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.

Julia Gillard disembowels with words

Just a little something to brighten your day, if watching a snide Australian Romney-esque asshole get wiped across the floor for fifteen minutes by a Thatcher/Clinton/Patrick Henry-esque Australian badass is your thing.

Daniel Craig in Drag, or, How to Shame-Bludgeon

Scanning the interwebz for scents of the upcoming Skyfall--a sequel to the 1960s cult flick Dr. No--I stumbled across this gem. Dressed in a decidedly non-007ish suite, Daniel Craig looks manfully into the camera as Judi Dench's disembodied voice chastises him for systemic sexism. (Dench plays his boss, M, in the Bond films.) Craig walks off camera, then back on in drag, as Dench continues her Auntly lecture. I guess this was supposed to be a surprise or something? Like, we didn't know it was him until the camera zoomed-in on Craig that we were indeed looking at Craig-qua-drag?

I hesitate to leap right into all the ways that this ad is fucked up, because I don't want to puritanically search-out the evil in everything that doesn't 100% agree with my own political agenda. So, let's talk about what's good in this ad.

Dench's first line is, "We're equals, aren't we, 007?" This is important: the whole gist of the commercial is disproving the claim that Dench is practically equal to Craig, and by extension that women have practical equality to men. I guess there are people who believe this? If so, then, by all means: yes, pile up evidence of systemic sexism until it is cognitively impractical to suppose that women are not perpetually disenfranchised, disempowered, fucked with, etc.

That said, there are so many things wrong with this ad. The most obvious is the line that men stand "hardly any chance of falling victim to sexual assault." Like most fucked-up statements, there's an important element of truth here: namely, that women are far more at risk of sexual assault than men. But that's by no means equivalent to 'men are hardly ever raped.' What's fucked up about this statement is the way that it frames the issue: women get raped, men don't. This is a simple and clear message, which makes it a friend of rhetoric and an enemy of truth. It presupposes conventional heterosexuality, and implicitly denies the existence of (for instance) gay men and/or trans people. Let me emphasize: the problem is not the explicit message (i.e. that women get sexually assaulted way more than men). The problem is the implicit message, i.e. that conventional sexual assault by conventional men against conventional women is the only sexual assault worth talking about.

Come to think of it, isn't it kind of weird that James Bond--who's not just any privileged straight white (etc. etc.) dude but is in fact the Ur-Man, the archetype of conventional maleness--is the stand-in for men-in-general? And that sexless, grandmotherly Judy Dench is the clucking, churchlady voice of Conscience? The sanctimony in this ad is just stifling, like a stiff fart in a closed room:

"SHAME! SHAME ON YOU, JAMES BOND! SHAME ON YOU, MEN OF THE WORLD! With your systemic privilege and your fancy suit-jackets, while we poor Women lie shivering and less-opportune'd, under the bus, out in the cold! SHAME!!!"

Then comes the weirdest part: "For someone with such a fondness for women, I wonder if you've ever considered what it might be like to be one..." Exit James Bond, enter Daniel Craig in drag. At this point Dench started listing some devastating statistics re: work done by women vs. women's pay, but I was too disoriented by what I was seeing to pay any attention to what she was saying: "What the fuck? That's...Craig in drag. I.e. the reason I clicked on this Youtube clip in the first place. But he's just standing there, posing, with this like I guess accusing look on his face? Like by putting on drag, he knows what it's like to be a woman? And now he's taking off his wig and staring-down the camera? WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON???"

Dench: "So, 007: are we equals?" Long stare.

I mean, I guess he's supposed to be the standard-man (James Bond) who puts himself (literally) in the shoes of a woman, and with this new firsthand experience of sexism, he piously stares at the audience.

There's nothing more righteously indignant than a long-stare.

And there's nothing more sanctimonious* than scripted righteous indignation. And that's why I basically hate this ad: rather than critically discussing sexism or portraying alternatives to it (or, for that matter, portraying sexism itself), it uses a caricature of maleness and a sexless, bodiless voice of Women to bludgeon the (male) audience with shame: "SHAME! SEXISM IS BAD! YOU CAUSE SEXISM! GO FEEL BAD!" What is the ad's goal: to get all the (conventional) men in the audience to say three Hail Mary's and five Our Father's? What better way to get men to clam up about their privilege and refuse to discuss oppression than shame-bludgeoning?

*Sanctimony: the use of putative morals as an instrument of manipulation.

But what I really hate about this ad is the way it frames stuff like gender, sex, class, race, class, etc.: y'know, the whole panoply of privilege/oppression spectra. Rather than questioning hyper-privileged James Bond as the embodiment of what it means to be a man, it reinforces the idea that he constitutes the essence of maleness (white, straight, English-speaking, educated, casually wealthy, etc.). And WHERE the fuck is Judy Dench? SHE'S A DISEMBODIED VOICE! There are NO WOMEN in this ad about the OPPRESSION OF WOMEN. This ad is like one of the 'gay' episodes of Community, in which there are no gay characters, just straight people thinking about gayness.

Plus the ad talks about "equality," which is the bourgeois substitute for "justice." And it acts like queer people don't exist. And implies that men don't get raped. And it clumsily uses drag (presumably for novelty, since it makes no sense otherwise). And its atmosphere of guilt precluded me from enjoying the sight of Daniel Craig in drag, which--never you doubt--is bloody difficult to do.

What the fuck.