I support legal abortion, but I’m skeptical of both arguments that banning abortion is unconstitutional. The privacy argument has been pretty widely acknowledged as logically weak and dubiously following from the constitutional right. And I agree with Leah that premising women’s equality on their ability to make their bodies more like those of men is a shallow and patronizing model of what equality between men and women should mean. I would go even further and say that it is a *sexist* standard, since it seems to imply that women’s bodies are inferior to men’s bodies, and, well, what makes me a woman IS my body.
I think what I would want to ask a woman in favor of outlawing abortion is: what is your limiting principle on when the state can and cannot force you to sustain another person’s life at the expense of your own body/bodily autonomy? Or in some cases, your own life?
Not truly answering their question (and I'm a man so couldn't), but there is interesting case law on Siamese twins, which is in some sense how those opposed to abortion would see the mother and unborn child. Here's an important recent case from the UK that allowed doctors to perform a medical separation in the knowledge that it would result in the death of one party. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Re_A_(conjoined_twins)
The judgement, as I understand it, kept the current general legal position that necessity is not a defence, even to save your own life.
"It must not be supposed that in refusing to admit temptation to be an excuse for crime it is forgotten how terrible the temptation was; how awful the suffering; how hard in such trials to keep the judgment straight and the conduct pure. We are often compelled to set up standards we cannot reach ourselves, and to lay down rules which we could not ourselves satisfy. But a man has no right to declare temptation to be an excuse, though he might himself have yielded to it, nor allow compassion for the criminal to change or weaken in any manner the legal definition of the crime." [R v Dudley and Stephens, a case which resulted in the defendants being sentenced to death for killing a man to preserve their own lives in a shipwreck.]
(I suspect, unoriginally, that there's also an ethical distinction between ceasing to sustain a life as an act of omission and decisively acting to end a life. This is again straying well outside my comfort zone, but my wife's pregnancies all felt more like her body choosing to sustain the baby, even at the cost of her health. The distinction between mind, body and baby feels more complex and messy than some simple "autonomous and integrated mind and body relating to an external fetus". Abortion feels more like the mind employing a third party to force to body to stop sustaining the fetus.)
I was just reading L. M. Sacasas’s latest newsletter, and I think some of his summaries of Ivan Illich and Jacques Elul are relevant to the idea of abortion as the female entrance fee to modern society: “ the reason for this is that the dominant techno-social configuration of modern society demands that human beings operate at a scale and pace that is not conducive to their well-being—let alone rest, rightly understood—but by now most of us have been born into this state of affairs and take it more or less for granted.…
“ For the most part, we carry on in techno-social environments that are either indifferent to a certain set of genuine human needs or altogether hostile to them.5 For this reason, Ellul argued, a major subset of technique emerges.6 Ellul referred to these as human techniques because their aim was to continually manage the human element in the technological system so that it would function adequately….
I wonder what about the modern system we could change to accommodate the human reality of pregnancy, post-party’s recovery, and the utter dependence in f tiny humans.
Another question, perhaps for those who are pro-choice and who also support the viability standard. There's something that has always confused me about the viability standard. It seems contradictory to support the viability standard and to also support abortion because of infringements on women's bodily autonomy. Sure, an unborn child is able to survive outside the womb at 24 weeks, but it's not like a 24 weeks pregnant woman can reclaim her autonomy by going out and getting an elective C-section. Besides the fact that no doctor would be willing to do this, it also might well be medical malpractice. If it is really only about bodily autonomy, viability doesn't seem defensible; infringements on autonomy proceed well past the point of viability.
I wouldn't call myself pro-choice, but I've always been one of the "weaker sisters" on the pro-life side, and having borne several children myself has left me even weaker.
There's a part of me that considers pushing viability ever-earlier with technology rather cruel to the premature children actually born that early. Their prognoses often aren't good, and while we shouldn't court death, sometimes letting it come "naturally" (as if that word had real meaning!) can be a blessing. Is a child really "viable" when, at enormous expense in the best facilities, it can be kept barely alive?
But I suspect "viability" may be proxy for something else, which, being probabilistic, is just hard to argue in the moral terms we're used to. It's said there's no such thing as being a little bit pregnant, but my own experience of pregnancy is that there is: When you look at natural miscarriage rates, Mother Nature herself is a cruel abortioness, and the earlier on in pregnancy you are, the less certain you are that it will result in a live, born baby. Given our lack of knowledge, early pregnancy does feel more like maybe-life. As pregnancy progresses, the life you're carrying feels more sure; and, past the point of viability, the child no longer has to die in the womb if something bad does happen, but can be born if the problem's caught in time.
My first confirmed pregnancy was suspected of being ectopic, resulting in an emergency ultrasound confirming that, mercifully, it wasn't. But if it had been, I'm not Catholic. I would have resorted to chemical abortion to safeguard my own life and fertility, killing a life that couldn't be, anyhow. Most pro-life people are OK with that. My first confirmed pregnancy also led me to realize I may have had an unconfirmed pregnancy earlier that miscarried before I bothered to check.
A maybe-life is meaningfully different from a life that cannot be. But I also experienced maybe-life as meaningfully different from more assured life. I've experienced this also in hospice, where we won't kill our loved ones, but we become progressively less worried that comfort measures could hasten death. The very beginning and ending of life are maybes. Maybe not for long, but long enough I can't pretend they aren't. In law, recklessness (carelessness about avoiding harm) is bad, but still less bad than intent (decisions ensuring harm). At the maybe-est extremes of life, death is quite likely even if you do nothing, and with that uncertainty, there does seem to be "less life" to take.
I think this is an excellent question! I think if autonomy is the only reason applied to abortion then viability makes no sense. I am personally of the opinion that abortion is so contested and unresolvable because most of us have deep moral intuitions that underlie our reasoning and that those moral intuitions resist the extremes of either side. For me those extremes would be on the one side - a bodily autonomy argument that would logically extend to abortion until birth being acceptable and on the other - fetal personhood enshrined in law which would lead to intense policing of pregnant women. I think most of us resist both ends of this spectrum and that we are drawn to some sort of compromise solution.
For several decades I've defined feminism as choosing "power with" instead of the patriarchal approach to life of "power over" -- choosing love and imagination over the use of force.
....If I apply that to questions about abortion, this introduces the need for dialogue -- between mother and the fetus within her (and the potential adult who might grow from this experience) -- between mother and father -- between father and the fetus and potential adult. Beyond this intimate triangle (however wanted or unwanted) there's a larger group of stake holders -- potential grandparents, great grandparents, cousins, aunts, nieces, friends, church or other faith group....and the government has also traditionally had a stake in the well being of all children and potential children, sometimes opposing the wishes of a parent or faith group if the medical treatment of a child is at stake. (I'm not saying any of this always turns out well!) And this is simply my vision of an ideal.
....For a long time I ignored abortion issues and just rolled along with the vague idea of "abortion should be legal but rare." Then a cousin posted on Facebook that she's a feminist AND pro-life, and that because of her own many sins, she could never judge another woman for having an abortion. It was this last phrase that shocked me into wondering what actually happens in an abortion, and I started to research....and also delved into abortion laws in different countries, abortion rates, how it all played out in relation to access to day care, parental leave, etc. So now I'd like to see access to abortion in the U.S. comparable to that in most European countries -- legal, but with some restrictions and exceptions to those restrictions.
....When my Democratic Party began getting more extreme about access to abortion, with comments flooding Facebook and the news that implied that getting an abortion should be as simple and easy as going to get your teeth cleaned...I balked. I can't go that far.
....As a Christian, I don't see my body as just "my" body, unrelated to anyone else's body and something only I should be able to control. Yes, I confess that I hold onto my desire to control my body and my life, even when God tells me to give God the control. And I don't believe our laws should be based on my particular religious beliefs, or on anyone else's.
....So I expect some sorrow and grief if "easy abortion on demand, woman's private business only" becomes the law of the land. It's still up to me to refrain from judging any woman who does have an abortion, and I'm so grateful to my cousin for opening this Pandora's box of troubled thoughts to me.
I hold very similar opinions to Leah on this issue, so I very much agree with pro-choice women that sexism is a problem in society and that women are often unfairly punished for their fertility.
But the question i would pose to that side is, at what moment does the in-utero baby gain her own rights, and on what philosophical ground?
We as a country assert that human rights (the most basic of which is the right to stay alive) are not given at the whim of the government, but are inherent to human dignity. That means they cannot be voted away even when it's "practical"--personhood comes with rights attached, and violating those rights IS injustice, even when it's legal. Science cannot tell us at what moment a human being "gets" those rights (science can't measure a soul, or human dignity). If we say, "well, let's hope a fetus isn't really a person at X weeks, because it's necessary to our society to be able to abort then," we are cavalierly gambling with murder. The only definitive line we can draw is at conception--once there is a new (albeit immature) human creature with its own identifiable DNA, we should assume it is a person and has some rights. (This does allow for termination when the mother's life is in danger through the moral "double-effect" line of reasoning. You can act to save the mother without positively intending to end the life of the child. This is tragic, just as the death of the mother would be, of course.)
When does the baby's life have moral weight, and why? And when it does, how does that measure against the wishes of the mother?
I do think a fetus has moral weight, and I'm also very very opposed to outlawing abortion. But my opposition doesn't have to do with the wishes of the mother trumping the dignity of the fetus, it's my distrust of the State being involved in anything as complex as pregnancy.
Say an embryo was granted full personhood under the law from conception onward. When the technology becomes available (we're nearly there!) would a mother who was at risk of a miscarriage be required to have the embryo removed and gestated in a lab?
Less sci-fi, there have already been cases in the US of women incarcerated for miscarriages. Women who want to be pregnant and desperately want to be pregnant & carry their kiddo to term will be impacted by any personhood legislation. And doctors who are looking to do what's best will have their hands tied and have to jump through more hoops in critical situations, directly leading to increased maternal mortality. Of course, on both fronts, Black & Brown & poor women will be disproportionately impacted, as with any legislation of this sort.
This also seems like a case against having CPS and other child welfare services, which, because of structural bias, often burden poorer women and women of color, rather than giving them more access to the services they need to care for their children.
I understand the temptation to wipe the slate clean and say that the state hasn't proven itself worthy of the power to protect children... but I think this *is* one of the basic functions of government! The question is more about how we reform the flawed system (both through regulation and moral conversion) rather than giving up on the work.
How we reform the system is *the question*. I do think it's possible for notions of interdependence and autonomy to coexist, and for group norms to be effectively enforced without violence.
But abolishing Roe, given trigger laws, etc., on the books, is a step toward violence, not away from it.
Martha, if you think fetuses have dignity, do you think that abortion laws should be judged on whether they do good on balance, or are they unacceptable if they ever lead to perversions, no matter how rare? Ross Douthat's op-ed in the NYT today mentions that plausibly 2000 fewer abortions happened in TX as a result of the new law. The TX law has also already caused some of the perversions you mention. But I think it's hard to argue that abortion laws do evil on balance if you assign a fetus moral weight that is anywhere close to that of an already-born person.
I think there are other reasons to argue that the state should not regulate abortions. But I think that if you believe a fetus has dignity, I'm not sure that squares with also thinking that abortion regulations cause more violence than they prevent.
I believe every living thing has dignity. For me it comes down to when state violence is appropriate, and when it is not.
When a woman chooses to have an abortion because she already has two kids and can't afford to feed them (much less pay a hospital bill for delivery), who is responsible for her abortion? I don't think assigning legal blame to her and/or her provider is just & right. And I think if half the energy of the pro life movement went toward advocating for universal healthcare and a higher minimum wage, we'd have had it decades ago.
I really like the framing of your answer in terms of who should be assigned blame when a woman gets an abortion out of a "necessity" created by the world around her. It feels intuitively right to me.
But I do think there is something missing from this line of reasoning if we also want to distinguish abortion from infanticide. I guess I am presuming you agree with me that a woman who commits infanticide should justly go to jail or confinement in a mental health institution. If you do, is there a point in pregnancy where apportioning individual blame/consequences becomes just?
I agree. I have concerns with the general policing of pregnant women's bodies, whether they have abortions or carry to term. The main topic that comes to mind debates over whether women can take anti-depression/anxiety medication.
That is an excellent point, and i have really no argument against it. Horrible consequences like jailing women who have suffered miscarriages would be one reason i would support legislation with legal consequences only for doctors who provide abortion, not for the women who undergo them. I would also support lots more societal efforts to improve prenatal and postnatal care for women and families.
I do think, though, that a law which simply prohibited doctors from performing abortions except when the life of the mother was at stake, could recognize the humanity of the fetus without giving the state the ability to compel women into the situations your describe above.
People may then say i am putting women at risk for backdoor coat-hanger abortions, which are obviously more dangerous to mothers. I think the only real way to minimize that danger is through greater support for pregnant women and all families, to reduce the felt need for abortion.
I do think that empirically, you can't make the case that having legal consequences only for doctors is sufficient to prevent these horrific outcomes. The current law in Texas does not criminalize women seeking abortions, but it has already led to a woman with an ectopic pregnancy being denied an abortion (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/29/opinion/heartbeat-abortion-bans-savita-izabela.html).
Now, I do feel torn about criticizing the law on these grounds, since it seems like that instance was an obvious misapplication of the law (the procedure to terminate an ectopic pregnancy is not even classified as an abortion under Texas law; even if it was, it would be a clear-cut instance of necessary to save the life of the mother). I'm hesitant to say that a law is bad because it was used to prevent something that it clearly did not prohibit. But on the other hand, outcomes like this are so predictable that it's hard to give the benefit of the doubt that legislators are not on some level aware that they will happen. The Texas law could have included clear guidelines on how a termination could be classified as medically necessary (e.g. a list of accepted diagnoses, two doctors must agree, etc.), but it doesn't. I have a hard time seeing that with anything but a cynical perspective.
I think this is where theory and reality come into conflict. When Roe is overturned abortion immediately becomes illegal in 20 states. In most states, women can be prosecuted for a crime (in Missouri for instance, a felony with 10 years in prison) if they are accused of aborting their own pregnancy any time after conception.
While I'm also horrified by the abortion black market that will be created when Roe is overturned, I'm more immediately concerned by the way laws currently on the books will be used against pregnant people.
That said, I'm in complete agreement on greater support for pregnant women and all families.
I love the way Martha summarizes this as "theory and reality come into conflict." I think that best captures a lot of the complicated feelings I have towards abortion. I also believe in the dignity of the fetus and find myself struggling with the cognitive dissonance required to justify legal abortion. However, when I imagine a world where fetal personhood is enshrined in law by the state, I am very fearful of how that would be used by the state and the reality that we could find ourselves in. I appreciate the discussions around prosecuting miscarriages and I think we could see this go even further. Woman could be persecuted for drinking/ drug use while pregnant, reckless driving, eating incorrectly, etc. In my mind the list of activities and behaviors that could be policed if fetal personhood was realized is endless and terrifying.
Yes! And activities could be policed not just for pregnant people. Safety of a potential fetus was/could be an excuse for banning *all* women of child bearing age from drinking, or from working stressful jobs, or taking certain medications.
An additional thought I have on this debate centers around the physical toll of pregnancy. I am currently three months pregnant and it has been a horrible pregnancy. I can't remember the last time I wasn't nauseous and a good day is one where I puke only about 2-3 times. I know my experience is in no way unique, thanks is no small part to how much I have had to hear that "this is normal," but I am having a very wanted and desired pregnancy. When reflecting on how I would feel enduring what I have with an undesired pregnancy I have really struggled to reconcile how much suffering we feel comfortable requiring of pregnant women. I think there is something unique about the conjoined nature of fetus and woman in the pregnant state that cannot be compared to our moral duty to other separate beings.
My pregnancies are pretty horrible, too, because of underlying conditions that pregnancy exacerbates. I feel for you. And yes, pregnancy ended up making me more sympathetic to women who get abortions. Had I not been married and able to modify my work and, eventually, leave it altogether, for the sake of childbearing, I don't know how I would have gotten through the "few months out of my life" that pregnancy takes.
Because reflux of any kind, including vomit, can exacerbate lung conditions, and simply being pregnant, without morning sickness, too, already exacerbated mine, I controlled morning sickness during my pregnancies with half-tablets of OTC doxylamine (one tablet supplies 25mg doxylamine; half that is 12.5 mg). I'm all too aware of stigma surrounding taking any medication during pregnancy. Even Tylenol has been subject to new shame lately. In the non-pregnant, doxylamine is used as a sleep aid, so it can make you drowsy. To the pregnant, it can be offered in combination with vitamin B6 in a specially-formulated combination tablet, but there's no need for a combination tablet when both ingredients separately are accessible and affordable, and B6 may already be in your pregnancy multivitamin:
I stand on both sides of the abortion debate, and so I find myself agreeing and disagreeing with myself.
On the one hand, I agree with everything that is said here and elsewhere about the infinite good of children and the awfulness of a society that values anything more than loving and caring for one another, at any age. If I could wave a magic wand and recreate society in the way I would like to see it, every family and every individual would be abundantly cared for in every possible way. No one would go hungry. No one would lack a safe and lovely home. No one would lack whatever health care they need. No one would feel unloved or alone. And no one would ever place anything but the highest value on every human life, at every age and stage.
On the other hand, I find it repulsive that anyone should try to compel anyone else to carry a baby to term if they are not physically, emotionally, or morally ready to do so. No one can carry that burden or joy inside themselves except the woman in whose body the pregnancy is evolving, and no one should try to assert control over what is happening inside her body without her permission. Doing so is as repellant when a woman has become pregnant as it would be beforehand. It is not my job to imagine the children another woman might have had, or to try to force her to have them. That belongs between her and her conscience, her God. "What is that to thee? Follow thou me."
I have many questions and concerns over Roe that I am not sure I can articulate well. I have thought and changed my mind a lot over the past few years, to the point where I am pro-choice, even though I could never imagine stating that a teenager in a Catholic school.
A few main questions are the scenarios that will play out if Roe is overturned, similar to the situation in Poland recently. I also think it is worth exploring the increasing ties between the mainstream American pro-life movement and automatism (i.e., Trump) and how it also ties into control of women / other people generally.
In addition, over the past few years, I have become increasingly uncomfortable with the amount of misinformation in the (conservative/GOP-backed) pro-life movement. I do not think it will ultimately lead to wholeness or goodness. It isn't true that birth control is harmful or that women always regret abortion, and the information provided by crisis pregnancies centers is not always accurate. Shouldn't the movement be based on truth, not falsehoods? Can lies create truthfulness? I'm not sure.
Second, I would like to know where many pro-lifers stand on other political/social issues, such as health care and a larger safety net. The conservative idea that communities and pro-life clinics will care for all the children is not realistic. It will not be enough.
"To be pro-life must mean being pro-truth as well. For we believe America’s current theory and practice of abortion rests on two lies: The lie that the unborn human person has no inherent dignity, and the lie that a right to killing an unborn human can be found in the Constitution’s penumbras and emanations. These two great lies gnaw at the foundations of the legal-medical-cultural edifice. But we cannot salve the wounds of truth by uttering petty lies of our own. We must treat truth, like an unborn child, as an innocent under threat. If we persist in the metaphor of “culture war” to describe the fights over abortion and related issues, then we must wage it as a just culture war, in which virtue is as indispensable as valor, and compassion for our opponents more important than rallying our allies with rhetorical overkill."
I know I am late to this discussion, but I am behind on my reading too. Anyway, after reading though the many thoughtful comments already made, I only have a few thoughts I would like to add. First, I am politically pro-choice even though I think abortion is morally wrong in part because I do think the child is a person who has value, but I also genuinely believe there are fates worse than a premature death. Being born into a home where one is not wanted and at high risk for neglect or even abuse/pain etc is a far worse fate than being sent straight into the arms of a loving God before birth.
My biggest issue with the entire hyper polarizing of the abortion debate has been the drastic effect is has clearly had on our collective average views of the value of children and life in general. That there is now a huge subset of people who think of abortion as trivial or no big deal is very problematic. I don't think forcing women to have babies they don't want is a good solution, but I do think that the intense efforts to make it "ok" socially to help shore up the pro-choice legal point of view has done a lot of damage to women overall and worse has actually created a pressure for women to abort children even when they are not ok with doing so. While many women do not regret getting an abortion, many many of them do suffer lasting personal harm from doing so. And honestly, I genuinely believe it is a lot like Schrodinger's Cat... you cannot know if one will be damaged or not until you open the box.
I do think a viability line should be drawn but almost more for the sake of our society's greater value/moral compass than concern for any specific individual babies. I think allowing elective abortions in the 3rd trimester, especially late in the 3rd trimester require a hardening of hearts and active disregard of life to be embraced by society at large that does active damage to its moral fabric and to the bulk of the individuals within it. The more viable the child is, the more difficult it is to dismiss its personhood out of hand. And insisting for political expediency that it is not a baby until the minute it takes a breath outside of its mother's womb only makes matters worse.
Additionally, even if one is willing to buy entirely into a bodily autonomy argument, 3 plus months is plenty of time to make a decision. Even assuming one doesn't realize they are pregnant until 12 weeks in, a cut off for abortion on demand at 26 weeks or so gives a person plenty of time to make an informed choice or to take the responsibility for not making a choice. Of course, dealing with unexpected medical complications for the mother and/or child should be left within control of the woman/parents and her medical advisors even into the 3rd trimester. But assuming no major health changes, 26 weeks or so reasonable place for society to officially start factoring in the child's life as also important. If for no other reason than because it makes us all more human/empathetic when we do so.
So those are some of things I wanted to add to the discussion.
So appreciate your comment. The way I see it, almost everyone who identifies as pro life or pro choice generally has the same set of beliefs; how they identify has more to do with their community.
What I don't understand is how folks who identify as pro life aren't more vocal about opposing the radical laws that have been adopted or are attempting to be adopted. I see those laws being the trigger for the continued polarization and radicalization.
On your comment about viability status being enshrined in law, I do wonder why you think there should be legal hurdles vs us relying on established medical ethics. There has been much excellent ethical thought put into third trimester abortions, with this being the established frame (Chervanak, 1990), "Previable fetuses are patients solely as a function of the woman's autonomous decision to confer such status. The abortion of a viable fetus is, with few exceptions, never ethically justified, because it is a patient. The abortion of nonviable third-trimester fetuses (i.e., premature termination of pregnancy) is justified when the pregnant women consents to it. Abortion of the previable fetus is justifiable when the pregnant women consents to it."
That frame would imply support for laws that ban post-viability abortion on the grounds of the baby’s possibly disability. If you wouldn’t euthanize a child with Down Syndrome post-birth, then, if the doctor considers them a patient in the womb, you shouldn’t do it there either.
I'm opposed to any laws that ban abortion, I think there's too much nuance in pregnancy for a good law to be written that will be implemented perfectly. That said, I do think it is unethical to abort a viable (will live outside the womb, today) fetus for any reason, including those who have Down syndrome (and don't have other syndromes that will result in their death).
Viable in this case has nuance that is also discussed at length in the field of medical ethics. There's no such thing as 100% confidence in viability, which is also why I think this should be left to doctors and patients. I would abhor a world where a child is born who will almost certainly die, and against their parents wishes is subjected to experimental procedures in an attempt to prolong their life. As Lynette says, "there are fates worth than premature death." I would not force a parent to lose the chance to hold their dying child.
I have a question for those who are pro-life and believe in punishment only for abortion doctors. With self-managed abortion increasingly on the rise (medication abortion where pregnant women take abortion pills received in the mail without any physician involvement) and the myriad ways that a pregnant woman can harm her unborn child on her own (drug/alcohol use/etc), how can responsibility be so easily delegated to "just" the physician? Further even including the standard seeing a doctor in a clinic for an abortion, by any other definition of murder, a pregnant woman would be at best an accomplice for asking for the procedure to be done. How does one square away these contradictions?
I don't want the punitive consequences to be the main reason why people refrain from abortion. (Fear of punishment is not the primary reason why people having a hard time don't commit infanticide—it's because it rightly feels outside the moral universe of real choices).
I think in a post-Roe world. abortion by mail will become more common and it will be difficult to curb. There could still be penalties for dispensing the drugs, but I do think it will be much easier for groups like the Janes to coordinate self-administered abortion than it was pre-Roe.
The main reason for not charging a woman is that, in the cases where women seek abortion, something has *already* gone wrong, and I care more about rectifying whatever injustice made this feel like a compelling choice than punishing her for feeling like other options were closed to her.
I often hear this perspective from those on the pro-life side. It makes a lot of sense, but the one thing that bothers me about it is that it does seem a bit contradictory to the view that fetuses are full human beings, at least insofar as it treats their murder extremely differently than the murder of a born person. One reason our society takes murder extremely seriously is because it is the worst affront to the dignity of the human person. Does it then say something about the dignity of the fetus that those on the pro-life side often advocate prosecuting abortion in an entirely different manner than the murder of a born person?
I think the dignity is the same, but that my goal is moral conversion (against a big headwind!) not just criminalizing things that are wrong. There are a lot of things that are abominable in our current society (mass animal agriculture, prisons, etc.) that I think people would have a much easier time rejecting if they were *new* ideas, but that are difficult to uproot as the status quo.
I also think the hiddenness of children in the womb shapes people's intuitions—just like the hiddenness of violence against prisoners does. Both horrendous, but easier to go along with without being an active moral monster than if you could *see* it and stood by and did nothing.
Hmm. I don't think this gets at the question I was asking, so I'll try to rephrase: if a fetus is a full human being, does that fact not *require* that the murder of a fetus be prosecuted in the same way as the murder of a born person?
I can see what you're saying about prudence of laws and moral conversion, so let's take this question to your hypothetical ideal world where abortion is as rare and unthinkable as infanticide. In that world, is there a criminal difference between abortion and murder?
Much less of one in that case. But in that world, I would expect abortion to resemble infanticide more—where the rare cases often involved a mother going through a mental health crisis or intense pressure, and there were mitigating factors from a criminal perspective.
There *isn't* a lot of infanticide by moms, because it's a very alien thing to do! There's more danger from unrelated men in the home, which could also be a danger for pressure to abort/abuse more broadly of both mother and child.
I do think it's worth taking this hypothetical in a different direction: imagine we live in a world where no one carries a child. There's some sort of alert every time an egg is fertilized and the embryo is near immediately transferred to a safe external womb-like contraption. This is done explicitly for the safety of the developing embryo/fetus/person.
Should a person who rejected this process be charged with endangerment? If they miscarriage should they be charged with murder?
I'm intrigued by the phrase, "whatever injustice." There's an excerpt of the 1703 book New Voyages to North America quoted in The Dawn of Everything, "To imagine one can live in the country of money and preserve one’s soul is like imagining one could preserve one’s life at the bottom of a lake." It also includes some great reflections on the immorality of the French not providing aid to their fellow man - letting the poor be hungry or cold being an indictment of the whole society.
The consequences we will be seeing - jail time for next year's "Janes", and for next year's mothers who miscarriage and for doctors and all the other injustice post-Roe - doesn't, in practical reality, bring us any closer to soulful living imo.
With regards to "rectifying whatever injustice made this feel like a compelling choice" - do you mean socio-economic reasons or moral reasons as well? I am wondering what you would think of an upper-middle class woman who has an abortion without any regret and perhaps even celebrates her choice? Do you think the injustice here is the way she has been led to think her choice is something that could be celebrated?
“What question would you like to ask a woman on the opposite side of this divide?”
When a woman signs the consent form for getting an abortion, is there a consent for the fetus’s body remains to be sold and used in research? If so, why can’t the abortion be free?
This is so bothersome: somebody’s else’s life is more worth it if dead and dismembered.
Men in first world countries are not allowed to walk away from the children they have fathered. Just ask the millions of men paying court ordered child support. Women can decide to kill the baby OR to have the father put into a form of indentured servitude (work and pay or go to jail). Men should, of course, be married to and financially support the mother of their children. But stop kidding yourself that men have all the choices here. In fact, they have zero choices once the baby is conceived.
"Among the 6.8 million custodial single parents who were awarded child support in 2015, only 43.5% received all of the child support money that was due (similar to the 43.4% seen in 2011)
25.8% of custodial parents received some of the money that was due
30.7% received none of the child support money due"
I support legal abortion, but I’m skeptical of both arguments that banning abortion is unconstitutional. The privacy argument has been pretty widely acknowledged as logically weak and dubiously following from the constitutional right. And I agree with Leah that premising women’s equality on their ability to make their bodies more like those of men is a shallow and patronizing model of what equality between men and women should mean. I would go even further and say that it is a *sexist* standard, since it seems to imply that women’s bodies are inferior to men’s bodies, and, well, what makes me a woman IS my body.
I think what I would want to ask a woman in favor of outlawing abortion is: what is your limiting principle on when the state can and cannot force you to sustain another person’s life at the expense of your own body/bodily autonomy? Or in some cases, your own life?
Not truly answering their question (and I'm a man so couldn't), but there is interesting case law on Siamese twins, which is in some sense how those opposed to abortion would see the mother and unborn child. Here's an important recent case from the UK that allowed doctors to perform a medical separation in the knowledge that it would result in the death of one party. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Re_A_(conjoined_twins)
The judgement, as I understand it, kept the current general legal position that necessity is not a defence, even to save your own life.
"It must not be supposed that in refusing to admit temptation to be an excuse for crime it is forgotten how terrible the temptation was; how awful the suffering; how hard in such trials to keep the judgment straight and the conduct pure. We are often compelled to set up standards we cannot reach ourselves, and to lay down rules which we could not ourselves satisfy. But a man has no right to declare temptation to be an excuse, though he might himself have yielded to it, nor allow compassion for the criminal to change or weaken in any manner the legal definition of the crime." [R v Dudley and Stephens, a case which resulted in the defendants being sentenced to death for killing a man to preserve their own lives in a shipwreck.]
(I suspect, unoriginally, that there's also an ethical distinction between ceasing to sustain a life as an act of omission and decisively acting to end a life. This is again straying well outside my comfort zone, but my wife's pregnancies all felt more like her body choosing to sustain the baby, even at the cost of her health. The distinction between mind, body and baby feels more complex and messy than some simple "autonomous and integrated mind and body relating to an external fetus". Abortion feels more like the mind employing a third party to force to body to stop sustaining the fetus.)
I was just reading L. M. Sacasas’s latest newsletter, and I think some of his summaries of Ivan Illich and Jacques Elul are relevant to the idea of abortion as the female entrance fee to modern society: “ the reason for this is that the dominant techno-social configuration of modern society demands that human beings operate at a scale and pace that is not conducive to their well-being—let alone rest, rightly understood—but by now most of us have been born into this state of affairs and take it more or less for granted.…
“ For the most part, we carry on in techno-social environments that are either indifferent to a certain set of genuine human needs or altogether hostile to them.5 For this reason, Ellul argued, a major subset of technique emerges.6 Ellul referred to these as human techniques because their aim was to continually manage the human element in the technological system so that it would function adequately….
“In [Elul’s] view, human techniques are alway undertaken in the interest of preserving the system and adapting the human being to its demands.” (https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/you-cant-optimize-for-rest)
I wonder what about the modern system we could change to accommodate the human reality of pregnancy, post-party’s recovery, and the utter dependence in f tiny humans.
Another question, perhaps for those who are pro-choice and who also support the viability standard. There's something that has always confused me about the viability standard. It seems contradictory to support the viability standard and to also support abortion because of infringements on women's bodily autonomy. Sure, an unborn child is able to survive outside the womb at 24 weeks, but it's not like a 24 weeks pregnant woman can reclaim her autonomy by going out and getting an elective C-section. Besides the fact that no doctor would be willing to do this, it also might well be medical malpractice. If it is really only about bodily autonomy, viability doesn't seem defensible; infringements on autonomy proceed well past the point of viability.
I wouldn't call myself pro-choice, but I've always been one of the "weaker sisters" on the pro-life side, and having borne several children myself has left me even weaker.
There's a part of me that considers pushing viability ever-earlier with technology rather cruel to the premature children actually born that early. Their prognoses often aren't good, and while we shouldn't court death, sometimes letting it come "naturally" (as if that word had real meaning!) can be a blessing. Is a child really "viable" when, at enormous expense in the best facilities, it can be kept barely alive?
But I suspect "viability" may be proxy for something else, which, being probabilistic, is just hard to argue in the moral terms we're used to. It's said there's no such thing as being a little bit pregnant, but my own experience of pregnancy is that there is: When you look at natural miscarriage rates, Mother Nature herself is a cruel abortioness, and the earlier on in pregnancy you are, the less certain you are that it will result in a live, born baby. Given our lack of knowledge, early pregnancy does feel more like maybe-life. As pregnancy progresses, the life you're carrying feels more sure; and, past the point of viability, the child no longer has to die in the womb if something bad does happen, but can be born if the problem's caught in time.
My first confirmed pregnancy was suspected of being ectopic, resulting in an emergency ultrasound confirming that, mercifully, it wasn't. But if it had been, I'm not Catholic. I would have resorted to chemical abortion to safeguard my own life and fertility, killing a life that couldn't be, anyhow. Most pro-life people are OK with that. My first confirmed pregnancy also led me to realize I may have had an unconfirmed pregnancy earlier that miscarried before I bothered to check.
A maybe-life is meaningfully different from a life that cannot be. But I also experienced maybe-life as meaningfully different from more assured life. I've experienced this also in hospice, where we won't kill our loved ones, but we become progressively less worried that comfort measures could hasten death. The very beginning and ending of life are maybes. Maybe not for long, but long enough I can't pretend they aren't. In law, recklessness (carelessness about avoiding harm) is bad, but still less bad than intent (decisions ensuring harm). At the maybe-est extremes of life, death is quite likely even if you do nothing, and with that uncertainty, there does seem to be "less life" to take.
I think this is an excellent question! I think if autonomy is the only reason applied to abortion then viability makes no sense. I am personally of the opinion that abortion is so contested and unresolvable because most of us have deep moral intuitions that underlie our reasoning and that those moral intuitions resist the extremes of either side. For me those extremes would be on the one side - a bodily autonomy argument that would logically extend to abortion until birth being acceptable and on the other - fetal personhood enshrined in law which would lead to intense policing of pregnant women. I think most of us resist both ends of this spectrum and that we are drawn to some sort of compromise solution.
For several decades I've defined feminism as choosing "power with" instead of the patriarchal approach to life of "power over" -- choosing love and imagination over the use of force.
....If I apply that to questions about abortion, this introduces the need for dialogue -- between mother and the fetus within her (and the potential adult who might grow from this experience) -- between mother and father -- between father and the fetus and potential adult. Beyond this intimate triangle (however wanted or unwanted) there's a larger group of stake holders -- potential grandparents, great grandparents, cousins, aunts, nieces, friends, church or other faith group....and the government has also traditionally had a stake in the well being of all children and potential children, sometimes opposing the wishes of a parent or faith group if the medical treatment of a child is at stake. (I'm not saying any of this always turns out well!) And this is simply my vision of an ideal.
....For a long time I ignored abortion issues and just rolled along with the vague idea of "abortion should be legal but rare." Then a cousin posted on Facebook that she's a feminist AND pro-life, and that because of her own many sins, she could never judge another woman for having an abortion. It was this last phrase that shocked me into wondering what actually happens in an abortion, and I started to research....and also delved into abortion laws in different countries, abortion rates, how it all played out in relation to access to day care, parental leave, etc. So now I'd like to see access to abortion in the U.S. comparable to that in most European countries -- legal, but with some restrictions and exceptions to those restrictions.
....When my Democratic Party began getting more extreme about access to abortion, with comments flooding Facebook and the news that implied that getting an abortion should be as simple and easy as going to get your teeth cleaned...I balked. I can't go that far.
....As a Christian, I don't see my body as just "my" body, unrelated to anyone else's body and something only I should be able to control. Yes, I confess that I hold onto my desire to control my body and my life, even when God tells me to give God the control. And I don't believe our laws should be based on my particular religious beliefs, or on anyone else's.
....So I expect some sorrow and grief if "easy abortion on demand, woman's private business only" becomes the law of the land. It's still up to me to refrain from judging any woman who does have an abortion, and I'm so grateful to my cousin for opening this Pandora's box of troubled thoughts to me.
I hold very similar opinions to Leah on this issue, so I very much agree with pro-choice women that sexism is a problem in society and that women are often unfairly punished for their fertility.
But the question i would pose to that side is, at what moment does the in-utero baby gain her own rights, and on what philosophical ground?
We as a country assert that human rights (the most basic of which is the right to stay alive) are not given at the whim of the government, but are inherent to human dignity. That means they cannot be voted away even when it's "practical"--personhood comes with rights attached, and violating those rights IS injustice, even when it's legal. Science cannot tell us at what moment a human being "gets" those rights (science can't measure a soul, or human dignity). If we say, "well, let's hope a fetus isn't really a person at X weeks, because it's necessary to our society to be able to abort then," we are cavalierly gambling with murder. The only definitive line we can draw is at conception--once there is a new (albeit immature) human creature with its own identifiable DNA, we should assume it is a person and has some rights. (This does allow for termination when the mother's life is in danger through the moral "double-effect" line of reasoning. You can act to save the mother without positively intending to end the life of the child. This is tragic, just as the death of the mother would be, of course.)
When does the baby's life have moral weight, and why? And when it does, how does that measure against the wishes of the mother?
I do think a fetus has moral weight, and I'm also very very opposed to outlawing abortion. But my opposition doesn't have to do with the wishes of the mother trumping the dignity of the fetus, it's my distrust of the State being involved in anything as complex as pregnancy.
Say an embryo was granted full personhood under the law from conception onward. When the technology becomes available (we're nearly there!) would a mother who was at risk of a miscarriage be required to have the embryo removed and gestated in a lab?
Less sci-fi, there have already been cases in the US of women incarcerated for miscarriages. Women who want to be pregnant and desperately want to be pregnant & carry their kiddo to term will be impacted by any personhood legislation. And doctors who are looking to do what's best will have their hands tied and have to jump through more hoops in critical situations, directly leading to increased maternal mortality. Of course, on both fronts, Black & Brown & poor women will be disproportionately impacted, as with any legislation of this sort.
This also seems like a case against having CPS and other child welfare services, which, because of structural bias, often burden poorer women and women of color, rather than giving them more access to the services they need to care for their children.
I understand the temptation to wipe the slate clean and say that the state hasn't proven itself worthy of the power to protect children... but I think this *is* one of the basic functions of government! The question is more about how we reform the flawed system (both through regulation and moral conversion) rather than giving up on the work.
How we reform the system is *the question*. I do think it's possible for notions of interdependence and autonomy to coexist, and for group norms to be effectively enforced without violence.
But abolishing Roe, given trigger laws, etc., on the books, is a step toward violence, not away from it.
Martha, if you think fetuses have dignity, do you think that abortion laws should be judged on whether they do good on balance, or are they unacceptable if they ever lead to perversions, no matter how rare? Ross Douthat's op-ed in the NYT today mentions that plausibly 2000 fewer abortions happened in TX as a result of the new law. The TX law has also already caused some of the perversions you mention. But I think it's hard to argue that abortion laws do evil on balance if you assign a fetus moral weight that is anywhere close to that of an already-born person.
I think there are other reasons to argue that the state should not regulate abortions. But I think that if you believe a fetus has dignity, I'm not sure that squares with also thinking that abortion regulations cause more violence than they prevent.
I believe every living thing has dignity. For me it comes down to when state violence is appropriate, and when it is not.
When a woman chooses to have an abortion because she already has two kids and can't afford to feed them (much less pay a hospital bill for delivery), who is responsible for her abortion? I don't think assigning legal blame to her and/or her provider is just & right. And I think if half the energy of the pro life movement went toward advocating for universal healthcare and a higher minimum wage, we'd have had it decades ago.
I really like the framing of your answer in terms of who should be assigned blame when a woman gets an abortion out of a "necessity" created by the world around her. It feels intuitively right to me.
But I do think there is something missing from this line of reasoning if we also want to distinguish abortion from infanticide. I guess I am presuming you agree with me that a woman who commits infanticide should justly go to jail or confinement in a mental health institution. If you do, is there a point in pregnancy where apportioning individual blame/consequences becomes just?
I agree. I have concerns with the general policing of pregnant women's bodies, whether they have abortions or carry to term. The main topic that comes to mind debates over whether women can take anti-depression/anxiety medication.
That is an excellent point, and i have really no argument against it. Horrible consequences like jailing women who have suffered miscarriages would be one reason i would support legislation with legal consequences only for doctors who provide abortion, not for the women who undergo them. I would also support lots more societal efforts to improve prenatal and postnatal care for women and families.
I do think, though, that a law which simply prohibited doctors from performing abortions except when the life of the mother was at stake, could recognize the humanity of the fetus without giving the state the ability to compel women into the situations your describe above.
People may then say i am putting women at risk for backdoor coat-hanger abortions, which are obviously more dangerous to mothers. I think the only real way to minimize that danger is through greater support for pregnant women and all families, to reduce the felt need for abortion.
I do think that empirically, you can't make the case that having legal consequences only for doctors is sufficient to prevent these horrific outcomes. The current law in Texas does not criminalize women seeking abortions, but it has already led to a woman with an ectopic pregnancy being denied an abortion (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/29/opinion/heartbeat-abortion-bans-savita-izabela.html).
Now, I do feel torn about criticizing the law on these grounds, since it seems like that instance was an obvious misapplication of the law (the procedure to terminate an ectopic pregnancy is not even classified as an abortion under Texas law; even if it was, it would be a clear-cut instance of necessary to save the life of the mother). I'm hesitant to say that a law is bad because it was used to prevent something that it clearly did not prohibit. But on the other hand, outcomes like this are so predictable that it's hard to give the benefit of the doubt that legislators are not on some level aware that they will happen. The Texas law could have included clear guidelines on how a termination could be classified as medically necessary (e.g. a list of accepted diagnoses, two doctors must agree, etc.), but it doesn't. I have a hard time seeing that with anything but a cynical perspective.
Wow, that's horrible.
I think this is where theory and reality come into conflict. When Roe is overturned abortion immediately becomes illegal in 20 states. In most states, women can be prosecuted for a crime (in Missouri for instance, a felony with 10 years in prison) if they are accused of aborting their own pregnancy any time after conception.
While I'm also horrified by the abortion black market that will be created when Roe is overturned, I'm more immediately concerned by the way laws currently on the books will be used against pregnant people.
That said, I'm in complete agreement on greater support for pregnant women and all families.
I love the way Martha summarizes this as "theory and reality come into conflict." I think that best captures a lot of the complicated feelings I have towards abortion. I also believe in the dignity of the fetus and find myself struggling with the cognitive dissonance required to justify legal abortion. However, when I imagine a world where fetal personhood is enshrined in law by the state, I am very fearful of how that would be used by the state and the reality that we could find ourselves in. I appreciate the discussions around prosecuting miscarriages and I think we could see this go even further. Woman could be persecuted for drinking/ drug use while pregnant, reckless driving, eating incorrectly, etc. In my mind the list of activities and behaviors that could be policed if fetal personhood was realized is endless and terrifying.
Yes! And activities could be policed not just for pregnant people. Safety of a potential fetus was/could be an excuse for banning *all* women of child bearing age from drinking, or from working stressful jobs, or taking certain medications.
An additional thought I have on this debate centers around the physical toll of pregnancy. I am currently three months pregnant and it has been a horrible pregnancy. I can't remember the last time I wasn't nauseous and a good day is one where I puke only about 2-3 times. I know my experience is in no way unique, thanks is no small part to how much I have had to hear that "this is normal," but I am having a very wanted and desired pregnancy. When reflecting on how I would feel enduring what I have with an undesired pregnancy I have really struggled to reconcile how much suffering we feel comfortable requiring of pregnant women. I think there is something unique about the conjoined nature of fetus and woman in the pregnant state that cannot be compared to our moral duty to other separate beings.
My pregnancies are pretty horrible, too, because of underlying conditions that pregnancy exacerbates. I feel for you. And yes, pregnancy ended up making me more sympathetic to women who get abortions. Had I not been married and able to modify my work and, eventually, leave it altogether, for the sake of childbearing, I don't know how I would have gotten through the "few months out of my life" that pregnancy takes.
Because reflux of any kind, including vomit, can exacerbate lung conditions, and simply being pregnant, without morning sickness, too, already exacerbated mine, I controlled morning sickness during my pregnancies with half-tablets of OTC doxylamine (one tablet supplies 25mg doxylamine; half that is 12.5 mg). I'm all too aware of stigma surrounding taking any medication during pregnancy. Even Tylenol has been subject to new shame lately. In the non-pregnant, doxylamine is used as a sleep aid, so it can make you drowsy. To the pregnant, it can be offered in combination with vitamin B6 in a specially-formulated combination tablet, but there's no need for a combination tablet when both ingredients separately are accessible and affordable, and B6 may already be in your pregnancy multivitamin:
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/324672#how-does-it-work
I stand on both sides of the abortion debate, and so I find myself agreeing and disagreeing with myself.
On the one hand, I agree with everything that is said here and elsewhere about the infinite good of children and the awfulness of a society that values anything more than loving and caring for one another, at any age. If I could wave a magic wand and recreate society in the way I would like to see it, every family and every individual would be abundantly cared for in every possible way. No one would go hungry. No one would lack a safe and lovely home. No one would lack whatever health care they need. No one would feel unloved or alone. And no one would ever place anything but the highest value on every human life, at every age and stage.
On the other hand, I find it repulsive that anyone should try to compel anyone else to carry a baby to term if they are not physically, emotionally, or morally ready to do so. No one can carry that burden or joy inside themselves except the woman in whose body the pregnancy is evolving, and no one should try to assert control over what is happening inside her body without her permission. Doing so is as repellant when a woman has become pregnant as it would be beforehand. It is not my job to imagine the children another woman might have had, or to try to force her to have them. That belongs between her and her conscience, her God. "What is that to thee? Follow thou me."
I have many questions and concerns over Roe that I am not sure I can articulate well. I have thought and changed my mind a lot over the past few years, to the point where I am pro-choice, even though I could never imagine stating that a teenager in a Catholic school.
A few main questions are the scenarios that will play out if Roe is overturned, similar to the situation in Poland recently. I also think it is worth exploring the increasing ties between the mainstream American pro-life movement and automatism (i.e., Trump) and how it also ties into control of women / other people generally.
In addition, over the past few years, I have become increasingly uncomfortable with the amount of misinformation in the (conservative/GOP-backed) pro-life movement. I do not think it will ultimately lead to wholeness or goodness. It isn't true that birth control is harmful or that women always regret abortion, and the information provided by crisis pregnancies centers is not always accurate. Shouldn't the movement be based on truth, not falsehoods? Can lies create truthfulness? I'm not sure.
Second, I would like to know where many pro-lifers stand on other political/social issues, such as health care and a larger safety net. The conservative idea that communities and pro-life clinics will care for all the children is not realistic. It will not be enough.
You might like this piece from my husband: https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2017/03/pro-life-pro-truth
"To be pro-life must mean being pro-truth as well. For we believe America’s current theory and practice of abortion rests on two lies: The lie that the unborn human person has no inherent dignity, and the lie that a right to killing an unborn human can be found in the Constitution’s penumbras and emanations. These two great lies gnaw at the foundations of the legal-medical-cultural edifice. But we cannot salve the wounds of truth by uttering petty lies of our own. We must treat truth, like an unborn child, as an innocent under threat. If we persist in the metaphor of “culture war” to describe the fights over abortion and related issues, then we must wage it as a just culture war, in which virtue is as indispensable as valor, and compassion for our opponents more important than rallying our allies with rhetorical overkill."
Ah perfect, thanks! That was a good read and gets at a lot of the smaller issues that I worry about.
Sorry, that should read authoritarianism, not automatism!
I know I am late to this discussion, but I am behind on my reading too. Anyway, after reading though the many thoughtful comments already made, I only have a few thoughts I would like to add. First, I am politically pro-choice even though I think abortion is morally wrong in part because I do think the child is a person who has value, but I also genuinely believe there are fates worse than a premature death. Being born into a home where one is not wanted and at high risk for neglect or even abuse/pain etc is a far worse fate than being sent straight into the arms of a loving God before birth.
My biggest issue with the entire hyper polarizing of the abortion debate has been the drastic effect is has clearly had on our collective average views of the value of children and life in general. That there is now a huge subset of people who think of abortion as trivial or no big deal is very problematic. I don't think forcing women to have babies they don't want is a good solution, but I do think that the intense efforts to make it "ok" socially to help shore up the pro-choice legal point of view has done a lot of damage to women overall and worse has actually created a pressure for women to abort children even when they are not ok with doing so. While many women do not regret getting an abortion, many many of them do suffer lasting personal harm from doing so. And honestly, I genuinely believe it is a lot like Schrodinger's Cat... you cannot know if one will be damaged or not until you open the box.
I do think a viability line should be drawn but almost more for the sake of our society's greater value/moral compass than concern for any specific individual babies. I think allowing elective abortions in the 3rd trimester, especially late in the 3rd trimester require a hardening of hearts and active disregard of life to be embraced by society at large that does active damage to its moral fabric and to the bulk of the individuals within it. The more viable the child is, the more difficult it is to dismiss its personhood out of hand. And insisting for political expediency that it is not a baby until the minute it takes a breath outside of its mother's womb only makes matters worse.
Additionally, even if one is willing to buy entirely into a bodily autonomy argument, 3 plus months is plenty of time to make a decision. Even assuming one doesn't realize they are pregnant until 12 weeks in, a cut off for abortion on demand at 26 weeks or so gives a person plenty of time to make an informed choice or to take the responsibility for not making a choice. Of course, dealing with unexpected medical complications for the mother and/or child should be left within control of the woman/parents and her medical advisors even into the 3rd trimester. But assuming no major health changes, 26 weeks or so reasonable place for society to officially start factoring in the child's life as also important. If for no other reason than because it makes us all more human/empathetic when we do so.
So those are some of things I wanted to add to the discussion.
So appreciate your comment. The way I see it, almost everyone who identifies as pro life or pro choice generally has the same set of beliefs; how they identify has more to do with their community.
What I don't understand is how folks who identify as pro life aren't more vocal about opposing the radical laws that have been adopted or are attempting to be adopted. I see those laws being the trigger for the continued polarization and radicalization.
On your comment about viability status being enshrined in law, I do wonder why you think there should be legal hurdles vs us relying on established medical ethics. There has been much excellent ethical thought put into third trimester abortions, with this being the established frame (Chervanak, 1990), "Previable fetuses are patients solely as a function of the woman's autonomous decision to confer such status. The abortion of a viable fetus is, with few exceptions, never ethically justified, because it is a patient. The abortion of nonviable third-trimester fetuses (i.e., premature termination of pregnancy) is justified when the pregnant women consents to it. Abortion of the previable fetus is justifiable when the pregnant women consents to it."
That frame would imply support for laws that ban post-viability abortion on the grounds of the baby’s possibly disability. If you wouldn’t euthanize a child with Down Syndrome post-birth, then, if the doctor considers them a patient in the womb, you shouldn’t do it there either.
I'm opposed to any laws that ban abortion, I think there's too much nuance in pregnancy for a good law to be written that will be implemented perfectly. That said, I do think it is unethical to abort a viable (will live outside the womb, today) fetus for any reason, including those who have Down syndrome (and don't have other syndromes that will result in their death).
Viable in this case has nuance that is also discussed at length in the field of medical ethics. There's no such thing as 100% confidence in viability, which is also why I think this should be left to doctors and patients. I would abhor a world where a child is born who will almost certainly die, and against their parents wishes is subjected to experimental procedures in an attempt to prolong their life. As Lynette says, "there are fates worth than premature death." I would not force a parent to lose the chance to hold their dying child.
I have a question for those who are pro-life and believe in punishment only for abortion doctors. With self-managed abortion increasingly on the rise (medication abortion where pregnant women take abortion pills received in the mail without any physician involvement) and the myriad ways that a pregnant woman can harm her unborn child on her own (drug/alcohol use/etc), how can responsibility be so easily delegated to "just" the physician? Further even including the standard seeing a doctor in a clinic for an abortion, by any other definition of murder, a pregnant woman would be at best an accomplice for asking for the procedure to be done. How does one square away these contradictions?
I don't want the punitive consequences to be the main reason why people refrain from abortion. (Fear of punishment is not the primary reason why people having a hard time don't commit infanticide—it's because it rightly feels outside the moral universe of real choices).
I think in a post-Roe world. abortion by mail will become more common and it will be difficult to curb. There could still be penalties for dispensing the drugs, but I do think it will be much easier for groups like the Janes to coordinate self-administered abortion than it was pre-Roe.
The main reason for not charging a woman is that, in the cases where women seek abortion, something has *already* gone wrong, and I care more about rectifying whatever injustice made this feel like a compelling choice than punishing her for feeling like other options were closed to her.
It's similar to the model of criminalizing buying sex, but not selling it, where you focus on the less vulnerable person in the transaction.
I often hear this perspective from those on the pro-life side. It makes a lot of sense, but the one thing that bothers me about it is that it does seem a bit contradictory to the view that fetuses are full human beings, at least insofar as it treats their murder extremely differently than the murder of a born person. One reason our society takes murder extremely seriously is because it is the worst affront to the dignity of the human person. Does it then say something about the dignity of the fetus that those on the pro-life side often advocate prosecuting abortion in an entirely different manner than the murder of a born person?
I think the dignity is the same, but that my goal is moral conversion (against a big headwind!) not just criminalizing things that are wrong. There are a lot of things that are abominable in our current society (mass animal agriculture, prisons, etc.) that I think people would have a much easier time rejecting if they were *new* ideas, but that are difficult to uproot as the status quo.
I also think the hiddenness of children in the womb shapes people's intuitions—just like the hiddenness of violence against prisoners does. Both horrendous, but easier to go along with without being an active moral monster than if you could *see* it and stood by and did nothing.
Hmm. I don't think this gets at the question I was asking, so I'll try to rephrase: if a fetus is a full human being, does that fact not *require* that the murder of a fetus be prosecuted in the same way as the murder of a born person?
I can see what you're saying about prudence of laws and moral conversion, so let's take this question to your hypothetical ideal world where abortion is as rare and unthinkable as infanticide. In that world, is there a criminal difference between abortion and murder?
Much less of one in that case. But in that world, I would expect abortion to resemble infanticide more—where the rare cases often involved a mother going through a mental health crisis or intense pressure, and there were mitigating factors from a criminal perspective.
There *isn't* a lot of infanticide by moms, because it's a very alien thing to do! There's more danger from unrelated men in the home, which could also be a danger for pressure to abort/abuse more broadly of both mother and child.
I do think it's worth taking this hypothetical in a different direction: imagine we live in a world where no one carries a child. There's some sort of alert every time an egg is fertilized and the embryo is near immediately transferred to a safe external womb-like contraption. This is done explicitly for the safety of the developing embryo/fetus/person.
Should a person who rejected this process be charged with endangerment? If they miscarriage should they be charged with murder?
If not, why not?
I'm intrigued by the phrase, "whatever injustice." There's an excerpt of the 1703 book New Voyages to North America quoted in The Dawn of Everything, "To imagine one can live in the country of money and preserve one’s soul is like imagining one could preserve one’s life at the bottom of a lake." It also includes some great reflections on the immorality of the French not providing aid to their fellow man - letting the poor be hungry or cold being an indictment of the whole society.
The consequences we will be seeing - jail time for next year's "Janes", and for next year's mothers who miscarriage and for doctors and all the other injustice post-Roe - doesn't, in practical reality, bring us any closer to soulful living imo.
With regards to "rectifying whatever injustice made this feel like a compelling choice" - do you mean socio-economic reasons or moral reasons as well? I am wondering what you would think of an upper-middle class woman who has an abortion without any regret and perhaps even celebrates her choice? Do you think the injustice here is the way she has been led to think her choice is something that could be celebrated?
Both. I think we rightly rely on the world around us, people we trust, etc. for moral formation, and an unjust society malforms us.
Or to ask this in a more open-ended way, what would you think the injustice is in a situation like the above scenario?
“What question would you like to ask a woman on the opposite side of this divide?”
When a woman signs the consent form for getting an abortion, is there a consent for the fetus’s body remains to be sold and used in research? If so, why can’t the abortion be free?
This is so bothersome: somebody’s else’s life is more worth it if dead and dismembered.
Men in first world countries are not allowed to walk away from the children they have fathered. Just ask the millions of men paying court ordered child support. Women can decide to kill the baby OR to have the father put into a form of indentured servitude (work and pay or go to jail). Men should, of course, be married to and financially support the mother of their children. But stop kidding yourself that men have all the choices here. In fact, they have zero choices once the baby is conceived.
Not true in the US:
"Among the 6.8 million custodial single parents who were awarded child support in 2015, only 43.5% received all of the child support money that was due (similar to the 43.4% seen in 2011)
25.8% of custodial parents received some of the money that was due
30.7% received none of the child support money due"
https://www.verywellfamily.com/us-child-support-statistics-2997994
There are also 18.3 million children (1/4) who grow up with an absent dad.