{"id":1346,"date":"2005-02-08T00:00:53","date_gmt":"2005-02-08T08:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2005\/02\/08\/every-birth-a-wanted-birth\/"},"modified":"2005-02-08T00:00:53","modified_gmt":"2005-02-08T08:00:53","slug":"every-birth-a-wanted-birth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=1346","title":{"rendered":"Every birth a wanted birth. Oh, really?"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Libservative” Demi at Pilgrim’s Progress doesn’t appreciate it<\/a> when pro-choicers say “every birth should be a wanted birth.”<\/p>\n

Am I “wanted” now? Was my life worth having?<\/p>\n

I wonder if people realize how very devastating these “arguments for choice” can be to someone like myself, someone who so narrowly escaped the butcher knife almost 46 years ago? No, they don’t get it. Maybe they were “wanted children.” So I guess that means that their lives are somehow more appropriate than mine.<\/p>\n

Sometimes I feel like I should apologize for even being here.<\/p>\n

Look! My husband loves me, and he thinks I’m the best thing that ever happened to him!<\/p>\n

Look! My students benefit from my knowledge and expertise, and my principal reeeally likes the way I do lesson plans on Excel spreadsheets (complete with automatic date-stamp on the tab code in the header!! I figured that one out all by myself!)<\/p>\n

So now… may I stay? Am I “useful” enough? Am I “wanted” enough? May I stay?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That’s just a small sample of a very eloquent post. There’s a lot there that’s disturbing to pro-choice ears; most of us don’t want to think of ourselves as insensitive or hurtful. (Then again, since Demi suggests that Nazis during the Holocaust were on “higher moral ground” than pro-choicers today, perhaps she shouldn’t be quick to criticize other people’s insensitivity.)<\/p>\n

I’m also disturbed about Demi using her position as a high-school teacher to preach pro-life thought to her students, which she does “every chance I get,” but I suppose that’s okay as long as she’s teaching at a private school.<\/p>\n

The traditional abortion debate boils down, I think, to two questions. First, what kinds of self-sacrifice can be legally forced<\/em> on parents for their children? (I seldom hear pro-lifers suggest that parents be legally forced to donate their lungs if their born child requires it to live. But logically, a born child of a father who refuses to donate his lung will be no less dead than a ten-week embryo whose mother gets an abortion; if we’re willing to legally force the latter, we should be willing to legally force the former).<\/p>\n

The other question – which is more relevant to Demi’s post – is this: Is there an important moral distinction between preborn humans (zygotes, embryos and fetuses), and a born person such as Dani or myself? Or – to put it in short form – are zygotes, embryos and fetuses people<\/em>?<\/p>\n

Demi’s post uses a rhetorical trick that pro-lifers are fond of: Pretend that the “personhood” question is, rather than a major disagreement between people of good will, already settled<\/em>. Assume that there is no difference between a zygote and Demi herself. And then – because pro-choicers say that zygotes have no right to life – Demi pretends we’ve said that Demi herself<\/em> has no right to life.<\/p>\n

It makes for a very stirring post – but lousy logic. Demi isn’t even debating the question; instead, she skips <\/em>arguing the key question, assumes an answer, and based on that assumed answer pats herself on the back for being so very morally superior compared to us worse-even-than-the-Nazis pro-choicers.<\/p>\n

Yes, it’s true; if we assume <\/em>that pro-lifers are right about everything, then pro-choice thought is terribly immoral. (But then again, if we assume that pro-choicers are right about everything, then pro-life thought is likewise terribly immoral.) I don’t think it gets us anywhere to point this out over and over again – and that’s really all Demi’s post does.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

Here’s my concern: Why are pro-lifers so uninterested in asking “in the real world, what policies are associated with the world’s lowest abortion rates?” You’d think this would be an essential question for anyone who thinks abortion is a terrible moral wrong. Yet I’ve almost never seen a pro-lifer consider the question.<\/p>\n

I’ve said this before<\/a>. It deserves being said again. Without exception, every country in the world with a very low abortion rate has either legal abortion, or bans so toothless that abortion is effectively legal. But what those countries (Belgium, West Germany, The Netherlands, etc) also have are cultures that strongly promote effective use of birth control, and that have strong social support programs that support poor parents – not just before birth and in the first year of infancy, but for life.<\/p>\n

The abortion debate in the US can go on forever. We can have yet another round of clever, heartfelt essays like Demi’s, implying that the other side is immoral; or, if we want a better debate than that, we could argue for the millionth time about how to define personhood. But that will never get us anywhere. I will never, ever convince Demi that there is a fundimental moral difference between herself and a seven-day-old embryos; Demi will never convince me that it is sane, when running into a burning building and having a choice between saving a three-year-old child or a petri dish containing 10 seven-day-old embryos, to rescue the petri dish instead of the child.<\/p>\n

Rather than rehash those questions, I’d like to ask Demi: Will there ever be an abortion ban in the United States that vastly lowers our abortion rate?<\/p>\n

Can Demi point to a single case, anywhere in the world, where banning abortion has turned a country with a high abortion rate into an abortion rate comparable to Belgium’s?<\/p>\n

If the primary purpose of the pro-life movement is to punish women who get abortions, then the pro-life strategy we’ve seen in this country makes sense. But if the primary purpose is to make the US abortion rate as low as possible, then it would make a lot more sense to look instead at strategies that have actually worked in the real world. And the pro-lifers, by and large, have demonstrated no interest in that.<\/p>\n

Demi and I have common ground here. Demi’s a Kerry-voting, gay-marriage-favoring, pro-welfare pro-life liberal. She’s more open to solutions that will actually lower the abortion rate than most pro-lifers are. Nonetheless, it’s hard not to notice, reading through her blog, that she seems to loathe pro-choicers (especially pro-choice men) a lot more than she loathes right-wing pro-lifers.<\/p>\n

Now, I’d rather not loathe anyone, but I’m not perfect in that regard, so I can’t expect Demi to be either. But I would point out that pro-choice lefties like me are not the people standing between the USA and a low abortion rate. Banning abortion does not, in practice, lower abortion rates by a large degree. What would lower abortion rates to a large degree would be free birth control, high-quality, high-quantity education about birth control, and generous state support of single and poor parents. And what’s standing between the US and these steps to a much lower abortion rate are Demi’s pro-life allies, most of whom would rather have a high abortion rate than take effective steps to reduce it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Libservative” Demi at Pilgrim’s Progress doesn’t appreciate it when pro-choicers say “every birth should be a wanted birth.” Am I “wanted” now? Was my life worth having? I wonder if people realize how very devastating these “arguments for choice” can … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1346","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-abortion-reproductive-rights"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1346","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1346"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1346\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}