| The following is a very long essay on abortion that took me a very long time to write. It was cross-posted to talk.abortion, alt.philosophy, and alt.religion.kibology on January 19, 2004. It is an attempt at transformative abortion debate, and the process of writing it was transformative for my beliefs on the subject. I realize it is long and that my style of writing is dense, but- as it moves gradually from the abstract to the concrete of the mainstream abortion debate- I hope it will reward the receptive reader and disarm those quick to a shoutingmatch. |
Concern almost becomes a function of distance. Peoples you've never heard of in postage stamp nations you can't locate, their very names yielding only to a trained tongue. The exposition of their worrisome situation is usually followed by an unambiguous political solution in unambiguous English. No one will take you to task for any such concerns as concern itself can never be spread too thin, solutions themselves are judged by honest effort; in the end they are only words, they are only opinions,-- in any case preferable to the complete absence of interest. But one need only say "I believe the fetus has a right to life" and one can scarcely have made more instant enemies. One did not defend for these people the right to vote, the right to a homeland, the right to healthcare, &c. no, the right *not to have their lives taken from them*. One is a zealot even before proposing any course of action; because one is not talking about the murder of hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of human beings in some distant land, one is talking tens of millions of human beings in our very country, in our very lifetimes,-- this can only be a gross caricature of our austere, dispassioned concern! Abortion is all the more alarming for its ironies; the instruments made to help bring life into the world are used to destroy life. Faceless, voiceless millions are sacrificed in the name of individual sovereignty. People who are most critical of the awesome suggestive power of mass media are often first to mute all but the most marginal of the many, many people who say something is very, very wrong-- no, these are hate groups! Anything political or societal is fair game as far as idle critique is concerned, yet the technological practice of abortion remains off-limits; why should people not be just as critical about the technology that affects everybody's very physicality as they are encouraged to be about government and society that affects us more distantly?
Usenet can be a profoundly upsetting experience for a person. The unifying philosophy of usenet is volume;-- semantic noise that has to be all the more bombastic just to be heard above all the other noise. All these blithely offensive broadsides- unimaginative in purpose even if not in delivery,- quickly forgotten after the next unimaginative broadside but before you can realize why it actually kind of upset you, become furtive assaults on your own silence. And, for those taken with the timeless chore of offending easily offended church folk, the pro-choice movement has obvious appeal. The most mortal human issue has the most outlandish arguments; usenet is its logical medium. Usenet is the ideal forum for an argument predicated on ulterior motives of the opposition; usenet is populated with invented selves, and they will debate only invented opponents. The medium divorced from any physicality is by no accident also a spiritual Sahara; if the iconoclasts of usenet have at times succeeded in making me feel lukewarm about the death of the unborn, it was only because they made me feel lukewarm about death. Usenet has an overabundance of opinions and a deficit of ideas; the format- if you're lucky- favors point-by-point refutations to actual fully formed counterarguments-- if you're not, point-by-point zingers and innuendoes, both bursting at the seams with self-consciousness. Usenet is not a dialogue but rather a shared inner monologue, it is the lends itself to the person who identifies themselves not by discursive culture but by inert political stance. Instead of myth, we have the cult of the opinion. Instead of great ideas that are communicated through tradition, we settle for mediocre ad-hoc ideas that are somehow all the more special for being of our own invention. There is an element of narcissism at work; it seems not as many people are as interested in convincing me of their opinions as impressing me with their opinions. Political apathy is not the cause for concern, now, rather this unwillingness to suspend opinion.
On a nearly weekly basis on the internet newsgroup talk.abortion, some freshman waltzes in- and I hesitate to add that the guilty parties are almost invariably of the pro-choice persuasion- and gives lie to their purported "solution" to the abortion debate. Needless to say, traffic in the newsgroup continues unabated, as they've "solved" the abortion debate to nobody's satisfaction except their own, least of all the people on the same side of the debate who nonetheless construct their solutions on mutually exclusive grounds. I believe this compulsion to "solve" the abortion debate is part of the problem; it would be absurd to assume one would be able to put to rest a debate where science intersects morality. Because of the volatility of the subject, combined with the fact that there's no real way of gauging a person's sympathies outside of a expressly political environment, the issue of abortion has incrementally become one best not discussed in polite company-- unfortunately so, as- despite hopeful trends- abortion is a continuing reality. One talk.abortion poster claimed that human rights are more important than Republican agendas, and, indeed, one could make a similarly definitive sounding counter argument by substituting "Democratic" for "Republican," but the fact is that the abortion debate is much larger than any political party, and if abortion were just an agenda, there would be no reason for it to be any more emotionally charged than, say, the issue of rent control. If I could put any matters to rest for good, it would be these two widespread misconceptions-- pretexts pro-choicers should abandon. The first misconception is that pro-choicers have any more of a claim to level-headedness than pro-lifers, although when it comes to lifestyles vs. human life itself, I will agree that they do indeed have a far lesser cause for alarm, and are in fact often a little cavalier on this point. The second misconception is that pro-choicers are any more mindful of moral ambiguity than pro-lifers; not only do most believe an abortion is not a social wrong in itself, but rather something that corrects nearly all other social wrongs-- and because of this, pro-lifers are advocates only of making life more difficult, certainly not because of any justifiable concern (Many, many times "these creatures" have been described as "squealing with glee" and even growing erections at the thought of others' misfortune.) The pro-choice moderates tell us that nobody likes abortion, but one needn't do much reading at all to discover that- yes- many do, and modern feminism has certainly left an incriminating paper trail (the writer Ellen Willis- perhaps joking- recalled her coterie looking forward to a day when abortion clinics would be as ubiquitous as McDonalds.)
Here are my introductions to two talk.abortion personalities I will reference throughout this article. From what I've discerned, both these people make a profession of being pro-choice. If looking into the bathroom mirror each morning and saying to yourself "I'm going to advance the cause of abortion" has some sort of cumulative psychological effect on a person, these would be my first choices for subjects. One is an inheritor of a tradition of American hucksterism, the other is ferocious intellect that frightens me more than any terrorist. 1) First Personality: M is for Malapert It is through talk.abortion that I have met the most loathsome person I have ever met on the internet or elsewhere, pseudonymously known as "M is for Malapert" (I have been criticized for only using pseudonyms, and I feel it interesting to note in passing that my first usenet pseudonym was "Maude is Murder,"-- itself a rather hermetic abortion joke.) Malapert can medley fact, opinion, observation, and fantasy- bluffer's-guide gender theory, Google-intensive scientific and historical factoids, social commentary, and strained, ill-timed emotional appeals,- in such a transparently disingenous manner that insulting the reader seems to be for her a natural part of argument. The basis of her argument seems to be that something is under attack and she's sheparding it; sometimes its women under attack from misogyny, sometimes it is young people under attack from guilt-ridden "post-hormonal" baby boomers, and sometimes its capital-'S' Sex under attack from those anti-sex people. Any way you slice it, however, women are more pro-life than men and young people more pro-life than those of her generation, so she can't expect full cooperation from everyone, but I'm sure if capital-'S' Sex could talk, it would say, "thank you for giving me a murderous political agenda!" Malapert appears to be a one-note player; a web search fails to bring up anything not related to abortion (although it does yield an article where a woman who was mentoring a 17-year-old says she was assailed by Malapert for pressuring the girl into not aborting despite the fact the girl in question was morally opposed to abortion anyway.) Malapert may never commit to any one victim, but her final appeal is one-size-fits-all,-- abortion. Apparently, the most can you do for these victims requires a surprising noninvestment of self,-- do not act on or voice any moral objection to abortion. The actual right to safe, legal abortion seems secondary to the absolute good of abortion itself; what is argued is not so much the protection of rights for everyone than the assurance of individual welfare and safety. Malapert herself appears to have secured some amount of worldly success. When I wondered why so many pro-choicers- having shown no prior proclivity to the field- suddenly become such discerning psychologists in the abortion debate aren't themselves making millions tending to a wounded public, she wondered how I was sure they weren't. She speaks in passing of articles she's written for online publications, and on talk.abortion can make the most trite observation or the most terrifying argument with the same cool, polished authorial voice. A person who is both a journalist- an internet journalist- and a psychologist is suspect in both the hows and the whys- respectively- of their argument. There is a saying common on the internet, "saying it doesn't make it so,"- something that would hopefully pass without saying anywhere else- but the internet can barely abide even this. Saying something that is unfalsifiable does not make it so either; a negative that really is unprovable-- "prove this isn't you thought process." A frequent tactic of Malapert is to tell you what you really think- and your thought processes are always duly idiotic- so you'll hopefully start debating this alter self (leaving Malapert with more time for the serious cause of women's welfare.) She has been very patient in explaining to me all the things about my motivations that don't make sense to me, without even expecting so much as I'll change my mind in return. 2) Second Personality: Craig Chilton At the end of your street there is a man- so very justly shunned by mainstream society- who, despite his outward appearance of quiet is constantly firing off a steady stream of letters to the editor that never quite make it to print. Thanks to the internet, you can read what this man thinks, freed from any limitations of space. Usenet is teeming with people who have a point to prove and the full force of their egos with which to prove it; it matters not whether they're arguing that the Armenians slaughtered the Turks rather than the other way around, that re-orbiting the Earth can stop epidemics worldwide, or that Shostakovitch was in fact a faithful soviet, their message is communicated with the same redline level of urgency. These people are known as "kooks." Enter Craig Chilton; a published author, maker of rounds on the affiliate news circuit, a man not modest about his experiences as a civil rights worker in the South of the early '60s, and- nowadays- a self-appointed "messenger," presenting us with all the "relevant facts" (some of great "factual relevance") that support the "highly beneficial remedy of abortion" (fittingly, the gee-whiz loquaciousness of his presentation uncannily resembles that of a ninteenth-century cure-all peddler.) The definitive text here is "Abortion is your Time Machine," aimed at teenagers, and beginning and ending with an invitation to print the article out, photocopy it, and distribute it to all their friends at school; quite frankly, it has to be read to be believed. Abortion, the article maintains, is the closest thing to a time machine we will perhaps ever know of, undoing all the damage of an unplanned pregnancy. But beware the hateful, bigoted, mindless, busybody, control-freakish (an adjective train Craig is especially fond of) Religious Right that does not want YOU to know of the HIGHLY beneficial REMEDY that is ABORTION. Craig tends to capitalize words at random with no regards to relative weight or grammatical function; the reason given is that we don't speak in monotone, so there is no reason we should write in monotone. This in spite of the fact- perhaps even because of the fact- that Craig's prose has a certain weightlessness, a certain tonedeafness that I can only chalk up to an aphasia of sorts,-- aphasia being a somewhat antiquated way of saying that a person is incapable to some degree of interpreting and communicating meaning; ranging in extremes from complete dissociativism to a slipperiness with words or a deafness to their nuance. And perhaps it is because of this that Craig didn't understand why the authors of a website housing kook texts found "Abortion is your Time Machine" so morbidly, unintentionally humorous-- ascribing its inclusion to some likely conspiracy on the part of the site's maintainers with the religious right. Craig is as deaf to the weight of words as he is to the phonetic revulsion of the word "abortion" itself; in a war of words he has no designs on winning with any nuance of meaning, only sheer volume. Craig continually reposts several exhaustive texts, some of which are years old, some translations for the benefit of Spanish speaking readers ("abortion" en Espanol is "aborto"! How adorable!), all of some great imagined importance, often reposting at least twelve articles a day. Even in original posts he routinely segues into multi-paragraph-long boilerplate the reader may only realize he's read dozens of times before three or four sentences in. For those whose point to prove transcends the etiquette of what is basically an honor-system medium, an overburdening volume of posts is never a consideration and a large enough audience can never be found. On usenet, making your post available to additional newsgroups of thousands or tens of thousands of readers each requires no more than a few keystrokes-- the abuse of this feature characterizing nearly all usenet kooks. Chilton crossposts nearly every article to alt.teen (putatively to counter the Religious Right's efforts to brainwash young people,) and alt.bible (to expose those already brainwashed to the light of truth.) Naturally, not everyone appreciates his messianic zeal spilling over into newsgroups that are- by all appearances- completely unrelated. Once Craig made the mistake of crossposting to alt.teens.poetry-and-stuff. Yes, there are things not welcome on alt.teens.poetry-and-stuff, the rather open-ended nature of the group's purpose notwithstanding. In response to a crosspost, a resident writhing vortex of angst composed a poem about abortion, ending cryptically with "you'll get what you want, but you won't like what you'll get." Craig responded with signature pollyannaism that abortion will (paraphrasing) instantly RESTORE, TIME-MACHINE style, ALL of her life's opportunities to PRE-unplanned pregnancy levels. "She WILL like what she gets," he concludes "VERY much." The poet made the mistake of employing the phrase "blood-covered boobs," walking him right into "...the only BOOB I see here is YOU." We may only guess it was in Birmingham that Craig first learned the art of the dozens.
This seems to be the mode of operation for the pro-choice movement: debate pro-lifers on the arguments they aren't making. I remember one pro-choicer trying to force an answer out of a pro-lifer on this point: is sex by itself good or bad,-- or is it neutral, only infused with goodness or badness by circumstance? Murder, for instance, might not be wrong if it is done in self-defense. The point he was trying to make was that an action by itself is morally neutral; rather it is the circumstances under which it occurs that makes it good or bad. This is just plain bad philosophy; as if there were an action seperable from circumstance, an action that itself was not a series of nested circumstances. I was at a later time been involved in this exact same debate with Malapert, where one has to defensively uphold one's allegiance to sex- in constant danger of falling out of favor- to demonstrate one's argument as not suspect-- this issue of moral agency in sex incrementally siphoning off from the issue moral agency at the abortion clinic,- even at the very instant one is signing one's name- which one does still have apart from any moral waivers one has "drawn up" through innocent circumstance (so, all things being equal, the good woman who aborts an unplanned pregnancy does not carry any lesser moral weight than the bad woman who purposefully concieved just for the thrill of having an abortion.) When pushed up to that "anti-sex" podium, one has to measure one's words to fail as gracefully as possible. I realize now there was nothing I could say short of turning pro-choice to prove I had my attitudes in check to weigh in on the subject of abortion; it was an absurd, unwinnable question, and Malapert was never feigned so much interest in what I had to say. If the contest is to decide who has the most casual attitudes towards sex, I freely admit it is not a game I realistically have much chance of winning, and I fail to see why ulterior motives paraded out in plain sight are any more trustworthy than hidden ulterior motives. The "pro-sex" argument put forward by the male contingent of t.a has apparently been taken over by middle-aged computer programmers who are more at ease with the insouciance of the pro-choice cause than its indignation. Female pro-choicers, on the other hand, tend to be much more proprietary about the goals of the sexual revolution than men. Why this is isn't exactly clear to me, but I'll guess it's a muddle-headed combination of a reaction against a history largely apprehensive about female sexuality, and a reaction against the idea that, until recently, women were slaves to their own biology until technology set them free. Due to the human instinct for anthropomorhisization, the same disposition to see faces in clouds, this male-centric Western history came to personify the biological slavery; after all, what's the point of an injustice if there's nobody to blame it on, no culpable party to rally against? The epithet "anti-body" is shorthand designed to squeeze as much belief system into something that would fit on a placard yet presuppose no philosophic vocabulary; but was in the end fittingly identical to an already existing false friend-- one might as well say an objection to bulimia is anti-food. We'll let this pass with the understanding a lifetime in the rallies and picket lines can inure one to the fact some things just plain sound really stupid. Malapert goes so far as to say that the pro-life movement is a conspiracy to deny women sexual pleasure. When I hear these things, it occurs to me that there is no dearth of psychological "explaining away"s, but rather of listening. We must realize that humans are complex beings, and we must respect this psychological inviolability even if our subjects are intent on tearing it down for the purposes of demonstrating the totality of their political beliefs, even if their own statements seemingly invite such explaining-aways. We come to what is both a caveat and, hopefully, a suggestion of the open-endedness of what is to follow.
When I was still in high school, I had a revelation about the nature of the revolutionary psyche,-- what I called "political identity" serving as a surrogate for the cultural and religious identities almost eagerly abandoned (political identity is not to be confused with "identity politics," but not unrelated either-- indeed, one only notices one's teeth when one has a toothache.) The political identity must draw the "us" closer because the "them" is much more solidified. This idea has been difficult to get away from in the eight years since. My beliefs on the prevailing pro-choice argument started out as a hypostatization of my beliefs on politics, but as I started reading talk.abortion months ago, I quickly found things falling- alarmingly neatly- into place. As such, it was a struggle to keep my psychological explaining-aways at a distance from the more immediate task of debating abortion. I had the key that seemed to unlock everything- all the more suspect precisely because of its totality- and I had to exercise restraint. Why? Part of my original revelation was that, in the twilight of religion and culture, all human connections had been severed, so part of the new identification was that, if we understood others better than they understood themselves, we wouldn't feel as if we were missing out on anything. (Yes, a psychology explaining-away psychological explainings-away is a contradiction to be sure, but at least an examined contradiction, and in any case one not elevated to social contract like the startlingly unsound "you can't force your subjective opinions on others.") Particularly harmful was this new identification coupled with political activism; there was now an "us" that understood a "them" better than they understood themselves, the complexity of the self was unseated by politics. This can be combined with a victim power omnipresent in the abortion debate; if we understand our oppressors better than they understand themselves, we can "control" them,-- just tell them what they really think, whether framed as a rational argument or not, and, perhaps embarrassed, they will relent. In the end, everybody understanding everyone else better than they understood themselves was a psychological Ponzi scheme bound to break down somewhere along the way. When it does, the reality is cast in stark relief; nobody understands anyone. Start over again.
More pragmatically; conjecture as to the psychology of one's opponent simply doesn't make for good debate. Once face-value interpretations are abandoned, one gets involved in a meta-debate in which verifiability and falsifiability are impossible. Once you expose your opponents' super true super secret motives, you stalemate the argument, you silence all debate. Any argument involving an ulterior motive- even that the issue of abortion has anything to do with gender is itself an ulterior motive,- effectively terminates all discussion; one can point to news items where Planned Parenthood barred pro-lifers from public libraries or pro-choice professors barred pro-life students from college courses, and this does not surprise me as almost all pro-choice arguments I've encountered begin with pre-empting discourse. (Once I referred glibly to abortion technology as "sucky-sucky machines," and once bemusedly wondered why fetuses should be punished for sex if women shouldn't. In both cases, people responded scoldingly with the clearly loaded "why do you hate women?" Isn't this the most insidious form of censorship? Pro-lifers at worst want to control what people do, but pro-choicers want to control what people think.) When you explain away their words you explain away the person; human beings are complex enough that a face-value "reading" of a statement can be fascinating in and of itself. That being said, statements like "the pro-life movement is a conspiracy to deny women sexual pleasure" fascinatingly don't bear up to a face-value reading. Should we forget, debate is the art of persuasion; mocking or insulting in a for-show attempt at deprogramming, using slow-burn subrational innuendo, saying what one believes the other really believes in the hopes one will score a one-in-a-million shot and jolt one's opponent out of his torpor-- all of this, no matter how cathartic for the debater, if not designed as a good-faith attempt at persuading, is bad debate. I believe the pro-choice movement did the most to lower the bar for modern discourse; it convinced the pro-choicer on the street that it urgently needed their help (filling their need for identity,) it taught them the slogans to parrot, and sent them out to a democratized arena, freed from bigoted, archaic notions of critical judgment and philosophical acuity. The purpose, for those who engineered the movement, was not to win the debate but to stop the debate, to congest the arena with so much semantic garbage that discussion was impossible. Precision of thought has undoubtedly brought to pass this state of affairs, and confusion is used to hold it in place. Sometimes the doctrinaire pro-choice realizes halfway through an argument that their leaders have ill-equipped them to actually debate abortion, and conclude simply "you don't get it,"-- maybe even "you can't get it." Is there any circumstance in which deferring what I believe to be right and wrong- even more than what I may or may not do- to someone else for reasons I am told I can never understand would not be the worst moral decision I could make? If I can never understand it, what then have you doing up to that point... filibustering, wasting my time?
The best friends and worst enemies of the polemicist are substantiative nouns,-- freedom, respect, dignity, individuality, &c. In the course of making his argument, sometimes one finds that the rhetorician begins channeling these substantiatives, and- lucky for us- they speak perfect English, they have an instant mastery of all new technologies, and- upon request- they will send you a mailing telling you how you should vote! People think they're doing a service to these substantiatives by saddling them with a political agenda,-- their political agenda. A well-made argument need call on these substantiatives almost not at all; an overreliance on them, however, is a sign the debator is more interested simply in making it difficult for their opponent to disagree with them. This is argument by pre-emption: it is worth making the initial stab even if you have to spend much longer backpedalling; selfish argument-- "give me that!" Pro-choicers on t.a have always argued that the right to abortion's alignment with these values is self-evident, and indeed they have spent the last fifteen years arguing how it is self-evident. Do not ask me to absolve abortion by appealing to "respect": you can respect the person and you can respect their actions, and sometimes you can't do both. Do not appeal to "dignity" in defending abortion, either. Usually there is some element of reciprocity in philosophical conceptions of human dignity- isn't the slaveholder supposed to be freed from slavery just as much the slave?- but in the pro-choice movement human dignity becomes something to be bartered, taken from one and given to another. As a matter of course one entity's dignity obstructs another's, so instead of a grand vision of secured dignity for all, we are instead witness to an even grander vision of the squeaky wheel getting the grease. Self-determination, individuality-- we completely undermine the meaning of these words if we speak as if they are worthless if not ergonomic. Is it a win-win situation if self-determination and individuality are not hard-won, but rather painlessly acquired and cut-and-dried, and that, luckily, the state and technology have decided for us what these are and have them available for our disposal before we ever need ask? Do not appeal to trust; when is trust violated if not after the crime itself-- the worst possible crime. It is an insult to second-guess the wants of a woman who may seek an abortion- who are you to presume to tell her she doesn't already know everything she needs to know?- but reassuring her (to doubtless relief) that absolutely nothing is at stake if she does choose to abort is acceptable and, of course, compassionate. I always found it curious when people talk of that which "words cannot express";-- perhaps it is felt that so much lies beyond the discursive because any word attached to any sort of virtue or value has long since been strip-mined. Malapert has- offhandedly, sandwiched between doubtless more important points- called dibsies on every listable favorable human affect (happiness, joy, hope, &c.), claiming that pro-lifers want to level them all to make way for a "worship of the fetus." (Perhaps it's not quite so important to "worship" the fetus as it is to make an attempt to somewhat slow the rate of their murder. The unborn child goes straight from parasite to deity, never stopping at human.) That is, she may attempt to show how pro-lifers are merely misguided here and merely misguided there with some presumable expectation of success, but when you pull back a bit, the real issue becomes pro-lifers' unresolvable hatred of happiness. Admittedly, the explosion of human happiness in the past 30 years has sent the pro-life movement scrambling, but without addressing the morality of abortion itself, it does sound like a temporary facade of comfort sweeping human life itself under the rug. The substantiative I most resented being pitted against was hope. Hope is not scoring the perfect job or continuing with college exactly as planned, even if it happens to the fashionably sympathetic downtrodden; hope is more a constancy-- a belongingness beyond even the comforts and privileges afforded us. Autonomy and choice without a right to life are housewarming gifts for a house that doesn't belong to us. Hope is such a primal and fundamental human value because it stems from the most fundamental human concern of them all-- identity. I may hope to live comfortably in the future, but it is conceptually impossible to hope to be a comfortably living amnesiac-- amnesia of our cultural identity, amnesia of our religious identity, and- yes- amnesia of our physical being. Hope is generational; that subsequent generations value what we value, that they belong as we belong. We can have no hopes for an amnesiac generation. The absence of hope is by no accident equally primal-- angst, the fear of oblivion, moral oblivion, generational oblivion.
The moral relativist/moral absolutist arguments supposedly point to some great underlying division of thought, but in contemporary experience these terms surface almost exclusively in the abortion debate, despite the existence of any number of jailable or capitol moral offenses that pass without debate. I have little interest in arguing either side, especially as I disagree with the one point on which both are seemingly agreed: the more absolute the morality, the more freely ignorable it is. I do have a problem with the clearly circular argument frequently advanced on t.a that morality is a societal construct and therefore society should adopt the societal construct as our morality,-- this is usually intended to put the matter to rest clearly in favor of the pro-choice position. I am certainly not the first person to point out the disheartening fact that liberals who should otherwise rally behind "thinking for yourself" or "challenging authority" are the first to appeal to consensus as unimpeachable truth or to our rights- even our very physical being- as creations of judicial fiat when it is advantageous for them to do so. Then again, after toppling preconceptions to the desired state of affairs, why should the preconceived virtue of preconception-toppling itself still stand? "Societal construct" is itself a rather abstract philosophic concept, bastardized for the impatient purposes of advocacy into something determined by breadth of societal saturation. No less problematic is the term "societal consensus", which again we are told clearly favors the right to choose. The term "consensus" is misappropriated in the abortion debate; when a sixty percent agreement is a liberal account, I wouldn't call it much of a consensus (then again, when sixty percent agrees that abortion is okay, I'm not sure I would call it much of a society, either. In my experience, however, the greater part of pro-choice sympathetic are merely resigned to the fact the wallpaper has come unstuck in a corner. Those who can actually explain the "right to choose" front-to-back with zero moral hesitancy are usually radical, godless, and marginalized.) If we're not talking about consensus in the strictly "syncronic" societal sense but rather in the "diacronic" cultural sense,- that is, value versus handcount- the issue then becomes: who is qualified to determine what this consensus is? I believe the underlying cultural consensus lies with the immorality of abortion by extension of the immorality of murder, and we're back to square one; the consensus argument solves nothing if we can't agree what the consensus is. The problem with syncronism is that the idea of either truth or right and wrong being determined by a show of hands would, paradoxically, never pass a show of hands; that is, if truth is societal consensus, then it isn't. Qualifying either "relativism" or "absolutism" with "moral" is unnecessary; truth and morality is a creature that walks on two legs. Certainly there are several sets of rights and wrongs floating around out there, one may even say that they are locked in some sort of Darwinian struggle, so one cannot be content simply to believe "a" right and wrong- a profession of which gives us almost no information,- rather, one aims to believe what is right and wrong in truth. And what command could the truth possibly have over us? The truth cannot browbeat or extort us into believing what is true, although many have certainly tried on its behalf; no, we do so because it is right to believe what is true. What concerns me is the "relativism" that says that people, knowingly or unknowingly, have little reason to want to say or believe what is true; the motivation to believe or say what is true is weak, easily overpowered by any number of consciously self-interested motivations or byzantine unconscious sublimations. In the Inuit religion, the physical world is at the constant mercy of innumerable tiny mischievous devils, and these modern relativists seem to live in a ghost world of innumerable mischievous motives. The end effect is to dissolve the singularity of the individual-- the moral agency. Terms of dissolution enter our vernacular; pandemic mind viruses, the term "brainwashed" tossed off casually. A person who calls you "brainwashed" is twice as unlikely to change their mind. The vernacular "relativism" as it appears in moral discussion is an unworkable dead end; an anthropologist may show differing sets of moralities through various societies, but they all contain the aspiration of the good, and we may in turn pass judgment on their amount of success. An expression of truth in one tongue might prove untranslatable to another, require lengthy annotation or appear improbably trivial to yet another- frustrating expectations only of a truth bypassing meaning, a truth merely cabling up extra-linguistic concepts to words- but truth is not only in its expression, and the work of the translator or hermeneutician is an expression of truth independent of the analyzed text. We can be aware of distance, but also be aware there is no ruler we can hold up to cultural or linguistic distance, and the distance between two societies does not correlate in any predictable fashion to either geography or era. It is no excuse for laziness or callousness, and without a caution in mind those immeasurable nearers and farthers quickly come telescoping inwards-- dialects, idiolects, situations. Unsound appeals to cultural or linguistic distance reduce to solipsism. Pragmatically, for the purposes of determining what we originally hoped to determine, delta x- the immeasurable- must at some point collapse to back to nothing.
One of the strangest words to enter our lexicon is "lifestyle";-- as if life is something to be styled from without rather than merely lived from within. If an individual life is some sort of blank canvas for us to scrawl whatever we please, the governing body almost reflexively becomes a blank canvas for us to scrawl whatever theories or programs we may have for fashioning the individual in the likeness whatever ideas of individuality or liberation we have scrawled on our own canvases. This is the individualism of political identity: a million people trying in a million different ways to impose their conformity of will. If individuality or liberation truly were the responsibility of the state, I would class it as a mission critical application demanding of the state a degree of competency never before hinted of. I once said it is not the state's responsibility to lead us by the hand down the path to selfhood, and Malapert claimed to agree (our correspondences are a comedy of errors) saying essentially that the state should pick us up as we stumble through "all of life's adventures" (She may have been being cutesy there, I have difficulty imagining the phrasing was unironic.) I realized the confusion a few weeks later (these disconcerting Malapertisms tend to backlog) and clarified that I did not mean only that it is not the state's responsibility to guide us by the hand through one state-sanctioned path of selfhood, but that it is not the state's responsibility to guide us by the hand through any path of selfhood. This freedom is not even an anarchy but rather a nanny state; things like the individual potential for good and evil are kept safely on the high shelf. Malapert critiqued a new parent's sometimes unexpectedly acute attachment to their newborns as basically being narcissism; heaven forfend we be narcissistic when nature so predisposes, far better to live in a hell of our own making than to be trapped in the atavistic embrace of biology, spurning instinctual narcissism in favor of well-earned and rational attachment to some crystal palace utopia whose genotype is left to no mere crap toss. In a tortured emotional appeal that left agape the jaw of even as grizzled a veteran of manipulative, bad faith debate as myself, Malapert directed the attention of the proud new father and reaffirmed pro-lifer- by his own curiously repeated admission not a complex man- to an all-too-possible future in which his pride and joy has become a fat, pimply teenager knocked up by her loser, ne'er-do-well boyfriend. The rather loaded question then becomes: would this father love his daughter enough to drive her to the abortion clinic? After all, she seems to be drawing short straw after short straw, so why don't you cut her a break and give her the best thing you can give a person-- exactly what seems most economically advantageous in the short term. It is the best sweet sixteen present you can give a person-- the gift of self-determination, an abortion that will last an eternity and will see her drawing those short straws straight into the next world. And the father is doubly blessed, for he has discovered a love beyond that of the instinctual auto-pilot. What sickened me was that this man's newfound optimism and conviction was soon smothered-- not by real-world considerations, but by the considerations of a hypothetical Malapert world, and that it was what he felt, what he had experienced firsthand that was not to be trusted. The man folded, and the newsgroup pro-choicers added another feather to their cap. Malapert claims that pro-lifers have sacrificed happiness, joy, pleasure, and hope for the worship of the fetus, but this exchange has darkened my heart probably more than anything else I've read on usenet, and the reality of any pro-choice state of affairs couldn't possibly be much more sanguine than the arguments its engineers use to justify it.
Pro-choicers don't seem to realize that one of the perks of being in the right is that you don't need to congratulate yourself. It was actually a point of agreement among t.a pro-choicers that pro-choice posters were more well-spoken, caring, compassionate than pro-lifers. (All their caring and compassion would mean very little if everyone assumed, as they do, that the fetus has no right to life, in which case caring and compassion would be indistinguishable from apathy.) Chilton has made an issue of the fact that t.a pro-choicers are less pseudonymous than t.a pro-lifers, and a pro-choicer even proclaimed to me on the supposed behalf of all pro-choicers, "we love our mothers." Certainly, then, there would be no reason to go onto t.a to debate undeserving opponents, especially if one already enjoys the political status quo (and the pro-choice movement is so quick with demonizations, sloganeering, and huffy indignance that it must be easy for them to forget they are the political status quo.) As I quickly learned even in my earliest fumblings in online debate, internet pro-choicers rival only internet atheists in their capacity for self-congratulation. I have heard many a pro-choicer on t.a speak categorically on behalf of "those who love freedom" or "those who truly love women." Chilton repeatedly calls pro-choicers "FAIR-minded, egalitarian FREEDOM-Fighters" (in his frenzied thesaurus scavenger hunt, Craig doesn't seem to realize that "egalitarianism" is part of the murderous revolutionary triumvirate that crowned reason goddess in Notre Dame.) Are they inviting me to join them, to become pro-choice- or at the very least smile and pretend abortion doesn't repulse me to the core- so I can become all of these wonderful things, or are they patting themselves on the back and have no intentions of persuading me by argument whatsoever? The latter seems more likely; there is no "us" without a "them," and after awhile all these "us"es and "them"s all begin to sound like misplaced Nationalism-- a political identity. The pro-choice movement also seems to adopt the affects of religion. Is not "the pro-life movement just wants to control women's bodies / punish women's sexuality" an article of faith? I've certainly heard it enough times, yet have never seen any sort of evidence defending the use of this chestnut without begging the question. It seems to be an explanation as pre-emptive as the "GodDidIt" explanation the atheists routinely accuse theists of in this very same forum. If one wonders whether abortion providers are in fact punishing women for sex by charging money for their services, or doctors punishing men for sex with any STD test involving a Q-Tip, one is questioning the unquestionable. I once said that pro-choicers are too steeped in articles of faith to make a cogent argument, and a one said "the irony meter just exploded" (the "irony meter" is what passes for humor on t.a.) Evidently one of the pro-choice articles of faith is that articles of faith are exclusive to pro-lifers. What about "the fetus isn't a human being"; anyone can see this is a definition and not a statement about reality,-- certainly not the reality in which suction curettage meets flesh. And yet we are to believe a shuffling of words, bypassing argument, can "solve" an issue of life and death? Pat Winstanley has been known to post only minor variations of "no child is killed in an abortion, all children have been born" for months on end; what is the point of this ritualistic repetition if not to change minds, which it quite spectacularly doesn't do? Of course, Pat dismisses religion as being "superstition"-- doubtless a testimony to his/her own enlightenedness. I would much rather be ruled by an "unenlightened" leader whose religious views I disagreed with than by an autistic droid like Pat.
This article has taken me far too long to write, the process sometimes subtracting more than adding. As much as I would love to convince the reader of some broader philosophical point, I trimmed most of the material not relating directly to the subject of abortion discourse. An argument that suggests a unity demands something different from the reader than an argument that explicates a totality; abortion is not as self-neutral a subject as history or biology, one cannot argue purely as authority for too long. So we talk faster and louder before our "not too long" is up. We have all seen a political activist reading rapid-fire from a mental script, more concerned with not omitting anything than in persuading you of any of it. Perhaps too he can gather as many people into the streets to change as few minds as possible. A few years ago, when the Communications Decency Act was a hot topic, I encountered a petition on a newsgroup in the form of an open letter to then president Bill Clinton, imploring him to veto the bill. Evidently, in order to better illustrate that the bill was a bad idea, as few can doubt it was, the author felt it necessary first to debunk the entirety of Christianity. This man was so blinded by disgust with his time and place that he failed to realize his manifesto served not to win a great number of readers to his side, but only to alienate people who might have otherwise been sympathetic to his cause. In the unlikely event the president did in fact read the petition, it only confirmed the portrait of opponents of the bill painted by its proponents, so it served not to expand the dialogue at all, but only to tread the same paths with an inverted moral emphasis. This is what should be avoided, a belief system one has to adopt whole cloth before one can believe any of it. Are those who refused to abandon their religious beliefs in order to satisfy the philosophical ideals of some guy with an opinion- and they are in no short supply- but were nonetheless opposed to the bill, opposed to the bill for entirely the wrong reasons, but in a way nonetheless distinguishable from those who were simply sold on the promise of continued indecent communications? These are the tough issues of ideals; clearly, conformity of political opinion is not the desired result, but rather some sort of congruence of ideal,-- not an ideal maintained by fashionability, but because the ideal itself commands respect. As for our petitioner, I am left only to conclude his efforts are an example of suspect thinking and an even more suspect moral code. It seems Christianity forbids things he himself would not forbid-- fair enough. When laws are entertained- grievances directed justified or not- bearing a (perhaps imagined) familial resemblance to these religious beliefs, however, the accusing finger gets pointed at precisely the wrong place-- the religion rather than the law. "Theocracy!" they cry. The confusion is a common one; even if a belief is held only by religious people- even if only by people of a particular religion,- that does not make it a religious belief-- and when enacted into law, does not make it a religious law. Having some of our laws influenced by religion is not only fair exchange for, but in fact the logical consequence of not having all our laws determined by religion. Failing even to effect the desired and unprecedented about-face giving modernity in one Bill Clinton its first scandalous heathen president, the petition's thesis suffers from its failure to disentangle its value system from the latent disgust of its author. If his argument against a vaguely Christian form of censorship depends so centrally on demonstrating the wrongness of Christianity, it invites the question,-- could there be a form of censorship built on more agreeable moral ground that would in that circumstance not be wrong?
The purported right to choose and fetal non-personhood are the two pillars of the pro-choice movement that take the weight off eachother, allowing the arguer to jump from one to the other with the unspoken assumption the one not currently under discussion has already been established. Even if you believed the fetus were a human being, you would- per your own argument- still be defending abortion for the very same reasons-- because of the "right to choose." So why even argue for fetal non-personhood, which just confuses the issue, wastes everyone's time, and even injures the cause with the appearance of moral cowardice? (To use Faye Wattleton's words, "Any pretense that abortion is not killing is a signal of our ambivalence, a signal that we cannot say yes, it kills a fetus, but it is the woman's body, and therefore ultimately her choice.") The right to choose- if it does warrant its namesake status- should stand on its own merits, even assuming fetal personhood. And if the nonpersonhood of the fetus has been established, there is no reason to argue passionately or righteously- or even, for that matter, at all- for the "right to choose," as the matter reduces to inconsequential personal liberties, and is not unique in any way. One of these reasons convincingly put forward should be enough to recommend a pro-choice position. Two half-reasons, however, do not amount to one whole reason... in fact, any number of half-reasons cobbled together do not amount to a whole reason. Belief is not determined by critical mass; when right and wrong are concerned, nobody believes anything for more than one reason. These two main half reasons of the pro-choice argument are dealt with below: 1) First Half-Reason: The right to choose I have been calling myself a pro-lifer for about ten years. If a pro-choice argument hasn't been offered to me it has been thrown at me. I have found during this time that- because of what I call myself- there is little about me or my motivations that exists beyond the knowing of those who gather under the banner "pro-choice." My shameful confession, after having been explained away time and time again by these pro-choicers: I still don't know what even their name means! Of course, a choice can be anything from the choice to buy firearms, to dump oil in storm drains, or to shoot abortion doctors, and realizing they can't be pro-every choice, many t.a pro-choicers have adopted the moniker "pro-abortion-choice", with no explanation given as to what makes abortion-choice unique from oil-in-storm-drains-choice. The pro-choice position maintains that it is immoral to illegalize abortion, as this is robbing the abortion patron of choice; yet it would be absurd to say illicit drugs are not still a "choice" for an eighth-grader despite their illegality. Choice is not an issue of legality but rather availability; even if something is illegal, it is still a choice if available. Even in acknowledging the existance of illegal abortion, pro-choicers nullify the premise that the ability to choose is something that can be given or taken away from you. Were abortion illegal,- and mere illegality is not the objective of pro-lifers- you would have to blame inept organized crime for the absence of abortion-choice, and, were it legal, the doctors who chose not to become abortionists or the people who chose not to manufacture or service abortion technology for the absence of abortion-choice-- in either case, not the criminal law. I have heard feminists declare "if we do not have freedom of choice, we have nothing," (we "need to need"! The vast throngs of the World's destitute would really appreciate that "nothing" nonetheless!) but this "freedom of choice" seems very difficult to pin down-- it seems they are seeking some moral, technological, legal sanction for abortion, a sanction that cannot be earned simply by stringing words like "choice" and "woman" together.. A newborn may be entirely dependent on its mother, would she not have a just-as-defensible choice to fatally neglect the infant? No, the stock answer tells us, because it is no longer a part of her body; "choice" is qualified as a choice concerning one's own body, as "choice" will be qualified again and again. The right to choose overrides all other considerations, but curiously, prospective abortion patrons are never presented with any literature or counseling in which the personhood of the fetus or the morally actionable nature of abortion is even remotely entertained. They want a choice, they don't want that kind of choice! The pro-choice idealogues know abortion is about freedom of choice overriding the right to life, even if the ones we are liberating have to be told- lied to, even- that it's not a human life-- no, they are not ready to stare directly into the face of freedom! What "pro-choice" defends is not merely any choice, but a choice demanding special treatment because, unlike a personal breakthrough or a demonic possession, it directly affects a person's body,-- nay, a woman's body. (If an actual woman's body seems to shave a few points off most men's IQ, the phrase "woman's body" itself would appear to knock a clean fifty off everyone's in the abortion debate.) What is demanded is not mere availability of choice, but a legally sanctioned, technologically aided choice divorced from all moral consequence. After applying all these qualifications and conditions to the idea of choice, how can you still meaningfully say you stand behind "choice" on principle? Indeed, the average "pro-lifer" falls on the side of choice on many issues the pro-choicer would shudder even to consider; so why does the pro-choicer get to draw the threshold between "pro-" and "anti-" on one side of one issue? Case in point: Malapert so believes in choice that she applauds (in internet stage direction) compulsory abortion training for medical students. A woman's technologically realized "freedom of choice" evidently overrides a doctor's freedom of conscience private only to themselves (indeed, Paul Anderson even calls an ob-gyn's refusal on religious grounds to perform abortions "bigotry.") As the community of abortion providers is fast approaching the age when their med school classmate pretenders' retirements and and senses of satisfaction of a job well done are fading in memory- and their stick-to-itiveness is certainly not due to monetary considerations but to a love of doing God's work (although abortionists can certainly be forgiven a wariness of putting themselves in any situation where a roasting is a possibility,) and inevitable and non-elective death is the only thing that can slow these busy bees down, the old pro-life thought experiment of a completely free society where nobody wants to perform abortions is becoming more of a reality, and- to the pro-choicers- a By Any Means Necessary approach to reproductive freedom is demanded (the situation could easily escalate to a state of affairs where the abortion rights activists find themselves in bed with the Christian Scientists, although of course that's just silly talk... or perhaps a solution worthy of Solomon?) "Nobody forced them to become ob-gyns"- in those very words- seemed to be a point of consensus among ta pro-choicers,-- the very same who flew into hysterics every time they heard the "nobody forced her to have sex" argument. Freeedom of choice is dismissed wholecloth so we can shave that safety margain even closer. Another case in point; there was widespread, unchallenged support among t.a pro-choicers for the right of parents to force an abortion on a troubled teenager, the given reason being that the parents would most likely end up raising the child for her-- the "bodily autonomy" argument tossed out the window, the "choice" here belonging to the party that stands to be inconvenienced the most. I can understand in theory the difference between "pro-choice" and "pro-abortion," but have seen no evidence that most self-proclaimed pro-choicers- at least the ones on t.a- are in fact not the latter, as they seem to fall clearly in favor of abortion in every situation. Finally, a comment on choice for the woman who sees none: two women in identical circumstances may find themselves in the exact same position; one may wonder how she can continue the pregnancy, the other how she can't. The circumstances of women who can actually choose freely between the two- who could just as easily go one way as the other- completely lack the moral gravity to warrant the righteous indignance that fuels pro-choice movement. Inexplicably, most pro-choice advocates seem insistent on making this "choice" seem as trivial and inconsequential as choosing one's wardrobe for the day; all this under the misapprehension that it will pacify pro-lifers. If a person who believes abortion is murder and should be so handled is, as is said, in a position of telling an unexpectedly pregnant woman seeking an abortion that her wants are unimportant, than the person who doesn't is in a position of telling an unexpectedly pregnant woman who has made sacrifices purposefully to avoid abortion that her sacrifices have been in vain, purely for her wants, and in fact is most likely bringing only a burden into the world. This is the "freedom of choice" argument as it has been presented to me; abortion is vindicated by the principle of choice, here meaning a legally and technologically and culturally sanctioned choice taking precedence over whatever other unsanctioned or unsanctionable choices by virtue of the fact it is, of course, abortion at issue,-- abortion being vindicated by the principle of choice, here meaning an easy choice of no moral consequence, all moral consequence having been voided by the fact it is, of course, abortion at issue. Abortion is the mother of countless double standards. I don't doubt the pro-choicer feels something in their heart that makes them argue with such feverence; in any case, they have failed to communicate it to me and to many others who see an attack on human life as the more urgent concern. The pro-choicers are doing no service to what they feel if pride makes them stick with a unconvincing argument. 2) Second Half-Reason: Fetal Non-Personhood As a simple experiment, ask five pro-choicers to write down on sheets of paper exactly when they believe a human life begins and- just as importantly- why, and you will likely get five different responses; meaning- even among themselves- what is acceptable to one is another's murder... yes, but the galvanic outrage is reserved for the person who says that the matter is not up for guessing,-- and that guessing is all they have essentially been doing so far. Chilton maintains that since the material forming an embryo is no more than the sum of the sperm and ova, the embryo and all its subsequent reproductive stages up to the point of birth have no inherent properties beyond those of the individual sperm and ova. This is a mirage; for want of a better phrase I'll call it the "sum of the attributes are the attributes of the sum" fallacy. Pro-lifers, Craig argues, are hypocritical if the invest any more moral significance in one abortion than in any menstruation or all the sperm expended daily which- worldwide- Craig estimates conservatively in the gazillions. Of course, an egg will live for a few weeks, sperm a few hours, and both will become nothing by themselves, so it would seem of somewhat more consequence to forcibly terminate the life of an embryo that will otherwise continue developing for a full threescore and ten (Craig himself is still chipping away at that last "...and ten.") Abortion, according to Chilton, is simply reversing a process; it is as if the sperm and the ova had never met in the first place. An anti-entropic force has been elevated to the status of a right: anything that can be done should be just as easily undone. (If- as Norman Mailer said- all our problems could be solved by a four-letter word that would get any fifth-grader sent home, perhaps in the spirit of completeness we could add that it would only save the world in conjunction with a five-letter word, and that- in exchange for a pack of cigarettes from the convenience store- that very fifth-grader will tell you what it is.) Craig believes an abortion at eight months is routine surgery of no more moral consequence than having a broken arm set, but that infanticide five minutes after separation is murder. Malapert, of course, doesn't believe these fairy tales, setting the beginning of personhood precisely at a vague period between the second and third trimesters-- clearly, the motives of anybody who would contest such self-evident and widely corroborated truths is suspect! A ta regular named Reptile says legally establishing any one starting point prescribed by religious doctrine for human life over that of birth itself is wrong, and I couldn't agree more;-- arguing conception over implantation over birth over viability over any intermediate point draws attention away from the real issue that this is a decision nobody should make. In the spirit of objectivity, she argues for sentience (a very concrete, non-philosophical sounding term) as the beginning of personhood,-- and, in the spirit of objectivity, I don't remember agreeing to this. Consciousness is talked about as if it's something that's been solved as easily as the tic-tac-toe or the psychology of pro-lifers (is there anything pro-choicers won't pretend to know?) Then you have the tactic, not uncommon on ta, of arguing that abortion is by societal or legal precedent not murder, or the fetus by same is not a human being-- they're trying to argue a legal proscription against murder by removing it from any sort of moral dimension. That the law says a fetus before the third trimester isn't a human being means the fetus in reality isn't a human being is the cart dragging the horse; that reality is determined by letter of law is totalitarianism. The nonpersonhood of the fetus has also been argued from societal precedent; at the intersection of Venn diagrams and excellence stands one Paul Anderson, who says "human being" has heretofore been defined by implication as the intersection of "born," "human," and "alive," and argues that this societal precedent should govern our handling of the abortion issue. "Fetus" fails the first criterion, and is therefore not a human being, which makes abortion not murder. Should you think- as I first did- that the "born" criterion was intended only to exclude "fetus," be assured it also excludes human, alive things like human thumbs and human kidneys but does not exclude, curiously enough, Caesarean sections. Something that is born, according to Paul, is something that begins life in the uterus and ends life outside of it. If someone objected to this definition of "human being," Paul invited them to find a counterexample other than "fetus" that he would concur was in fact a human being. Of course, the entire premise is his, why is the onus on the reader to disprove it? If I can find a counterexample, what assurance do I have that he won't disagree with it as he already has the one at issue (as, in fact, has happened-- the adult products of hypothetical artificial-womb clones); if I can't, simply presuming the definition as established is turning a statement of certainty into a statement of necessity (certainly every man I've met is shorter than seven feet tall; if I meet a man who is eight feet tall, is he necessarily then not a man?) And again, there is no reason to presume "human being" can be defined as an overlapping of sets at all; if "human being" can only be defined as the intersection of a countable number of other words, why are we to believe "born," "human," and "alive" are not themselves the intersection of other words, regressing backwards until we stumble upon the same word again- as we eventually must,- establishing its meaning as either circular or contradictory. I offered that a human being is whatever seems to be a human being, which Paul lambasted as typical liberal thinking-- "words mean what I want them to mean." Much better that words mean what I want them to mean until we triangulate our disagreements precisely enough to agree that they don't. One final complaint about Paul Anderson; it is both backwards logic and shockingly irresponsible to establish a human being's right from murder as a moral absolute before "human being" itself has been defined; if we get to decide the distribution of "human being" after-the-fact, any a priori protection from murder is basically defeated in principle. What's more, even if it is wrong to kill what is defined as "human being," this does not mean that it is not wrong to kill what isn't. Common sense bears up; moral principles in issues of life and death will not magically be summoned by a shuffling of words. Neither the Left nor the Right nor the Libertarian has any monopoly on word superstition. One can say it's not a human being until it can walk up to us, shake our hand, and say "hello"; in which case the unborn would only be a potential human being. Malapert claims that the phrase "potential human being" indicates precisely that it is not yet a human being and therefore not deserving of the protection of human being status. As it happens, the term "human being" has a gerund- not just any gerund but the mother of all gerunds- affixed permanently to the very word that's causing us so much trouble. Perhaps, as a friend of mine said, God recreates the world every instant, or perhaps physicists will discover a smallest discrete unit of time and in doing so overturn centuries of Western thought, but until then there is no being without potentiality. The following is left as an exercise for the reader: the fetus is only a potential human being, so it can guiltlessly be terminated; of course, by the same token, it only has the potential to inconvenience, so why would you even want to?
Simply claiming something is a right because you really want it does nothing to hold your purported right in higher esteem, if anything, it cheapens the real rights we do have, and rights that are cheapened are rights that are that much easier to take away. If rights are denied, there is an oppressor. If nobody wants to perform abortions, or the technology doesn't exist, who is oppressing women? Or are they simply oppressed, by a passive-voice non-entity? A favorite of t.a pro-choicers is that "nobody has the right to access another person's bodily resources without their explicit, ongoing consent" (They're talking about biological existence since the dawn of mammalian reproduction or a divine covenant as if it's some legal contract to be negotiated! In the case of pregnancy, exactly how and to whom this consent is made explicit is left unexplained.) Arguing the general from the absurdly specific, this has been on many occasions illustrated by a baroque thought experiment in which a man- by some futuristic medical miracle- is attached- unlike pregnancy, usually indefinitely- by tubes to the life systems of the unwilling operatee. The man clearly doesn't have the right- natural or otherwise- to continue living off the other's body, and with this they consider the principle well enough established. Of course, pregnancy isn't some freak medical experiment, but rather a natural process of our own bodies from which every one of us begin our lives, and- barring the fetus as a human agency,- the principle covers by extension our right to be free of any organ we presently deem unnecessary as long as it is accessing our bodily resources (or at least as much as our bodies are accessing the organ's resources.) Malapert goes so far as to claim that, "of course, women do have a right to abortion," and that the right to life is an "obviously untrue" fiction. Am I removing this from context? Is there some acceptable context from which this could misleadingly be removed? How can she seriously expect us to believe every atrocity is not permissable from here on? Rights are Universal; a non-Universal right is about as useful as a non-Universal truth. The only rights we have are the rights we've always had, and abortion is simply not one of these. If rights are not Universal and existing outside of time, at least they are grounded in the aspiration of universality and timelessness. Perhaps abortion can be called an "emergent right,"- a right that advances side by side with technology,- but I'm skeptical that a right can simply come into being from nothingness. To me, tacked-on, time-variant "rights" can only be privileges. As a man, I will obviously never get pregnant (as has not passed without comment by pro-choicers), so I have no "right to abortion." Accepting abortion as a right, what inherent right besides abortion does any person have that another does not and can never have? Would this not paradoxically cripple the entire concept of "equal rights" here argued? Is abortion an equal right or an apologetic, corrective right? If rights, on the other hand, are social constructs, then it is doubtful if rights can have much meaning in a culture as fragmented as ours, and, in the name of cultural diversity, we should remain neutral about perceived injustices in other cultures where other "social constructs" are clearly operative-- not likely for panglobal, pancultural feminism!
Pro-choicers have magically produced a right from the very subtext of our culture (I hope they put it back) that says we have a right to "bodily autonomy" or "bodily sovereignty." Supposedly, the right to "safe, legal" abortion is a corollary of this right. Since calling "bodily autonomy" waives any moral responsibility attached to technologies augmenting the functionality of our bodies in a way we feel we need, I have a right to be outfitted with interocular X-ray vision that lets me see a woman's undergarments in the exultant seconds before she collapses to an ashen heap. My body, my choice; any reason is a valid reason. The right to abortion- surgical abortion- is the right to bodily sovereignty, the right to decide what happens to our own bodies; at face value, this gives elective abortion no more moral urgency than- say- elective hair plugs or elective tummy tucks. Even less if we consider that pregnancy is a temporary condition (frankly, I'd be surprised if it took longer than ten months to clear up.) Even less when we consider that the purpose of medicine- and medicine should answer to morality- should be to protect life, not to destroy it. The purpose of medicine should be to help our bodies to overcome disease, not us to overcome our bodies. I have a philosophical objection to elective surgeries- from cosmetic to transexual- where the person comes out the other end saying "now who I am on the outside is who I am on the inside"; the same things are said on behalf of elective abortion patrons in the name of "bodily autonomy," only in their cases it was at the expense of a human life,-- and my objection is no longer philosophical, but instead moral. That we need technology or medical proceedures or anything outside of ourselves to be autonomous contradicts the meaning of the word "autonomy" itself. And if the criteria for autonomy is constantly changing with our society, autonomy becomes something measured in degrees, it is not something we either have or don't have. "We demand control over our own bodies!" "How much control?" "Total control!" "How much control is total control... how are we to know when we have total control over our bodies?" "When we tell you we have total control over our bodies!" We do not choose the big stuff; we do not choose to be born and we most likely do not choose to die, and it is doubtful if we choose much of what happens to us in between;-- if we were simply the product of our own choices, we would be far, far simpler creatures. To what extremes will we go to maintain this delusion of total control over our bodies?
The pro-choice animus of everything pro-life boils down to issues of "control" and "coercion.". Of course, most seem to be just as critical of things like pro-life PSAs, protests, CPCs and any nongovernmental and undeniably noncontrolling attempts at persuading the public at large- without which "control" would indeed be the only recourse for reducing abortion,- so the issue of "control" or "coercion" is a red herring. Even in discussing the criminalization of abortion to any degree, the word "coerce" is misappropriated; one can only be coerced under threat of present physical force; in order to coerce, one actually has to be there. With abortion rights, what is complained of is the absence of a person-- the abortionist. The force is precisely what doesn't occur. Fetal development cannot be forced from the outside, and neither can labor (the proceedure "forced labor," of course, only being done with the mother's consent.) These are not things that can be forced on us by other people, this is the nature of our physical being. The only thing that can be forced from the outside- that can be coerced- is the active termination of fetal development. According to Ray Fischer, simply making something illegal isn't government coercion, making something mandatory is;-- on this point we are agreed. Where we disagree is how it applies to the abortion debate. As I understand the argument, abortion could legally be held to a moral standard were it the fifth or fourth or third option; but when it is one of only two available options, it can be held to no moral standard- even that of murder- because to criminalize it is to mandate the other option under threat of punishment,-- to remove "choice" itself, to enslave. The either/or nature of abortion has people hearing even the simplest expression of a concern for human life as "control" and "coercion." In describing a state of "safe, legal" abortion nonavailability predating government itself and resuming inevitably after the twilight of technological society, pro-choicers toss around hyperbolic terms like "chattel for the state" and "government-mandated breeding" when the government was hopefully not responsible for the pregnancy at any stage nor has any conceivable interest in mandating such things. (If the government were actively impregnating unwilling women, then it would be "government mandated breeding", and it would still be wrong even if abortion were at the same time a legal option.) Pro-life legislation, it is said, is giving the government too much control; if this is giving the government too much control, why even have a government at all? What business does the government have building roads and schools if it's not going to protect the lives of the people for whom they're intended? For the moment arguing morality by degrees, the government has no problem "coercing" education on American children; actively forcing, not merely removing as an option... forcing all citizens, not just some... forcing for ten years, not nine months... and, most importantly, not having the life of a human organism contingent on compliance. If pro-life legislation is indeed coercion, the government coerces us far more strongly a hundred ways even where a human life isn't involved. But this human life becomes less and less identifiable as a human life the more it is talked about as if it were the embodiment of the will of a fascist state. In some cases, "getting the government out of our lives" is letting technology get into our lives in a far more invasive way; government- on occasion- is the lesser of two evils and should rein in technology when need be. Laws about human cloning or soil toxicity are no less about "control" than laws about abortion. (Both environmentalists and pro-lifers are routinely accused of wanting to give the government excessive control under the guise of a guesswork science, and have ulterior motives routinely ascribed to them,-- one a retrogressive social/sexual agenda, the other an ultraprogressive socialist economic agenda.) With any issue concerning the regulation of technology, the same issue surfaces; taking away control is not the same as not giving undue control, but where does one end and the other begin? I happen to believe any right beyond natural right- i.e. those technologically realized- must be the lesser consideration when another person's natural right is threatened, and that government must occasionally step in to restore natural right when it is threatened by checkless and wildly accelerating technology. Technology, however, can bear no responsibility for the ancient extreme of control; slavery,-- a word surfacing frequently in the abortion debate. A t.a pro-choicer once turned an argument around, likening pro-lifers to slave owners because (yes, it was this simplistic) pro-lifers were "for control" and pro-choicers were "for freedom." In reality, slavery- like abortion- was a reality not because of single law actively taking away human right but rather a single loophole suspending a global protection of human right. When slavery was overturned, the slave owners could correctly complain they were being coerced by the government. Slavery was wrong, but it is also wrong to belittle the sacrifices the slave owners had to make for a lifestyle they inherited-- sacrifices greater perhaps than any modern-day crier of "slavery" can understand. It is wrong to belittle their sacrifices with the hindsight of 150 years because we, in turn, may have to make sacrifices nowadays for what is right. And one final truth to put the "control" issue to rest; people shouldn't not have an abortion because it's illegal, they shouldn't do it because it's the wrong thing to do. There is nothing more intrinsically punitive or criminal about the belief a fetus has a right to life than the belief that you yourself have a right to life. The pro-life belief system does not begin or end with politics or criminal statutes, it is a human rights issue; nobody believes anything will be gained simply by throwing more people in prison, the goal is to reduce a staggering, shameful abortion rate;-- not under threat of punishment, but rather because of a good-faith respect for life. "Control" or "coercion" is no more of an issue in abortion than in any other protection of other people's human rights.
There is an organization known as "Feminists for Life" who claim inheritance of the feminist mantle carried by the likes of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Victoria Woodhull- all anti-abortionists in a time when abortion was completely unregulated- before the 1960s, when abortion-on-demand went from being a non-priority to first priority. They have been very successful in bringing to attention certain issues unduly neglected by other pro-life organizations (for example, college health care plans- paid for by tuition- covering unlimited abortions but no obstretic care... FFL here encountering expected opposition from Planned Parenthood, natch.) Nowadays, what about feminism remains recognizable when you subtract abortion-on-demand? Not only are lesser issues reprioritized, but the whole heady might-makes-right ethos that came part and parcel with the idea that even murder was permissable with cursory justification- the very same might-makes-right that alone favored the patriarchy- is atomized. I imagine it requires great courage to attempt to reclaim the name "feminism" when instituting an abortion culture remains mainstream feminism's top priority. That the fetus is not a human being, and that it is in fact only a pawn used by mysogonists to impose their social/sexual agenda-- these are not idealogical contingencies for feminist/abortion-rights organizations. For the last forty years, they have so firmly been based on these givens that even entertaining the possibility that abortion might be murder and that the pro-life enemy might actually for the most part be good people genuine in their concern-- this would quickly become an existential crisis for the movement. And when one ceases to believe that killing is an acceptable cost of any form of liberation, and that our most glaring human injustice has been signed in the name of the ones we are putatively trying to help, all other issues unskewer. If women's rights are human rights, that in itself should be the carrot; but- operationally- for most modern feminists, "women" is now the stick,-- agree with our agendas or you are either a sexist or have been lured into a sexist belief system. When a phrase like "sexist" is used, there has to be some higher human principle appealed to; absent some higher principle, the accusation turns hollow. A pro-choicer- going on nothing other than their pro-life sympathy- can call a person a "sexist" or a "mysognist," but they have failed to give them a reason to care; a person can take on only the appearance of a respect for women if the permise on which it's built seemingly insults everyone- men and women- as human beings. Naturally, pro-choicers don't speak for all women, not even most women. Concerned Women Of America purportedly has more female members than NOW, and NARAL combined. How one can speak for the advancement of all women when so many are not onboard I have heard answered time and time again in the same manner: these "tag-alongs" simply don't count. It is with unsurprising anger pro-choicers accuse pro-lifers of their own condescending, cynical views of womanhood. A very long time ago, on another abortion forum, I heard a pro-choicer declare "Childbirth is degrading." Childbirth is the one function unique to women; without it, any talk of women or women's rights would be meaningless-- it is degrading, says the cause of women's dignity. (Do all pro-choicers say this? No. Have I ever heard even one take action to such statements by other pro-choicers? They don't have time for that!) Malapert claims that if pro-lifers were honest with themselves, they would admit they just want to "humiliate" the "sexual woman" with childbirth. People walk out of torture chambers with less dismal views of the human condition! Feminism was contemporaneous with the civil rights movements, but is not a subset thereof; civil rights worked towards a recognition of an equality of intrinsic human worth; the intelligensia of feminism tries to turn the entire concept of human worth on its ear, demanding we change course entirely. It matters not whether feminist thought draws from scolding German dialecticism as it did a generation ago or from French obscurantism as it does today,- I doubt it has come any closer to the truth in the meantime,- the agenda itself has not changed much, the reasons why are just harder to understand (but perhaps in reconciling oneself with a forbiddingly ascetic belief system, one gains a psychological advantage over those who flinched in the sixties or those who just tend to gloss nowadays); whatever the truth is, the Left is never at a loss as to exactly what to do with it. Fortunately, the most fashionable feminists of post-modernity are married to the idea of changing thought by replacing words of oppression with distributionally equivalent synonyms of liberation, so we needn't worry about those who try to guide the ship by standing on the deck and huffing and puffing into the sails. Perhaps, I imagine, the now lettered and salaried feminists of the sixties have to keep from flinching as modern anarchists who- not only having failed to have been recruited for their side- have willfully adopted- not a new- but already well established rubric "pro-life" in reaction to their intellectualized anti-life asphyxiation. The feminists' sixties burned themselves out too quickly, the revolutionary momentum dissolved, the window of opportunity shut. How many revolutions have claimed they have not been given enough time when all they had to show for themselves were mounting death tolls? Reproductive freedom is only an ideal; what alarms feminists of today is not a swift toppling of a fully realized reproductive freedom, but rather- take note of this phrase- moving backwards. In an age where the scarequotes obligatorily surrounding the word "progress" is old hat even to mock, here is a group that still uses it without hesitancy. Feminism has taken abortion technology from the very male-centric culture it rails against, wrested it from its lily white hands, and claimed it as its own. Any sort of thankfulness or gratitude would undermine the feminists' hard won sense of entitlement. It matters not that surgical abortion was invented by white men in white lab coats and made legal by white men in black robes, those who wish to pull it from the shelves are the enemies of women's self-determination itself. It is common in Leftist circles to use the word "commodatize" pejoratively to refer to a devaluing of human worth or work. Strangely, when it comes to reproductive rights, it often seems few on the Left seem at all concerned that freedom itself has been commodatized-- perhaps in too literal a sense to be noticed. (We have commodatized freedom, and human carcasses are now disposable items.) In the strain of Socialism that predominantly survives to the present, the problem is class envy and the solution most often is simply to pacify it-- a solution that to me always seemed a little too abrupt. The modern feminists attend to questions of political power or slippery notions of control with equal abruptness. Political control is the problem and political control is the solution; sexual control is the problem and sexual control is the solution. When all the slave masters give you are shovels, shovels become the tools of liberation come the rebellion. With this ad hoc approach to liberation, reproductive freedom must come as a commodity if it can come no other way-- abortion, an artless quick-fix that has the distinguished honor of being the only quick-fix available. There was no right to safe, legal abortion until abortion technology reached its present state, and when something new comes along that is even safer and less expensive, the methods prized in the here-and-now will undoubtedly go the way of the coathanger. How absolute is the moral demand that abortion be "safe and legal..."- one can't help but wondering how safe and how legal- "...and rare,"-- this one sometimes tossed in by moderates for good measure,- perhaps abortion is too expensive for birth control- but I suspect some think the abortion rate a standing monument to sexual liberation. Abortion should also be cheap; if abortions cost $10,000, they would certainly be arguing for more than the simple legality of abortion, would they not? So is there an actual right superseding natural right for "safe, legal, cheap" abortion? No, neither the techniques nor the technologies nor any particulars of abortion themselves constitute the "right," rather it is the social dynamic created by unfettered access to reasonably cheap, relatively safe, largely legalized abortion that approximates an ideal state,-- it is this state of biological untetheredness that is our supposed right. Are we to lay down the value of human life uncritically for an approximation of some person's ideal state?
In one of the most jarringly inane coinages I've encountered, Malapert said pro-lifers speak about the fetus as if it is going about its business like anybody else before being kidnapped by a "predatory sexual woman" and tormented continually with threats of death (projection in action: she thinks we think the fetus' relationship to the woman is as adversarial as she thinks the woman's relationship is to the unborn child!) before being released; even Malapert admitting she would be relieved to get away from this "terrible woman." Pro-lifers, she hypothesizes, symbolically identify this victim of the "predatory sexual woman." I asked her why I'm so concerned about sexually predatory women, as I need to know what I feel and why I feel it before I can begin to put forward an intelligent argument; she made the perfuctory correction, not understanding that I was making a joke, and being perhaps incapable of understanding why I would make such a joke. Malapert's polemic world is inhabited by a cast of recurring characters of varying degrees of reality. In the articles for publication she has reproduced for us, Malapert argues on behalf of females of "nontraditional lifestyles". We will assume that Malapert's readership sits in the realer side of the spectrum since she addresses them by such a dignified sounding name. Then you have the "woman who has sex" ("woman who has sex" is apparently not just a woman who has sex, it is a marketing term to be understood in the if-you-need-to-ask-you'll-never-understand sense.) She is a strong, autonomous being whose very identity, liberty and well-being just happens to be dependent on the concerted and unflagging commitment of both technology, law and society. Women who have sex seem only to become "women who have sex" proper when they want an abortion. Any person who indignantly defends the "woman who has sex" against the repressive attitudes of their opponents while discussing, say, neo- or post-natal care would roundly be dismissed as an imbecile by all, so why is this somehow acceptable in the abortion debate? The question answers itself. Of course, sex has nothing to do with making babies. Sex- per the t.a pro-choicers- is not an "explicit contract" for pregnancy. However, when women feel victimized about not being protected from the possibility of unwanted pregnancy, their "sexualness" gets pushed to the fore as the reason for their persecution. But victim power is fraught with the danger of blowback; Malapert leveled a damningly elliptical ("weepy wrinklies"!?!) dismissal of very real "post-abortive women;"-- personal guilt and a profound feeling of cheatedness are mere "crocodile tears"; the tears spent indignantly demanding whatever services you've decided you're entitled to are far more useful politically. Perhaps Malapert would not speak so harshly if so many self-identified "post-aborts" did not become pro-life activists; evidently the "sexual woman" forfeits whatever moral immunity she enjoyed as soon her suffering undermines the pro-choice cause itself-- indeed, it seems to be about the only thing she can do wrong! It is common for pro-choicers to say pro-lifers want to return women to a default state of "baby machines," but would of course never call even the most shackled woman a "baby machine" to her face, much less a woman who willingly has many children and would, all said, have to be deserving of such a title. Similarly, the pro-choicers' rather cynical, two-faced language of liberation has given us a new creation,-- Malapert's "leg-spreading slut." The leg-spreading slut's unmistakably pejorative nomenclature is no accident because- wonder of wonders!- she's the strawman of a strawman! She is the figment of the imagination,-- but try figuring out whose imagination she's a figment of! "Do you defend her or decry her?" "Exactly!" That Malapert claims there is a strong "voyeuristic" element in the pro-life position is telling perhaps not that she believes pro-lifers have psychic powers or even that there is some Orwellian slippery slope inherent in the pro-life argument, but rather that these characters were never intended to be anything more than rhetorical distractions. (And If talking sex is voyeurism, certainly nobody on t.a takes as leering an interest as Malapert.) For pro-lifers, the crime is not lifestyles or attitudes or attitudes about attitudes, but rather what actually happens: immersion in a caustic saline solution, dismemberment by forceps, or a host of other abortion techniques whose very mention pro-choicers nervously deflect, resuming much more urgent talk of characters and their attitudes and their dramas. Perhaps it's a misunderstanding; pro-choicers are so obsessed over pro-lifers' not having the "attitudes" they think they should that perhaps they've begun to believe the pro-life objection is at heart just about attitudes. Whenever discussion turned to the physical being of the fetus, Malapert would attempt to terminate the discussion by saying "Woman!?! What woman?" Indeed, the woman has as undeniable a physicality as the unborn child, and we can draw innumerable parallels between the two if that's indeed what Malapert wants. Sadly, we don't know this woman's sympathies on the abortion issue, whether or not she appreciates Malapert's "whatever's in your belly is whatever you think it is!" empowerment, or if in fact she's not the very person whose argument Malapert was at that very instant attempting to derail. Totalitarianism is a philosophy that can can lie with the individual as much the state, and even in "choice" it seems to be the only language the Left speaks; it seems to me no coincidence that a movement that holds the individual's rights have no existance outside of the consensus of the many or the law of the land also says that not only does the fetus not have a right to life without the woman's permission, the fetus has neither existence nor essence without the woman's permission. "Women aren't property... so who is?" The wantedness or valuedness of a child throws a belief of intrinsic human worth as little as the sexualness, trampiness, or unconventionality of a woman. The pro-choice argument is covered in a thick wooly coat of qualifiers-- the right in modern times of the woman to easy, unfettered access to the safe, legal abortion of her unwanted pregnancy. You try to grab it at any part and pull back only a fistful of noetic patchwork. The pro-life argument is by comparison underqualified, there are not many adjectives besides the "unborn" predeeding "child";-- a timeless, nameless, gender neutral, race neutral, technology neutral, politics neutral, philosophy neutral human being.
The case of one Mark Fuhrmann should have- may have- illustrated very publically a principle for those putatively concerned for the welfare of women; the mere suggestion of an ulterior motive on someone else's part can void all evidence of guilt. An ulterior motive argument in the abortion debate doesn't say that there is no good reason to believe abortion is murder, just that you don't really believe it at all. Almost by force of habit pro-choicers default to saying what pro-lifers really think or want or are, but only occasionally brush on what should be discussed-- what abortion is. Never mind why I only say I believe abortion is murder-- tell me instead why you are so sure it isn't. I just want to control women's bodies? I just want to punish women for sex? No, actually, I don't just want to believe that 4000 murders occur in America each day, that these deaths are brazenly rationalized, that people are talked out of any guilt, that these murders are inextricably tied to another group's supposed liberation, and that- at the end of the day- people make a tidy living off it. This is not a particularly seductive misconception. Should all the accusations be true, I would hope the concern for those more compassionate than I would then become: why should the unborn have to pay for this guy's sins? Reptile says the pro-life cause is an attempt by misogynist men to keep women "barefoot and pregnant" because they can't let a "mere woman" stand in the way of their siring of a progeny (the only person in t.a who unironically uses the word "mere" is her hero Chilton; "MERE stages of the reproductive process." As far as the female contingent who subscribe to this "misogynistic" doctrine: they are brainwashed.) By all appearances, this ulterior motive is apposite to the "punish for sex" ulterior motive, but I have never heard a pro-choicer object to another pro-choicer's mutually exclusive reason for dismissing the pro-life position. Craig Chilton never explicitly brings gender and rarely sex into his ulterior motive, dismissing pro-lifers simply as "mean-spirited busybodies." Pro-choicers' conviction in a singular ulterior motive remains undeterred despite the fact that they are themselves not of one mind as to how- in their unspoken motives- the pro-lifers are of one mind. What, then, is so implausible about the premise that abortion is murder that you're left with no choice but to reach for an ulterior motive? Is the pro-life position really that difficult to understand? Every twenty seconds an undeniably complete and undeniably human organism is forcibly killed in the United States; pro-choicers could do everybody a favor by admitting that the stated concerns of pro-lifers do not completely defy comprehension. That pro-lifers believe the issue is one of human life is something pro-choicers seem to have great difficulty bearing in mind with any issue- personal, social, environmental, economic, philosophical, &c.- attendant to the nonoccurance of abortion (the issue, for the child who could only have "never wanted to have been born anyway"- in the bizarre "what about the children?" reversal,- is that of an an already existing human life.) People come to talk.abortion and fire off dozens of messages a day- what must add up to months of their lives- on these sorts of ancillary issues, yet never get beyond the presupposition that pro-lifers oppose abortion purely on whim; when faced with such grave opposition, the only way you can take your own position seriously is to take the opposing position just as seriously. I'll now try to deal with the two most pervasive ulterior-motive buzz-phrases, though I feel I am dignifying ridiculous and cynical arguments. If abortion were made criminal at noon, at what hour would any pro-lifer- having no direct involvment in the passage or enforcement of the law, and no direct contact with the individual lives of the women who would otherwise be having abortions- first begin to experience the heady rush of controlling women's bodies? "Pro-lifers just want to control women's bodies" has become a stock expression, and were it said by only a handful instead of millions, almost nobody on either side would deny it fails to make sense on a very basic level. The same problem crops up in the "punish for sex" argument. I am not administering the punishment, nor is anybody else-- in fact, it is the lack of administering that's the problem. The idea is not liberating- in fact it's actually pretty servile- that if the nanny state isn't there to bend the rules for us to protect us from any potential hardship, it is because it is punishing us. If a pregnant woman is morally opposed to abortion- as we would hope she would be,- it would be unlikely she would see the nonavailability of abortion as punishment, and- in any case- mandatory abortion would be a far more effective way of "punishing sex." Who exactly am I punishing, how do I know, why do I enjoy it, and- of course- why is this all easier to explain than why abortion isn't murder? I once said that pro-choicers must think pro-lifers quite cynical to use a human life as punishment, and a pro-choicer responded with something to the effect of "duh,"-- why is the onus on the pro-lifers to prove that their agenda isn't cynical when in fact it is the pro-choicers who- in making the argument- place the woman and the unborn child in an inherently antagonistic relationship? And isn't it a bit cynical to believe that nobody, for or against, is concerned about abortion for what it is in and of itself, but only for what it means for societal attitudes about sex? Indeed, in some feminist circles, a very specific role of sexuality has been seized upon with unexplained divine right as the key to liberation- as "liberation" is apparently required,- and they are battling an historic, "dialectic" resistance to this liberation. This resistance will seize upon any reason to oppose this role of sexuality, and it matters not that the beginnings of human life itself just happen to be this "any" reason. (It was the editorial opinion of a popular music magazine throughout the '90s that the causal relationship between HIV and AIDS was merely an invention of a similarly conspiratorial anti-sex mindset.) The pro-life movement is all about controlling women's bodies or punishing sex, but in order to maintain the appearance of consistency, the mainstream pro-life movement's lie has grown to encompass such remarkably non-lurid things as opposition to cloning, stem cell research, and mandatory abortion in China-- surely one could only feign interest in such things! Malapert claimed I seemed suspiciously too insistent on dealing with the ulterior motive argument, as if I could more profitably spend my time discussing the finer points of abortion under the unspoken pretext that my concern is a hoax. Should the fact that it is a token in almost every pro-choice argument make you think it is more than it is, rest assured that this ulterior motive is nothing more than a way of dismissing your interests in the matter entirety; the fact that it is also too silly to be dealt with critically is a trap we set to prove the motive itself correct should you attempt to do so! Laughter aside, Malapert tells us of dozens of case stories she's read of women who died because of botched back-alley abortions, including one where a woman's last request before finally slipping off was for someone to take her daughter home from school. In a rare and disarming moment of emotional candor, Malapert assured us she's cried when reading and thinking about the unspoken victims of the abortion struggle. This prankster says: I will try my best to imagine what it's like.
I believe a subconscious- what was once known as the old brain before the term would have taken on an air of affection- is essential to the complexity of the human, but its broad acceptance has proved anything but liberating. The subconscious has become an ideological cubbyhole, an excuse for packing even more garbage into the human mind. We can scarcely think of a better place for our vague discontents and half-finished thoughts than in someone else's subconscious, which, precisely because freed from logical scrutiny or refutability, is seen more clearly than anything else. The only reason I am talking about a subconscious is because it seems the logical place for every ulterior motive ascribed to me that I- the subject- cannot make sense of with my conscious mind. A scenic detour, seemingly unrelated (perhaps keeping with the Vienna of the ninteen-aughts?); I once happened upon an essay on the internet about "extensionalization" as it relates to Schoenberg's twelve-tone method of composition. Schoenberg invented the twelve-tone method supposedly to address issues of harmony and thematic unity in atonal composition, but the end effect of the method- the author maintains- is to remove the composer from these considerations. What's more, this method of effecting aesthetic unity only further removes the composer from all aesthetic decisionmaking. It is not important that I disagree with the author's critique of serialism, I am appropriating the concept of "extensionalization" for my own purposes. All acts of creation or understanding are by nature extensionalized; but extensionalization is a distancing force, and the more developed the model, the more the married the subject is to the model itself than to the model's original purpose. "I began with a plan for universal liberation and have ended with a plan for universal enslavement, but I assure you it is logical every step of the way." Serialism is extensionalization in one direction-- the generative direction. The psychology of the "them" is extensionalization in the other direction- the analytical- but in both the model still serves to further distance the subject from the modeled. The supposed psychology of my own beliefs and actions puts no formative elements in place, establishes no vocabulary, so when I am presented with the end model- predigested thought- I can either take or leave it, the discourse having been changed not at all. In spite of this, the psychology of pro-lifers ever-present in the pro-choice argument is a persuasive device so entirely divorced from the goal of persuasion that, in fact, its failure to persuade me will most likely be seen as a victory for the theory itself. It "deals" with the pro-life argument by giving sufficiently intellectualized reasons for never having to deal with the pro-life argument ever again. The rubber band has snapped; overextended psychology is basically a form of solipsism,-- an extreme of underextension. All this by way of relating another Malapertism; Malapert explained the abortion of psychol- er- the psychology of abortion quite matter-of-factly to me, even prefixing this exegesis with an "OK" signaling that, indeed, she would be breaking it down. Sex is death, and the purpose of religion is to control sex, and therefore to control death. Therefore, religion foists death on sex, ably represented by the "leg-spreading slut" (a woman, thank you very much,) by making her die from a botched back-alley abortion. (The audit system at work, apparently-- of course only a small fraction of sex acts result in pregnancy and a minority of those in abortion-- maybe two thirds of one percent at this point. If we estimate a 4% abortion mortality rate from 1972, we end up with maybe one in every three thousand... and Malapert claims a 130% increase in the risk of breast cancer attendant to abortion is statistically negligible! In reality, any attack on legal abortion- much, much less some death toll of botched illegal abortions- is not exactly a distributionally sound way of "controlling" sex.) This was followed by an excerpt from a scientific article retrieved by Google, and I would be lying if I were to say it was not difficult reading. I believe that its thrust was essentially that the existence of death necessitates sexual reproduction, although the words "sex is death" themselves never occurred in immediate succession. Malapert does not talk of any philosophy of science,-- from what I've seen she has only the most pedestrian, common-sense belief system concerning the natural sciences (some devil's advocacy even launching her into an unspeakably dull "science is a way of looking at the world..." monologue.) Perhaps if she were more critical in either direction she would realize she is damaging whatever authority the investigative method ever had by appropriating a three word axiom, locating after-the-fact a biology article it is to be an abstraction of, and padding the rest out with pure fantasy. The investigative method has become a museum piece whose purpose is to impress, but is too inefficient to actually use anymore. "Religion controls sex"? What happened to her claim to populism? Why is the conviction of millions and the thought of millennia somehow disproven by a mile wide and inch deep dilettantism on which no two people can seem to agree? Even Freud- to explain actual scientific data- says mass religion siphons off individual sexual neurosis, so why is Malapert herself always in the high and dry? And- not to put too fine a point on it- why can we not force our subjective beliefs on others, but we may decide life and death issues with this,-- this fetid odor unsettlingly intimating what teen slasher movie theory I have caught wind of? And why is a social critic of nontrivial atheism describing the physical processes of our own bodies as embodiments of a narrative device? Malapert has said the right to life is "mythical," so I can only believe there is nothing but browbeating behind the belief that the only injustice is if the sex and the death attendant to sex fall on the same person,-- the only injustice lies in preventing certain death from falling on the fetus rather than minute chance of death on the "leg-spreading slut." In any case, for any party, an antipathy towards human life cannot be contained. If the purpose of psychology is to promote some ideal of health, then in defending the abortion culture it has become an absurdism. Fittingly, for an argument of subconscious motives, there is a fragmented dream logic in operation; one instant one is concerned with urgent life and death issues, the next they're holding a referendum as to whether to put the leg-spreading slut onto a rocket and launch her forever into the icy depths of space and you're casting the deciding vote; the thread of the first part of the dream maddeningly lost. This isn't stalemating the discussion so much as flipping the board over and playing backgammon instead. It's nice to live in a society where where you can believe hot-dog ideas. It's also nice to live- in actuality- in a world where not everyone has to be impressed by them. Whatever pro-choicers heap on pro-lifers,- should even the right to choose very rightly be the overriding concern- they have to be thankful to live in a world where not everyone tosses the right to life so willingly out the window, even for reasons twice as impressive, twice as convincing as the ones they give.
The pro-choice movement has sold out all human belongingness for convenience and fairness. A moral thought experiment that enjoyed some currency on t.a went as such: if you were a fetus that knew it was unwanted, would you willingly abort yourself in order to spare the "host"'s inconvenience? If you wouldn't, it was agreed, you were no better than a rapist. Since the mainstream pro-choice concept of self-worth seems to be predicated on the idea that we begin our existence as "parasites" (a recurring term) I would consider the matter with all the respect for the host a parasite can be expected to drum up. Malapert compared the sense of "entitlement to a woman's body" of men who are "refused sexually" (in her anecdotal experience;-- I wonder how many of these morons are in actuality pro-life,) with that of the right to life (to be entitled at all, the fetus- for the purposes of this argument- becomes a human being.) Our right not to be killed and our right not to be cockblocked-- the issue is one and the same. The pro-choice movement's marriage of convenience to environmentalism is based on a similarly offensive premise; what allows environmental devastation to continue is this resistance to the fact we are by our very existence scourges upon the Earth; again, I pledge I will treat the Earth with all the respect that can be expected of a scourge. Those who criticize mankind's spiritual hubris, however, seem to be passing judgment from an even more removed philosophical plane, and seem all the more certain in the rightness of leveling the worldly institutions of strength of culture, religion, and family. It is much safer to identify with the weak: this woman victimized by nature, who can be freed only by medical proceedures. In any case, I pay penance for the general lack of scientific rigor in this paragraph by an admission;-- the pro-life movement- part of the New Left, if you will,- has been put in the unfortunate position of idolizing that which is weak, at the mercy of others, as well-- the fetus. When dealing with the weak, sometimes sacrifices have to be made. If it is the case, as many pro-choicers on t.a maintain, that there is no right to kill, only a right to abortion, and that the death of the fetus is merely an unfortunate consequence of abortion, we can say, in turn, that the stripping of the right to bodily autonomy of the pregnant woman is merely an "unfortunate consequence" of taking away that which was never hers to begin with-- the technology that enables her to decide between life and death, returning her to her unknowing role as a breeding sow.
It would seem many pro-choicers are not interested in at any time addressing the substance of the pro-life argument, but rather just want to see the movement itself go away. One poster said the movement will "embarrassingly deflate" when fetal transplant technology emerges and no pro-lifers will be willing to bear the prohibitive cost, the hypocrisy of the movement having been exposed. Craig Chilton believes the pro-life movement peaked in the early nineties and is headed- as segregation, its "first cousin" in "hateful bigotry", had done some forty years earlier- into "extinction" (steadily increasing in number is certainly the least expected way of heading into extinction.) Craig even wished a pro-lifer's children laugh at the beliefs of their father,-- the seeming Old Testament nature of this curse being no likely accident. (I don't doubt one can be both a Christian and a pro-choicer; while such things are usually only attempted by minds cleverer than Craig's, those who see some irony in being both fail to see the further irony that to fall decisively one way or the other would require of Chilton a dynamism not in his possession.) If the pro-choice argument rests on such a firm foundation, shouldn't pro-choicers invite healthy opposition? Slippery slope arguments are used to dismiss the pro-life argument whole cloth; there is no way the recognition of fetal personhood could result in anything other than unreasonable measures. The poster Ghost In The Machine has on several occasions written- in one sitting no less- articles easily as long as the present detailing the supposed logical consequence of the belief that a fetus is a human being. Hidden "snoopy cams" record all women's entrance and exit of all buildings, trained dogs detect hormones released by newly pregnant women, and halfway houses are established so pregnant women can be monitored at all times, making sure they don't have an abortion. Since this would be an unacceptable invasion of privacy, this demonstrates conclusively- in the rigorous, exacting thinking of a computer programmer- that abortion is not a morally objectionable act. I argued that the same slippery slope could just as easily be the logical consequence of a belief that child abuse or infanticide is wrong, and he brought up the "but it's inside her body" line, ending this discussion. Just because a moral conviction does not provide a solution for every possible contingency or does not contain a built-in check system for its application in no way invalidates the moral conviction itself; it is never the purpose of a moral conviction to function as a road map. Pro-choicers talk in non-conflicted tones about freedom, dignity, choice, autonomy, &c. and then introduce the non-personhood of the fetus as if it were ever given any space in which to disagree-- the personhood of the fetus has been defeated a million times in practice before it has ever been defeated in principle. The pro-choice advocacy groups responded with alarm at proposed laws to extend health benefits to the unborn or to treat fetal death as murder. It is clear that fetal personhood is not even a consideration, what the fetus is in and of itself is arrived at working backwards from the primacy of the right to choose. "I once read that there there are too many people in the world... abortion can help with that!" (I have read the argument put forward in homlier terms.) The believer in fetal personhood is now undeservedly saddled with the problem of world overpopulation. Is others' lives for the comforts we are clearly unwilling to part with a trade we can make in good conscience, even as scientists are working tirelessly on extending our lifespans decades past senility? Is it fair to assume the unborn would be willing to risk death for the chance of inheriting the lifestye we've already chosen for them? I have made humble- most likely ineffectual- sacrifices in my own life for the environment, as have many others; is it fair for those of dubious commitment to lifestyle sacrifices to demand moral sacrifices that cannot reasonably be expected of pro-lifers? And of course, the pragmatic question becomes-- does all this work to endear the environmental cause to the hearts of the public, or rather to alienate? Even the authors of _The Population Bomb_- and they come no more radical- agree that this is a dead end. The unavoidable charge of hypocrisy is another obstacle pro-choicers demand we scale. Of course you have the "telling" rape exception adopted by some pro-lifers; why is abortion not treated as murder here? The gauzy, seemingly profitless motive of "punishing (voluntary) sex" now has a provable, demonstrable smoking gun. (Malapert and others are fond of using the very definite words "prove" and "demonstrate," almost to make up for the gauziness of the motive itself.) In itself an criminalization of abortion in itself would be the most shallow of victories, but morally, an individual cannot correct a grave injustice with a graver injustice. The rather cruel challenge posed to those adopting the rape exception is; "why would you attempt legally to reduce legal abortion if you aren't willing to eliminate it?" Perfectionism is the luxury of those who think anything other than human life is at issue. "If you really do believe the fetus is a human life," Ray Fischer asked, "why aren't you giving of your time and money to help pregnant women not abort?" (I'm being kind; it has always been Ray's contention that anything short of throwing all your money to prospective abortion patrons to basically bribe them not to murder- as any measure short of bribery is in vain- is hypocrisy on the part of pro-lifers.) A pro-lifer responded that, in fact, he was active at a charity that did exactly this. Who cares- Ray responded- why aren't you doing more?
The pro-choice doctrine may be one of least resistance, but as long as conscience persists the fight for "reproductive rights" is forever uphill. The pro-choice activists have complained almost since the time of Roe vs. Wade itself of the gradual erosions of reproductive freedom happening since; they should realize that this is no accident and that it will never cease. If a woman is under no obligation to bear the responsibilities of parenthood should she become pregnant, surely it is unfair- I have heard the word "slavery" used- to forcibly take money from the biological father and give it to the woman to support a child he may have never wanted. If a woman has a right to forgo biological parenthood, a man has an equal right to forgo financial child support; this is known as "Choice for Men" and split the ta pro-choicers down the middle. The "C4M"ers, mostly grouchy libertarian men (ulterior motives? possibly even plausible?) throwing around phrases like "bleeding-heart liberals" to the true believers who had to invent ad hoc reasons why increasing the permissible level of female selfishness should not sympathetically increase the permissible level of male selfishness,-- the supposed problem in the first place. Perhaps both sides were of the uncomfortable realization that pro-lifers were reading every word exchanged and wished to draw the matter to some hasty conclusion, but the entire central idea of freedom of choice over another human's life was challenged in a way that refused to be dismissed so easily. The introduction of fetal homicide laws was the subject of much debate during the time I was reading ta, and I can only imagine a certain sensationalized case has only escalated the level of discussion in the time since. If an assault on a woman results in fetal death, surely she should have some legal recourse beyond mere bodily injury- indeed, her right to choose was injured,- but this would seem to undermine the contention that the fetus is a part of a woman's body no greater or no less than any other (there's no reason to be angry since nobody's stopping her from giving pregnancy another shot!) The way this seeming contradiction was circumvented was that the inclusion of fetal death in homicide laws in no way recognized the personhood of the fetus; the given reasoning being "murder is a societal definition, and just because something is classified as murder does not mean a human being is involved." The pro-choice doctrine is by nature political; things default to life. This idea of choice- if left for any amount of time unattended, if not sustained on political life support- will quietly crumble. Even in defending a principle of convenience, having to do so over and over again from every direction results in a moral overtaxation that is difficult to envy, and, eventually, a lapse into a kind of autism. The right to abortion is in a constant state of collapse; it is in a constant state of repair.
Abortion is an overwhelmingly ugly thing, but an unfortunate reality,-- something that will probably always be with us. What I find truly repulsive is this reconciliation with abortion, a rationalization of abortion; we have taken the ugliness and have put it in our hearts. The problem here is not immorality but rather a morality of compromise, not in the interests not of what is right but rather what is tidy or consistent. Perhaps it's human nature; just as what wastes the most time is a refusal to believe one has already wasted time, what most allows immorality to continue is a refusal to believe one has already been responsible for immorality. Malapert paraded out on nearly a weekly basis the same depressing statistics on the commonness of abortion, and said that abortion is somehow vindicated by the fact that millions of women have abortions for "sane, sensible" reasons-- a line of reasoning statistically somewhat more effective as a defense of rape. (Naturally, it's usually fairly easy to give "sane, sensible" reasons for why you did the wrong thing. If someone were to murder me, that they had perfectly good reasons for doing so would, I imagine, serve not to lessen the indignity. Whenever anything is defended as being "sane," it is done only failing all other defenses.) She once titled a post simply "50 Million a Year," a figure which would shame any global epidemic. Chilton uses the same technique in his heavily padded outline of "facts"; it is almost to say if abortion truly were murder, the reality is too staggering, too overwhelming to be faced.
One question that always bothered me was "what are the social roots of behavior?" This question offended me so much that I banned it from my thinking. Over time, I found myself pursuing another question, "what are the social roots of the behavior of examining the social roots of behavior?" This disturbed me, was I only drawn to this question because "explaining away" is a fundamental compulsion of our time-- that is, was it social conditioning? This in turn led to the question... yes, you guessed it. Certainly, people have been doing bad things like murdering and committing adultery in all cultures and in all times, and yet this predisposition to explaining away is a uniquely modern characteristic, so the nested questions seem more practical and more likely to bear fruit than the original, while at the same time addressing the fundamental problem of the causal nature of individual actions. One t.a pro-choicer often mused in only the most detached, academic way that he had lost all interest in punitive law; rather, what social, economic forces were in place that precipitated the crime, and how could they best be eliminated-- this- the preventative method- for him held far more interest. The question for me becomes: why is it abortion never seems to be one of these societal problems in need of root-level prevention? I would dismiss it as a convenient omission, but there seems to be a fearful consistency to this bleak program for human dignity; a population is freed from the moral agency for right and wrong, reassured that even in the womb there is nothing to wonder at, nothing about them that is not already known. And again, once I asked how the apparent national disgrace of teenage mothers not aborting their unwanted pregnancies could best be corrected, a question answered tersely by another poster-- "education." My response was equally terse-- "indoctrination." Malapert, who has the habit of being by turns fanciful and pragmatic seemingly only to upset me most, then assured me in unequivocal terms that if it gets the desired results- i.e. more abortions,- indoctrination is the order of the day. This is no Classical education, this is a patchwork, behaviorally corrective education-- a remedial education. The greater the degree to which the individual is a moral and philosophical responsibility of the society, the more likely the society is to forget its first responsibility to the individual. Indeed, it is the intrinsic worth of human life- unenlightened, unenlightenable- that has always been the sword in the stone for enlightenedness, and intellectual fashion after intellectual fashion have tried their best to unseat it. And here we have a doctrine of liberation that states- as necessity- that there can be no protection for life at a stage through which every one of us- liberated, liberator- has had to pass;-- it is worth the risk of death for the chance of justifying death. Paul Anderson directed us to Patrick Henry; "give me liberty or give me death." I offered- and this was apparently very difficult to grasp- that, while we may value our freedom over our own lives, we cannot value our freedom over the lives of others. Could we say that, if our imperialist Western culture has uprooted cultures and decimated peoples, it has more than made up for it by giving them 100% effective surgical abortion without which their women were mere cattle, or at least the closest things to cattle they had? "If not life, why choice?" I tossed off, to which Malapert responded "If not choice, why life?"-- the condition was now philosophical instead of logical, based again on this problematic "choice." The reasons why need not be or have the appearance of being overly intellectual, in all these cases we are applying philosophical conditions to human life, philosophical conditions to moral free agency, rendering the worth of the individual no longer intrinsic but extrinsic. Perhaps it makes us feel smart to apply philosophical conditions to life, but the humbling truth is that life alone is gloriously sufficient.
Politics is a makeshift substitute for the identifications of religion and culture. When the old institutions are muted, when the values inherent in them are depleted, there is another casualty-- language. There is a language of impermanence; the abuses of intellectual fashion, cult-speak, and an overbearing panache of pop-cultural noise, all- whether by design or not- ephemeral and quickly uprooted, and incrementally it will become a language of uprootedness, a language of meaninglessness. Not meaninglessness in the Humpty-Dumpty it-means-what |