I highly recommend the dialogue on Slate titled “Is Abortion Bad?” The discussants are William Saletan and Katha Pollitt. The thread starts here. It’s a rich discussion. I find myself far more sympathetic in this instance to Saletan, who argues that pro-choice individuals and groups should “wage war on the abortion rate though birth control and sex education,” forming a coalition among a broad swath of the public that favors abortion rights and thinks of abortion as bad, at least, and certainly a morally serious event, and simultaneously favors a broad range of interventions that might reduce the number of and need for abortions. Pollitt argues, in effect, that such rhetoric plays into the hands of the anti-abortion lobby and, more broadly, moralizes contraception and abortion in ways that will not be effective. In fact, there is much common ground between them, as they acknowledge. But the gap between them is there too, subtle but deep. Two illustrative quotes, I think, more starkly suggest the nature of the chasm. From Saleton:
You ask why I think abortion is bad. I think it’s bad because the fetus is of us and is becoming us. It’s not a person, but it’s on the way to becoming a person, and the longer it develops, the more I recoil at the idea of killing it. Most people, according to polls, think the same way. [para] What about you? You say pro-choicers don’t see abortion as “morally trivial.” You say they defend it as a reluctant decision, a “sad necessity,” a “morally serious, very unfortunate event.” Is that how you see it?
And from Pollitt, in response:
When I think about unwanted pregnancy I think about it as an issue in women’s lives. I think about what women need to control their fertility, to have the kids they want and not have the kids they don’t want. * * * You ask what my own view of abortion is. I think the meaning of abortion is what the woman says it is: For a woman who wants a child but can’t have this one it can be sad; for a woman who doesn’t want a baby, it can feel like a huge relief, like having your whole life given back to you. * * * I do not think terminating a pregnancy is wrong. A potential person is not a person, any more than an acorn is an oak tree. I don’t think women should have to give birth just because a sperm met an egg. I think women have the right to consult their own wishes, needs, and capacities and produce only loved, wanted children they can care for—or even no children at all. I think we would all be better off as a society if we respected women’s ability to make these decisions for themselves and concentrated on caring well for the born.
And therein, I think, lies the gap. Saletan, although pro-choice, views abortion as a morally serious event, worthy of being discussed as such, because he thinks it does and means something beyond the person seeking the procedure. He may believe that it is acceptable to end an unwanted life, but wants to yoke that belief to a set of policies that address this problem before it reaches the post-conception stage. While I cannot read her mind, it seems to me that Pollitt sees abortion almost entirely as a question of women’s rights. If abortion is a morally serious issue, it is not because of the act itself, but because of its impact on women’s own ” own wishes, needs, and capacities.” If it is “sad,” it is because women feel that it is sad, not because there is something inherently sad about ending, not a mere acorn, but a potential human life in being. The fetus qua fetus is just not a relevant data point for her.
My sympathies, as I said, lie with Saletan, and I suspect in this we are closer to the mainstream of American thought than Pollitt. I think it is possible — I think many Americans take this view — to be pro-choice (as I am, leaving aside the constitutional questions), to believe in the free availability and use of contraception, and to believe that it blinks reality, and trivializes the very nature of the event that occasions women’s “sadness” in the first place, to reduce abortion to a mere medical procedure, the mere elimination of an “acorn.” To be sure, none of this answers the question why I treat with differing degrees of moral seriousness the developmental continuum that lies between the sexual act, the meeting of sperm and egg, and childbirth itself (although this may be equally true for Pollitt; does she view the zygote and the full-term baby in utero as identical “acorns?”). But while I share with Pollitt the sense of the importance, if not centrality, of women’s rights and women’s experiences in this dialogue, I cannot accept that that is all there is. We often confront tragic choices, and we often — usually — have the right to make tragic choices. This may be one such instance. But they are made no easier by the refusal to see them as tragic.
Posted by Paul Horwitz on February 3, 2006 at 03:38 PM
Comments
Rick:
Even if we were to assume there is no significant difference between a 14-day old and a 37 year old (and that the law shouldn’t recognize differences, which it does in many contexts outside the right to choose to have an abortion), I think your “intentionally killing” line is what we should focus on. A woman who becomes pregnant accidentally and without wanting a child, if she does not terminate her pregnancy, now is faced with the following: at minimum, she must undergo a 9-month pregnancy which at best is physically very demanding, has certain risks to her health, at many points will disable her from doing basic daily tasks, and will almost certainly make her unable to work for some period. Then she gives birth, at which point she could go through the difficult process of giving the child up for adoption, or sign onto a couple of decades (at least) of significant emotional and financial committment that will interfere or prevent other life choices she could have made.
The decision to terminate a pregnancy at this point is not comparable to me walking into a bar and shooting some 37 year old. You might say it’s much more analogous to me deciding not to take affirmative steps to rescue some poor homeless person I accidentally encounter, who, through many months or years of my time, energy, and resources, could have lived, but without such affirmative aid would have died. The law doesn’t require such duty to rescue in any other context.
Posted by: Joseph Slater | Feb 7, 2006 11:44:04 AM
Great post, Paul. For my own part, I do not know what to make either of Saletan’s statement (though, like you, I think his views are more appealing than Pollitt’s) that a human fetus is “not a person, but it’s on the way to becoming a person” or of Pollitt’s that “a potential person is not a person, any more than an acorn is an oak tree.”
A 14-day-old human being (i.e., a fetus) and a 37-year-old human being (i.e., me) are both, well, “human beings.” What is it *about the human being in question* that is, for Saletan and / or Pollitt, doing the serious moral work of identifying that human being as a “person” (who should not be intentionally killed), as opposed to a “potential person” (who may be)?
Posted by: Rick Garnett | Feb 4, 2006 6:53:41 PM
I think Marc has put his finger on the problem. If “the morality of abortion and the right to have an abortion as two entirely separate issues,” then of course Saletan is right and we should say that abortion is bad but the right to have an abortion is good.
But the morality of abortion and the right to have an abortion are in no way separate. Every abortion is the result of someone exercising their right to have an abortion; and every exercise of that right results in an abortion. If abortion is immoral, there is no moral right to have an abortion. If there is a moral right to have an abortion, abortion is not immoral.
This does not mean in any way, and Pollit was not suggesting it means, that abortion not “morally serious.” It is perfectly coherent to say that abortion is morally serious, but that a woman’s right to determine her own path in life by having an abortion is also morally serious, sufficiently so that it justifies abortion, which is therefore not immoral. The word “sad” is appropriate because it denotes the seriousness of abortion without suggesting that it is unjustified.
To say that abortion is “bad” or “immoral” is to suggest that those who exercise their right to an abortion are doing something bad or immoral. If we believe that there is a moral right to have an abortion, we can’t say that.
Posted by: AF | Feb 4, 2006 12:02:05 PM
I consider the morality of abortion and the right to have an abortion as two entirely separate issues. Saletan has hit the proverbial nail on its head. I agree with the saying that “abortions should be safe, legal, and rare.” It’s a right you have but not one you’re happy about exercising: no woman becomes pregnant to have an abortion.
Posted by: Marc | Feb 4, 2006 1:32:27 AM
Paul, I pretty much ago with your comments. Pollitt loses me when she says: “Morality has to do with rights and duties and obligations between people.” I think most people would define morality as having to do with duties and obligations between living beings (and living beings would include God). For instance, I consider it immoral to make an animal suffer for the sake of amusement. Abusing one’s own body is often considered immoral. Pollitt’s definition omits those occurances as well as any obligations people may feel they have toward God.
Pollitt’s definition is much more fitting for the word “legality” (although even there animals are slowly winning protections.) Keeping that distinction in mind, I think it becomes much easier to argue that the law should protect women first and potential human beings second– that abortion harms a living being, but it’s repugnant for the government to force a woman to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term.
On the practical side, I wish there were far more consideration paid to how sex education and public morality should address different sex acts. It’s worth thinking about treating sexual intercourse as a far more serious sex act than others which lead to orgasm.
Posted by: withrow | Feb 4, 2006 12:07:20 AM
I agree with you that the Slate exchange is a must-read. However my sympathies lie more with Pollitt than Saletan. I think that another way of parsing the difference between their two positions is that Saletan views the abortion debate as purely about abortion, whereas Pollitt sees arguments on both sides of the pro-choice/ pro-life line as more about women’s status and sexuality. For this reason, she does not see Saletan’s targeted strategy — no abortions but more contraception — as productive or good in its own right. It is not productive because it 1) will not satisfy the pro-lifers, who by and large are against most forms of effective contraception, and 2) is a bit too policy wonkish to mobilize any constituency to resist the pro-life drive for greater abortion restrictions, abstinence-only classes, and reduced contraceptive availability.(this is of course an empirical question, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Saletan is right since he appears to be pretty well immersed in all of the polling-data that Pollitt rightly does not care about too much). But I suspect that Pollitt’s main objection to Saletan’s position, is that it surrenders on the larger fight in the name of preserving some small access to abortion rights. If the abortion debate is driven mostly by perceptions of the proper role of women in society — the pro-choice position being that women are as deserving of the same autonomy as men and the pro-life position being animated by the anti-feminist idea that women ought to fulfill their traditional gender role, either as madonna or whore — then, despite his commitment to abortion rights, Saletan is giving support to the pro-life side.
It is a sad commentary on the status on women’s rights, that abortion has become recast as a “moral” issue, unmoored from the concerns that have animated the fight for abortion rights in the first place. Thus, we have pro-choicers, who may represent the “mainstream of public opinion,” advocating for positions that ultimately undercut the political support for abortion rights.
Posted by: SR | Feb 3, 2006 5:12:18 PM