What we should talk about when we talk about abortion, pt. 2

In part 1 of this post, I wrote about the question of fetal personhood vis a vis abortion, and concluded since it's not at all clear when a fetus becomes a person, fetal personhood is a problematic criterion for whether or not an abortion is ethically okay. I also wrote that I don't think that fetal personhood should inform laws surrounding abortion, and in this post I'll explain my reasoning.

(I should note that women aren't the only people who can get pregnant; trans-men and other people outside conventional gender norms can as well. I wasn't sure how to write about abortion in a way that acknowledges this fact without putting long, irritating caveats on every sentence, so I opted for elegance over accuracy. Apologies to all for not finding a better solution.)

It seems conventional to discuss abortion-law in terms of fetal personhood: are they people or objects? At least that's been my experience, as a child and later as a student. But this is a particular way of framing the issue, which assumes that fetal personhood is the ethically relevant issue in abortion. Pro-life advocates speak of fetuses as "children" or "babies," waving giant pictures of adorable, thumb-sucking, 2001: A Space Odessey-esque proto-infants in utero and MURDER or PRO-LIFE in all-caps.

THE STAR CHILD IS BORN!

Of course, the question of whether and when abortion is ethical is distinct from the question, "Would you MURDER this slumbering, Muppet-like fetus?"

But both questions still focuses on fetal personhood as the ethically-relevant issue, to the exclusion of all other issues. Which tells us something important: that talking about fetal personhood is the conservative way of framing abortion.

In Don't Think of An Elephant!, George Lakoff explains how progressive and conservative worldviews derive from different family-based metaphors for thinking about larger human communities: conservatives use a strict-father worldview, in which the father must protect the family against evil in the world, provide for them, and teach his children (and wife, who's sort of like a child) to be good. Implied in this model is that it is the duty of children and wives to obey the father: disobedience amounts to evil, and the proper response by the father to disobedience is either punishment or, if that doesn't work, disowning the wayward child. (Progressives, on the other hand, use a family-model which emphasizes equality of parents, and casts responsibility and compassion as the primary virtues.)

Proof of liberal bigotry against elephantine persons.

If you accept the idea of a strict-father morality, then conservative opposition to abortion makes sense: it's less about protecting fetuses and more about control over women's sexuality. This conclusion is supported by the fact that the policies supported by "pro-life" advocates don't actually prevent abortions or save fetuses. As Libby Anne discusses here, countries with strong anti-abortion laws (e.g. in Africa and Latin America) tend to have high rates of abortion, while countries with wide access to birth control (e.g. in Europe) tend to have low abortion rates. Needless to say, the pro-life mainstream has little love for birth control. Poverty also seems to encourage abortion, and the stories about how the Pill causes 'mini-abortions' are false in several ways. In other words, pro-life policies encourage abortions, while pro-choice policies discourage them. This makes no sense if being pro-life is about saving fetuses, but is perfectly reasonable if being pro-life is about a worldview in which women who control their sexuality and reproduction are sinful sluts who deserve to be punished.

Pretty sure that the US and the EU don't have identical laws on abortion...

(Map from http://womenslawproject.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/abortionlawsmap.png.)

As Jacob Kovacs puts it,

1) That people’s morality shouldn’t be subject to government interference is a defining conservative belief.

2) That abortion should be restricted by law for moral reasons is a defining conservative belief.

This contradiction is reconciled if you define women as less than full people, less than full moral agents, on whose behalf it is downright necessary to intervene.

Being pro-life is about controlling women, not about saving babies.

I've taken our discussion a bit afield from the original topic, which was "What are the ethically relevant issues around abortion?," but I have a solid rhetorical reason for doing so. I want you to see that the pro-life position is bankrupt. Not only does it rely upon the implausible concept of ensoulment-at-birth to argue that all abortions are unethical; it actively opposes policies which discourage abortion. Seen in the most charitable light, it is nonsensical; seen in a more cynical light, it's old-fashioned chauvinism in disguise. "Save the children!" is just an excuse for controlling women.

(I'm not suggesting, by the way, that pro-lifers are consciously lying when they say that they want to protect children. I'm suggesting that their real motivation is based in a particular worldview or schema, since their purported motivation makes no sense in light of their actual behavior.)

So we shouldn't talk about fetal personhood when we talk about abortion--or in any event, we shouldn't just talk about fetal personhood, and we should stop talking about it once we notice that it's too complicated to get us anywhere.

Instead, let's talk about agency. Let's talk about who should decide whether an abortion is ethically permissible instead of what that decision should be. Let's acknowledge that there may not be a straightforward answer to "Should this person get an abortion?" in every instance, and instead talk about who's in the best position to make that difficult call.

Once we start talking about agency rather than the misnomer of "life," it becomes obvious that the person who's facing pregnancy, the person who will have to go through the expensive, invasive, difficult procedure of an abortion, the person who will deal with the consequences of pregnancy or abortion--they should be the one to decide. Not their family or church. Not society. Not the moral paragons in Congress.

The woman should decide.

George Washington explaining his own "struggle" with the ethical dilemma of abortion, to be followed by Thomas Jefferson on his "struggle" with the ethical dilemma of slavery.

This is what we should talk about when we talk about abortion: agency, not fetal personhood.

Religion talk

We talk about religion amid modern political-religious tensions in bizarre and incoherent ways. It would take a special sort of blindness to believe that, as (ostensibly) under US law, all religions are equally legitimate and respected in practice: note not only the well-documented phenomenon of e.g. Islamophobia (which helped our country wade into a decade-long pair of wars), but also the fact that to be a recognized "religion" rather than a despised "cult" is largely a matter of popularity and collective perception (Mormonism, for example, is currently somewhere between "cult" and "religion" in the eyes of most Americans). Notice, too, the mutual-disdain held between liberals like yours truly and the Evangelical Right.

In America today, religions are 1) powerful, 2) contested, and 3) importantly different from one another.

Islam, Homosexuality, and the Bed of Procrustes, Pt. 2

(This is the second part of 'Islam, Homosexuality, and the Bed of Procrustes.' See part 1 here.)

(Note: ideas for this article were consulted with the illustrious Jacob Kovacs.)

Whence, then, my peer's thesis about the content of 'true' or 'real' or 'legitimate' Islam? Edging farther out onto my speculative limb, I'm going to suggest that he was motivated by political imperatives. To wit:

1) Homophobia is bad (contra social conservatives).

2) Islam is not bad (contra social conservatives).

Reconciling the two imperatives to 1) combat homophobia and 2) not combat Islam, he had to presume that:

3) Islam is not homophobic.

On Casting Pearls Before Swine, and Self-Serving Christians

In Matthew 7:6, Jesus famously says, "Do not give dogs what is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs. If you do, they may trample them under their feet, and then turn and tear you to pieces." The first sentence appears to be metaphorical in a fairly obvious and straightforward way: "Don't give something valuable to those who can't appreciate it." And then: "If you do, they might destroy it, and destroy you as well." I think I understand the propositional content of this quotation, but it's not at all obvious to me how it's meant to be interpreted into the broader context of Jesus' message(s).

The quotation is from the Sermon on the Mount, part of a haphazard list of rules and principles for right-living. It's immediately preceded by the parable of the lillies, "Judge not or you'll be judged," and the plank-in-the-eye-of-the-hypocrite parable. It's immediately followed by "Seek and you shall find" and "Which of you, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone?" In general, Matthew's Jesus seems concerned in this section with promoting fatalism and criticizing hypocrisy. It's not clear that the "pearls before swine" bit fits into either of these categories, though it does seem to conflict with 7:1's "Judge not lest ye be judged" rule. Doesn't identifying someone as a pig-dog who will trample on pearls involve judging them? Even without any clue about what it is that Jesus intends this metaphor to concretely refer to, it seems inescapable that the admonition to "not judge" and the admonition to "not give dogs what is sacred" are in conflict with one another.

The reason I'm curious about this is that in my experience, contemporary Christians uniformly interpret this quotation in a very specific way, taking it to mean, "Don't bother trying to convert unbelievers who don't want to be converted. Fuck 'em." And they use it as a formula for writing-off anyone who seriously or aggressively disputes their religious claims: the heathen doesn't refuse to be saved because she has good reasons, but because she's constitutionally incapable of hearing the truth of the Good News. By framing the discussion in terms of revelation, these Christians insulate themselves from debate or criticism (they might debate, but only so long as it's going their way). Revealed truth--the "pearl"--can only be heard or not-heard; there's no way to interrogate it the way you can interrogate claims about shared, investigable experience. With revelation, there's nothing to discuss: either you get it, or you don't. And if you don't, then you must be a pig-dog: deaf to the Good News, ignorant to truth.

While this sentiment of "Fuck 'em" is clearly at odds with the Pauline goal of "all (becoming) one in Christ" and the Christian rejection of virtue for grace, it certainly seems to have emotional utility for Christians who need a rationale for why heathens don't see the obvious truth of the Gospel. Your reporter can report that these Christians use the "pearls before swine" line as snarky insider-code which, in both its form and its content, distinguishes between the Insiders and the Outsiders. I'm not saying that this is what the author of Matthew had in mind when he wrote 7:6 (though it's hard to see how "Don't bother with the pig-dogs" could mean anything other than Us vs. Them), but that is manifestly what snarky, self-congratulatory contemporary Christians take it to mean. Which is sadly funny, considering all the ink that the book of Matthew expends in that same section on the evils of self-serving hypocrisy.

(Disclaimer: obviously I'm making broad points about "Christians" in general, and obviously the rainbow of diversity which is "Christianity" is way, way more complex and subtle than I'm giving it credit for. If Christians were at all marginalized, I might think twice before making big clumsy statements like these; but since they are in fact the opposite of marginalized--since they have a long-standing choke-hold hegemony on my society, to the extent that atheism and Islam are effective barriers to holding public office, and finer-points of soul-theology obstruct women's reproductive health --I'm comfortable with unfair caricatures. See Shakesville's explanation of Christian Privilege, here.)

"No, I'm a REAL Christian!"

On "Real" Christians and Christian Privilege: I understand, really I do, why liberal Christians want to think of this as somehow "different" from other issues of privilege. I understand why they don't want to be associated with people with whom they share a label but little else. But requesting this exception, asking to receive the benefits of Christian privilege while accepting none of the responsibility of Christian supremacy, is not only unfair; it's flatly not progressive, because it ultimately serves to more deeply entrench Christian supremacy and privilege. Asking me to make distinctions about "real" Christians is asking me to participate in my own marginalization. That is a request I cannot accommodate.

http://www.shakesville.com/2009/09/on-real-christians-and-christian.html