Sometimes, You Need Less Complexity in Your Analysis

[tim]

A friend on Facebook linked to this article from New York magazine, about how Americans aren't as pro-choice as we'd all like to think. (Warning: somewhat NSFW image on the first page.) It's a thought-provoking article; I take the author's conclusion as being, basically, that pro-choice people ought to spend more time acknowledging the "moral complexity" of the abortion debate.

I couldn't possibly disagree more.

Of all the issues currently up for debate, I see abortion rights as being a pretty simple one. Yes, it may be unclear just when life begins and how much we ought to consider granting any putative rights to fetuses. However, none of that matters. There is nothing that can possibly justify the evil of government forcing women to be pregnant when they don't want to be pregnant. Whatever the harm resulting from destroying fetuses, it cannot exceed the harm to women when the law tells them their bodies aren't their own.

That it even enters into our minds to consider that supposed fetal rights might justify forced pregnancy is evidence that Americans haven't really assimilated the first-class citizenship of women.

This is not to say that the choice to have an abortion, or not, isn't ever difficult for an individual woman. But that's not what the abortion debate is about. The debate is about whether women should have the choice in the first place. Being pro-choice is about respecting the difficulty of that question and acknowledging that all solutions other than leaving it up to the individual woman whose body is at stake are worse than anything that can come of respecting women's autonomy.

Relatedly, I'd love to hear people stop saying that abortion should be safe, legal, and rare. What I'd like to see become rare is women ruining their lives, and quite possibly those of their future children, because the pro-forced-pregnancy movement guilted them into turning a single mistake into a lifetime burden. (And yes, I do believe that much of the supposed emotional ambivalence about abortion is manufactured; advertising can be very effective at manipulating emotions, and to acknowledge that that manipulation exists is not to downplay the intelligence of the manipulated.) Once that's rare, once nobody brings a child into the world out of guilt, maybe then we can work on making abortion rare. Then again, I'm not sure that wouldn't be putting the cart before the horse. Maybe we could work on creating the kind of world where women can carry condoms, or take birth control when they're not in a relationship, without being made to feel like "sluts", and then abortion rates would go down as a side effect. It's just a thought.

When I say that we ought not to concede "moral complexity", I don't mean to say that persuading the public to accept reproductive freedom is going to be simple -- not at all. But that's because persuading the public to accept that women are human beings has never been simple, and won't be simple for a very long time. It's not because whether to force women to give birth is a morally complex question.

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If you agree, consider donating to the National Network of Abortion Funds, which -- if done via the link -- will go towards my goal of raising $290 for the NNAF by my birthday! (End of shameless plug. If you don't use Facebook, you can donate to them directly, and that'll be just great too.)

Comments

[tim]

People don't have to like babies; they just have to like sex. (From a survival-of-the-species point of view.) I don't think people were very sentimental about babies until the day arrived when they became optional. And since the anti-abortion movement as we know it didn't exist until the 19th century at the earliest, I find it improbable that liking babies (or any other supposedly innate human trait) implies opposing abortion.

[anemone.livejournal.com]

People don't have to like babies; they just have to like sex.

Babies cannot survive on their own. They require every-two-hourly or so care for the first few weeks. They are disgusting, spewing vomit, poo, and pee at regularly intervals. They destroy the desire for sex in women, and may make sex painful. After six weeks of baby maintenance, you get...a smile. A year into the project, you get a baby who can reach more things. At two, they want to be useful, but mostly mess stuff up when they try. It's three before you can put them to work.

Maybe you could argue that only women need to like babies, but someone needs to like them. And if a man is living with a woman with a baby, he'd better like the baby. Even if he doesn't have to deal with the feeding or cleaning, the baby is going to interfere with his life substantially, and if he doesn't let it do so, then the baby will have a much higher chance of death.

It may be true that this time is more sentimental about babies than other times (and some cultures are clearly more so than others)--but to keep people from leaving their babies to be eaten by wild animals or dropped in the river, there has to be some sort of imperative that amounts to "care for the babies."

[tgies]

As a baby, I am offended.

[rebbyribs.livejournal.com]

It's three before you can put them to work.

Really? My experience seems to be it's more like they sometimes want to help and can sometimes help without messing things up, but this is very limited.

[anemone.livejournal.com]

I heard that in the 1700s, at about three, kids on farms start getting simple chores to do (like feeding the chickens). Three seems to be a dividing line for other can-follow-directions sort of stuff, so I bought that as an approximate line.

In the modern lifestyle, it seems to me that there's less useful work for a young children to do.

Now, since I don't really have any actually research to back it up, and I don't even have a three-year-old, I would be willing to believe I'm wrong.

[etb]

People don't have to like babies; they just have to like sex. (From a survival-of-the-species point of view.)

People have to like babies enough to take care of them; otherwise they'd all starve to death.

It seems entirely plausible to me that fetuses being shaped like babies has something to do with anti-abortion sentiment (compared to, say, the lack of similar moral concern about amputations).