My favorite thing about anti-abortion folks is how they don’t actually take their own views all that seriously. Here’s Ross Douthat describing his views to Mother Jones’ Mark Oppenheimer:
He began with the boilerplate position: “It would probably be a blanket ban on abortion with exceptions for rape, incest, and to save the life of the mother.” He went on, however, to say such a ban would require “radical experimentation with the welfare state” and likely “a lot of new welfare agencies of one kind or another,” plus orphanages and an expanded “network of crisis pregnancy centers.” Nobody involved would go to jail, he said, as “it is possible to believe that abortion is murder and also believe it is a completely unique form of murder. Abortion would be, you know, if you have first-degree murder, second and third degree…it’s like seventh-degree murder or something.”
“But,” he quickly noted, “those things aren’t on the table.”
Granted, my ethics background isn’t nearly sophisticated enough to fully parse this out, but I think it’s fair to say that this distinction is completely absurd. If a woman came to me and gave me money in exchange for killing her husband, we would both be charged with murder. And rightfully so. By our society’s standards, her husband was a person, with all the rights and privileges we accord to persons. We committed premeditated murder, and as such violated the fundamental rights we accord him as a person. If we weren’t arrested and prosecuted, it would be a gross miscarriage of justice.
Why is abortion any different? Since pro-lifers maintain that the fetus deserves full rights of personhood, the above scenario is basically analogous to nearly any given abortion. Indeed, the only way it can be different is if pro-lifers implicitly believed that a fetus isn’t quite a person and didn’t deserve the rights we accord to adults, children and the mentally impaired. Honestly, I think the main reason for why pro-lifers are reluctant to take their argument where it leads is that they realize that their position isn’t a popular one. Americans would quickly turn against the anti-abortion movement if it began pushing for prosecution and prison terms for women and doctors. As far as political strategy goes, it’s far better to obscure the full implications of ones views.
Of course, the other possibility is that pro-lifers have so little respect for the rights and choices of women that they don’t acknowledge the validity of their choices, even when it results in the death of an innocent human being. This is a little less charitable, yes, but judging from the hostility pro-lifers have towards women, it has the virtue of being pretty close to the truth.
Jamelle, you really have been on a roll today in terms of number of posts, but I am finding them pretty unsatisfying. From the quote, Ross is taking a position where a fetus is a proto-person, deserving of some of the rights we accord to grown-ups but not all of them. Why can’t he be sincere in this position? And why can’t it be distinct from the position of, say, Robert George, who (I believe) holds that fetuses do have full personhood?
I mean, I think I’m pro-life, but I wouldn’t say that “the fetus deserves full rights of personhood.” I do think a baby in the womb has some measure of moral significance, which increases as the child develops, apart from whether or not the mother wants to carry it to term. This is certainly not to say that the mother and her choices have no moral significance, for they do. This is hard to talk about, because I don’t think I could ever have any deep understanding of what it is like to want or need an abortion. It would be in some ways easier to resolve the conflict in one way or another: to deny the moral significance of the baby in the womb altogether, or else to make that significance absolute. Neither move seems right to me. And then I see someone trying to work out something like what I believe, perhaps a little clumsily, and you accuse him of thinly veiling his hatred of women, more or less. It’s not encouraging.
I could make a similar point about today’s post on conservatism and poverty, though the quote you pulled from Bauer is totally odious and I wouldn’t even try to defend that guy.
You’re probably right to say that I’m being a little unfair here, both with regards to this post and the earlier post on conservatives and poverty. Not all pro-lifers are hostile to women, and not all conservatives are opposed to helping poor people. I guess my point though is that a lot of them are (or seem to be), and it just so happens that those that are tend to hold the most prominent positions in the conservative movement. My sometimes heated rhetoric definitely isn’t fair to you (and I apologize for that), but it does describe a large enough portion of conservatives, which is why I use it.