There are an awful lot of people who take positions on issues not on the basis of what they really think or
believe, but because it’s the opposite of what those think whose "political aesthetic"
revolts them. I read this kind of thing all the time on liberal and conservative blogs, and even among those who think of themselves as moderates. Conservative-leaning moderates may not be all that comfortable with conservative extremists, but they dislike Liberals more, even if on most issues they would be closer them.
I call it a political aesthetic because it’s not so much about the policy; it’s about the style, and the Liberal style makes an awful lot of people right of center sick. Bill Clinton, to take a recent example, was by 20th Century standards a right-of-center moderate in his policies, but he had a liberal aesthetic, and that’s what made conservatives loathe him so. Nixon was his mirror image–a man with conservative aesthetic, but left of center on many of the issues. Remember his push for a Guaranteed Annual Income? The aesthetic is what determines our emotional reaction, our sympathy or antipathy, to a particular person in the political sphere. His or her stand on the issues is secondary.
But the same is true of Liberals who are nauseated by the conservative style, and this is particularly evident when the question of abortion comes up. I could advance an anti-abortion argument by appealing to a liberal aesthetic along the lines that the rights of the weakest and most vulnerable should be protected at any cost, that the measure of any civilized society is the protections it affords those who have the least power. That the destruction of nascent human life is anti-progressive, de-sensitizing, profoundly alienating, and barbaric in all but the most extraordinary, exceptional, and tragic cases. But that argument can’t get any traction because an ideologically brittle, sanctimonious feminism cornered the liberal market on attitudes about abortion, and they did it by appealing to a Libertarian or "choice" aesthetic, which as I have argued here on several occasions is a symptom of a deeper political pathology. (See here, here, and here.)
And at the time when Roe v. Wade came down, people who didn’t have strong opinions on the subject bought the feminist "choice" sloganeering which seemed in tune with times, that being the sexual-liberation zeitgeist of the 70s. It didn’t help progressive anti-abortion arguments that to make them would also made you an ally of the liberal bogeyman, the Catholic Church, or now that opposing it makes one an ally of the wackos on the fundamentalist right. And so in the public imagination being anti-abortion became associated with the aesthetic of the repressive, uptight cultural right. Yuk. So the substance of a progressive anti-abortion argument has an almost impossible task to overcome the powerfully negative aesthetic that anti-abortion position has among all liberals.
Anyway, I’ve been thinking about all this because my son recently asked me what I think about abortion. He knows basically where I stand, but it’s not something we’ve discussed in depth. He said the issue came up for debate in his school, and the discussion from his description of it sounded pretty sophomoric, which I suppose is to be expected of high school sophomores. But because we’re in Seattle and not Tulsa the cliches were mostly liberal ones: "Keep your laws off my body." " A woman has the right to control her own body." "If you think abortion is wrong, don’t have one–but don’t impose your moral values one me." "All women want is the right to choose."
If we lived in Tulsa or Biloxi, I suppose the cliches would involve over-the-top accusations of baby killing and how abortion is a license for sexual promiscuity. Unfortunately, discourse among adults doesn’t get all that much better. So what I want to do here is get away from the cliches and attempt to look at the issue in a sane, humane, and non-ideological way. I want to say here what I said to my son.
First, let’s get away from the idea that this is a religious issue. Anyone who has been reading this blog for some time knows that I take religion and religious concerns very seriously, but that I also think that when you enter the political sphere you have to speak in secularese. And political secularese is fundamentally rights language, and never religious language. It’s not against the law to steal or to murder because both are prohibited by the Ten Commandments, but because both are an infringement on the rights and liberties of one’s fellow citizen. They are breeches in the social contract, and that contract has no need to appeal to a transcendent source for its justification.
And so it’s incorrect to frame the abortion debate as if it’s only about religious conservatives trying to legislatively impose their idea of morality on everyone else, which is how an awful lot of liberals think about it. Rather it should be framed in terms of human rights and whether the human fetus has any. And if it does have rights, whether they take precedence over the reproductive rights of the mother. We all recognize that the fetus eventually develops into a human being that is protected by the law. The crux of the debate lies on differing opinions about when you think a developing human being should be afforded such protections. At conception? At three months? Six months? Birth? At age 21?
Different societies have different answers to that question, and the problem with our society is that we have no clear consensus about it. So I recognize that reasonable people can have different opinions about the matter and that there is no way to have a certain test that has scientific certainty. And that’s why it’s an issue that has to be politically determined. It’s something we need to debate in the legislatures, and our laws need to be flexible enough to adapt as attitudes change. But we’ve had one zealous group, with the help of the Supreme Court, pretty
much decide the issue without any broad debate or consensus building. The feminists who pushed their abortion on demand agenda are classic Jacobins. Jacobins don’t care how much of a bloody mess they make so long as it’s in the service of their great idea. The Neocons are another variation on the theme.
So I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that so many pro-choicers can so glibly dismiss even the possibility that the fetus has any rights. The dismissal of those rights is easily justified in the service of the grand idea of female sexual emancipation from the bondage of biology. Surely women have the right to control their own bodies, but does any sane person really believe that the fetus has the same status as the mother’s kidney or liver? To think so is the worst kind of alienation. For you don’t have to be religious to recognize that something profound, mysterious, vulnerable, precious is growing there–and that while it is dependent on the mother, it is not the mother. It is supported by the mother’s biology, but it is not identical with it. And so you just don’t think about it as if it’s only an unwanted organ. And if the choice is made to destroy it, there better be extraordinarily good reasons for doing so. That should be the common sense attitude toward abortion.
And even when justified, it is always a tragic choice. Nothing horrifies me more about abortion as a contemporary phenomenon than the way it is treated as a hygienic "procedure" that has as little moral seriousness as a tonsillectomy. This is pretty much the way "termination of the pregnancy" was presented to my wife by her "health care professional" when some complications arose around her pregnancy with my son. Naive me. I was shocked at how routine they were about it. What does it say about us that so many people, especially people in the business of caring for our health, such tragedies as routine?
The real debate is not about religious values but about what makes a human a human, and everybody, no matter what his or her beliefs, has an opinion on the matter. I grant that there is good reason to doubt that a fetus is "human" from the moment of conception, but if you have such doubts can you grant that there is good reason to believe that maybe it is human? Can you say for certain that it is not? I’ll grant that there is a lot of gray area that needs to be given more definition. But how else ought that definition to be given except through the process of people working it out in the political process? If people could just talk about it and work out some kind of reasonable consensus, whatever the legislation that resulted, whether it be a liberal or restricted abortion policy, at least people would have more of a sense of ownership of the result. But we never really have been able to have that debate because of Roe v. Wade. Roe short-circuited the process by which we might have developed a consensus.
Let me come at this from another angle. For argument’s sake let’s say that there were a political movement to designate babies born with Downs Syndrome or other mentally or severely handicapping conditions as subhuman. And let’s say that the goal of this movement was to promote legislation that would give parents who discovered that their children are disabled in this way the right to "terminate" their lives, say, within the first three months after birth. I think it’s fair to say that most Americans would be appalled.
But who’s to say that such a movement with
enough money and persistence might not succeed? If well funded and effectively organized, such a movement could plausibly change public opinion on the issue, arguing that society has no right to tell
parents who will have the expense and heartache of raising "defective"
children that they must take on that burden. They will arrange to have parents with their horror stories appear on Oprah and the Today Show. And they’ll say, "If you think it’s morally
wrong to kill retarded babies, don’t do it. But don’t impose your
morality on me." "Who are you to judge what burden I
can bear? Shouldn’t I, as a parent, have the right to choose?" And many Americans will sympathize–wouldn’t it be better for everyone if this child didn’t have to suffer? There are painless, hygienic ways to put the dears out of their misery. Why shouldn’t we leave it to the parents to decide?
And if you find yourself moved to oppose such a program, what arguments can you make? Would not such arguments come down to your private moral opinion about what makes a human being human? And won’t your success in defeating this political agenda depend on your getting organized to oppose such a redefinition of what it means to be human, and isn’t this essentially what the pro-life people are doing? So whether you agree or disagree, like or loathe their style, surely you can recognize that they have as much of a political right to do so as you would have if you organized to fight those who wanted to euthanize the severely handicapped.
The point I’m trying to make here is that what defines a human as human in the political sphere is politically determined. It comes from a consensus that derives from traditional and evolving cultural values. Whatever individuals might believe privately in the cultural sphere, the definition of "human" is not an absolute in the political sphere. Like anything else, it changes as groups with political agendas work to have it changed. What drives change, for better or worse, is well-organized groups who persist until they reach their goals.
My problem with Roe v. Wade is the same as Michael Kinsley’s. He’s a pro-choice critic of Roe because he thinks as I do that it is an an anti-democratic form of top-downism that subverted the political process. He believes that if it were left to the legislatures, American attitudes would have gradually evolved toward acceptance of the pro-choice position. He may or may not be right about that, but I do agree that it would have been a far more acceptable way to handle the issue. At least it would have been debated, and citizens would have had a greater feeling of ownership of the decision no matter whether the laws were liberalized or not.
So what it comes down to for me is that policies about abortion should
be determined in the state legislatures based on the consensus within
the state about when a fetus becomes a human. Different states might
decide on different standards, but at least it would be decided by the people and not imposed from above by elites in black robes. If a majority
of the people in South Dakota or Mississippi debate the issue and come
to a more traditional understanding of the fetus’s status as a human
being and want to have more restrictive abortion laws to protect it,
why should they be prevented from doing so? If people in New York or
California debate the issue and decide on a more liberal standard,
fine.
Like Kinsley, I think that attitudes toward abortion will continue to evolve, and I don’t like the idea that abortion has taken on the status of a constitutional right that makes legislative adjustments in relationship to people’s changing attitudes virtually impossible. Let people decide on a state-by-state basis when they think human life begins, and so let the legislation evolve as people’s attitudes do. The main thing is that the issue be debated and both sides present their case–Roe prevents that. And so if this conservative court finds a way of overturning Roe, I see that as a positive development if it promotes a more democratically open process toward developing legislation that reflects what people think, not what relatively small but powerful groups tell them it is poltically correct to think.
Leave a Reply