Doghouse Riley shreds an abortion column by William Saletan in a post I highly recommend. He points out that one aspect to the abortion debate is that the premises of the “pro-life” crowd are rarely challenged. In fact, that’s so much the case, that I have a hard time finding a label other than “pro-life” that doesn’t sound odd for lack of use: “anti-reproductive freedom, pro-state-control-of-the-uterus crowd.”
And, he leaves us with a fact about which I had not been aware:
Here’s an experiment for you. Go among the Holiest of Holies and the Demiest of Demagogues and try to tell them that Abortion was perfectly legal, openly practiced, even advertised, until after the Civil War. See what diversity of opinion you get then. Were you aware of that yourself?
No, in fact I was not. Now I am.
@23/41: Maybe I should be offended, but I’m actually kind of amused. The arguments I’ve posted here are entirely my own – though I certainly won’t claim to be an original source in the abortion debate. In fact, the abortion debate (and Roe) was raging long before I was even born. People much smarter than myself have undoubtedly made similar arguments with much greater clarity than my own.
My familiarity with Griswold, Roe and others can be attributed directly to the fact that I am currently in law school. Constitutional law was one of my favorite subjects. I’m not affiliated with CLS, but I believe my law school has a chapter.
I’m not sure why this is at all relevant – regardless of the source of my arguments or my particular religious background, why not respond to some of my points? Unless I’m missing something, I haven’t seen any responses to my post @ 18.
I don’t think either side needs to pull out articles from scientific journals in order to move the discussion forward in response to a blog post. They might be helpful if we can understand them, but the request largely just serves as a “gotcha!” attempt with little needed thought behind it. I think we can all agree on basic facts: the fetus can survive outside the womb at viability; a baby, once born is a life with constitutional protection; pain can be felt by the fetus at some point before birth; the fetus begins to assemble recognizable human characteristics well before birth; etc. If we hit a point we disagree on, we can always look for a specific article on that particular point.
I’m not a scientist, but I can grasp the basic concepts of life and I started by comparing the fetus to a human (post-birth) in post 18. Of course, no reply as of yet.
@27: This helps clarify your position. My response to this is two-fold:
1) Life was obviously protected at the time the Constitution was adopted. (Yay! Common ground?)
2) If fetus = life, then it too is also protected. Life has remained protected since Day 1, we agree on that. So shouldn’t life itself be protected regardless of what the prevailing thought was in the late 18th century? I think the Founders, regardless of their knowledge of the fetus, would agree. Even if I accept the premise that the definition of life has expanded since the Constitution was adopted, its ridiculous to argue that “proper redress” must be afforded before we can remove the “right” to abortion if it kills a HUMAN LIFE. Nothing is held in higher esteem in our laws than life. Freedom, liberty, the Bill of Rights are all irrelevant if you never even made it out of the womb.
So, here we are again: when does life begin? I still haven’t heard your take on that.
@48: I don’t think the pro-choice lobby is always 100% consistent either, and of course, reasonable minds can disagree. You seem to think the pro-life side of the debate needs to act in complete unison and agreement – why? We are united by a common them: life begins before birth, and should therefore be protected.
Underlying your arguments is a sort of bitter, cynical take on the pro-life side of the debate: we’re all Bible-thumping zealots who want to throw women back into the 18th century with no right to decide what’s best for their own body. In reality, I think most of us are just passionate about protecting a population that has no voice of their own: the fetus can’t talk or vote, but we believe its a human life worth protecting.
Obama spoke recently about finding common ground in the abortion debate, which I’m all for if we limit abortions in the process. But characterizing the pro-life arguments as merely religious without ever answering the question of when life begins is delusional at best.
I am sorry to note the pigeon-holing of my position and the stereotyping of line of reasoning. This tends to be a left-wing kind of blog (nothing wrong with that) and of course, I’m coming from a different perspective, but perhaps not the one you assume, Pila.
I will reiterate that my take on the subject is my own, completely. I have never been a law student, and am neither a fundamentalist nor evangelical. That someone who is this things may employ a similar line of argument doesn’t explain much, nor does it address in any way the substance of the argument put forth.
However, since I am pro-life, it is incumbent upon me to have thought through my position carefully, as it is attacked often, and on many fronts. As permissive abortion law is the status quo, proponents of that side can afford to be complacent and dismissive of the opposition. Hence why I don’t expect an answer to the question “When does human life begin?” from the pro-choice side here even though 1) there is general consensus that it begins sometime and that 2) important rights accrue when that happens. If you’re winning the policy debate without answering the question, why answer it? It suffices to answer, in sum, “It does not begin when you say it does.” The pro-life side cannot afford to be so rhetorically complacent.
I am under no delusions as to my ability to change anyone’s mind here. I simply find the facile dismissal of the pro-life position as merely a religious one as intellectually lazy and idealogically elitist. Why is it so surprising that on so controversial an issue there would be those with a reasoned, non-sectarian line of argument that differs from yours?
As for #41, what “hard questions” did I evade? When asked a direct question, I posited an answer, allowing that it was a generalization and can’t answer for why others hold a position they do.
That said, I do in fact believe that in actual practice, abortion is largely used for lifestyle and economic reasons not related to the “hard cases” (where the mother’s life is in danger and rape and incest). (The sleight-of-hand use of life and/or health did not go unnoticed.) In any event, the circumstances of conception have nothing to do with what that being is. Regardless of the reasons for terminating a pregnancy, that which is killed is either a human life or it’s not. The subsequent questions about criminality and penalties and culpability are different.
My goal in advocating for a more protective stand toward unborn life has nothing to do with being judgmental or controlling, but of acknowledging that an offense commited on one innocent life offends the dignity of all. I posit that accepting definitions of the value of life that depend on the subjective assertions of the powerful over the weak, especially in the face of strong evidence that what is involved is human life, has consequences that matter and a position that subjects that life to destruction without due process ought to be subjected to the greatest scrutiny and treated with great scepticism.
I will have to let my comments on this thread end here, since I won’t be able to respond for a while. From my view, a very interesting exchange!
A liberal woman friend told me years ago that the reason the abortion issue has been and remains without common ground is that men are the ones who debate it and women are the ones who live it,and it has always been that way…
Science and religion are just tools of argument.
eric: our host has moved on. He’s too nice a guy to object to our continued use of his bandwidth, and I’m not exactly a diplomat. But then, on the other hand, you seem more interested in pulling faces than engaging the argument; when, for example, I ask you “What article? A treatise on Metaphysics?” and you reply, “Haven’t seen that article yet,” then you cement your reputation for mere time banditry. I’ll pass. It was obvious from the beginning that you had no idea of what you were talking about, and my request for a single citation wasn’t serious, for there is none and cannot be; it was just an attempt to let you prove this to yourself, or to at least behave like something other than a spit ball artist once you were called on it. School’s out.
Jon: there is no way anyone can answer every last contention in a thread this long; I showed up because I read Doug regularly, and because my own post was his starting point. I stayed because there were unsupportable claims about science made and I wanted to challege them. In the course of this you characterized my declaration that the question belongs to metaphysics, not science, as indicative of my “confusion”. This is a rather profound misreading, sorry to say, not just of me but of the concepts involved; in response I tried to explain how one could, in fact, hold one of any number of metaphysical positions with personal certainty while still believing, as I do, that the metaphysical nature of the question precludes easy legalistic answers about “Life”, and, in fact, which makes all such contentions irrelevant. You chose at that point to seize upon one or two examples I’d used to treat them as my own opinion, even though it was obvious they weren’t, and to demand I answer the question anyway, as though I’d been typing frantically in the hope of avoiding your penetrating analysis, and none of it actually meant anything. Sorry; it’s a conversation killer. I did not avoid answering your question; I’d answered it before you asked. Now I’ll answer it another way: tell me how you know that Life “begins” at some point, or how you know it ends at another. When you do you’ll have your answer. Again.
@54: This isn’t going any further. If you attempt to characterize the debate as a mere ‘pie in the sky, purely religious’ discussion, then you’ve missed the boat. No, the discussion is more properly characterized as: if the fetus is not a human life, than of course abortion should be legal and sanctioned by the state. On the other hand, if the fetus is a human life, then there better be some AMAZINGLY GOOD reasons for aborting that fetus.
If you characterize this debate as metaphysical, how do you define life at all? Would the debate over whether or not YOU (at this time) are a human with constitutional rights also be metaphysical? And if not, how is that any different than the current debate?
Furthermore, even if I grant that the issue of when life begins is simply unknowable or not known yet – isn’t that an argument to give the fetus the benefit of the doubt? Because if you’re wrong, you’ve deprived millions of life.
It doesn’t matter that you refuse to address the question, or even take a stand on when life begins. You’ve already said: the fetus’ life is not valuable, it can be discarded at will by the mother. And I’ve already used a variety of factors, in post 18, to show that life begins before birth.
I’ll give you this, you do a nice job of trying to muddle the issue without ever addressing the real questions in the debate. Must work well in the blog world.
Just got back from two days of camping at Clifty Falls with the family. Lovely– and highly recommended.
DR, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen that combo of confidence and X.
A piece of financial advice for you as I close out: be careful about the people with whom you play poker.