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Making Pro-Life Plausible

Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 11:35 am Posted in Blogs I Read, Politics, Religion, Society

http://parablemania.ektopos.com/ChristianCarnivalRed150.gifLight of Dawn raises a good question about Christian responsibility to political issues.  Primarily, should we not speak much more about the needs of the world and give less time to the continual slogging that accompanies both abortion and homosexuality?

This lead me to consider the problem with Pro-Life as it currently stands in many political arguments.  One can be anti-abortion and that is respectable enough if that’s what the position is. I can be on board with an argument that looks at the sanctity of life and that we should protect it as an irreducible value for the unborn.

The problem is that those who espouse the position are espousing pro-life and not anti-abortion.  Pro-life means that you favor the protection of all life regardless of age or behavior. So, if you do not support any legal form of abortion, then you must also support life among the already born. For example, you must also support programs to make adoptions a more efficient process than it is since if we make abortion illegal, there will be even more unwanted babies on the street who will grow up in non-nurturing environments and this we know is a predictor of delinquency.  You must also support improved prison programs that seek to rehabilitate rather than simply punish.  After all, the prison system does not have a superb track record with reduction of recidivism rates and may actually predict increases in recidivism.  You must also support improved foster care systems that work with the improved adoptions systems to move unwanted kids into permanent homes.  You must also support improved drug rehabilitation programs to mitigate the drug culture from promoting said unwanted pregnancies.  You must also support improved social welfare and health-care systems to allow lower-income “working poor” the freedom to raise their children.

The above is no doubt not exhaustive of the kinds of programs that ought to be in place to have a robust pro-life system in place.  The hypothesis here is that we do not currently have these systems in place making the current pro-life arguments structurally discordant with rehabilitation and child support systems that are currently in place.

However, one objection to this is that we would then be in a culture that actually promotes pregnancies and more liberal sexual ethics.  Is there data to substantiate this claim?  The same arguments tend to come from sources that do not approve of birth control education in schools, failed abstinence programs, condoms, HPV vaccinations, etc.  The Family Research Council, for example, makes the myopic vision of their pro-life stance clear:

Few things touch on the sanctity of human life more than the practice of abortion. A pregnancy should not simply be “terminated,” as if it were something impersonal and problematic and it cannot be without physical and emotional consequences. A child in the womb is a distinct, developing, wholly human being, and each time a mother decides or a father pressures to end such a life it is a profound tragedy. Abortion harms the mother as well, and deprives society of the gifts of the unborn. Nevertheless, our laws rarely recognize this, and so FRC uses various media to present the intrinsic dignity of unborn human life and the costs of abortion to the public, to lawmakers, and to the courts. The Roe v. Wade decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, declaring abortion to be a constitutional “right,” was without foundation in the text of the constitution and thus was wrongly decided, and we look forward to the day when this grave error will be corrected.

The question is how society then supports those unwanted pregnancies that are born if the FRC policy would have its full implementation.  There truth is that there are cases when it is better to save the mother at the expense of the unborn baby.  But if we make abortion illegal, and want to be pro-life, the social structures must be in place to mitigate the fear and ostracism that pregnant, young, unwed mothers now face.  An absolute, deontological ethical position here seems both implausible and unreasonable.

Because many of the social programs to support unwed young mothers and born children who are living in less than nurturing conditions, cross the “liberal” line, conservative policy makers are not apt to support such programs which is simply unreasonable. The blame seems to continue to be on the mother who gets pregnant. After all, birth control is still not supported by many insurance providers, but Viagra is.  Strangely, the coverage of Viagra spurred enough debate that insurance providers have been under more pressure for birth control coverage since the drug hit the market.  But the fact that this continues to be a challenge is indicative of a strange phenomenon in our culture where pregnancy is largely the fault of the person who gets pregnant - e.g. the woman.  The question here is when we can dump this out-dated cultural bag of assumptions about the sexual roles of women and men and how these roles correspond to social structures in order to have better systems in place to mitigate abortion and improve care of young unwed mothers.

It seems that the prevalent pro-life position supports the unborn child at the expense of all other life.  This is why it is not a pro-life position at all, but anti-abortion.  The only plausible solution is to make pro-life supportive of all life.  However, this seems to require an agenda that would remove the polarizing effects of various lobbies like the FRC and Planned Parenthood.  So can it be de-politicized to the degree that it is actually a plausible position?  In the current political environment, we should all have our doubts if we continue to allow that environment to polarize the issue of life as it continues to reinforce.

Viewing 23 Comments

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    Alan, I stand by my claim. We're about to have our fourth childbirth any day now, and all throughout all four pregnancies the doctors have been perfectly happy to refer to the fetus as a baby and as a child. This is with several different doctors and a number of other medical professionals. It is only in the context of abortion that doctors do not do that. There's no internal inconsistency to think all of the following:

    (1) a fetus is a child
    (2) it's morally wrong to have or perform an abortion in most cases
    (3) it's worse to bake a child in a microwave than to kill it early in a pregnancy when it can't feel pain

    The only way to make that an inconsistent set is to add some other premise, such as (4) it's not wrong to kill anything that can't feel pain or (5) something isn't a child if it can't feel pain, but such a premise would be false. I do think abortion is morally equivalent to infanticide in principle. I just don't think every case of abortion or infanticide is morally equivalent with every other case, because lots of factors affect the moral status of killing, including how much pain is caused, how long a potential life gets cut off, how good the killer's intentions are, whether any serious consequences are avoided, whether anyone has special (e.g. parental) responsibilities toward the person being killed, and so on.

    I don't do my philosophical conceptual analysis by looking in a dictionary or an online encyclopedia, especially one anyone can edit, but even that definition has two options, and the second one is perfectly compatible with calling a fetus a child. There's a parental relationship between me and my unborn child, so it's my child that isn't born yet that's about to come out any day now. But the main point against the first definition is that words get their meaning because of how they're used, and people regularly use the word 'child' to refer to their unborn babies. I was watching an episode of Stargate Atlantis the other day where the character Teyla did exactly that with her unborn child. In fact, your claim is so ridiculous that it means the now more rare but once very common expression 'with child" meant that someone was carrying around a child who had already been born, which is ludicrous. The word child has a very long history of being used to describe a human being in the fetal stage of development.

    What I was saying is that the law is unjust if it ignores the metaphysics entirely and tries to base its decisions on something that's a pure fiction. We ideally want the law to track morality. Even if we don't want it to track every moral issue (which would be impossible and too interfering), we do want it to track the moral issues that are morally important enough and the right sort of issue to have laws about, and that requires paying attention to metaphysical distinctions. Whether something has moral status and is the sort of thing we have responsibilities toward is surely important for figuring out what the best laws are regarding that thing.
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    RE: There's a huge difference between a ten-week abortion and putting a newborn in the microwave.

    Indeed there is. Thank you for acknowledging that. We are constantly being bombarded with the claim that "abortion is murder". The claim is that "its a child, not a choice". There is an extremist tendency to equate abortion with infanticide and some of the horrific executions of children we have heard of some deranged parents carrying out. What you said above was "I'm not willing to allow people to kill their children just because..." If you do not want to be considered an extremist of this sort, you might want to chose your words more carefully.


    RE: Most pro-choice apologists among careful philosophers do in fact acknowledge that abortion is killing.

    What I said was that many moral, intelligent and thoughtfully people have come to the conclusion that they are not "killing their children." I did not say they were not killing . I said they were not killing their children . I do not consider a zygote, a blastocyst, an embryo or a foetus to be a child. Neither does the consensus of the medical profession. Nor do our laws.


    RE: A careful pro-choicer would say that it's a morally allowable instance of killing one's child...

    I think you need to look up "child" in a dictionary. Although not a dictionary, here is a quote from the Wikipedia entry on "child":

    "A child (also called bairn in Northumbria, Scotland, and parts of Northern England) is most often defined as a young human being between birth and puberty; a boy or girl. The legal definition of "child" generally refers to a minor, otherwise known as a person younger than the age of majority. 'Child' may also describe a relationship with a parent or authority figure, or signify group membership in a clan, tribe, or religion...."

    Then they have some pictures - Children in a doorway in Jerusalem - Children in Namibia- Girls in Xinjaing in northwestren China. Not one zygote, blastocast, embryo or foetus among them.

    A careful philosopher would not characterize a zygote, blastocast, embryo or foetus as a child, especially since the term child implies the developmental, social and moral status which is the point of the dispute. A pro-choicer who did so would be incredibly stupid.


    RE: We obviously disagree on the metaphysics if you think I didn't exist a few second before I was born...

    I don't think I said anything about a person's existence a few seconds before birth. What I said was that the law, as a practical matter, may solve the problem of a gray area between two qualitatively different stages of development by considering all of the gray area to be within one or the other stage, whichever is more just. The whole "one second before birth" problem is avoided. Metaphysics has nothing to do with it.
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    Drew, who is claiming absolute equality between a zygote and a newborn or teenager? All I claimed is that human organisms all have the same basic moral status. My view is not that every human being is equal in every sense. It doesn't mean we have the same responsibilities to all human beings. I don't have responsibilities to the other kids in the neighborhood that I do to my own children, for example. I do have a very strong responsibility to my unborn child, much stronger than my responsibility to the neighbor's three-year-old. What responsibilities I have to various humans depends on my relationship to them and contextual factors of various sorts. But they all have moral status of the basic level that all humans have, and thus it's wrong to do to them what it's wrong to do to humans as humans, and one of those things is killing. That's a basic fact about being human that all humans possess.

    Since it's always possible to find situations where the consequences make it necessary or allowable to kill a human, e.g. in a just war, with just cases of capital punishment, in defense of an innocent, and so on, I'm not making this an absolute claim. There will be allowable cases of abortion, but they will be parallel to the allowable cases of killing you. This means consequences are relevant to when it's ok or wrong to kill a human (even though I'm no consequentialist; I'm a moderate deontologist). It's usually wrong, and factors need to be a great moment for that to be outweighed. But another kind of equality that a fetus and infant don't have, that an adult and fetus don't have, is that the consequences are also different. For example, if I have to choose between my wife and the unborn child in her womb right now, I don't think that's a straightforward choice, but it is relevant that our other three children need her, and I have a responsibility to them. That doesn't mean she has a higher moral status. It just means consequences might tip the scale in one direction or the other. The same goes for the tragedy of losing a child at a few months of development. It is a tragedy, and anyone who denies that is callous. But it's not as much of a tragedy as losing a newborn or a ten-year-old, because the consequences aren't as bad for anyone. Those concerns are morally relevant. They just aren't what gives moral status.

    Marquis gives an argument that abortion is wrong. It's also wrong to let someone die when you can prevent it. But in cases when both are present, you need some means of deciding. Maybe he'd rely on the do/allow distinction to favor allowing the mother to die and not killing the child. I don't know. But I could easily see him going the other way. His general argument is compatible with either approach. So I'm not sure what you're getting at. This certainly isn't a criticism of his argument, just an issue that he further needs to deal with.

    As for the political issue, you also wrongly assume that I would favor treating abortion as murder, as if (1) there's only one kind of murder on the law books and (2) the only way to outlaw abortion is to treat it as any of those to begin with. Lots of pro-life people want to hold doctors responsible if they perform abortions but not the mother (or at least not at the same level). There are a lot of different pro-life positions on how to handle making abortion illegal. Some of them surely would simply make it equivalent to murder legally, but that's not the only option, and a lot of pro-life people favor other options.

    Alan, I think I've already said enough to show that your charge is extremely unfair. There's a huge difference between a ten-week abortion and putting a newborn in the microwave. The latter causes much more pain, for instance. Anyone who thinks that's irrelevant is morally confused. Nevertheless, thinking that factor must be the only relevant factor is logically confused. It need not be. Moral status may well be independent of factors such as how much pain is caused or whether any pain is caused. Marquis thinks it has to do with robbing someone of a future. I think there's more than that to moral status having to do with the image of God, but I don't have a philosophical argument for that. I do think Marquis has given an adequate philosophical argument for the immorality of abortion in most cases, certainly most actual cases, and his argument rests absolutely nothing on factors like how much pain is caused.

    As for the legality of abortion and killing their children, you make a lot of false assumptions. Most pro-choice apologists among careful philosophers do in fact acknowledge that abortion is killing. It would be biologically insane to think otherwise. Most pro-choice apologists among careful philosophers also acknowledge that abortion, when sanctioned by a parent, is the killing of biological offspring of that parent, a fully human organism with its own DNA. They might deny moral status to the fetus, whether by denying its personhood or by some other means, but they cannot plausibly claim that it's not killing one's biological offspring. A careful pro-choicer would say that it's a morally allowable instance of killing one's child, not that it's not the killing of one's child. Merely citing that many people are ok with its being legal does not amount to showing even that those people think abortion is not killing one's child, never mind showing that it simply isn't killing one's child (which is what you did, a real howler of a non sequitur if I've ever seen one).

    We obviously disagree on the metaphysics if you think I didn't exist a few second before I was born, when it would have been completely legal in some states for my mom to kill me (and still would today). That conclusion is so radically removed from reality, indeed so immoral, that I consider it a reductio of your position. Moderate pro-choicers get some sympathy from me when they recognize obvious facts and don't stray too far from obvious moral truths. Judith Jarvis Thomson is one such philosopher. But ridiculous views deserve nothing but contempt and moral condemnation, and the consequences of your position are pretty awful.
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    RE: You present a complete non sequitur. Abortion is indeed legal, but how does it follow from its legality that they aren't killing their children?

    Abortion has been a historical fact over many hundreds, even thousands of years. It has been legal, illegal, supported, discouraged and ignored but it has never been treated as the moral equivalent of infanticide or murder. Apparently you think that a poor, unmarried, 16 year old girl who terminates an unintended pregnency so that she and her future children can enjoy a decent life is the moral equivalent of (to cite a recent example) a woman who puts her child in the microwave oven and turns it on. I'd say that your moral sentiments are severely out of whack.

    The legality of abortion means that many very intelligent, thoughtful, moral and concerned people have come to the conclusion that they are not killing their children. The considered opinions of the supreme court; medical professional organizations; governments of multiple states; of multiple countries; many, many religious organizations and theologians are not to be lightly dismissed, and citing legality is a legitimate way of making that point.


    RE: I've heard that claim, but the only evidence I've ever seen backing it up has relied on misuse of statistics

    The relationship between restrictions on abortion and the incidence of abortion comes from a synthesis put together by the Guttmacher Institute: http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/fb_IAW.pdf.

    "Legal restrictions on abortion do not affect its incidence. For example, the abortion rate is 29 in Africa, where abortion is illegal in many circumstances in most countries, and it is 28 in Europe, where abortion is generally permitted on broad grounds. The lowest rates in the world are in Western and Northern Europe, where abortion is accessible with few restrictions."


    RE: As for the law, laws can always be changed.

    The law is evolving towards greater sympathy for the plight of the living, breathing, real person whose actual life will be affected, not towards the mere potential of an undeveloped embryo or foetus. Between 1995 and 2005, 17 countries liberalized their laws to increase access to safe abortion while three countries tightened restrictions.


    RE: There are also people who think moral status develops gradually as the organism's complexity increases, but I think that view has some really disturbing implications

    The law deals with this problem all the time, and has been since the beginning of time. You pick a developmental stage that is early enough to be clearly not infanticide, and late enough that the woman who is making the decision is not being treated unjustly. This is what the supreme court did. Problem solved.


    RE: If my mom had aborted me, it would have been me she was killing.

    As one philosopher to another, I'd say that is definitely not true.
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    @ Jeremy

    I understand that claiming a "start point" for an organism's moral status is somewhat arbitrary. However claiming an absolute equality between a multiple cell zygote or a freshly fertilized egg and a newborn or a teenager does not work that well pragmatically. This is as much about the relational significance of the life as it is the biological presence of the life itself. On a relational level, there is a clear distinction between a newborn and a zygote. To say that there is not seems to be rather disingenuous. I think we would rather like to believe that there is no distinction, but there clearly is. This is particularly true in cultures where there is a higher infant mortality rate and the life of the mother, and the father as well, is simply more vital to the community than a birth pang that would likely kill the mother. Saying there is an absolute equality there results a rather implausible choice since either would result in murder. So there must be some distinction here or the choice would be impossible to render.

    To use Marquis' term, I am not sure that a future of value and a present value in an organism to which a future of value points are equal in practice and it seems that in the decision-making process between two lives, they are not. I am not sure that he quite addresses this gap unless my memory is foggy.

    But this is actually beside my point. My point says that if there is an absolute equality in moral status between a zygote, a teenager, a newborn, and a middle-ager, then the focus on the moral status of the newly fertilized egg is an uneven application of a moral position that ought to take into account all life stages. That it does not in terms of attention given to the policy in question means that it is an implausible and I would say irrational application of a moral position. It is, in the end, an anemic political argument.
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    Alan, I've heard that claim, but the only evidence I've ever seen backing it up has relied on misuse of statistics, e.g. the false claim that abortion has gone up under Bush's presidency.

    You present a complete non sequitur. Abortion is indeed legal, but how does it follow from its legality that they aren't killing their children? That's no support for your claim. Abortion is the deliberate killing of an innocent life, a human organism. There's no question about that scientifically. I'm the same organism I was when I was conceived. If my mom had aborted me, it would have been me she was killing.

    Now there are people who think moral status suddenly begins at birth, but that's crazy. There's no spot between conception and birth where it makes sense for moral status to begin suddenly, since nothing special instantaneously any point in there to justify such a claim. There are also people who think moral status develops gradually as the organism's complexity increases, but I think that view has some really disturbing implications, e.g. that it's not intrinsically immoral to do bad things to someone who has severe developmental disorders or at least that it's less bad to harm or kill someone who is severely mentally retarded or severely autistic. It also follows that infanticide is perfectly ok, at least in principle. The most careful philosophers who take this view have to think either late-term abortions are in the realm of immorality, or infanticide is ok, and they acknowledge this, but I think that admission is enough to show the view to be wrong.

    As for the law, laws can always be changed. Moral arguments often end up convincing people. Prohibition was overturned. Segregation was overturned. Voting rights were granted to women and blacks. But even if the law isn't changed, it's worth giving the moral argument. I'm a philosopher, and I care about careful thinking. If people are going to tolerate some of the worst evil as pro-choicers do on this issue, I'd like them to be doing so after having understood the arguments against it, and I really don't think most people have thought carefully about this issue. (That goes for pro-lifers too.) I've taught this subject in ethics classes since 1997, and pretty much every class that I've taught has thought about the issue without ever having encountered the best forms of the opposite view or the most careful reasoning for either side of the issue.
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    Here is a link for anecdotal (and other) evidence for the prevalence of abortion amongst those who are "pro life".

    "The Only Moral Abortion is My Abortion" http://mypage.direct.ca/w/writer/anti-tales.html
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    Drew has it right, Jeremy.

    "I’m not willing to allow people to kill their children" They aren't killing their children. Abortion is legal, it is a right at the highest level of our law, and you have already lost that one.

    "So abortion laws take priority over forcing people to accept unwed mothers."

    Then you are not going anywhere. Even if you do get general laws against abortion, enforcement will not be practical. Those societies with the lowest abortion rates are those with the least restrictive abortion laws. Even those who protest abortion outside the clinics are often found inside having one. For some abortion protesters, "everyone's abortion is wrong... but mine".

    Drew's approach is more practical, more humane, and essentially the best you can do. Your extremism will cause us all, and especially the more vulnerable amongst us, more problems than it will ever solve.
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    My position is that of consistency in policy. We cannot have an perfect society. But what we do need is a society that supports life in a much more consistent manner than it does. The current pro-life political rhetoric does not do this and only polarizes the issue to an implausible end in my judgment.
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    I think the main difference between your approach and the standard pro-live view (and I do call it that, knowing that you think it's inaccurate) is that you prefer to wait until society is perfect before making things illegal that people want to do. We could wait until society is ready to be the safety net needed for people who are inclined to murder or steal, or we could make the law and then try to help people too. I'm not willing to allow people to kill their children just because some people aren't going to accept unwed mothers. If it were a matter of life vs. life, where every unwed mother killed herself, that would be another story, but it's not. So abortion laws take priority over forcing people to accept unwed mothers.
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    Scenario: A 15 year old girl is kidnapped and forced into prostitution. By Chris' standards, she cannot have an abortion and must have the baby. The question is what the outcome of this decision actually is.
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    Chris, you probably missed this - I am pro CHOICE. I don't think abortion is in any way, shape or form like murder, rape or theft. Not even counterfeiting!

    Abortion is NOT against the law, and it is held to be a woman's right at the highest level of our law.

    Legal abortion is only right or wrong within the context of the circumstances of the individual making the decision. As a society, we can reduce the necessity to make that decision, and to the extent that we want one or the other decision to be made, we can change the specific circumstances that would influence her one way or the other. And by this I mean alleviate the negative social impacts on the life of he woman, not make it harder for her to get an abortion.

    So, if you want young, unmarried women to have babies, you should be willing to help them out when they do.
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    Alan, we don't say "leave them alone to do the right thing as they see it" about murder, rape, theft, or even counterfeiting. Why is abortion different?

    If it's wrong it is wrong whether it's easy to do right or not.
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    Chris, Since I am Pro-Choice, my response is, why don't you leave them alone to do the right thing, as they see it? And if you realy don't think their choice is right, then YES, you DO have an obligation to help them towards what you think they should do.

    Let me add that I agree with Drew, that there is a lot we can do to help alleviate the difficulties that confront young people in difficult situations whatever their choice. And if we can help to keep them out of a situation that requires making a difficult choice, I think it should be considered with both an open mind and an open hart.