This the second part of my extended response to Katha Pollitt’s
questions for abortion opponents, inspired by the still-ongoing release of
Planned Parenthood sting videos; you can find the first half of my response
here. If you like you can consider this a strange sort of counterprogramming for the global economy’s current China-driven jitters, and fear not: Full-spectrum Trump coverage will no doubt resume shortly.
Onward:
5. Men. You want to force women to carry every pregnancy to term, but the fact that men can easily walk away does not seem to interest you much. What are the responsibilities of men to avoid getting women pregnant, to support them while they are pregnant, to provide for mother and child? And what measures would you promote to enforce those responsibilities?
This is a strange accusation to lodge, for two reasons. First, political conservatives, pro-life and otherwise, have long been eager to talk critically about “deadbeat dads,” and over time the normal right-of-center bias in favor of states rights has been mostly set aside on this issue, and we’ve seen a steady federalization of child support enforcement that was
consolidated in the 1996 welfare reform. Whether this has made for optimal policy is an open question, one that’s inevitably tangled up with the wider debate about the welfare state — since men who evade child support payments are often poor or incarcerated, and women who receive child support are less likely to receive public assistance. But the claim that abortion opponents aren’t “interested” in the issue and need to come up with some sort of tougher child support agenda doesn’t seem right at all; if anything,
the de facto liberal view today seems to be that conservatives have become too aggressive about making low-income fathers pay child support, and need to ease off and let the welfare state take care of things instead.
Then second, it’s a strange accusation because one of the more commonplace pro-life arguments is that the current abortion regime is itself a gift to men who want “to easily walk away,” itself a legal and cultural enabler of male irresponsibility, on a profound, society-altering scale. Here pro-lifers are fond of citing (as I’ve been
known to do) the famous
Janet Yellen and George Akerlof paper linking legal abortion and rising out-of-wedlock birthrates, which suggested — quite reasonably, I think — that Roe dramatically changed male incentives around sex and marriage, and significantly weakened the relational power of women when they do get pregnant: “By making the birth of the child the physical choice of the mother,” they wrote, “the sexual revolution has made marriage and child support a social choice of the father.” That argument obviously need not imply pro-life conclusions; indeed, Akerlof and Yellen are themselves pro-choice. But it lends the pro-life view of things a certain coherence on this front: We believe in male responsibility, and we think that your preferred policies, not ours, are the ones that made it far too easy for men to wash their hands of their most primal, powerful, essential responsibilities.
6. Equality. Contraception and legal abortion have played a crucial part in enabling women to advance in education, the workplace, self-development and public life. How do you see women continuing to progress if they cannot control when they bear children? Do you think equality of the sexes is desirable? If so, how would you make it compatible with ill-timed pregnancy and motherhood? If not, what do you think is the appropriate place of women?
I addressed this by implication in my prior response, but I simply don’t accept your premise here. Not the harp (as it were) on the case of Ireland, but if unrestricted abortion were as essential to female advancement as you assume, you would expect a society with such outlying abortion laws to be an outlier (in a bad way) in terms of female opportunity, equality, and advancement. And you just don’t see that trend in
cross-national comparisons; Ireland’s score in The Economist’s female opportunity rankings, to take just one for instance, is basically identical to the neighboring, much-more-abortion-friendly U.K.
Or forget Ireland and just look at the vast and complicated United States. Your list of questions for pro-lifers, like
your recent book, is premised on the idea that our side has won major victories over the past few decades, both by passing various sorts of restrictions and by driving the real case for abortion rights into a kind of cultural underground. Obviously I think you’ve somewhat overstated our success, but it’s definitely true that the pro-life movement has made some real gains, culturally and legally, relative to the status quo in 1975. So over that same period, by your abortion-is-essential-to-female-advancement logic, you would expect those pro-life victories to produce steady female disempowerment. But the evidence isn’t there: The abortion rate has gone down, abortion has become more culturally taboo, more restrictions have been passed … and women have
leaped past men in educational attainment,
doubled their share of managerial and professional jobs, quadrupled
the share of households in which they’re the primary or sole breadwinner (which is not necessarily a good thing, of course, but we’re talking about indicators of female independence), and so on down a much longer list. If America is more pro-life than it used to be (again, an arguable point but a plausible one), the era in which it’s become more pro-life seems to have been pretty good for female advancement overall.
And not surprisingly, given this overall cultural combination, the pro-life movement has itself
also evolved over time: Its gender politics have
always been more complicated than your side’s interpretation of the debate would suggest, but what we’ve seen over the last forty years is that pro-life sentiment has held steady even as religious-conservative opposition to women in the workforce, in politics and so on has essentially collapsed. As Jon Shields
pointed out a few years ago, today “the average moderately pro-life citizen is a stronger supporter of gender equality than even the typical strongly pro-choice citizen was in the early 1980s.” Maybe all these pro-life citizens are just hopelessly deluded, but they — we — simply don’t see the necessary connection between abortion and the equality of the sexes that your side takes for granted.
Now I know the implications of the data on female advancement are hotly disputed among feminists, and that I’m implicitly taking
the side of Hanna Rosin in an ongoing intra-liberal dispute about the patriarchy’s resilience. But I think we could even concede, for the sake of argument, that a kind of patriarchy is resilient at the highest levels of American society — in elite-level boardrooms and law firms, at the highest levels of the entertainment industry, in the halls of power in Washington D.C., and so on — and it still wouldn’t necessarily help your argument, because 1) these are some of the most pro-choice sectors of American society, 2) the women in these sectors have the easiest access to abortion, inevitably, of any demographic group, and 3) the biggest challenge facing women in these arenas to be their desire to have and rear children, not their inability to abort them. That’s the heart of the whole “
having it all” debate, after all: Not whether elite women need better access to abortion but whether elite workplaces need to become more family-friendly, more flexible in their hours and demands, less inclined to pass over women who seem to be on a “mommy track,” so that their glass ceilings might be more easily shattered. Which is an important, complex debate — here’s
what I wrote about it when Ann-Marie Slaughter’s piece came out — but not one, in the end, in which the pro-life movement’s recent gains are particularly implicated.
There’s a lot more to say about this topic, but at the broadest level my view is
sketched out here: I think increased female economic opportunity is a great good, but that like previous gains for human welfare it need not be permanently associated with the collateral damage of the sexual revolution, and I think your side of the abortion debate is a bit like the cohort of Social Darwinists who assumed that the economic gains of the industrial revolution were so precious (and they were, indeed, precious!) that they required the terrible factory conditions, massive child labor, perpetually polluted skies and other dark-satanic-mills barbarisms that came in along with the 19th century rise in human wealth. From that fatalism I respectfully dissent, and I look forward to a future in which my daughters’ self-determination doesn’t need to bought with a kind of society-wide blood sacrifice of the unborn.
7. Personhood. You believe the fertilized egg is a person, with the same right to life as a baby or, for that matter, a 40-year-old. But abortion is not the only threat to this tiny being’s life. What about failure to implant, miscarriage and, of course, in vitro fertilization and stem cell research? (Well, actually you’ve managed to hamper that last item quite a bit.) Should IVF be banned if it destroys pre-embryos? Should every miscarriage be investigated, as is the death of a born child? Why focus exclusively on women’s behavior, when so much pre-birth death has other causes?
First, yes, a consistent pro-life position would require stricter regulations on IVF, of the kind that exist in some European countries but which most Americans are unlikely to support. And yes, it requires explicit bans on creating and destroying embryos for research purposes. But these issues differ, starkly, from miscarriage and the failure to implant for the same reason that the law treats homicide differently from the natural death that awaits all human life. And I also think they differ for another reason, which is a place where I tend to think (to anticipate your final question a little) that the pro-choice side does get something right: There is a right to human privacy, there are areas of human life that the state cannot police without becoming, well, a police state, and protecting every embryo from every possible threat to its well-being simply isn’t a role that the state can reasonably play. (Just as, in a different but related area, the state
shouldn’t be in the business of overpolicing parenthood and trying to protect born children from every conceivable threat.)
With
in utero life, the law should do what it can to prevent the deliberate, premeditated killing of embryos and fetuses, and I think there are many legal steps that can offer such protection without crushing the liberties of women. But miscarriage, while a tragedy, is not an injustice in the sense that deliberate killing is, and so attempted state regulation or pre-emption would be not only practically impossible but unreasonable and unjust. And in the gray area of the suspicious miscarriage that might be an abortion, I think that the state should generally err on the side of privacy and restraint and reserve its resources for the investigation of clearer cases.
Further: To the extent the pro-life laws, whether in the U.S. or abroad, are used to justify meticulous investigations along those lines, I oppose that kind of application, just as, while supporting a ban on assisted suicide, I don’t think the state have a policeman at every sickbed examining every medication that changes hands. And to the extent that law enforcement abuses its discretion in that scenario (as law enforcement, yes, tends to do), I would like to see pro-lifers join pro-choicers (as I think many would) in arguing for restraint. Which brings us to your next question …
8. Murder. If zygotes are people, abortion is infanticide, a very serious crime. Kevin Williamson, a correspondent for National Review, has said that women who have abortions should be hanged. That’s going pretty far. After all, if every woman who had an abortion were executed, who would raise the children? But if abortion becomes a crime, what do you think the punishment should be? I’m assuming you approve of jailing the provider, but what about the parent who makes the appointment, the man who pays, the friend who lends her car? Aren’t they accomplices? And what about the woman herself? No fair exempting her as a victim of coercion or manipulation or the culture of death. We take personal responsibility very seriously in this country. Patty Hearst went to prison despite being kidnapped, raped, locked in a closet and brainwashed into thinking her captors were her only friends. Our prisons are full of people whose obvious mental illness failed to move prosecutors or juries. Why should women who hire a fetal hit man get a pass?
This is the hardest and most reasonable question, and the place where I least expect my answer to convince. But here I think the pro-choice side of the argument, the argument for not making abortion illegal at all, rests on a belief that many pro-lifers actually share: That while abortion is killing, while it is murder, it is also associated with a situation, pregnancy, that’s unlike any other in human affairs, and as such requires a distinctive legal response. No other potential murderer has his victim inside his body, no other potential murder victim is not in some sense fully physically visible and present to his assailant and the world, no other human person presents herself (initially, in the first trimester) to her potential killer in what amounts to a pre-conscious state. And again: no other human experience is like pregnancy, period, whether or it comes expectedly or not.
These are not, in my view, strong arguments for the pro-choice view that we should license the killing of millions of unborn human beings. But I think they are strong arguments for maintaining the distinctive approach to enforcement that
largely prevailed prior to Roe v. Wade, in which the law targeted abortionists and almost never prosecuted women. And I don’t think pro-lifers should be afraid to say that a pregnant woman’s decision to take a first-trimester life is simply a different kind of murder than the murder of a five-year-old, and one where the law should err on the side of mercy toward the woman herself in a way that it shouldn’t in other cases, and reserve the force of prosecution for the abortionist, the man or woman who isn’t experiencing the pregnancy, instead.
This approach is, yes, exceptional in terms of how the state treats homicide. But its “exception from the general rule seems to be justified by the wisdom of experience,” as a pre-Roe court ruling put it. And while — again — pregnancy is unique, it is not the only situation where older legal forms approached killing in distinctive ways. Suicide, for instance, was historically treated as a form of murder in many jurisdictions, but attempted suicides were hardly ever prosecuted for the attempted murder that they had committed, whereas people who assisted in suicide were more likely to be charged. And a version of that distinction survives today: Suicide itself has now been largely decriminalized but assisting a suicide is still illegal, though of course a subject of much culture-war controversy, in most U.S. states.
Could one argue that this combination is illogical — that if we don’t throw attempted suicides in jail we shouldn’t make it illegal to help them make their quietus? Certainly; this is an increasingly popular position. But I think the older position, which recognizes the reality that suicide is murder but also treats it distinctively and assigns legal culpability in a particular-to-that-distinction way, is actually the one more consonant with justice overall. And in a different-but-related way, the same is true for abortion: A just society needs to both recognize abortion as murder and grapple with its distinctives, and that’s what an effective pro-life legal regime would need to do.
9. Last Question. Are there any pro-choice arguments that resonate with you? Which ones?
To the arguments noted above I would briefly add that cases where the mother’s life is in danger clearly require a zone of medical flexibility that certain pro-life laws, or the overzealous enforcement of the same, might unduly shrink. And without being convinced by it, in cases of rape I think the famous Judith Jarvis Thomson thought experiment gains some
real intuitive force, because it’s a case where the distinctiveness of pregnancy becomes radically more distinctive still. Which is why these are areas where I, like many pro-lifers, accept the necessity of some kind of political compromise even in a world where our ideas have mostly carried the day.
I’ll end there, with thanks for the questions, and hopeful that my answers have been clarifying if not, I’m sure, convincing.
