I'm dismayed by people who are willing to ignore the inherent injustice in policies that support one kind of care for children (child care services) while ignoring care when it's provided by parents themselves. All care has value; all caregiving must be equitably supported through public policies. In the WaPost article, both Marc Thiessen and Alyssa Rosenberg point to Mitt Romney's proposed child tax credit plan without any discussion about the "work" requirement. The poorest families would get nothing. The 2021 Refundable Child Tax Credit reduced poverty dramatically because it went to ALL families, regardless of parents' paid employment. The grassroots organization I serve as volunteer executive director, Family and Home Network, calls for principles of inclusive family policies. In our capitalist society, those with economic and/or ideological interests in keeping parents in the paid workforce spend millions to push for child care and bury the data on parents' preferences for the care of their infants and young children.
I’m in the UK, Leah, yet found your conversation so refreshing, deeply fascinating and hopeful. I’d love to listen to you chat to more guests like this. Thank you!
On the quesion of how to get legislators to vote for policies that support women and childrren, the single most important thing where prolife voters are conerned is whether or not you will vote against an anti abortion candidate who is not pro women and children policies. As long as voting on iabortion is # 1 on your list there is no reason for them to change if you hold opposition to abortion, when push comes to shove first.
Yes! And this gets to the trust piece that was discussed in the conversation as well. If a major pro life organization wanted to team up with progressive groups advocating for paid family leave, for instance, they'd first need to prove that they were willing to deny a candidate for office their endorsement if they didn't support it. As far as I know, that's never happened.
I also think it's hard to establish trust when someone says they support poorly written 'pro-life' policy that explicitly endangers people's lives and wellbeing.
That isn't to say collaboration isn't possible. But that conservative pro-lifers should be on capitol hill daily advocating for pro women and pro family policies and not waiting for liberals/leftists to invite them. The left will always be best able to win over democrats, the right is better positioned to win over Republicans. That's how this would happen. Plus in our current congress a bipartisan group going door to door is more likely to hinder legislation than help it.
There have been numerous efforts at dialogue or common ground which are quite different things. My own experiencev which is extensive and almost always subject to confidentilality and rarely with majorbplayers on either side moves me away from common ground and toward dialogue amine at understanding the humanity of and recognizing "otherness." The best thing I have ever read is this "Attempts to establish dialogue between conflicting identities usually focus on mutual understanding and the common, while downplaying the elements of the conflict and ignoring the element of otherness, which is especially important for conflicts in which the other is the opposite of the self. This article suggests real dialogue requires that the parties first acknowledge this otherness as the distance between them. Thus, the ability to not understand, rather than the ability to understand the other, is posited as crucial to the dialogic process. The author argues that only when the parties relinquish their previous understanding can dialogue address the nucleus of the opposition and conflict, and mobilize relations between the parties within the dialogic framework. Examples are given of attempts at dialogue, one by a group representing the religious and secular Israeli populations and one by a group representing Jews and Arabs in Israel, with their encounters described and analyzed in terms of the possibilities of understanding." The Power of Not Understanding: The Meeting of Conflicting Identities
Thank you for this fascinating and lovely conversation! I especially appreciated your exchange on abortion at the end. Alyssa's point -- that without abortion access, women are subject to some potentially terrible losses of autonomy -- is basically the one argument that keeps me pro-choice. I would really love to hear what your answer might have been to her (or just a pointer to related readings). I think the best arguments on both sides (humanity of the baby vs. autonomy of the mother) are often neglected by the other, and so I don't get challenged on my beliefs as much as I would like -- especially since I'm really not certain I'm right on this issue.
One possibility, though, is that the answers from the pro-life side are simply hard for me to hear -- if they really boil down to "autonomy is less valuable than life, however valuable it may be, so we don't have to solve the autonomy problem," then maybe the work to be done is not pro-lifers providing solutions to the autonomy problem, but me wrestling out the moral weight of the two concerns on my own.
In any case, thank you for this substack, and this conversation in particular! It's helped me a lot in forming my views on this issue and related ones.
This isn't a direct reply on autonomy (it's not an abortion piece) but I appreciated it today:
"From this baffling relationship between self and other there can emerge an ambient feeling of unfreedom. The great responsibility and the great vulnerability of being a parent can be unsettling for one’s identity, in the past, present, and future. It can be difficult to recall with any certainty who you were before you spent so much of your time wondering, ruminating, fretting, or catastrophizing about another person. If, like Dubin, you are relatively privileged, you know that you have chosen your unfreedom. Yet you may still feel that you did not choose to bind yourself to these people, these intimate strangers, or to this whole life. By this logic, the entire atmosphere of parenthood, no matter how privileged it may appear from the outside, can come to feel like “a scam,” as Dubin puts it. And the decision not to make lunch can seem like the ultimate horizon of liberty. Acceptance of the fact that parenthood necessitates the relinquishment of various freedoms would seem to be one of its central features.
[...]Dubin is not really imagining the freedom to be more than “one thing” but the freedom to run away from this bind and into the arms of nothing—no fixed roles, no lasting responsibilities. This is a negative freedom that does not expand one’s sense of self so much as shrink it to pure potentiality. But you cannot live in potentiality forever. If spouses and children do not get in the way, then time will. In its purest and most personal moments, Dubin’s rage seems like grief for the future, which is available to her children in a way it will never again be available to her."
That’s so interesting that autonomy keeps you pro-choice!
Is it a full autonomy of self that you ascribe to? I often find that many good faith pro-choice people will have situations where autonomy is no longer the overruling right. For example, can a woman have an abortion at *any* stage in pregnancy, for *any* reason she likes, due to autonomy? If the answer is no, then there are already situations for many pro-choice people where autonomy is not a good enough reason to end a human life.
These losses of autonomy that we bear as women throughout pregnancy...what are they? It would be helpful to hear, as a pro-life person, what specific autonomy problems pregnancy poses.
My own issue with the idea of autonomy is that I always go back to “No man is an island”. We socialise, we make communities, we make laws that bind communities, often infringing on individual autonomy *for the benefit or even potential benefit of others* (e.g drink driving laws). Why is pregnancy a time when autonomy comes out on top, over and above another human life, when so often in life outside the womb it doesn’t?
This is such an interesting question -- and I think a really good answer to my question as well! I think your outline of how we already accept curbs on autonomy to protect life is succinct and makes sense. I'll try to outline where I differ from it.
I think there are two big differences for me: 1) I want to distinguish in degrees of impingements on autonomy, and 2) a huge, huge part of my policy position is based less on my positive moral vision and more on my degree of uncertainty about it.
So, first: degrees of impingement on autonomy. We don't allow people to drive drunk, but that's a pretty small impingement on their autonomy. Carrying a pregnancy with a risk of severe maternal injury or death is obviously a much bigger impingement. Between those two extremes lie most pregnancy outcomes: (relatively) minor birth injuries, economic precarity, parenting with an abusive spouse, etc.
Second: uncertainty. The other big difference I have here is that I am less certain of the status of a child in utero. I have heard various arguments, theological and otherwise, for the status of the child as person, as human, as possessor of rights, etc. and I don't feel deeply certain of the correctness of any of them.
So, given that I feel highly certain of the existence of potential harms (of extremely varied degrees of severity) and highly uncertain of the status of the child, I end up at something like this: The only case where I feel anything like certainty that abortion is okay is when the mother's life is in danger. At that point, it seems like the math is less autonomy vs. life, and more life vs. life. At all other points in the spectrum, where the harms may vary from the extremely severe on down, I'm uncertain. I intuitively feel that the greater the potential for harm, the more justifiable the abortion.
So the place I end up at personally is that, given so much moral uncertainty about the status of unborn children, I am committed to not seeking an abortion for myself outside of life-threatening situations, and have made a lot of conscious choices about how to live my life in consideration of that commitment. But politically, I am very sure that holding all women to that standard will result in harms to all women, and I'm much less certain that preventing abortions is saving lives. As a result, I lean towards putting that choice in the hands of individual women (with exact policy implementations varying).
Anyway, thank you again for your well-considered response and the opportunity to think this through. I'm generally rarely a commenter, and I found that I spent a shocking amount of time thinking about this today, so I'll probably log off for now, but I want to convey that I have appreciated the exchange!
I second this! I'd also love to hear your response, Leah, to Alyssa's points at the end.
I think part of this would include grappling with the outcome of pro-life legislation on all women's autonomy, not just pregnant women's autonomy. How far does 'protecting unborn life' or 'privileging unborn life' go? What do you consider reasonable? Banning birth control, for instance. What about banning women of childbearing age from drinking? Taking certain medications? Receiving certain medical procedures?
And how comfortable are you with the blurring of the separation of church and state implicit in these laws? Which gets into your comfort or discomfort with pluralism in general, and the use of force to deny different people their beliefs.
It depends whether or not you recorded on separate tracks (and whether THAT happened depends on the program you used to record!) If each of you has your own track, it’s straightforward to change the volume of one of them in Audacity. If not, you’re kinda up the creek unless you want to manually edit the audio in painstaking detail, which would take a couple of hours, probably.
I found a free Audacity plug-in that does a serviceable (though not amazing) job. Here is the link to the plug-in, and I'll also send the mp3 of the podcast that I generated to an email of yours, if I can find a public one :)
I'm dismayed by people who are willing to ignore the inherent injustice in policies that support one kind of care for children (child care services) while ignoring care when it's provided by parents themselves. All care has value; all caregiving must be equitably supported through public policies. In the WaPost article, both Marc Thiessen and Alyssa Rosenberg point to Mitt Romney's proposed child tax credit plan without any discussion about the "work" requirement. The poorest families would get nothing. The 2021 Refundable Child Tax Credit reduced poverty dramatically because it went to ALL families, regardless of parents' paid employment. The grassroots organization I serve as volunteer executive director, Family and Home Network, calls for principles of inclusive family policies. In our capitalist society, those with economic and/or ideological interests in keeping parents in the paid workforce spend millions to push for child care and bury the data on parents' preferences for the care of their infants and young children.
I’m in the UK, Leah, yet found your conversation so refreshing, deeply fascinating and hopeful. I’d love to listen to you chat to more guests like this. Thank you!
On the quesion of how to get legislators to vote for policies that support women and childrren, the single most important thing where prolife voters are conerned is whether or not you will vote against an anti abortion candidate who is not pro women and children policies. As long as voting on iabortion is # 1 on your list there is no reason for them to change if you hold opposition to abortion, when push comes to shove first.
Yes! And this gets to the trust piece that was discussed in the conversation as well. If a major pro life organization wanted to team up with progressive groups advocating for paid family leave, for instance, they'd first need to prove that they were willing to deny a candidate for office their endorsement if they didn't support it. As far as I know, that's never happened.
I also think it's hard to establish trust when someone says they support poorly written 'pro-life' policy that explicitly endangers people's lives and wellbeing.
That isn't to say collaboration isn't possible. But that conservative pro-lifers should be on capitol hill daily advocating for pro women and pro family policies and not waiting for liberals/leftists to invite them. The left will always be best able to win over democrats, the right is better positioned to win over Republicans. That's how this would happen. Plus in our current congress a bipartisan group going door to door is more likely to hinder legislation than help it.
There have been numerous efforts at dialogue or common ground which are quite different things. My own experiencev which is extensive and almost always subject to confidentilality and rarely with majorbplayers on either side moves me away from common ground and toward dialogue amine at understanding the humanity of and recognizing "otherness." The best thing I have ever read is this "Attempts to establish dialogue between conflicting identities usually focus on mutual understanding and the common, while downplaying the elements of the conflict and ignoring the element of otherness, which is especially important for conflicts in which the other is the opposite of the self. This article suggests real dialogue requires that the parties first acknowledge this otherness as the distance between them. Thus, the ability to not understand, rather than the ability to understand the other, is posited as crucial to the dialogic process. The author argues that only when the parties relinquish their previous understanding can dialogue address the nucleus of the opposition and conflict, and mobilize relations between the parties within the dialogic framework. Examples are given of attempts at dialogue, one by a group representing the religious and secular Israeli populations and one by a group representing Jews and Arabs in Israel, with their encounters described and analyzed in terms of the possibilities of understanding." The Power of Not Understanding: The Meeting of Conflicting Identities
Z. D. Gurevitch
Thank you for this fascinating and lovely conversation! I especially appreciated your exchange on abortion at the end. Alyssa's point -- that without abortion access, women are subject to some potentially terrible losses of autonomy -- is basically the one argument that keeps me pro-choice. I would really love to hear what your answer might have been to her (or just a pointer to related readings). I think the best arguments on both sides (humanity of the baby vs. autonomy of the mother) are often neglected by the other, and so I don't get challenged on my beliefs as much as I would like -- especially since I'm really not certain I'm right on this issue.
One possibility, though, is that the answers from the pro-life side are simply hard for me to hear -- if they really boil down to "autonomy is less valuable than life, however valuable it may be, so we don't have to solve the autonomy problem," then maybe the work to be done is not pro-lifers providing solutions to the autonomy problem, but me wrestling out the moral weight of the two concerns on my own.
In any case, thank you for this substack, and this conversation in particular! It's helped me a lot in forming my views on this issue and related ones.
This isn't a direct reply on autonomy (it's not an abortion piece) but I appreciated it today:
"From this baffling relationship between self and other there can emerge an ambient feeling of unfreedom. The great responsibility and the great vulnerability of being a parent can be unsettling for one’s identity, in the past, present, and future. It can be difficult to recall with any certainty who you were before you spent so much of your time wondering, ruminating, fretting, or catastrophizing about another person. If, like Dubin, you are relatively privileged, you know that you have chosen your unfreedom. Yet you may still feel that you did not choose to bind yourself to these people, these intimate strangers, or to this whole life. By this logic, the entire atmosphere of parenthood, no matter how privileged it may appear from the outside, can come to feel like “a scam,” as Dubin puts it. And the decision not to make lunch can seem like the ultimate horizon of liberty. Acceptance of the fact that parenthood necessitates the relinquishment of various freedoms would seem to be one of its central features.
[...]Dubin is not really imagining the freedom to be more than “one thing” but the freedom to run away from this bind and into the arms of nothing—no fixed roles, no lasting responsibilities. This is a negative freedom that does not expand one’s sense of self so much as shrink it to pure potentiality. But you cannot live in potentiality forever. If spouses and children do not get in the way, then time will. In its purest and most personal moments, Dubin’s rage seems like grief for the future, which is available to her children in a way it will never again be available to her."
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/09/25/mom-rage-the-everyday-crisis-of-modern-motherhood-minna-dubin-book-review
That’s so interesting that autonomy keeps you pro-choice!
Is it a full autonomy of self that you ascribe to? I often find that many good faith pro-choice people will have situations where autonomy is no longer the overruling right. For example, can a woman have an abortion at *any* stage in pregnancy, for *any* reason she likes, due to autonomy? If the answer is no, then there are already situations for many pro-choice people where autonomy is not a good enough reason to end a human life.
These losses of autonomy that we bear as women throughout pregnancy...what are they? It would be helpful to hear, as a pro-life person, what specific autonomy problems pregnancy poses.
My own issue with the idea of autonomy is that I always go back to “No man is an island”. We socialise, we make communities, we make laws that bind communities, often infringing on individual autonomy *for the benefit or even potential benefit of others* (e.g drink driving laws). Why is pregnancy a time when autonomy comes out on top, over and above another human life, when so often in life outside the womb it doesn’t?
This is such an interesting question -- and I think a really good answer to my question as well! I think your outline of how we already accept curbs on autonomy to protect life is succinct and makes sense. I'll try to outline where I differ from it.
I think there are two big differences for me: 1) I want to distinguish in degrees of impingements on autonomy, and 2) a huge, huge part of my policy position is based less on my positive moral vision and more on my degree of uncertainty about it.
So, first: degrees of impingement on autonomy. We don't allow people to drive drunk, but that's a pretty small impingement on their autonomy. Carrying a pregnancy with a risk of severe maternal injury or death is obviously a much bigger impingement. Between those two extremes lie most pregnancy outcomes: (relatively) minor birth injuries, economic precarity, parenting with an abusive spouse, etc.
Second: uncertainty. The other big difference I have here is that I am less certain of the status of a child in utero. I have heard various arguments, theological and otherwise, for the status of the child as person, as human, as possessor of rights, etc. and I don't feel deeply certain of the correctness of any of them.
So, given that I feel highly certain of the existence of potential harms (of extremely varied degrees of severity) and highly uncertain of the status of the child, I end up at something like this: The only case where I feel anything like certainty that abortion is okay is when the mother's life is in danger. At that point, it seems like the math is less autonomy vs. life, and more life vs. life. At all other points in the spectrum, where the harms may vary from the extremely severe on down, I'm uncertain. I intuitively feel that the greater the potential for harm, the more justifiable the abortion.
So the place I end up at personally is that, given so much moral uncertainty about the status of unborn children, I am committed to not seeking an abortion for myself outside of life-threatening situations, and have made a lot of conscious choices about how to live my life in consideration of that commitment. But politically, I am very sure that holding all women to that standard will result in harms to all women, and I'm much less certain that preventing abortions is saving lives. As a result, I lean towards putting that choice in the hands of individual women (with exact policy implementations varying).
Anyway, thank you again for your well-considered response and the opportunity to think this through. I'm generally rarely a commenter, and I found that I spent a shocking amount of time thinking about this today, so I'll probably log off for now, but I want to convey that I have appreciated the exchange!
I second this! I'd also love to hear your response, Leah, to Alyssa's points at the end.
I think part of this would include grappling with the outcome of pro-life legislation on all women's autonomy, not just pregnant women's autonomy. How far does 'protecting unborn life' or 'privileging unborn life' go? What do you consider reasonable? Banning birth control, for instance. What about banning women of childbearing age from drinking? Taking certain medications? Receiving certain medical procedures?
And how comfortable are you with the blurring of the separation of church and state implicit in these laws? Which gets into your comfort or discomfort with pluralism in general, and the use of force to deny different people their beliefs.
I think you need to run it through a program to level the volume. It was too hard to listen to because your volumes are too different
Alas, thanks for the feedback. Any advice about what to use? I used Cleanfeed for the recording with the hope of avoiding this issue.
It depends whether or not you recorded on separate tracks (and whether THAT happened depends on the program you used to record!) If each of you has your own track, it’s straightforward to change the volume of one of them in Audacity. If not, you’re kinda up the creek unless you want to manually edit the audio in painstaking detail, which would take a couple of hours, probably.
^looks like this is why people pay for the non-free version of Cleanfeed. I've been a guest using it but it was my first time as the driver.
I found a free Audacity plug-in that does a serviceable (though not amazing) job. Here is the link to the plug-in, and I'll also send the mp3 of the podcast that I generated to an email of yours, if I can find a public one :)
https://github.com/theDanielJLewis/dynamic-compressor-for-audacity
Glad you got it figured out! I had no expertise to offer 😅