Abortion
I was looking for a featured image to use for a post about abortion and settled on a wire hanger. Why? Because this is the result of making safe abortions unavailable. My great grandmother, whom I knew, had eight kids and I think three abortions because enough was enough. They weren’t legal. They were dangerous. Her eight children could have been without a mother because of the unavailability of safe abortions. There’s no reason for them to be unavailable, and yet now there are a lot of politicians and judges (also politicians in this case) who are trying to limit their legality. They’re not really trying to reduce the number of abortions in America via the most logical means, which would be to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies, putting the lie to what this issue is really about.
I’m writing this because I want to address some of what I hear in opposition to legal abortions. I find too much of it generally unanswered.
Let’s start with the most commonly used image to upset people about abortions: the beating heart. If you hold a stethoscope up to a living goldfish, chances are you’ll hear a heartbeat, albeit a really fast one. There is nothing intrinsically human about a heartbeat and in fact the fetal heartbeat most parents first hear is not that of a four-chambered “human” heart because that comes later in fetal development. What makes heartbeats so emotional, and I speak from personal experience here, is that they are the first audible sign of fetal life. Hearing it is sensory proof that the fetus exists and if you want to be a parent that’s a very exciting thing. But in the abortion argument heartbeats aren’t a case, they’re an emotional technique. Nothing more.
Next, let’s talk about when we define human life as beginning. Conception is arbitrary. In the case of Catholics, conception is religious doctrine. I don’t know its origin but all I can say about religious doctrine in this case is to cite the value of the separation of Church and State, which is to say not basing policy on what your own religion states because that religion states it. This is the tightrope President Biden has walked, and walked well. It’s very similar to what was gay marriage as a legal issue.
Why arbitrary? Because it is far from intuitively obvious that a clump of undifferentiated cells constitutes a person. I’d say it’s far more obvious that it doesn’t. A fetus evolves, going through evolutionary stages mankind has gone through to become mankind. There’s a stage at which human fetuses have tails. There’s a stage at which they have gills. Generally speaking, people don’t have tails and gills, and so defining a fetus as a person doesn’t make biological sense.
Where does this leave us? With the case that a potential human life should have the same value as a human life. Being as this is a religious issue, do we have evidence that God agrees? We may have evidence that He doesn’t, based on human design. Every sperm cell has only one function: that of a potential human life, and yet we are designed by our Creator (for those of us who are not atheists) in such a way that even in cases of successful conception millions of potential human lives inevitably die. If you attempt to reproduce, you cause the death of millions of potential human lives. No way around it.
But to a certain extent these arguments obscure the real issue with abortions, and that’s what the issue is really about. A lot of pro-Choice people will tell you that the battle is about control of female bodies, nothing else. I don’t believe for a minute that no Right-to-Lifers are honest. I do, however, believe that many aren’t, particularly those currently involved in trying to reduce abortion availability on a state level, like Texas Governor Abbot.
My question for guys like Abbot is this:
How does your church treat miscarriages?
Are there memorial services? Is there grief counseling provided? Do people bring food to the house of the bereaved couple?
People who hear me mention miscarriages in this context are often angry at me for going there, like how could I politicize miscarriages, but my point is exactly the opposite of what they think it is: Miscarriages are absolutely tragic events that involve very serious grief. Having been through years of infertility treatments attempting to get pregnant, including surgeries on both my wife and me, I know what it is to want a fetus desperately, I know what it is to love one, and I know what it is to worry about one because my wife’s pregnancy was difficult. We were terrified of that loss.
What I can say for certain is that treating a fetus as a human being if it is aborted but not if it is miscarried doesn’t cut it. An abortion cannot turn a fetus into a human being. If you consider a fetus to be a person, that cannot be conditional. If it is, if it is treated as conditional, than your opposition to abortion cannot be about either justice or compassion. It really is about controlling womens’ bodies. Your outrage is phony.
The question often asked by pro-Choicers of Right-to-Lifers is How could you care about fetuses but not about babies, particularly poor ones? The question becomes way more stark if it really is How could you care about some fetuses but not about others?
I like honest arguments. The abortion argument isn’t usually one. I hate to watch it prove to be no more honest than the Voter ID argument. In some circles it is honest but in others it just isn’t.
10/12/2021 @ 4:31 am
How does any woman support a politician who advocates the reversal of Roe v Wade?
That’s like a black person who would support a politician who would declare Lincoln’s executive order that is known as the Emancipation Proclamation to be unconstitutional…
BTW:
“Her eight children could have been without a mother because of the unavailability of unsafe abortions.”
You may wish to edit and revise this sentence…
10/12/2021 @ 8:36 am
Thanks. Already found it but couldn’t find the Edit button so Alan helped.
10/21/2021 @ 9:43 am
Women aren’t buying into this daddy fantasy oppressive shit anymore. Like Rachel says, “watch this space”.
10/21/2021 @ 9:56 am
The argument re: fetus=human being isnt an argument. Its a fact. You dont eliminate viability by changing the word fetus to zygote. I’ve never spoken w a woman who’s had an abortion who believes otherwise. We know what we’re doing when we choose abortion. We’re not idiots and we don’t need to be delusional or create mental diversions to come to the decision to terminate a pregnancy although our cultures insist on mysticism and romance when discussing it while we, women, whose bodies nurture the process are alone, left to consider all that plus pragmatics.
10/21/2021 @ 10:03 am
Btw we dont merely nurture a human being, by choosing to continue we become responsible for the well being and quality of life of a brand new, tiny and vulnerable child.
10/21/2021 @ 10:05 am
There is a difference between a potential human being and an actual one. You’ll notice that I don’t trivialize abortion. It isn’t trivial. It also isn’t murder.
10/21/2021 @ 10:27 am
Kosh the argument is beside the point and truly counterproductive. Bc its an attempt to diminish pregnancy and the subsequent decision to abort as something less than what it is. using this argument makes women appear clueless, laissez faire and opens the door to some know it all reminding us that fetuses are human. Of course they are. But childbearing is far more long ranging and complicated than theyre willing to acknowledge
10/21/2021 @ 12:46 pm
The argument isn’t with women. Women aren’t clueless. Most of this beating heart stuff is from men. This idea that raped women should carry their rapist’s fetus to term is from men.
10/21/2021 @ 5:52 pm
There are plenty of crazyass women running prolife demonstrations and harassing women in their way into clinics etc. Loony is equal opportunity.
Let me add this: personally Im tired of the extreme example memes: like girls raped by their fathers and other utterly horrific but i think infrequent scenarios. I think the real issue is mostly economic- like can i afford to have a child, can i pay for hospitalization, do i WANT a child, have time to raise a child, have room to keep one? Is there even a system in place that allows a woman to monitor what kind of people get to adopt her child if she chooses to bare it?
Having a child is an often emotional but always complicated situation. The government mandating women birth unwanted children is perverse, particularly given no one seriously gives a rats ass about this “precious life” once it sees daylight.
10/21/2021 @ 6:05 pm
It’s economic to us. It’s in spite of economics to the opposition.
How we talk about this depends on to whom we’re talking. When I write about issues that differ between liberals and conservatives, I frequently address conservatives, mainly because there’s a vacuum there. There are plenty of people who can rally troops. That’s not me.
And I think the leadership of the Right To Life movement is mainly male.
10/22/2021 @ 10:59 am
Kosh abortion is about privacy and its our constitutional right. All arguments are weak compared to the absolute righteousness of religion and salvation. Only the constitution says we’re not to adopt a national religion, something conservatives are working overtime to reverse. Theyve loaded the supremes. This is their moment to take charge, overthrow our democratic republic and install a dictator.
I think our best bet is to fight and not pander, to not further weirdly creepy memes about teenaged girls. I believe we need to strongly appeal to the majority of us. Conservatives are not listening.
The majority of women seeking abortion are choosing the procedure because for whatever reason they’re making this choice, our bodies our choice.
10/22/2021 @ 12:40 pm
I don’t suggest pandering. That’s never my point.
Yes, we are looking at an attempted overthrow of our government. I wonder if Joe Manchin will finally get that now that the Republicans are not supporting election reform at all. He is unfortunately the swing vote.
I can tell people it’s important to vote. I can’t tell any liberal why they need to protect the right to choose. No one needs me for that any more than I need you to tell me that abortion is a privacy issue and that attacks on it violate the separation of Church and State. To readers here, that’s obvious. I don’t think we have any conservatives left here. The best I can do is help anyone arguing with a conservative understand where it might make sense to go.
None of it is pandering. Actually, it’s sales. It’s figuring out what’s important to the audience and shaping your pitch to address that as best you can. However, what sales does not typically involve is altering the product. Altering the product is where pandering comes in. Or I guess one could lie about the product but I don’t like to do that, both for ethical reasons and because I’ve always been in a business that depends on repeat business – trust only once helps you make a sale but not a living.
And I want to make them think. The problems typically happen when they don’t.
10/22/2021 @ 6:24 pm
There is an interesting show being advertised on MSNBC currently which airs sometime this weekend. It is about the Civil War. I mention this because it has elements within it which are analogous to the dispute within the abortion discussion.
The conflict over abortion involve principles and strategies. Rights such as privacy, and reproductive authority are simple, open, clearly targetable positions. The notion that a woman has the right to her body is clearly understood, and does not change. It meets the definition of nobility and principle. Conversely, its opposition takes virtually infinite shapes. It is not based upon principle. It is not even about principle. It is about leveraging power. The attack of the principle of rights takes on as many positions toward its goal as one can conceptualize in space. Attack angles are virtually infinite because they are unmoored from any principle.
Before Jerry Falwell, conservatism supported the position that abortion was not something to be discussed publicly, and was a personal right matter. Government should stay out of it. Falwell turned the issue from a concern of a rights principle to a weapon to leverage power. That change brought what we are familiar with today. In fact, it goes forward into the broad conflict in our society to the voting rights versus voting law suppression power. Notably, the voting suppression efforts deviate from facts, and lose no steam because they don’t use them. Power is not concerned with it. Rights and justice as a broad concern exists fully within a reality framework, and the leveraging of power is an end run. Leveraging power is like fighting the Vietnam war in Cambodia, in order to leverage more power in Vietnam.
There was a segment in this ad for the Civil war show, which I now see airs at 10pm Sunday, mentions how the war was a conflict between two groups of white men. Black Americans thought and expected that the resolutions of the principles at stake had resulted in freedom like white men enjoyed. The reality was that this was a dispute and a resolution of conflict between white men, and the resultant justice existed only within them. The principle did not emanate beyond them to the society as a whole. Outside of white maleness, leveraging of power existed as it had before. The expectation that justice would ensue is to misunderstand the conflict and the tactics involved.
Understanding the abortion conflict is challenged in precisely the same way as long as the principle/rights side views its opponent as having a principle/moral concern. That is an entirely false analysis. The religious, anti-abortion side is entirely about leveraging power. It can’t be addressed with principle. It can operate entirely without facts and reason, and can count on dividing women within the principle/rights side by offering them access to power (thru them), while not offering them actual power. All the talk about heartbeats, and the beginnings of life, and so on, are perfectly cloudy and unprovable for the purpose of leveraging power. The factless, reasonless side never has self doubt. It never moderates based upon evidence, and it concedes nothing. Conservatism/power, and justice/human rights divide today in all matters along this line. With rights, facts, reason, and ethics is our essence…and our weakness. With totalitarian conservatism, unreasoned unreasonableness is its strength.
10/22/2021 @ 10:37 pm
And so I guess we point out that the emperor has no clothes while we do what we can to mobilize our own people.
10/23/2021 @ 5:51 am
Well, for me, it means recognizing that those who oppose rights of individuals, whatever the particular subject may be, will not accept a proposed solution that is reasoned. It is like they say about Mitch McConnell. He does not want compromise. He wants capitulation. It seems to be this uneven dynamic across the spectrum. Those seeking the acknowledgement and protection of their rights seek inclusion. That does not require involvement of dominant culture other than respect of laws and rights. On the other hand, dominant culture seeks dominance, irrespective of what laws say. This side does require their opponents participation in the role of the dominated. Racists, after the Civil war, required a dominated class. Right to life advocates require that women surrender their independence to become incubators.
Therefore, discussion of “rights” with an opponent who essentially recognizes no rights other than their own, is fruitless. An additional complication is that rights do not exist outside of governments and civilizations. Power, on the other hand, does. And that result is perfectly acceptable to those who place power above all else.
10/23/2021 @ 8:51 am
This is good analysis. And it says why Manchin can’t keep trying to appease these guys.
10/23/2021 @ 9:23 am
Precisely.
Frankly, I do not believe Manchin is sincerely trying. Manchin knows that Democrats want things on principle, but Manchin’s political existence is entirely seeking and leveraging power. His family is invested in fossil fuels. He seeks greater wealth from those industries. He is a Democrat acting as a Republican for his constituency which is employed by Republican power. He could not get elected as a Republican because there is an endless stream of unprincipled right wingers available to make him seem feckless. But, Democrats count on him being a feckless Democrat, even though he is essentially a Republican, but being a Democrat in name gives a little power to Schumer.