other side’s stuff. It’s a linguistic coup that we call Social Security big government, but not the world’s largest military. But that’s getting a bit off-topic…
Harlequin:
I have thought about this a little and maybe I need to think about it more, but I do think there is a difference. Marriage equality might offend some people’s religious sensibilities, but marriage equality does not, for example, require that gay people get married in a church—my point being simply that marriage as an institution, at least the way we understand it now, also exists outside of religion and so the government’s decision also exists outside of religion.
However, the question of whether or not a zygote/embryo/fetus is a person is fundamentally a question of faith. You either believe it or you don’t. And so, when someone says that the government should outlaw abortion because protecting people’s lives is part of the government’s business, then it seems to me that the government has gotten itself involved in choosing one religious sensibility over another.
Preventing killing people has long been considered within the purview of government.
Yes, so why on earth would pro-lifers who believe abortion is “killing people” oppose the most effective possible thing the government could do to prevent it? You’ve just taken us full circle.
1. If you embrace this argument, presumably government’s choice to intervene or not each reflect a choice to privilege one perspective over another. This is a problem government cannot avoid via inaction
2. I don’t embrace the personhood argument. First, I have general skepticism about propositions employing the verb “to be.” Thus, I find no substance to the question “Is a fetus a person?” The answer turns on the definition of “fetus” and “person” you choose. Thus, the question becomes a smokescreen for an exercise in power–specifically, the power to define “fetus” and “person” for purposes of the law.
But second, I embrace the autonomy argument.
Walk into any dialysis clinic and observe the patients. Prod them. Poke them. Look them in the teeth. Ask them if they regard themselves as persons. Engage in whatever test of “personhood” you like. Then walk out the door with your two healthy kidneys intact. The fact that most of these people are doomed to die for lack of a kidney imposes no legal duty on you to provide them with a kidney–their personhood notwithstanding.
Admittedly, I’m interested in exploring a system for making the transfer of kidneys more liquid. That is, creating a system for cataloging the qualities of kidneys potentially available for donation. Once it became known that your choice to donate a kidney would be reliably reciprocated–perhaps even contractually so–if you ever needed one, I expect that the supply of kidney donors might increase. And if we could pay people, I expect the supply would grow even more. Ideally the system would become so robust that pretty much everyone would join in order to assure themselves of a kidney in the event of need.
But until we create a world in which we have a general rule compelling one person to donate his body for the benefit of another, I don’t see the point of barring abortions–personhood be damned. And if and when we choose to implement such a rule, I think I’d want to start where personhood was not in doubt–for example, at the dialysis clinic.
What percentage of Americans think that contraceptive usage is morally wrong? According to the Pew Research Center: 4%.
“However, the question of whether or not a zygote/embryo/fetus is a person is fundamentally a question of faith. You either believe it or you don’t. And so, when someone says that the government should outlaw abortion because protecting people’s lives is part of the government’s business, then it seems to me that the government has gotten itself involved in choosing one religious sensibility over another.”
I don’t understand how you are using the phrase “fundamentally a question of faith” here. Are you suggesting that atheists are incapable of deciding whether or not a zygote or embryo or fetus is a person (and please note that these could be different answers)?
You seem to be trying to insulate politics from “religious sensibilities”. That seems impossible. You say “religious sensibilities”, I say “moral sensibilities however derived”. At some point we ground our moral sensibilities at an axiomatic level. Some people say they are grounding them in faith. You call that “religious sensibilities”. But your faith in personal autonomy which lets you suggest that women should be able to terminate the life of a zygote or embryo or fetus isn’t grounded any more securely. I say that not because I’m a moral relativist. I think there are right answers to moral questions. I think that humans suck at finding them unless we try really hard because we let self interest get in the way. But ultimately that’s an axiom I believe, not something I can prove.
Politics is how we mediate a successful civilization for people who don’t all share the same axioms. That gets harder and harder in a multi-cultural society because there will be more axioms in conflict.
Calling some of the axioms ‘religious’ and trying to ban them from consideration of proper politics doesn’t solve the problem at all. It just unjustly privileges your axioms.
Sebastian:
By “question of faith” I mean simply that it is a matter of belief, not something that can be proven one way or another through any sort of factual evidence, and so to assert its truth is nothing more than saying one believes it to be true. An atheist who claims a zygote is a person is engaging in an act of faith that, to me, is essentially no different from one who says a zygote has a soul that descended from heaven at the moment of conception. The contexts of those acts of faith may be very different, but they are, it seems to me, acts of faith nonetheless.
I was struck as I read your comment by your use of the term faith in the phrase “your faith in personal autonomy.” Can I ask what you mean by that? Thanks.
The personhood of everyone is subject to the same problems. There is no purely scientific resolution to the concept of personhood. As a society we may choose to use scientific markers to encode our thoughts on personhood into law, but that is the reverse of the direction of logic you are trying to use.
Re “faith in personal autonomy” I mean that the axioms you use to define moral choices are no less mysterious than the ones that religious people use. You might derive a right to abortion from a belief that personal bodily autonomy is a good thing. But where do you derive the personal bodily autonomy insight from?
I think you’re correct that it is a very important moral consideration, but I don’t see where you get it from that is any more intellectually secure than “God’s book says so”. Deep down we have axioms that we believe are true. Politics is largely about mediating between people with various different axioms (while hopefully helping the country maintain other axiomatic goods). You’re attempting to privilege your axioms above religious people’s to get a free win in politics. That won’t work on a practical level (because there are lots more of them) but even on philosophical level it doesn’t work because excluding people from trying to operate in politics on the basis of their axioms would be excluding you!
This is weird for me to be arguing, because I believe in independent moral truths. But thus far at least, they aren’t accessible ‘scientifically’ so we all have to muddle through unscientifically. In terms of scientific or ‘factual’ validity, your axioms aren’t any more privileged than religious people’s.
I’m not saying you can’t be right about (some of) the moral truths and that they aren’t wrong about (some of) what they say are moral truths. I’m saying that you are unfairly using a false scientism to try to exclude theirs and privilege yours.
I guess I have to throw it back to you. Where do you think you get the insight that personal autonomy is an important moral consideration?