IF WE REALLY SUPPORT ABORTION, LET’S PROVE IT WITH OUR CURRENT STRATEGY
The abortion issue surely ranks among the great killers of liberal aspirations. Conservatives know this and have been gleefully playing our side like a bunch of intellectually snotty fiddles. Any liberal ambitious enough to think out of the box on this one is greeted with the most passionate sort of abuse and character assassination. Somewhere, in between chats with special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, Karl Rove is smiling.
Before going on, let’s explode a nefarious piece of bullshit that has prevented our side from finding new and more effective ways of neutralizing the abortion issue. Namely, that just about anyone who dislikes abortion enough to vote against Democrats because of it must be some ignorant, impervious-to-reason yahoo who cannot be coaxed into supporting us without giving away the store. Malarkey. We know this isn’t true because Bill Clinton got elected five times as governor of Arkansas without sacrificing his pro-choice position in the country’s third most antiabortion state (http://www.surveyusa.com/50State2005/50StateAbortion0805SortedbyProLife.htm).
How did he do it? Well, he didn’t imply that people who dislike abortion ought to be ashamed of themselves by telling them that they were engaged in a war against women (no, not even the women), or that they were a bunch of jerks who hated sex, or resort to any of the they’re-so-dumb-and-we’re-so-smart arguments that liberals love making to the delight of both themselves and Republicans working to screw the middle class. Nor did Clinton barely pretend to care what the anti-abortion side thought before looking bored and changing the subject.
He did it by taking the concerns of those opposed to abortion seriously and treating them with respect. Surprisingly, this is not the same thing as agreeing with them that they’re right.
(Incidentally, did you ever notice how, when it comes to abortion rights, feminists unintentionally parody the way conservatives deal with the issue of terrorism? After New York got bombed, I, like many liberals, tried to understand why so much of Arab/Muslim world supported Osama bin Laden in committing this mass murder because of a natural inclination to try and understand what was going on. As I’m sure you recall, many conservatives were outraged by these musings and stupidly equated any attempt to understand Arab thinking with sympathy and support for terrorists. In liberal/left circles, examining the possibly of legitimate concerns as to why people might oppose abortion is treated in exactly the same fashion. “Why do you hate America?” becomes “Why do you hate women?” It’s the exact same type of brainless lashing out that belies panic far more than it does confidence.)
There is no use denying that a large proportion of antiabortion people are, in fact, creepy, self-righteous dickheads who do regard women as second-class citizens, hate homos, want to fight reverse discrimination by bringing back Jim Crow, and still resent the Clintons for not being good, honest, truth-telling Christians like that nice George Bush. There is no question that we are never, going to get these righteous weenies to vote for a liberal Democrat who supports abortion rights. Ever.
But, the thing is, a person doesn’t have to be that far gone to be against abortion or at least find the issue troubling enough that Republicans can successfully exploit it and alienate them from their own self-interest. And, BTW, if we had been able to peel off an additional seven percent of evangelicals troubled by abortion and gotten them to vote Democratic in the 2004 election (which is three percent less than what Bill Clinton got in 1996), John Kerry would be president today. Think of that.
Before suggesting how we can fix the problem, let me draw you a picture showing how it’s perfectly plausible for a non-asshole to have profound misgivings about the morality of abortion and then follow that reaction to the point where they become rigidly anti-choice.
First of all, fetuses as they go along in the gestation process, start to look awfully human, especially when they’re far enough along to be candidates for partial-birth abortion (a term many consider objectionable because of its tasteless accuracy). There is a laudable instinct among many people not to kill things that look human which fetuses, after a certain point, do. Not only that but, not having been born yet, the fetus enjoys a natural presumption of innocence. Furthermore, every human atrocity throughout history has been founded on the assumption that certain people (i.e., slaves, Christians, Jews, blacks, homosexuals, women, Asians, etc.) are not fully human and, therefore, do not warrant having their humanity considered as a moral issue. Between you and me and the nearest listening device, I would argue that a general bias towards respecting the humanity of others is the kind of thing that ought to be encouraged.
Once someone’s instinct tells them that a fetus looks human and, therefore, ought to have the same rights as an individual, the question becomes, exactly when does its humanity start? As there is no obvious delineation point this becomes extremely problematic. To many, the safest and easiest decision becomes making no real decision at all but to try and buffalo their way through the dilemma by declaring that the fetus’s humanity begins at conception when it really is just an undifferentiated mass of cells—a position, which is not too difficult to understand, even if it is plainly irresponsible. (It seems obvious that many abortion opponents sense this, since that would explain why they are willing to make exceptions for rape and incest.* If an embryo actually qualified as a human being, this would make no sense whatsoever.)
Once someone decides that a fetus ought to be considered human all the way from conception to birth, it isn’t at all hard to understand why they would turn a deaf ear to complaints that by doing so they are “saying that they own women’s bodies” or “they are treating women as second class citizens” or “they are treating women as mere containers.” The fact of the matter is that pregnancy lasts about nine months but death is forever. And, like it or not, women are, unavoidably, vessels for future human beings. No matter how much you may desire keeping a person’s gender out of it, women are, ultimately, always the ones left holding the baby. Complaints that their rights are being infringed because of sexism seems an obvious distraction to people who aren’t already on our side of the issue The standard feminist response of declaring that it’s a woman’s decision and leaving it at that, likewise comes off as an evasive, utterly unsatisfying answer.
So, let’s say that you want to prevent abortion because you’ve decided it’s murder, even if it is a hell of a stretch to declare an undifferentiated mass of cells a human being. In principle, the simplest way to prevent abortion is to prevent unwanted pregnancies from occurring in the first place or it would be if keeping unwanted pregnancies from occurring were an easy matter, which it isn’t as people are impelled to bonk even when it’s against their better judgment. At this point it isn’t that hard to understand why someone, would want abortion to be illegal under the delusion that this is going to solve the problem by scaring a large majority of women into not having sex or at least forcing them to give birth. Nor is it at all hard to see how the same people could delude themselves into thinking that abstinence education is the answer. The alternative, reality-based sex education, does imply that people are going to do the nasty whether others likes it or not and that, when people do, there will be unwanted pregnancies many of which will ultimately end in abortion, which, in the minds of opponents, is to say murder.
And let us acknowledge something about sex that is rarely bluntly stated. Sex is wonderful and sex is hot, but sex is also profoundly unsanitary. And dangerous too. Not only are there unwanted pregnancies, there’s the clap, herpes, Chlamydia and, everybody’s favorite, HIV. If sex wasn’t so ravishing, we’d consider it disgusting. Yes, even fisting. The fact that gays are still having gobs of sex despite HIV should disprove the effectiveness of draconian prohibitions combined with scare stories (though it did wipe out the bathhouse scene) but unfortunately that sort of thing isn’t going find a place in the minds of those who want a definitive solution to stopping what they consider to be the murderous horror of abortion.
So, here we’ve gone step-by-step from a fairly laudable desire to protect something that looks and, at some point arguably is human to a rather rigid and draconian set of ideas as to what ought to be done about it without once bringing in irrational hatred of sex or desire to oppress women for its own sake into the picture. The etiology of the worldview on display here is every bit as easy to understand as it is ultimately impractical. That’s bad because there are far too many people on this planet for safe operating conditions already. Clearly something needs to be done to get more people on our side but accusing the antiabortion crowd en masse of being sexist or treating them like they’re stupid or saying that they’re only pretending that abortion horrifies as an excuse for inflicting their puritanical ideals on the rest of us is not the way out of this particular box. Not when the Republicans are successfully painting our side as self-involved, amoral snobs it’s not.
So, how do we lure them our way? A good place to start would be to admit that they have a point about the “ickiness” of abortion—to borrow the term favored by one of our more entertaining, if occasionally tone-deaf bloggers. By treating antiabortionist beliefs with respect if not agreement we retain the potential to get the ones who aren’t just a bunch of automatic reactionary jerks to see the considerable common ground we do have.
One way to combat a moral conundrum that’s making it difficult for people to agree with you on an issue is to throw up another one that undermines their current preference. This is something we are finding out courtesy of South Dakota, which has passed a bill making it a felony for doctors to perform an abortion, punishable by up to five years in prison with no exception made for rape or incest. Defining an actual punishment and parties who are to be punished has understandably given some earlier supporters pause as the reality of that part of the equation sinks in. (It also disproves the shibboleth that this is a war against women since, if that were true, they’d be the first ones in line for getting arrested and carted off to jail instead of doctors.) The question of what should be the punishment for abortion and who should get penalized is almost as sticky as deciding when a fetus should rate as an actual human being.
But mostly, echoing Hillary Clinton (who, truth be told, has been a disgusting coward on the war as well as other matters but, politically, is a very hip chick indeed) it should be our compulsively ballyhooed goal to make abortion safe, legal and rare. Why? Because it offers to mitigate the moral discomfort many people have with abortion, thereby respecting and acknowledging their feelings, while still insisting that women maintain the right. Once we have augmented or moral legitimacy by doing that, then we’re going to be a hell of a lot more effective at talking about healthcare, education, a dignified retirement, honest talk, an intelligent, fact-based foreign policy and all the other crucial things Republicans notoriously suck at.
Not only would be more effective than what we’ve been doing, it’d be a whale of a lot more fun.
PS: In the Inconvenient Facts Good Liberals Probably Don’t Want to Know About department, while doing what little research I did for this essay, one unanticipated stat I found leapt out at me. In 1992, the last year for which I could find a complete state-by-state breakdown, the state with highest rate of abortion per 1,000 residents was California, which came in at 42.1 per (the lowest was Wyoming at 4.3 per). However, the District of Columbia which is 60% black rang up a garish 138 per thousand. That’s a factoid some racially-motivated wing nut could have a pretty good field day with. Better you should hear it from me.
The abortion issue surely ranks among the great killers of liberal aspirations. Conservatives know this and have been gleefully playing our side like a bunch of intellectually snotty fiddles. Any liberal ambitious enough to think out of the box on this one is greeted with the most passionate sort of abuse and character assassination. Somewhere, in between chats with special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, Karl Rove is smiling.
Before going on, let’s explode a nefarious piece of bullshit that has prevented our side from finding new and more effective ways of neutralizing the abortion issue. Namely, that just about anyone who dislikes abortion enough to vote against Democrats because of it must be some ignorant, impervious-to-reason yahoo who cannot be coaxed into supporting us without giving away the store. Malarkey. We know this isn’t true because Bill Clinton got elected five times as governor of Arkansas without sacrificing his pro-choice position in the country’s third most antiabortion state (http://www.surveyusa.com/50State2005/50StateAbortion0805SortedbyProLife.htm).
How did he do it? Well, he didn’t imply that people who dislike abortion ought to be ashamed of themselves by telling them that they were engaged in a war against women (no, not even the women), or that they were a bunch of jerks who hated sex, or resort to any of the they’re-so-dumb-and-we’re-so-smart arguments that liberals love making to the delight of both themselves and Republicans working to screw the middle class. Nor did Clinton barely pretend to care what the anti-abortion side thought before looking bored and changing the subject.
He did it by taking the concerns of those opposed to abortion seriously and treating them with respect. Surprisingly, this is not the same thing as agreeing with them that they’re right.
(Incidentally, did you ever notice how, when it comes to abortion rights, feminists unintentionally parody the way conservatives deal with the issue of terrorism? After New York got bombed, I, like many liberals, tried to understand why so much of Arab/Muslim world supported Osama bin Laden in committing this mass murder because of a natural inclination to try and understand what was going on. As I’m sure you recall, many conservatives were outraged by these musings and stupidly equated any attempt to understand Arab thinking with sympathy and support for terrorists. In liberal/left circles, examining the possibly of legitimate concerns as to why people might oppose abortion is treated in exactly the same fashion. “Why do you hate America?” becomes “Why do you hate women?” It’s the exact same type of brainless lashing out that belies panic far more than it does confidence.)
There is no use denying that a large proportion of antiabortion people are, in fact, creepy, self-righteous dickheads who do regard women as second-class citizens, hate homos, want to fight reverse discrimination by bringing back Jim Crow, and still resent the Clintons for not being good, honest, truth-telling Christians like that nice George Bush. There is no question that we are never, going to get these righteous weenies to vote for a liberal Democrat who supports abortion rights. Ever.
But, the thing is, a person doesn’t have to be that far gone to be against abortion or at least find the issue troubling enough that Republicans can successfully exploit it and alienate them from their own self-interest. And, BTW, if we had been able to peel off an additional seven percent of evangelicals troubled by abortion and gotten them to vote Democratic in the 2004 election (which is three percent less than what Bill Clinton got in 1996), John Kerry would be president today. Think of that.
Before suggesting how we can fix the problem, let me draw you a picture showing how it’s perfectly plausible for a non-asshole to have profound misgivings about the morality of abortion and then follow that reaction to the point where they become rigidly anti-choice.
First of all, fetuses as they go along in the gestation process, start to look awfully human, especially when they’re far enough along to be candidates for partial-birth abortion (a term many consider objectionable because of its tasteless accuracy). There is a laudable instinct among many people not to kill things that look human which fetuses, after a certain point, do. Not only that but, not having been born yet, the fetus enjoys a natural presumption of innocence. Furthermore, every human atrocity throughout history has been founded on the assumption that certain people (i.e., slaves, Christians, Jews, blacks, homosexuals, women, Asians, etc.) are not fully human and, therefore, do not warrant having their humanity considered as a moral issue. Between you and me and the nearest listening device, I would argue that a general bias towards respecting the humanity of others is the kind of thing that ought to be encouraged.
Once someone’s instinct tells them that a fetus looks human and, therefore, ought to have the same rights as an individual, the question becomes, exactly when does its humanity start? As there is no obvious delineation point this becomes extremely problematic. To many, the safest and easiest decision becomes making no real decision at all but to try and buffalo their way through the dilemma by declaring that the fetus’s humanity begins at conception when it really is just an undifferentiated mass of cells—a position, which is not too difficult to understand, even if it is plainly irresponsible. (It seems obvious that many abortion opponents sense this, since that would explain why they are willing to make exceptions for rape and incest.* If an embryo actually qualified as a human being, this would make no sense whatsoever.)
Once someone decides that a fetus ought to be considered human all the way from conception to birth, it isn’t at all hard to understand why they would turn a deaf ear to complaints that by doing so they are “saying that they own women’s bodies” or “they are treating women as second class citizens” or “they are treating women as mere containers.” The fact of the matter is that pregnancy lasts about nine months but death is forever. And, like it or not, women are, unavoidably, vessels for future human beings. No matter how much you may desire keeping a person’s gender out of it, women are, ultimately, always the ones left holding the baby. Complaints that their rights are being infringed because of sexism seems an obvious distraction to people who aren’t already on our side of the issue The standard feminist response of declaring that it’s a woman’s decision and leaving it at that, likewise comes off as an evasive, utterly unsatisfying answer.
So, let’s say that you want to prevent abortion because you’ve decided it’s murder, even if it is a hell of a stretch to declare an undifferentiated mass of cells a human being. In principle, the simplest way to prevent abortion is to prevent unwanted pregnancies from occurring in the first place or it would be if keeping unwanted pregnancies from occurring were an easy matter, which it isn’t as people are impelled to bonk even when it’s against their better judgment. At this point it isn’t that hard to understand why someone, would want abortion to be illegal under the delusion that this is going to solve the problem by scaring a large majority of women into not having sex or at least forcing them to give birth. Nor is it at all hard to see how the same people could delude themselves into thinking that abstinence education is the answer. The alternative, reality-based sex education, does imply that people are going to do the nasty whether others likes it or not and that, when people do, there will be unwanted pregnancies many of which will ultimately end in abortion, which, in the minds of opponents, is to say murder.
And let us acknowledge something about sex that is rarely bluntly stated. Sex is wonderful and sex is hot, but sex is also profoundly unsanitary. And dangerous too. Not only are there unwanted pregnancies, there’s the clap, herpes, Chlamydia and, everybody’s favorite, HIV. If sex wasn’t so ravishing, we’d consider it disgusting. Yes, even fisting. The fact that gays are still having gobs of sex despite HIV should disprove the effectiveness of draconian prohibitions combined with scare stories (though it did wipe out the bathhouse scene) but unfortunately that sort of thing isn’t going find a place in the minds of those who want a definitive solution to stopping what they consider to be the murderous horror of abortion.
So, here we’ve gone step-by-step from a fairly laudable desire to protect something that looks and, at some point arguably is human to a rather rigid and draconian set of ideas as to what ought to be done about it without once bringing in irrational hatred of sex or desire to oppress women for its own sake into the picture. The etiology of the worldview on display here is every bit as easy to understand as it is ultimately impractical. That’s bad because there are far too many people on this planet for safe operating conditions already. Clearly something needs to be done to get more people on our side but accusing the antiabortion crowd en masse of being sexist or treating them like they’re stupid or saying that they’re only pretending that abortion horrifies as an excuse for inflicting their puritanical ideals on the rest of us is not the way out of this particular box. Not when the Republicans are successfully painting our side as self-involved, amoral snobs it’s not.
So, how do we lure them our way? A good place to start would be to admit that they have a point about the “ickiness” of abortion—to borrow the term favored by one of our more entertaining, if occasionally tone-deaf bloggers. By treating antiabortionist beliefs with respect if not agreement we retain the potential to get the ones who aren’t just a bunch of automatic reactionary jerks to see the considerable common ground we do have.
One way to combat a moral conundrum that’s making it difficult for people to agree with you on an issue is to throw up another one that undermines their current preference. This is something we are finding out courtesy of South Dakota, which has passed a bill making it a felony for doctors to perform an abortion, punishable by up to five years in prison with no exception made for rape or incest. Defining an actual punishment and parties who are to be punished has understandably given some earlier supporters pause as the reality of that part of the equation sinks in. (It also disproves the shibboleth that this is a war against women since, if that were true, they’d be the first ones in line for getting arrested and carted off to jail instead of doctors.) The question of what should be the punishment for abortion and who should get penalized is almost as sticky as deciding when a fetus should rate as an actual human being.
But mostly, echoing Hillary Clinton (who, truth be told, has been a disgusting coward on the war as well as other matters but, politically, is a very hip chick indeed) it should be our compulsively ballyhooed goal to make abortion safe, legal and rare. Why? Because it offers to mitigate the moral discomfort many people have with abortion, thereby respecting and acknowledging their feelings, while still insisting that women maintain the right. Once we have augmented or moral legitimacy by doing that, then we’re going to be a hell of a lot more effective at talking about healthcare, education, a dignified retirement, honest talk, an intelligent, fact-based foreign policy and all the other crucial things Republicans notoriously suck at.
Not only would be more effective than what we’ve been doing, it’d be a whale of a lot more fun.
PS: In the Inconvenient Facts Good Liberals Probably Don’t Want to Know About department, while doing what little research I did for this essay, one unanticipated stat I found leapt out at me. In 1992, the last year for which I could find a complete state-by-state breakdown, the state with highest rate of abortion per 1,000 residents was California, which came in at 42.1 per (the lowest was Wyoming at 4.3 per). However, the District of Columbia which is 60% black rang up a garish 138 per thousand. That’s a factoid some racially-motivated wing nut could have a pretty good field day with. Better you should hear it from me.
posted by Hieronymus Braintree at 3:28 PM
2 Comments:
I've been frustrated by this issue before, but I think both you and the liberal folk you're criticising are wrong. On the liberal folk side, I think that it's basically true that anti-choice activists do have a problem with female bodily autonomy. On the conservative folk side, I don't think that the above fact negates the conservative claim that they care about fetuses. The problem is that they are wallowing in their abstinence-only mythology rather than looking at the actual effects of their policy. Some liberals would claim that the obvious anti-woman and anti-child effects of anti-abortion advocates show that they don't really oppose abortion at all. Myself, I think it's simple hypocrisy and delusional thinking. In any kind of practical sense, they have gone all the way through hypocrisy and out the other side to lying, but who said religious beliefs were practical?
I'm not exaclty sure where you think I'm wrong. It looks to me like we're pretty much on the same page. I didn't call pro-lifers hypocrites, though I don't disagree that that's often an accurate description. I did say that they were being intellectually irresponsible, which pretty much covers the same ground. You could also say that they're being egregiously simplistic. My point is that human reality often doesn't match that feminist/liberal charicature which says that members of the antiabortion crowd are just a bunch of women & sex hating jerks. I am also saying that, by insisting on the charicature as being universally true, liberals are blinding themselves to political opportunity.
You seem like an intelligent person who is worth talking to but, for clarity's sake, you need to say exactly what you think I'm saying that is wrong.
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