{"id":1348,"date":"2005-02-09T00:00:03","date_gmt":"2005-02-09T08:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2005\/02\/09\/abortion-and-control\/"},"modified":"2005-02-09T00:00:03","modified_gmt":"2005-02-09T08:00:03","slug":"abortion-and-control","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=1348","title":{"rendered":"Abortion and Control"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pro-lifer John<\/a> (link via Hugo<\/a>, I think) notices something about pro-choicers:<\/p>\n

At the protest outside the Hospital, we were counter-marched by a dozen or so pro-choicers. I looked at them, curious. And in their eyes, I saw the same hatred, the same deadness, the same fear…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ah, the infamous “dead eye” condition! We pro-choicers may pretend to be regular human beings; but our dead eyes give us away every time. Curses, foiled again! Damn our dead eyes!<\/em><\/p>\n

To be fair, I was struck by the similarity to this comment by a pro-choicer, quoted on After Abortion<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Standing there with their “My abortion hurt me” and “I regret my abortion” signs, eyes glazed over, cheering their glorious leader….They look absolutely dead, inside and out.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Is it just me, or is this sort of thing becoming pro forma<\/em> in the abortion debates? No matter which side of the debate you’re on, it’s just expected that if you write about abortion you should include the ritualistic mean-spirited attack on the characters of everyone who disagrees with you. No one even takes these comments seriously anymore (the comments to John’s post include several respectful replies by pro-choicers); it’s the equivalent of, I don’t know what. Pro-wrestlers trash-talking each other?<\/p>\n

What was most interesting about John’s post was his analogy between pro-choice sentiment and anti-disabled bigotry:<\/p>\n

I was born with cerebral palsy. I didn’t learn to walk until I was 4. I fell over a lot, and even now, after several surgeries and bouts of physio, I walk badly, lopsidedly. […]<\/p>\n

People were afraid of me because I was a reminder. They hated me because I demonstrated something they tried very hard to forget. They are not in control. A car crash, ten minutes without Oxygen, a natural disaster, and as I am, thou shalt be. That’s an uncomfortable thought. We like our lives controllable, in little boxes, safe, and comfortable.[…]<\/p>\n

At the protest outside the Hospital, we were counter-marched by a dozen or so pro-choicers. I looked at them, curious. And in their eyes, I saw the same hatred, the same deadness, the same fear, that stares out at me from people on the street. We were a reminder. An inconvenience. They wanted us, and the unborn child who had wrecked their lives by existing, to go away. Why? Because, like the weak everywhere, the unborn child bears witness to our lack of control. “It’s a woman’s right” Pro-choicers say. A woman’s right “to control her own body”. Some things aren’t controllable. Some things just happen. Some things are graces, miracles.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I highly recommend reading the entire post<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The problem with John’s logic is that there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with wanting to control things. Having open-heart surgery rather than dying of clogged arteries is trying to control something; is it therefore wrong to have heart surgery? Is having heart surgery the equivalent of anti-disabled bigotry? How about taking medicine that makes heart attacks less likely?<\/p>\n

Wanting to control things – even things which, ultimately, can never be fully controlled – is not always a bad thing.<\/p>\n

I think that John’s right that fear and disdain of disabled folks is rooted in fear of what we can’t control. Having an abortion is also related to control – a woman’s desire to control if and when she has children. That, however, is where John’s analogy falls flat – just because they’re both about control doesn’t mean they have anything else in common.<\/p>\n

Bigotry against the disabled is wrong because it’s harmful to people who are disabled. Abortion, if it’s wrong at all, is wrong because it’s harmful to people who are zygotes, embryos and fetuses. But that’s a big “if”; there is legitimate, good-faith disagreement over whether a zygote or embryo or fetus is<\/i> a person.<\/p>\n

If I’m right, and there is no person to be harmed when a zygote or embryo or fetus is killed, then John’s comparison between abortion and anti-disabled bigotry is specious.<\/p>\n

But that means that – as always – the argument over abortion isn’t really an argument about control, or about the rights of the disabled, at all. The argument over abortion is an argument over what rights women have to control their own bodies, and what rights zygotes, embryos and fetuses have at all. Talking about dead eyes and control issues and all the rest is really just a red herring.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

What’s below the fold is just a slightly-edited reprint of what I said yesterday; so if you read it yesterday, skip it today, is my advice.
\n
\nHere’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 seriously.<\/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 John’s, implying that the other side has cold, dead eyes; or, if we want a better debate than that, we could argue for the zillionth time about how to define personhood. But that will never get us anywhere. I will never, ever convince John that there is a fundamental moral difference between herself and a seven-day-old embryos; John 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 even remotely consider rescuing the petri dish instead of the child.<\/p>\n

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

Are pro-choicers going away? Are we going to give up, give in?<\/p>\n

Can John 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 produced low abortion rates in the real world<\/i>. And the pro-lifers, by and large, have demonstrated no interest in that.<\/p>\n

John thinks that feminists and Democrats have fearful, dead eyes. But in the end, dead eyes or not, feminists and Democrats aren’t 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 John’s pro-life allies, most of whom would rather have a high abortion rate than take the steps that, in the real world, have actually brought about low abortion rates.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pro-lifer John (link via Hugo, I think) notices something about pro-choicers: At the protest outside the Hospital, we were counter-marched by a dozen or so pro-choicers. I looked at them, curious. And in their eyes, I saw the same hatred, … 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":[3,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1348","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-abortion-reproductive-rights","category-disabled-rights-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1348","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=1348"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1348\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1348"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}