Yesterday was Blog for Choice day. I didn’t get to participate, as I spent the whole day in meetings and airplanes. I had no choice! But at the end of the day, checking up on Bloglines from a hotel in Tucson, I found moving posts from Bitch Ph.D., Shakespeare’s Sister, Litbrit, and Lizardbreath from Unfogged, among numerous others.
Conventional wisdom among liberals and feminists is that being anti-abortion has little to do with a desire to protect helpless little blastocysts, and is really about denying women control over their bodies and lives. I always had trouble believing this, as I went to a nice Catholic school in which joining the “For Life” group was just as respectable a public-service move as joining Amnesty International. My friends at Villanova (including a large number of women) really, honestly, and in good faith did believe that fetuses were people with souls, and they needed to be protected. This didn’t quite amount to a well-thought-out and consistent philosophical position, admittedly; you’ll find very few such people who really want to punish abortionists just like we punish murderers, or who would save a petri dish of fertilized eggs from a burning building before saving a breathing baby, or who believe that heaven is filled with the souls of embyos that failed to implant in the uterus. But they really were just trying to do the right thing, according to social justice as they understood it. And they weren’t necessarily overly dogmatic about it; I helped organize a panel discussion on abortion that featured priests, biologists, and philosophers, which ended up being quite interesting (although it somehow failed to solve the world’s problems).
Ultimately, free of my protective collegiate cocoon, I realized that the conventional wisdom among liberals and feminists is completely correct! Although some people have anti-abortion feelings for straightforwardly moral reasons, for many more people (especially the most vocal), it really is about denying women their own agency. Curse those liberals and feminists, right again!
But I still remember my friends who were not like that, and I recognize that for many people abortion really is a clash of absolutes. You can say all you want that it’s the pregnant woman’s body, hands off, etc.; but if it were actually true that a fetus was a person with a soul who was entitled to all of the protections that any post-birth person was entitled to, none of that would matter. The heart of the matter is: people who believe that are wrong.
Which is why my favorite blog-for-choice post was Lindsay’s. She puts it pretty straightforwardly:
To me, it’s just obvious that fetuses aren’t people and that real-live people who have become hosts to unwanted pre-people should be able to take the necessary steps not to become the parents of actual people. Who the hell gave anyone the idea that this choice is a view that needs defending, as opposed to common sense? I don’t write posts explaining that you shouldn’t torture your dog, or steal from your employer. Shouldn’t it be obvious that you shouldn’t consign an innocent person to incubate a hunk of protoplasm until it becomes a baby?
It does seem pretty obvious, unless you really think that hunk of protoplasm is a person with all of the rights of any of the other people you meet on the street every day. Which, when you think about it, isn’t obvious at all. The only reason anyone thinks it’s true is because their definition of a “person” is completely divorced from common sense, and is instead informed by a supernatural notion of personhood in which a soul enters that single cell at the moment of conception. A notion that would seem completely absurd if it weren’t for religion.
Steven Weinberg famously said, “Good people will do good things, and bad people will do bad things. But for good people to do bad things — that takes religion.” This is a little bit harsh, of course, and I’d rather not get into the tiresome argument over whether the net effect of religious belief is to make people do more good things than bad things. But when squishy-liberal religious people ask why atheists bother making noisy public proclamations against their supernatural beliefs, it’s worth pointing out that such beliefs often do have consequences in the real world.
The idea that religion is the sole source of morality is silly — morality is invented by human beings, who are trying to negotiate their conflicting and incompatible desires in a world that doesn’t always play fair. The reason why it’s important to make the case that religious beliefs are false, even if adherents can point to examples where those false beliefs led people to be nice to each other and do other good things, is that false beliefs can just as easily lead people to treat each other badly. Given untrue hypotheses, it’s trivial to reach all sorts of untrue conclusions. Abortion is the perfect example. My friends back in college, with all of the good intentions in the world, would happily condemn a young and unprepared woman to an unwanted eighteen-year commitment, all because of their own misguided beliefs about nature and the supernatural. If we really want to make the world a better place, telling the truth about how it works is a good place to start.
Is this post perhaps an elaborate joke? Lindsay’s position is absurd. I am amazed that someone with a sharp scientific mind can admiringly cite someone who offers as her argument “It’s just obvious”. Just because she sincerely believes something doesn’t mean that a reasonable person cannot hold a diametrically opposed point of view.
And I say all this as someone who supports abortion. Maintaining that people opposed to abortion are “simply wrong“, though, is rather too much for me to take.
Speaking as an atheist who doesn’t believe in any universal morality, it seems to me a first-principles argument about whether or not abortion is acceptable is not simple.
I think most people accept that contraception is OK, while murdering a new-born is criminal (Catholic church aside). There must be some continuous function linking those two points – But who knows what shape it should be? A step-function at birth seems unlikely to me. In the absence of any obvious “bright line”, it seems a linear interpolation is reasonable.
By that argument, abortion at any stage is reprehensible – though perhaps less reprehensible than the other alternatives.
The best argument I’ve heard on this topic is from punkassblog
basically body rights trump all. Also, it should not be forgotten that women have died giving birth, and still do on occasion, if they do not want to undergo the risks of giving birth, they should not have to, no matter what the reason.
I find the whole ‘its my body, my right’ argument highly specious and rather irratating and childlike:
*As well as Seans usual conspiracy theories about how everyone is out to get the feminists and don’t really care about the actual argument perse. No offense, but thats just absurd. No one in their right mind would spend so much time/effort and tears on such a pointless endeavour. *
The fact is, its not ‘your’ body anymore, you have something else that may or may not be a life. You are simply a host, and as such have a responsibility that you cannot simply exorcise at will. In fact the law can and will punish you for say killing a child minutes before birth, so whatever there goes that argument other than in extreme circumstances (risk of life etc).
Now, having said that, I find the notion that a 1 month old arrangement of chemicals is hardly what I would call sentient, in fact its not even close. Science comes to the rescue here and should provide the legal definition of life as well as the cutoff date for abortions +- an error zone. Simply take the 1 or 2 sigma margin of error, and there you have it, as close to humanly possible.
Not sure whether anyone is still checking this post, but I was a little late in reading it. I just wanted to say I’m a woman and an atheist and I couldn’t agree more with Ashlie.
As far as the statement that it’s obvious that a fetus isn’t a person, I must admit I was relieved to read that I’m not the only (rational) person who finds this statement ridiculous. I’ve long wondered whether I was the only (sort of) pro-life atheist.
For me, it’s got nothing to do with the fetus having a soul. Instead, I have a reverence for human life.
So, there you have it, Amara: a pro-life woman who doesn’t believe in god. I only hope one day you will meet another one, so our existence can be confirmed.
I didn’t seem to notice anyone mentioning that a woman who had a unwanted pregnancy ususally chose to have sex. That was her choice (rape etc. excepted of course). Thus, she must accept (along with the man involved — he helped a lot too) the consequences of her actions. Just as accidental murder is called manslaughter, and comes with legal consequenses, the accidental creation of life comes with cosequenses. If she really doesn’t want to raise the child, there are many people who want children, but can’t have them (infertile, gays, etc). Let them raise them after birth, but good grief, grow up and accept the consequenses of your actions.
Don’t you think that your attitude towards ‘religions’ is pretty much formed and limited by those ‘western’ religions (from judaism to muslim)? There are other religions like Buddhism, who are very rational and don’t expect you to believe in a god-head, although theologists like to press them into such forms.
Abortion is killing – no question! Of course one can say killing a cell is not that grave, but where is that line when the cluster of cells turns into something that you would admit to be a being with a right to live?
The embryo developes pretty fast, you know!
But, be it killing, I think that society has no right to rule the belly of a woman! There is a being growing in the body of someone – does this being have the right to feed on this body? Can we *order* someone to share one’s body with someone else? I think *that* is the real question! Because then, we would have the duty to share our kidneys and livers and other organs with those in need, who would die otherwise! There is no final ethical solution on this issue. That is the problem with ethics compared to logic – sometimes there is no solution.
#55: and how would you make the man suffer the consequences of “creation of unwanted life by the choice to have sex”? Would he have to pay damages to the woman for the physical damage to her body and psychological trauma of carrying to term an unwanted pregnancy? Can money even equate to the following consequences to a woman’s body and health, forced upon her unwillingly – maybe we should physically maim the man somehow too so that it is fair. Or is it just female sexuality you want to suppress with the threat of pregnancy?
Although we should be used to this by now, it is still amazes me every time I read about grown up intelligent people saying that a fertilized egg is a human being.
If you look at what ethical issues they are debating in Korea, what the British government has been looking into recently, and compare that with ethical discussions in the US, then it seems like the US is not just one century but one millenium behind.
(adding to Count Iblis’ comment): and my favorite idea to help women combine career and family to bring about the next societal revolution.