Why don’t single-issue anti-abortion voters oppose this Trump Supreme Court nomination?

In our context, because social conservatism comes tightly packaged with support for market deregulation and public service erosion, a conservative Court would issue decisions that imperil the life and health of some of the most vulnerable members of our society. I don’t think that claim can reasonably be disputed.

I’m not sure what you claim to be beyond dispute – the association, or the downstream effects. The association you suggest is indisputable and widely known. But, as you know, conservatives and libertarians will argue until the cows come home that market deregulation is good for everyone, and particularly the most vulnerable. Your hypothetical single-issue voter may be sympathetic to such a viewpoint, or perhaps just agnostic.

Perhaps you don’t regard such disagreement as “reasonable.” I won’t seek to persuade you otherwise. But assuming we are talking about real-world voters, rather than spherical, frictionless ones, then a certain level of unreasonableness is to be expected.

More generally, no-one is a single-issue voter tout court. They are single-issue voters in the context of the current differences between the parties. Almost by definition, single issue voters don’t see a comparably important difference between the parties on issues other than the bee in their bonnet. For sure, if you think that legal abortion is a moral horror, but Republican economic policy is even worse, you should think twice before voting Republican! But then you probably weren’t a single-issue voter to begin with.

It’s almost as if you didn’t know anything about the history of this issue, and have never met, or even read about, anti choice absolutists as they actually exist. Look up Paul Weyrich. Read what the bloggers Fred Clark (Slacktivist) and Libby Anne (Love, Joy, Feminism) have written about the anti choice movement.

Should single-issue anti-abortion voters prefer a course of action that leads to fewer abortions, or should they prefer a course of action that leads to more abortions but that makes the laws better reflect their convictions about the ethics of abortion? This, I’ll suggest, is the actual choice situation they face.

I don’t think they oppose abortion so much as the idea of women having sex for non-procreative reasons. Cyndi Lauper could re-word her hit song as “Girl Can Never Have Fun” and it would work here.

Men are never connected with the act or made to take responsibility, despite the number of children conceived through non-consensual sex. The focus is on punishment, not prevention.

There is a reason the word “moralitarian” exists. The number of abortion will not go down but the number of illegal and dangerous ones will, along with the death rate.

There is no “sleaze” involved to a single-issue, anti-abortion voter. It’s that simple.

@Gina

I’m wondering if my mistake is in assuming that what single-issue anti-abortion voters really want is fewer abortions.

I think this is an important line of thought. I believe they’re, in general, less focused on the actual number than on society’s (and by extension, their own) implied acceptance/complicity in the act, and complicity in sin is a big deal for Christians of all flavors. From this view, being complicit in the deontological sin creates a cascade of negative consequentialist outcomes aside from the purely numerical/pragmatic one.

The timeline matters too, right? It seems to me that single-issue voters on abortion might reason that while the empirical evidence suggests that the patchwork of laws we have now doesn’t prevent abortions, something more thoroughgoing–a national life begins at conception law, or an anti-choice constitutional amendment, for example–will universalize the law, and finally do the trick.

I think they’re dreaming, but I do think that’s something like the dream.

Another question: I don’t know that there are any single-issue gun control voters out there. But I’m reasonably confident that if we see a President Biden, AR-15s and ammo will be flying off the shelves as they did when Obama was elected. I can’t think of anyone who is for gun control who would be bothered by this. Are the two situations analogous, in people’s view?

I have a couple of points to make.

The first is that the genesis of American anti-abortionism was by conservatives as a way to sell their own economic platform to a wider audience. So, its been heavily packaged for that end. Its all about tainting liberals with the attribute of immoral. So even those who are primarily thinking about the lives of babies, are doing so in a highly politicized framework that its difficult to step out of.

Then its not just that consequentialism isn’t all that popular, but that its hard to do right. To do it right one needs to make a spread sheet, and fill it in with numbers that are in some way defensible. Few are comfortable doing that, so they resort to principle and/or emotion as a means of avoiding the exercise.

= = = The first is that the genesis of American anti-abortionism was by conservatives as a way to sell their own economic platform to a wider audience. So, its been heavily packaged for that end. Its all about tainting liberals with the attribute of immoral. So even those who are primarily thinking about the lives of babies, are doing so in a highly politicized framework that its difficult to step out of. = = =

This raises the question of the tail vs the dog. The East Coast patricians and their lesser Texas “new money” cousins no longer run the Republican Party or the far Right, but who does? The ultra-billionaires including the Koch brothers (now singular), Sinqfeld, etc clearly have a role, but they can’t collect a lot of votes – particularly when their agenda of returning to feudalism is made explicit. Enter the christianists and their agenda of returning to a “righteous”, “godly” society, one where preachers rule and – you saw this coming – women are kept in subservient roles. That fits nicely with the Koch goal of a feudal society [1], so for the moment they are allies and backing anti-choice candidates with votes and money is part of deal.

Naturally each sub-party believes they will rule in the final arrangements. My money is on the billionaires in that endgame.

[1] noting for the record Duncan Black’s observation that the end society that the billionaires seem to be driving for would be a horrible place to live even for those sitting on their throne-chairs in their gigantic gated estates – do they realize that?

I’m not a single-issue anti-abortion voter, though I’m close to it; I think a majority of the people I know well are also fairly close to it.

I think that Brandon Watson (#1) and Hunter (#7) get one key thing right – for most of the outspoken anti-abortion voters, it’s about morality not consequence. But that gets treated in this discussion as weird, when I think it’s normal. I cannot imagine most of the bloggers on this site voting for someone who was outspokenly pro-Holocaust–whether they agreed with his other policies or not, even if he were running for a position as mayor of a small town with no Jews. At some point, a candidate’s positions on specific issues are important because of morality, not consequences. And also, this reflects an understanding that people’s understanding of morality is shaped by the law, and by what is and is not acceptable to advocate publicly.

I also think that most “single-issue” anti-abortion voters are thinking long-term and structurally, and disagree with your perception that more anti-poverty programs will reduce the abortion rate, although maybe not explicitly. In the historical context since 1960, as anti-poverty programs have grown, and access to contraception has expanded, the abortion rate has gone up tremendously and stable family formation among the working class has dramatically fallen. The trade-off hasn’t been fewer unstable relationships between joint parents, or fewer children growing up with a single parent–although in specific cases you’d expect those outcomes, the averages don’t support that conclusion. Like anti-smoking activists, the goal isn’t just fewer smokers/abortions next year in Iowa; it’s a world where smoking/abortion is less built into the design of the world–which will eventually change the numbers, but not necessarily next year.

I also think the natural order argument is important, but (again) rarely expressed in its most helpful form–which is as a modification of the violinist thought experiment. If you agree with Thompson’s conclusion that you’d owe no duty to the violinist in the thought experiment, would it change your conclusion if you had agreed to be connected to the violinist? For many people, it would.

As commenters have mentioned there are a lot of scum at the top who will ride any issue to power with power as the goal, not the issue, but also a lot of people at the bottom who do believe and always have that abortion is murder.

The founder of the evangelical movement, Billy Sunday, preached against abortion as murder circa 1910. When I read somewhere that the anti-abortion issue was a wholly made-up ploy by conservatives, it took me about a half-hour on Google to track that fact down. It may well have been fostered by some such as Falwell for their own ends, but in the small town I grew up in circa 1950, heavily-pregnant, unmarried teen-agers were a common sight and I never heard of the word abortion. Perhaps because it was illegal, but it was illegal then for a reason.

I personally think there are too many people in the world (about 1 billion in 1900, about four billion in my youth, almost eight billion now–this can’t go on much longer), and on many days I think an early abortion wouldn’t have been much of a personal loss, but my experience has been, as with some other commenters, that the anti-abortion voters I know are quite sincere (and have a lot of babies). (One said of her 8-month old, “Oh, I wish he could stay this way forever!”)

Others have already explained this better than I can, but I wanted to add concurring testimony, that it is an emotional issue with many, and they will vote their emotions.

I do know a few, just to add a note of hope, who saw Trump for who he is and could not vote for him–but couldn’t vote for HRC either, and wrote in some other name.

@11 writes:
”No single issue pro-life voter would give four nano-seconds of thought about any of the relatively complex and entirely off point arguments you make”.

It’s just basically –
”trump” –
(the Worlds Word for: ”STUPID”)

Should single-issue anti-abortion voters prefer a course of action that leads to fewer abortions, or should they prefer a course of action that leads to more abortions but that makes the laws better reflect their convictions about the ethics of abortion?

What single-issue anti-abortion voters should do is simple: they should stop being single-issue anti-abortion voters.

A lot of this debate focuses on consequentialism vs deontology. A comparison with the German jurisprudence may be interesting (at least of academic interest), because in this respect it is highly unusual. Many may not know that abortion is still illegal in the Federal Republic of Germany. Parliament tried twice to legalize it but the constitutional court would not allow it, claiming, contrary to their colleagues in most of the liberal world, that the fetus had an independent right to life which must be protected by the state.

The court argued essentially the following (https://www.servat.unibe.ch/dfr/bv088203.html):
– Since fetuses have rights, the state must take effective steps to protect those.
– In certain cases, the woman’s rights to life, bodily integrity and dignity must be weighed against those of the fetus.
– The state must declare abortion illegal as a matter of principle (deontology) but can decide not to enforce the ban if it concludes that other measures are more effective to protect the legal interests (Rechtsgüter) at stake (consequentialism). It is also a generally acknowledged constitutional principle that the state has a special duty to protect children and the welfare state must provide appropriate assistance to families in need.

This legal position is truly horrible. Procreational autonomy and bodily integrity are not outright denied but become an afterthought to imagined rights of fetuses. But there is some complexity in the argument that I think warrants closer attention.

I don’t think I’ve seen much discussion anywhere of the idea of politics as expressing (or less critically, attempting to vote to implement) one’s preferred system of government, philosophy of law, etc., especially where that’s not the established one.

If people who vote this way think about consequences, I think, they assume at the beginning that outlawing something is the best first step toward eliminating it. That liberals who insist on integrity keep telling them this isn’t a good argument may contribute toward their not caring so much about integrity.

More charitably, I suppose, one could see them as part of a movement, which some self-consciously are, to bring about better consequences eventually through the means the movement chose.

As for “serious, lasting damage to democratic institutions and exacerbating civic distrust and polarization,” I don’t know. Once a group has decided others’ beliefs about integrity don’t matter, how much will they care about distrust among those others?

My two cents.

First of all, “consequentialism vs deontology” is a false dichotomy: for example if I pull the trigger of a gun, a bullet shoots out of the gun and impacts somebody’s head, the consequence of my act is that somebody dies.
But in deontology terms, this is not a consequence of the act of pulling the trigger, instead the whole sequence of events is counted as a single action, that is “murder”.
On the other hand, in consequentialist term an attempted murder is still bad, even if it has no “consequences”, because it could and was indeed supposed to have some bad consequences (the same happens with deontology).

Which is to say that the difference between the “act” and the “consequences” of the same act is very fuzzy, and often it is just a linguistical choice to frame something as a consequence of an act or as an act itself (a big part of the differentiation is intentionality, but then if I know the most likely consequences of an act it is difficult to say that those consequence are not intentional, and anyway intentionality depends on perception so it is very ambiguous).

Many years ago I was a catholic, and an anti-abortionist (though not a single-issue one since there was no party at the time in Italy that was single issue anti abortion).
I was anti-abortion because I believed in the existence of the soul, not as a mere symbol but as a real entity.
So the anti abortion stance was part of a wider world view.
I think that “single issue” voters also have a sort of general world view, and that the issue in itself is not necessarily all that important, but rather these people use it as a litmus test to identify people who (they believe) share thir values.

So if someone is OK with legal abortion, from their point of view it is evident that he or she doesn’t share their principles, so he or she is also likely to betray their expectations in other fields.

Patiniowa@14:

My Midwestern lived experience tells me single-issue 2A people are definitely still out there. I’m related to one, and a couple of people I was friends with in high school profess similar views. In the current polarized environment, that becomes muddled since they may start single-issue and then work backwards from there to convince themselves that the entire GOP platform is laudable, but their foundation is very clearly 2A.

“People often say that Marxists have an overly plastic view of human nature, but at least we Marxists think that you can’t change people through culture warring and will alone- you need to change the structure of economic/social relations fundamentally- these conservatives have no such reservations and think they can will society out of abortion and many more things besides (premarital sex, for example).”

But don’t certain (most?) kinds of Marxists believe that ‘human nature’ can be changed by indoctrination? For example in re-education camps, or by exposing humans to massive propaganda, while suppressing and/or discrediting propaganda of the opposition (‘enemy propaganda’). In fact, forget Marxists; pretty much every doctrinaire believes it these days, and acts accordingly.

No, I don’t see how this makes anyone “moral utopian”. If you could force (or bribe) the mass-media, the education system, and social media to propagandize, skillfully, the pro-life doctrine, while suppressing/discrediting the opposing propaganda, I’d say in a decade or so the society would be solidly pro-life. Not the rocket science.

JimV,

(One said of her 8-month old, “Oh, I wish he could stay this way forever!”)

This says more about her attitude towards children than she may have realised, and it creeps me out.

Tm,

I am German, and to the best of my knowledge abortion is legal in the first three months if the patient has undergone a consultation and then thought about it for three days, or alternatively for medical reasons and in the case of rape. But yes, compared to the USA or many other European countries that is quite backward.

Pro Bono,

That’s a deontologist versus consequentialist question, not a progressive versus religious fundie question, although I grant that the latter are virtually all deontologists anyway.

I merely argue that most radical anti-abortionists do not, as a matter of observable fact, revere life in general. Many cheer when an abortion doctor is murdered or a clinic is bombed. Many are in favour of wars against Muslim countries. Many are in favour of the death penalty. And that is before considering their majority stance towards non-human life, which you must also consider when saying “general reverence for life”.

Now compare all that with the stance the modal Greens activist on how everybody should treat their fellow humans, even those they disagree with, and animals, on the preservation of nature, or even on war; there is really no doubt that reverence of life in general is located on that side of the spectrum.

Alex SL@17:

They do not, in fact, want fewer abortions. What they want is for all those [slur]s to be punished for having sex, except if it is their own daughter, who is a good girl who has just made a mistake and cannot afford to have a baby right now; that is different. Their declared motivation is not their actual motivation, as demonstrated decisively by their actions.

To circle back to my prior comment, this really feels more like we’re talking more about an adherent of virtue ethics than deontology: “Abortions should be banned because bad people have wrong desires that make them do bad things for wrong reasons and then want abortions, but my daughter is a good person, and I am a good person, therefore she should be able to get an abortion, and I should be able to want for her to get one, because our desire to do it is right and it would be done for right reasons.”

Alex 38: “to the best of my knowledge abortion is legal in the first three months if the patient has undergone a consultation and then thought about it for three days”

This is what many people think and for practical purposes, that’s how it works. But de jure it’s wrong, and the courts care very much about the distinction. See https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwangerschaftsabbruch#Geltendes_Recht. The decisive constitutional Court ruling states it in these terms:
“Der Schwangerschaftsabbruch muß für die ganze Dauer der Schwangerschaft grundsätzlich als Unrecht angesehen und demgemäß rechtlich verboten sein (Bestätigung von BVerfGE 39, 1 [44]). Das Lebensrecht des Ungeborenen darf nicht, wenn auch nur für eine begrenzte Zeit, der freien, rechtlich nicht gebundenen Entscheidung eines Dritten, und sei es selbst der Mutter, überantwortet werden.”
So the state must declare abortion fundamentally as a legal wrong even if it decides not to punish it in certain cases.
And: “Der Staat muß zur Erfüllung seiner Schutzpflicht ausreichende Maßnahmen normativer und tatsächlicher Art ergreifen, die dazu führen, daß ein – unter Berücksichtigung entgegenstehender Rechtsgüter – angemessener und als solcher wirksamer Schutz erreicht wird (Untermaßverbot). BVerfGE 88, 203 (203)BVerfGE 88, 203 (204) Dazu bedarf es eines Schutzkonzepts, das Elemente des präventiven wie des repressiven Schutzes miteinander verbindet.” So the state must take normative and actual measures to effectively prevent abortions. This aspect seems interesting to the current debate because the court acknowledges that the likely effect of state policy must be taklen into account, not just the intention. This also includes the duty of the welfare state must provide assistance to families in need, as I stated earlier, so that no woman should have to contemplate abortion for economic reasons. This commitment to the sanctity of life, or “Lebensschutz”, doesn’t end with birth, as the GOP would have it.

Many years ago, in my then slum of residence, I noticed a battered van with bumper stickers, one of which read ‘BOMB IRAN’ and another ‘PROTECT UNBORN BABIES’ or something like that. So I put a note under the windshield wiper of the van that read, ‘What about the unborn baby Iranians?’ A few weeks later I saw the van again and went to the back to see if there was a reply. But the bumper had fallen off. I like to imagine that the van-owner kicked it off in a fit of cognitive dissonance, which is surely a step towards enlightenment.

Actually, I have run into a number of people opposed to abortion who are also pacifists, environmentalists, socialists, vegetarians, animal liberationists, opponents of capital punishment, or adhere to other regular leftie stuff, and see their opposition to abortion as entirely consistent with their other beliefs.