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.
