So is Trump going to be able to pivot to pro-choice in the run-up to the election? I mean: he’s trying. But will it work? And will his pro-life base accept it, because he’s Trump?
I hope no pro-choice voters are fooled. I hope they hold him responsible for overturning Roe. It’s beyond obvious they can’t trust Trump to veto a federal ban, if he’s re-elected, and R’s pass one in Congress. Which they will (almost certainly?) try to do, if they can.
Here’s why I’m even bothering to ask (you knew that stuff I just said.) I think there’s one reason why the pro-life base might go along with it, besides maybe them being boxed in and nowhere else to go. And I haven’t seen anyone really think through the psychology of the shift. Permit me to speculate.
[UPDATE: comments have shown the above paragraph is misleading. Read it so: here’s on reason why the pro-life base, and politicians, might go along if he really goes pro-choice and makes a serious effort to drag others in the party with him. One can’t really trust him, but he might try to make the pivot credible. He doesn’t want to go to prison if he loses, after all. And yes I know there’s nothing he could do to render himself truly trustworthy, still there are things he could do to try to make the R party more pro-choice in an attempt to win voters.]
First a bit of background, most of which I take to be pretty obvious and not seriously in doubt.
Pro-choicers have always argued (clearly correctly) that a lot of the energy behind the pro-life position is not really pro-life, per se, more anti-something else.
Yes, there are some who sincerely believe – probably on religious grounds – that personhood begins at conception, hence deserves protection from that point. But very few really believe that, because the position has extreme implications few find acceptable (no IVF, no exceptions for rape or incest and probably not always even in the case of the life of the mother, and abortion should almost always be punished as murder.)
Also, if pro-lifers really felt this way they probably would be more in favor of social support for mothers who might choose to carry to term if they had better prospects for a better life for themselves and their future child. (This has all often been pointed out.)
Some pro-lifers clearly regard abortion, instead, more as a kind of mass ‘purity’ violation. They react in horror to the prospect of this being a medical industry, substantially to fuel sexual licentiousness and sin. This is a ‘wisdom of repugnance’ argument if it isn’t a religious argument (in which case it really shouldn’t pass establishment clause muster, be it noted.) The sexual revolution has been disgusting. The proof that a disgust response to the sexual revolution is warranted – the proof that rightly compounds the disgust – is it goes with the growth of this medical industry of death.
The proof that this attitude is common is the ready combination of anti-abortion but pro-IVF attitudes. A married mother seeking to have a child is not disgusting. On we go.
Last but not least, many pro-lifers clearly find the sort of sexual freedom that goes with the right to abortion a standing affront to rightful patriarchal authority and control. Disgusting or not, it just ain’t right she can do that. It feels like something has been taken from men if they can’t control this very crucial business of life: reproduction. Men should be heads of household, and reproduction should be household business, so men should decide. Or at least it can’t be right that they are legally excluded from such a key decision. It can’t be a woman’s right to choose. That gives women too much power and men too little.
It’s pure speculation, obviously, how these attitudes and moral impulses mix to make for pro-life advocacy as we know it. But I just want to note that the third impulse – the moral sense that a women’s right to choose is an affront to rightful male oversight over women and the business of life – may be satisfied or substantially assuaged by a figure like Trump turning pro-choice.
The thinking/feeling (call it what you will) will run like so.
It’s very bad that the Supreme Court gave this freedom to women, back in the bad Roe days. But for a certified patriarchal authority figure – someone whom no one would accuse of being shy about asserting power over women: he’s known to have assaulted them! – to give this freedom back to women, in a lordly, dispensing way, after wresting the privilege of doing so back from the Supreme Court, by main political force, by the power of his judge picks, and in exchange for some measure of support for him from women – well, that looks like recovery of the natural order of things. If women would thank conservatives for providing the right to abortion, then conservatives could be reconciled to it.
It’s not so bad to have abortions. It’s bad for women to have the right to choose rather than men rightfully have the choice of letting them – or not. And then, with that settled, the man can choose that the women may choose. All is as it should be, in hierarchical, patriarchal terms. Abortion ceases to be an affront to male moral authority.
I could fill in why this is almost certainly how Trump feels about it. He obviously isn’t pro-choice or pro-life in principle. He’s pro-Trump. So if abortion could become a sort of Trump-brand product – well, that would be all to the glory of Trump! It would cease to be disagreeably associated with women not doing what men tell them.
You see where this is going. A lot of pro-lifers have a sense that the issue isn’t running their way, electorally. I think a lot of them may be fine with Trump giving them this face-saving appropriation of the pro-choice position, especially if it means they don’t have to lose the election due to pro-choice women beating them at the ballot box. Having won Dobbs, it is settled who’s your Daddy. Trump. Now Daddy can say what goes – including choice. As he chooses.
I dunno. We’ll see whether Trump manages to make the pivot without pro-lifers peeling off.
Am I all wrong? Tell me so, then.
Further thought #1: If it’s the third thing and/or the second, is it all misogyny? Yes and no. I suspect it’s better to place the accent, especially in the 3rd case, on patriarchy. All men who subscribe to patriarchy are hostile to – misogynist against – women who don’t.
Further thought #2: re the third, it isn’t just women having too much autonomy, it’s liberal values invading a man’s castle (by invading the very body of his woman). Before Roe abortion didn’t code liberal. But it does now. For conservative women, too. But could Trump transvalue that value, by sheer force of will, for his base, by choosing to go pro-choice?
Further thought #3: this is sort of an ‘only Nixon could go to China’ argument. Only a conservative who was known to be capable of aggression against women could credibly go pro-choice without it coding as weakness.
Further thought #4: some comments are reformulating the third one, the impulse to control. Yes, I may not have nailed it. And, in fact, the impulse to control women’s bodies takes different forms, I’m sure.
{ 129 comments }
M Caswell 09.01.24 at 1:45 pm
There’s a much simpler, non-psychologizing explanation. If you “know” he’s lying about a federal ban, don’t pro-life voters also “know” that?
SusanC 09.01.24 at 1:48 pm
Hmm… maybe …
But also, our mainstream political parties seem to be heavily engaged in what, for want of a better term, might be called moral frog boiling.
So the voters find themselves supporting guys that they ought, by previously stated principles, find morally abhorent. But, you know, lesser evil argument and they hate the opposing candidate even more.
Hunter K. 09.01.24 at 2:02 pm
I think the Occam’s Razor answer is simply: evangelicals are very comfortable with the idea of Trump lying as a means to an end and they trust his actions over his words–as we all should.
John Holbo 09.01.24 at 2:20 pm
Some comments are already suggesting the obvious: he’s lying, duh. And his followers know it, duh. I am sure he is not seriously promising. Trump isn’t capable of making a promise about this or any other thing. But I do think Trump would pivot to actually taking a pro-choice stance if he could, not just before the election but after, if it would secure his position more than way. The question is: would his base let him, if he really pushed it? I dunno.
I certainly hope no pro-choice voters trust him for an instant if he tries.
superdestroyer 09.01.24 at 2:40 pm
If one interacts with a pro-lifer for more than a few minutes, they will eventually call women who experience contraception failures irresponsible, sl-ts, or something worse. This shows that pro-lifers really want to punish women who they believe are having sex with the wrong men (that is men who are not employed, a good provider, and who are not husbands). Pro-lifers believe that if they increase the downside risks of an unplanned pregnancy, then women will stop having so much sex with horrible men.
SusanC 09.01.24 at 3:08 pm
I have the disconcerting thought that maybe many political opinions aren’t strongly held..
a) Maybe the Republican party is all about delivering tax cuts to rich people, and all the rest of it is just smoke and mirrors
b) Or maybe they just hate Democrats, and any actual policy positon is highly secondary to sticking it to liberals
Harry 09.01.24 at 4:35 pm
Pro-choicers won’t believe him even if they’re idiots (and even if he were manifestly sincere, if you can imagine that counterfactual, which I’m not sure I can) — he just doesn’t have time for the message to cut through to them. Or anyone much. Especially with the counter-messages.
“personhood begins at conception, hence deserves protection from that point. But very few really believe that, because the position has extreme implications few find acceptable (no IVF, no exceptions for rape or incest and probably not always even in the case of the life of the mother, and abortion should almost always be punished as murder.)”
If you remove the “hence deserves protection from that point”, I’m not sure it has any of those implications (and anyway, people seem to find it easy to really sincerely believe X, and also really sincerely not believe Y, even though X implies Y). But what it definitely does imply is that miscarriage is by a huge distance the greatest public health issue of our time, which nobody seems to believe.
qwerty 09.01.24 at 4:58 pm
Out of curiosity: when does “personhood” “begin” in blogger’s opinion and why?
Cranky Observer 09.01.24 at 5:06 pm
It isn’t necessarily Democrats or even liberals: the hard Radical Right contains a very larger portion, approaching 100%, of people who enjoy seeing other human beings punished. Particularly those they deem their inferiors, but once-peers who fell from grace (e.g. “loose women”) will do. As long as punishment is being ladled on to someone and they can exult in it no inconsistency/contradiction/hypocrisy of policy or even religious principles matters to them. And they vote accordingly.
politicalfootball 09.01.24 at 5:48 pm
I don’t think in the current context — with all the activism and voter energy around Dobbs — Trump could make the case that he is voluntarily acknowledging reproductive rights.
Now if those damn women would just shut up about this stuff, maybe Trump might find it in his heart to be generous with them. (Except, no, that’s not how it works, either.)
pointyshinyburning 09.01.24 at 6:33 pm
One even less accepted implication of the personhood-at-conception theory is that enormous medical effort would have to be directed at saving the ~60% of pregnancies that fail “pre clinically”, that is after conception but before the first missed period. These outnumber abortions in the US by an order of magnitude and yet I don’t hear much from the pro-life movement about an enormous research program to save all these dying children…
Jay Arcey 09.01.24 at 6:36 pm
There’s also the Trump = Cyrus analogy, not an uncommon justification in some evangelical circles apparently. Persian king Cyrus destroyed Babylon and liberated the Israelites. JWHW used the bad unbeliever to achieve a good result for believers. No need to pretend to believe him, or believe he believes anything at all, one way or the other. Bad despots make good policy!
Chet Murthy 09.01.24 at 7:08 pm
John,
Perhaps you’re unaware of the history of how gestation slavery became a conservative cause celebre. It wasn’t by accident, and it wasn’t some long-standing thing. It was a choice by segregationist leaders of Protestant churches. They realized that segregation wasn’t working, and they were losing supporters. At the time, Protestant denominations didn’t have positions on abortion, or heck, thought it was perfectly OK. But these leaders decided they wanted more supporters, and they found them in the Catholic church. By embracing gestation slavery, these segregationists bolstered their numbers, and were able to use that to push back on racial equality.
Here’s a Guardian article about it: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/08/abortion-us-religious-right-racial-segregation
You can’t give up on gestation slavery, without losing all those supporters (and since then, generations have grown up in Protestant churches believing in gestation slavery — so you wouldn’t just be losing Catholics, but also various evangelicals). B/c those guys aren’t going to sit still for women getting their rights, even if given by some magnanimous President Trump. I mean, that’s just going to make him a traitor to the cause. Recall that back in 2021 Trump went to a couple of rallies and touted vaccines, said everybody should get ’em, touted his Project Warp Speed. He got roundly booed. And he never tried it again: indeed, lately he’s promised he’ll deny Federal funding to any school that has a vaccine mandate of any kind. Any. Kind.
You’re making the mistake of thinking that Trump is a leader — that he tells his Base what to think. But that’s not exactly accurate. Some wag said that political leader is someone who sees a parade forming and rushes to the head of it. That’s more what Trump did: he saw a mass of Neanderthal racist/misogynist/white supremacists, and rushed to the head of the mass.
If he betrays them, they will turn on him. Which is why he will NEVER betray them.
somebody who remembers safe legal and rare 09.01.24 at 7:37 pm
Chet @ 13 gets to the core of it. I would add that the racialized nature of anti-abortion advocacy is equally important to understand. black protestants have quite conservative religious beliefs on many other subjects but they run ahead of every other religious group in america on abortion rights (other than “unaffiliated”). anti-abortion campaigners routinely try to hit them with “ah but there’s so many abortions of black children it’s a GENOCIDE” and the black protestant congregations don’t buy it because they know what’s actually behind this purported religious belief in personhood-at-conception. it’s just another piece of the white supremacist racket. you dont even have to follow the money – it’s literally the same organizations many times.
every abortion provider in america sees people come off the protester line where they throw pigs blood on nurses and come in for their abortion, then go right back to planting car bombs. it isn’t hypocrisy because 1) even if they win they know they’ll always have access to abortion somehow – they’re white, and 2) they don’t see themselves as a Sl*t Who Lives In The City And Just Fucks Whoever She Wants For Fun And Gets An Abortion If She Gets Pregnant, the actual target of their advocacy.
This cryptid has never been seen, and careful consideration of its purported activities indicate that it could never, in fact, exist, but she haunts the american mind. you can even find people on the left sometimes modifying their decisionmaking, moderating their beliefs on reproductive health policies based on the SWLITCAJFWSWFFAGAAISGP’s long, dark shadow. you would think we could find at least a few hundred specimens of the species after investing so much money in considering her actions. but of course nobody can find even one, and people are not really that interested in looking. like all nightmares you can’t banish her by shining a flashlight under the bed to show nothing’s there. america hates women on a passionate, frantic level and that hate is sometimes going to manifest in ways that don’t make rational sense and can’t be altered by “evidence”. people know she’s out there, Fucking Whoever She Wants For Fun And Getting An Abortion If She Gets Pregnant, and no amount of pointing out that she isn’t will ever shake this knowledge. therefore they will take onerous action to stop her.
Seekonk 09.01.24 at 8:13 pm
@12 Trump = Cyrus, the bad unbeliever to achieve a good result for believers
It can also be argued that the supernatural actor behind Trump’s elevation is Satan, who cares not a fig about abortion, but who sees in Trump an instrument to provide corrupt and venal rewards for his satanic minions on earth.
Anders Widebrant 09.01.24 at 8:14 pm
I’ll second Harry that Trump has neither the time nor the attention span nor a plausible chorus of willing and ready amplifiers needed to pull off a pivot on abortion.
Mr_Spoon 09.01.24 at 8:35 pm
“Trump lying” is not a thing in the political arena any more. He just does it incessantly like a perverse bodily function; the notion that it can change pro-Trumpists into anti-Trumpists or vice-versa is quaint in 2024. I still have faint hope that “Trump changing sides” still has some tackiness but judging by how even expressed Trump haters in the GOP swallow his exudates and declare their support for him sooner or later, I suspect this is a non-starter too. And most frustratingly, I obviously still don’t grok why people continue to support him at all.
Cheryl Rofer 09.01.24 at 9:06 pm
The problem with Daddy Trump granting abortion rights to subordinate women is that it’s a once-and-done. Once they’ve got those rights, who knows what they’ll do! Now, if it were set up so that he or his subordinates were given the ability to grant a right one sl-t at a time, that might preserve the patriarchial power.
oldster 09.01.24 at 9:24 pm
qwerty @8:
“Out of curiosity: when does “personhood” “begin” in blogger’s opinion and why?”
After your username and email address have been verified.
J, not that one 09.01.24 at 11:30 pm
“But what it definitely does imply is that miscarriage is by a huge distance the greatest public health issue of our time, which nobody seems to believe.”
While probably nobody would say that preventing miscarriage is a pressing political issue, there are enough who would argue that any one particular miscarriage was probably either a mask for a voluntary abortion or the pregnant woman’s fault. The need to be able to question any one or another woman’s morals, the unwillingness to grant privacy in the case, overrides any desire for conceptual coherence.
Those who feel that way rightly see Trump as supporting them.
Alan White 09.01.24 at 11:50 pm
I also second Harry’s comments. Belief in full moral standing at conception is completely factually underdetermined. Since in cases of embryonic fission or fusion (twinning or heterozygotes) human individuality is not biologically determined until implantation, that counts heavily against the belief that a zygote has individual full moral standing (even if it has partial standing–as does a corpse that may not be indiscriminately violated–but no such being may be murdered as does one that possesses full moral standing). At least that then would mitigate the “public health issue” Harry suggests: that spontaneous emission of unimplanted embryos occurs in an estimated 15-40% of conceived zygotes. Prior to implantation (a week or two after conception) then there is little reason to believe the “life begins at conception” in any serious moral sense.
J-D 09.02.24 at 1:26 am
Thinking that America is exceptionally bad is also a kind of American exceptionalism. Don’t think you’re so special.
J-D 09.02.24 at 1:28 am
There are some things which ‘begin’ and there are some things which don’t. What makes ‘qwerty’ think that ‘personhood’ is the kind of thing which ‘begins’?
John Holbo 09.02.24 at 2:16 am
“Out of curiosity: when does “personhood” “begin” in blogger’s opinion and why?”
I think it’s unknowable and/or we don’t know. Uncomfortable but facts is facts.
Alex SL 09.02.24 at 3:51 am
I am not close to this discourse and not even in the USA, but from what I read about it from the outside, this doesn’t seem like a plausible scenario to me. Agreed, the issue is very much tied up with patriarchy, as the radical Christians never had an issue with abortion when one could expect the patriarch to make the decision for the wife or daughter in question. I also agree that the moral impetus of the movement comes from visceral disgust (“mass murder of babies”) as opposed to ethical reasoning of any kind (e.g., consequentialism, which would lead to free distribution of contraceptives and holding men responsible too, or deontology, where “life is holy” would have to lead to also being anti-war and anti-gun with the same zeal as being anti-abortion).
But now it seems to have grown beyond that starting point and has become half shibboleth, half stick to beat poor women with out of pure hatred. You could just as well have Trump come out for gun control or for increasing immigration from Mexico – there are a few core markers of identity that appear non-negotiable, and I would find it more plausible that the right could make a pivot on climate action or mask wearing than on something like abortion. And the kinds of mothers who protest abortion clinics and then have their 16yo daughter get one because “this is different, she just made a mistake, and we can’t ruin her future” aren’t doing this because it would be okay if we went back to patriarchy. They do it because they hate poor/black people and believe those should be punished with poverty for making mistakes, while wealthy/white people should get second and third and fourth chances.
Chet Murthy 09.02.24 at 3:54 am
Re: “when does personhood begin?”
It’s also an irrelevant question: it’s well-established that you can’t be forced to donate your bodily services to another person, howsoever fully-begun that person is. So no woman should be forced to donate -her- bodily services to a fetus. I forget which feminist philosopher came up with that series of thought experiments.
someone who lives in a place 09.02.24 at 4:12 am
You are indeed correct, J-D, that the hatred of women has occurred in many places and times, in many forms, but the post was about America, today, hence my comment implies no special position for America other than “a nation we are presently talking about.”
SusanC 09.02.24 at 7:44 am
There’s an antinomian quality to Trump.
Maybe his tendency to violate every taboo in sight is part of what makes him attractive to his base. In which case: becoming pro-choice is just more violation of the sacred.
I mean, if Aleister Crowley or Anton LaVey were running for President, you’ld expect this kind of policy pivot. (The gag, “Why choose the lesser evil?” has been done before)
Tm 09.02.24 at 8:22 am
“So is Trump going to be able to pivot to pro-choice in the run-up to the election? I mean: he’s trying.”
Is he? What am I missing? Some either credulous or outright deceptive mainstream journos have been trying to make that claim based on zero evidence. Trump promised to vote to uphold the 6 week ban and the GOP platform endorses fetal personhood in language that everybody who hasn’t just fallen out of a coconut tree understands. Where is he even trying to pretend otherwise?
SusanC: “our mainstream political parties seem to be heavily engaged in what, for want of a better term, might be called moral frog boiling.”
What are you talking about? The fascist party decided to go all in with total abortion bans. A frog boiling strategy of more slowly chipping away at abortion rights might have been more electorally successful but they couldn’t muster the discipline to go that route and are paying a heavy electoral price for it.
As to the Democrats, what are you talking about?
Tm 09.02.24 at 8:49 am
“Thinking that America is exceptionally bad is also a kind of American exceptionalism.”
It seems noteworthy that most European right wing parties, even those ideologically closely aligned with Trumpist fascism, have not followed the American lead to directly attack abortion rights. Le Pen even voted in favor of a constitutional right to abortion. She decided it wasn’t worthwhile taking an unpopular position on that issue. Meloni has made some anto abortion noises but no actual policy change (correct me if I’m wrong). The AFD as far as I’m aware doesn’t mention the issue at all. The Spanish Conservatives tried to restrict abortion rights 10 years ago but quickly capitulated to public push-back.
Apart from the very Catholic Poland, I’m not aware of any country that recently restricted abortion rights. So the US, parts of the US, is really exceptional in that respect.
Matt 09.02.24 at 10:39 am
Apart from the very Catholic Poland, I’m not aware of any country that recently restricted abortion rights. So the US, parts of the US, is really exceptional in that respect.
Putin has also moved to restict abortion, no doubt partly for demographic reasons, but also for “traditionalist” ones he’s all in on. It’s pretty unpopular (even as the society there gets more and more religious) so has been limited so far, but there’s a strong desire to move that way. https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/11/28/russia-limits-womens-access-to-abortion-citing-demographic-changes
Hungary has also made abortions harder to get, and already has pretty restrictive laws: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-62892596
The leader of the Liberal (sic) party in Australia, Lord Voldemort, er, Peter Dutton, has “voted consistently against reproductive bodily autonomy”. He hasn’t had the chance to try to put that into law yet, but if able, I don’t doubt he’d try: https://theyvoteforyou.org.au/people/representatives/dickson/peter_dutton/policies/281
Anna M 09.02.24 at 10:53 am
I doubt Trump would propose any concessions on abortion bans because (a) they wouldn’t impact “the people who actually matter”; (b) they are popular with his base; and (c) they are useful for capital.
I also don’t think Trump would be likely to pivot in rhetoric, as that would be perceived as both weakness and an admission that appealing to views outside the base is necessary to win an election (neither of which would be acceptable, even if it were understood to be a deception).
John Holbo 09.02.24 at 10:55 am
Interesting discussion. I ran an informal twitter poll asking: if Trump could, he would turn the R party pro-choice (because he doesn’t want to go to prison for his crimes.) True/False.”
Response is running 75% ‘true’. This is my intuition, too. So Trump has motive. But does he have means? There are two barriers. No one on the left should trust him. No one on the right will let him. I agree that the first barrier may and should hold. But what about the second? I think it’s an open question.
LFC 09.02.24 at 11:12 am
My intuition is that a lot of the opposition to abortion is more principled (though not necessarily in a philosophically sophisticated way) than the OP suggests. Some of it is about patriarchy and men wanting to exercise their power over women, but not all of it.
Second point is that if Trump loses the election, it’s very far from certain that he will ever (to quote OP) “go to jail for his crimes.”
Sorry if this duplicates other comments. Haven’t read most of thread.
oldster 09.02.24 at 12:14 pm
LFC @34 –
“ Some of it is about patriarchy and men wanting to exercise their power over women, but not all of it.”
I think that’s right, and it should not be too hard to imagine some of the other impulses. I am intensely pro-choice, and I think the impulses are confused and misguided, but I can still imagine them.
For many anti-abortion activists, fetuses are a kind of charismatic megafauna. You think polar bears and lemurs are cute, and you weep over the loss of polar ice and rain forests. You don’t think either species is human, but things that we find cute have a power over us whether they are human or not. (Cf. kittens, puppies, baby elephants, etc.).
You also feel protective of things that you think are cute: if you heard that polar bear cubs were being slaughtered by the thousands, you’d be moved to protect them.
So, the impulse to think that abortion is killing cute helpless animals does not have to originate in misogyny. It can originate in the confusion that fetuses are like baby seals — helpless, appealing, in need of protection, etc..
There is plenty of room for misogyny at the later stages, when you write women out of the scenario (fetuses floating in a void, no woman around) and ignore the demands of women and the injuries done to them.
But I suspect that for many anti-abortion people, the initial impulse is no different from what others feel about baby seals.
It’s confused, but if you want to understand your opponents, then you need to understand their confusions, too.
J-D 09.02.24 at 12:15 pm
Fair enough, I’ll give you that.
But how many of the world’s nearly 200 countries have you checked up on?
The law was made more restrictive in El Salvador in 1998, in Nicaragua in 2006, in the Dominican Republic in 2009 and in Honduras in 2021; that’s not mentioning examples where there have been recent efforts to make the law less restrictive and they have failed.
Tm 09.02.24 at 1:09 pm
J-D: I explicitly focused on Europe. Latin America seems to go strongly in the direction of liberalization, of course with exceptions. European countries have mostly – albeit to different degrees – liberalized abortion access already decades ago and some (Ireland) have done so recently (Malta is the exception that never liberalized at all).
Some eastern European Countries have recently gone in the other direction. I’m not familiar with all of these in detail but Hungary for example has enacted the kind of regulation that some US states had already before Dobbs, which is still far from an outright ban. To my knowledge no European country has gone even remotely as far as US states like Texas in rolling back abortion rights, with the exception of the Very Catholic Poland.
European right wing parties are just as misogynic than the GOP but most of them have chosen not to make banning abortion a primary campaign issue, because they recognize it would be too unpopular. That seems worth pointing out.
Harry 09.02.24 at 2:20 pm
I was in San Francisco 18 months ago and met a friend at the edge of a rally for abortion rights that was being led by the Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party, a local of leader of which was shouting through a megaphone “Restore Roe Versus Wade”. We both laughed, because the idea of someone who wants 5 old men to decide for a whole country whether abortion is legal calling themselves a revolutionary communist seemed… peculiar.
Abortion rights were decided in the US through judicial fiat and, unsurprisingly, were then taken away by judicial fiat. So instead of public opinion driving, or changing with, the behaviour of political parties, as in most if not all European countries, the issue (like many) festered in the US. And the peculiarity of the primary system, in which a single-issue minority can capture a party without actually getting very involved in politics, combined with rigorous state control of the political parties ensuring that it is effectively impossible for third political party to emerge and compete, meant that the 20% of voters who think abortion should (nearly) always be illegal (something hardly anyone in northern Europe, where the law was changed through political means) can exert outsized influence.
Hence the contrast Tm notes between the US and Europe. Maybe having a tiny superlegislature membership of which is a life appointment distorts political discourse. I wouldn’t recommend it to other countries.
I also think LFC and oldster are right about motivations. Its been many many years now since I spent weekends getting up at absurd hours to defend abortion clinics, and I never enjoyed it much, but always spent a lot of time talking with the protestors, many of whom were motivated in much the way oldster suggests and were real people, not the caricatures that some of our commenters seem to enjoy portraying: similarly the less politically active people I still frequently talk to who believe abortion is wrong (but, most of those I talk to, think it should be legal).
steven t johnson 09.02.24 at 2:20 pm
Possibly relevant to discussion:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy547v72nd4o
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-florida-abortion-ban-amendment-vote/
J, not that one 09.02.24 at 2:57 pm
I think the issue however is not whether the opposition to abortion is principled but whether the support for Trump is.
qwerty 09.02.24 at 3:30 pm
@John Holbo, 24
“I think it’s unknowable and/or we don’t know.”
Sounds like correcting the delusion you attribute to your nemeses doesn’t help your case (whatever it is) at all.
And by the way, according most media reports I checked today, “a federal ban” that “they will (almost certainly?) try to do” is likely to ban abortion on demand after X number of weeks of pregnancy; e.g.: https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/4857898-ohio-bernie-moreno-abortion-restrictions/ . Which further undermines your assertion (or relevancy of it, anyway) that “Yes, there are some who sincerely believe – probably on religious grounds – that personhood begins at conception“.
J, not that one 09.02.24 at 3:36 pm
@33 I think this is really “I think if the Rs were a rational party they’d support reproductive rights because it’s a winning platform and they’d get listened to for their other pretty good proposals.” It’s not about the plausibility of this being how Trump actually thinks. This is kind of idle talk about how people wish the world was.
someone who wasn't born yesterday 09.02.24 at 8:26 pm
@qwerty @ 41 – believing they’ll stop at a 6 week ban seems like the previous consensus “savvy” belief that the same people would never try to overturn roe v wade because of the negative electoral consequences. i mean believe it if you want.
perhaps even they will believe it as well, for a day or two. but in the small hours of the night they will sit up suddenly. “honey, wake up! i heard a noise! i think it’s a slut who lives in the city and just fucks whoever she wants for fun and gets an abortion if she gets pregnant?!” and the work for the total ban will begin again and maybe it’ll take a year or maybe it’ll take two or even more!
one thing i can promise is that every step of the way the new york times will be telling us that, actually, making seeking an abortion at any time for any reason, a felony punishable by 20 years hard labor, is good centrist moderate thinking. “after all,” bret stephens will write, “we all know who lives in the city and fucks whoever she wants for fun and gets an abortion if she gets pregnant.” another seven figure check will then go to him for these genius thoughts.
politicalfootball 09.02.24 at 8:58 pm
But what about the second? I think it’s an open question.
You are correctly questioning the root of Trump’s appeal, which does not lie in the specific policy positions he holds, but (as you suggest) the worldview that underlies those positions. You could see a scenario where he gave up tariffs (“Let the shithole countries do all the crappy work”) as long as he didn’t dial back his loathing of foreigners.
The real root of Trump’s appeal isn’t even racism or sexism or xenophobia. It’s his grant of permission for people to be as awful as they want to be — whatever their particular awfulness is. This is what “freedom” means to a Trumpist.
And so yeah, freedom from any kind of moral commitment is a feature of Trumpism. There’s no reason for anyone to suppose that he cares — or has even considered — the point at which a morally consequential human life begins. “We have always been at war with Dobbs,” he can say.
But why? What would his rationale be? Naked opportunism? His supporters could get behind that, but as you point out, that’s not really a viable electoral strategy here.
Patriarchal generosity? That’s a value that many of his supporters accept in their personal lives, but it’s not generosity if the law compels it. Roe was a violation of their sacred freedom.
The motivations behind the anti-abortion stance are powerful and principled — even if the principles don’t actually involve the sanctity of human life. Without some compelling reason (which I argue you haven’t provided) there is no way for Trump to actually reverse himself here. (We all understand that he could lie about it. His supporters trust him to lie when the truth is unwieldy.)
Tm 09.02.24 at 9:03 pm
qwerty, just to clarify, the point of a federal ban would be to overturn abortion rights in liberal states while leaving the total bans in fascist states in place. In addition, Trump would with absolute certainty act to ban Mifepriston, which he wouldn’t need Congress for. No doubt the executive orders are already drawn up. The point of such legislation isn’t to protect fetuses but to make life miserable for women. As you probably know, there has been no decrease in the number of abortions after Dobbs.
Tm 09.02.24 at 9:12 pm
“Watching Donald Trump trying to have it both ways on abortion would be hilarious if the prospect of his election didn’t signal the end of democracy in America (and if the media wasn’t simultaneously trying to make a big fuss out of Kamala Harris moving to the center on some issues).”
https://www.publicnotice.co/p/florida-amendment-4-trump-abortion-flip-flop
J-D 09.02.24 at 11:53 pm
I notice that (disappointingly but unsurprisingly) qwerty isn’t explaining what their position is.
I’ve got no problem explaining what my position is. My position is that there should be no criminal penalties for terminating pregnancies. My reason for taking this position is that imposing criminal penalties for terminating pregnancies does harm and no good.
I don’t have experience of encountering people who argue against abortion (not in person, anyway), but what I would say if I did would (I imagine) be something like ‘Are you suggesting that my parents should have been sent to prison? What good do you think that would have done?’ I guess you could say I’d be introducing into the discussion something that would play the role of ‘charismatic megafauna’ for my point of view.
LFC 09.03.24 at 12:18 am
someone who wasn’t born yesterday @43
The only time the New York Times, or any newspaper, speaks in its institutional capacity is in its unsigned editorials. Bret Stephens is not the New York Times, neither is David Brooks, neither is Ross Douthat, neither is Jamelle Bouie, neither is Michelle Goldberg, neither is whoever else writes for their op-ed page.
So when Bret Stephens writes something on the op-ed page, the NYT really isn’t telling us anything beyond the fact that it employs him. The only time the NYT tells us something as the NYT is in its unsigned editorials where the editorial board speaks as a collective (at least, such editorials used to be unsigned — I have a digital sub but confess to reading the NYT only very selectively).
Tm 09.03.24 at 7:35 am
LFC: “The only time the NYT tells us something as the NYT is in its unsigned editorials where the editorial board speaks as a collective”
This is an amazing take even for your standards. The writings of Stephens et al (or Haberman et al) in the NYT are not “the NYT telling us something”, they are simply Stephens (or Haberman etc.) telling us something and they just happen to write in the NYT. How come they just happen to write there? Can anybody just write in the NYT if they feel like telling the world something?
You LFC seem to be arguing a “view from nowhere”, as you often do. You are talking as if you, we, the NYT editors and publishers and everybody else, all just fell out of a coconut tree, as if we didn’t have background information allowing us to evaluate for example the publication practice of the NYT.
The fact that people like Stephens, Dowd, Douthat, Paul (Stephens’ former spouse btw) and many others are employed (handsomely) by the NYT to write poorly argued propaganda pieces that almost always are full of factual inaccuracies that the editorial process at this austere institution somehow doesn’t catch or (more likely) doesn’t care about does, I would argue, tell us something about what the NYT institutionally stands for.
The American media is deeply broken at least since 2016, when they failed – and have ever since failed – to adequately and factually accurately cover Trump’s corruption, vileness, deception, authoritarianism, and incompetence. Fortunately there is a great deal of excellent media criticism around but it can’t make up for the utter failure of mainstream news organizations in the face of the biggest threat to democracy and freedom of the press in US history.
https://presswatchers.org/2024/08/fact-checking-does-a-hopefully-fatal-face-plant/
https://www.emptywheel.net/2024/08/28/as-maggie-haberman-unabashedly-joins-the-kayfabe-tim-walz-sings-the-menards-jingle/
Tm 09.03.24 at 7:55 am
politicalfootball: “the root of Trump’s appeal, which does not lie in the specific policy positions he holds, but (as you suggest) the worldview that underlies those positions. You could see a scenario where he gave up tariffs (“Let the shithole countries do all the crappy work”) as long as he didn’t dial back his loathing of foreigners.”
Tariffs is an interesting example because there is good evidence that Trump voters mostly supported free trade – until Trump started telling them otherwise. It contradicts the thesis that trump just told his base what they wanted to hear.
International trade is policy question that most people don’t really care about in itself. What matters is the way it’s connected to the world view. Trump successfully integrated tariffs into a framework of nationalism, isolationism, anti-globalism and xenophobia.
What amazes me is that this framework works despite Trump himself and (and Kushner and others in his family) being a globalist plutocrat, a descendant of immigrants married to immigrant wives, employing undocumented workers in his biusinesses, etc. Of course, all that pales in comparison to the feat of making a godless, multiply divorced adulterer cum sexual abuser the standard bearer of traditional morality.
To get back to abortion: to his base, it really matters that he claims to be anti-abortion. At the same time they do not care how many abortions he personally paid for. How to make sense of this i really really don’t know.
J-D 09.03.24 at 8:51 am
No, they’re also telling us that they think what he has written merits (for some reason) the publicity they have given it. They may not be saying ‘This is our opinion’ but they are saying ‘This is an opinion which should be heard, and more than it already has been’. If they employ him, they are under no obligation to print what he writes.
Also, the patterns in what they choose to print (I don’t know what they are, because I don’t read newspapers, but there must be patterns) say a bit more.
Tm 09.03.24 at 11:24 am
Anything wrong with my comment responding to LFC? Is two links too much?
Anna M 09.03.24 at 11:33 am
Harry, 38
I cannot (and have no wish to) speak for other people, but from my perspective it is easy to believe both (a) that the US’s rollback on access to abortion highlights the failure of the system to meaningfully protect its citizens, demonstrating the need for revolution rather than reform and (b) that fighting against this rollback is an important part of class solidarity (even though it does not address the root causes). I can’t help but wonder if you might find this sort of position less peculiar if you considered engaging with the left with the same degree of generosity of spirit as you do when engaging with conservatives? Regardless, I would say there is a potentially interesting discussion to be had regarding the merits of decriminalisation and legalisation (particularly if, like me, you have little confidence in the state), but I am wary of the suggestion that one is inherently “superior” to the other – anything which is granted may be withheld, and that goes equally for political and judicial fiat.
I am glad to hear of your positive interactions with conservatives – after all, there is no better standard for judging people supporting a system which superordinates bourgeoisie white men then how they behave when interacting with a bourgeoisie white man! OK, that is perhaps a little unfair – however, don’t you find it a little odd that the minority of those wanting severe abortion restrictions are able to wield such influence over the republican party but not the democrats? It seems almost as if there is some degree of correlation between that and other conservative positions, and that other conservatives are not so opposed to increased restrictions as to press the issue…
Might I gently suggest that how people behave when affecting others’ material conditions is rather a more important metric than how they’ve come to that position? After all, I don’t particularly care if someone believes that abortion is wrong or not, I care whether they support a society in which abortion is available! The fact of the matter is that while there may be a majority of conservatives who are personally accepting of “the right sort of people” being immigrants, having abortions, getting married, etc., it seems that (a) the limits they place are narrow and (b) they are not so uncomfortable with the injustice they lend their support to as to actually oppose it – no matter how personable or reasonable they may seem to be on an individual level. Someone who regretfully supports a political party that will ban something is – for all practical purposes – acting the same as someone who does so gleefully. The counterargument you seem to be advocating is that through understanding and gentle discussion those who fit the former category will be persuaded even if the minority of the latter aren’t – and this will be reflected in changes within the political landscape. If that is true, perhaps it would be worth considering why this doesn’t seem to have happened during last 50 years or so, and what would actually change that?
From my perspective, focus on the individual is distracting – and this is generally the case. The point should not be “are there individual good police?”, “are there individual good millionaires?”, “are there individual good conservatives?”, etc. The point should be “is the system working to generate inequality, and if so are these people hindering or helping changing that?”. I am, therefore, sceptical that appealing to “good conservatives” will generate meaningful abortion reform for the same reason I am sceptical that appealing to “good police” will reform the justice system, or to “good men” and “good millionaires” reform patriarchy and capitalism. The purpose of a system is what it does – the only effective measure is to change the system, and when people defend a system which causes harm they are in fact directly contributing to that harm (regardless of intent).
Harry 09.03.24 at 1:29 pm
Anna M: “I am glad to hear of your positive interactions with conservatives – after all, there is no better standard for judging people supporting a system which superordinates bourgeoisie white men then how they behave when interacting with a bourgeoisie white man!”
As I say it’s 3 decades or more since I was doing clinic defences, but if your experiences of them have been that the protestors were white men, bourgeois or otherwise, that’s very different from mine! (admittedly, mainly in Los Angeles, which may explain the demographics. One of the discomforting things about the defences was finding people on the other side who were active with me in the Central American solidarity movement, and the striking racial and class contrast between the entirely white middle class people on my side, and the mainly non-white and substantially not middle class people among the protestors. Not a situation I was accustomed to in my by then decade or so of left-wing political activism).
Otherwise: I’m not sure what I said that you disagreed with so much, because I don’t really recognise most what your saying as disagreeing with anything I said! (What makes you think engage with people on the left with less generosity of spirit than that with which I approach conservatives?) Then again, its early morning.
My main point was that the Supreme Court short-circuited the kind of process that reconciles people to losing in politics. Abortion went from being illegal nearly throughout the US to being legal throughout it without any political or public debate at all. In most other countries where abortion is legal the decision was made by legislatures and/or referenda. It is no longer politically divisive (indeed is politically settled) in most of those countries, and that’s not (just) because the US is so far to the political right but because on many issues it is just better to bring people with you than to present them with a fait accompli. (Same Sex marriage is not the same story — by the time the Supreme Court made its fiat on that, civil partnerships had been introduced throughout most of the States, and same-sex marriage had been legislated in several states and legalised by state supreme courts in several others (Utah!). Brown… well that’s very complicated, and I think the evidence is reasonably clear that the long-term effects of Brown on inequality of educational outcomes between Black and white children have been positive, but it’s not as if it’s straightforward).
I didn’t mean to imply anyone is to blame by the way (except perhaps the founders!). Political movements don’t get to decide how litigation gets used, still less what Courts decide, and Courts have to do the business in front of them. I was just offering one explanation of the phenomenon correctly noted by Tm.
J, not that one 09.03.24 at 2:06 pm
I doubt that protesters are representative of anti-abortion Trump voters or of “low information voters” who feel generally that it’s wrong or just icky.
I also doubt that one can pick and choose which opinions are representative of some legitimate “traditional” belief system that has to be considered privileged until the people who hold those opinions have had their minds changed. (How would that even work? There seems to be an assumption that at some point the extreme “traditional” position just gives up.) Studies do not bear out the idea that at some time in the past everyone held extreme anti-abortion positions and that has only changed recently.
Tm 09.03.24 at 2:15 pm
@Holbo Perhaps you think that the NYt debate is a digression but then you did allow LFC’s and J-Ds comments so I don’t see why my comment sahould be treated differentlyx. Furthermore I think it’s not off topic at all since one of the links I tried to post does explicitly deal with the NYT narrative about Trump’s abortion stance which has direct bearing on the question you are raising in the OP, to wit:
“Meanwhile, journalists treated with respect are increasingly pumping out Trump-scripted propaganda. Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan have been releasing increasingly supine coverage for months. They falsely reported that a platform that enshrines fetal personhood presented a “softened” GOP face on abortion.”
https://www.emptywheel.net/2024/08/28/as-maggie-haberman-unabashedly-joins-the-kayfabe-tim-walz-sings-the-menards-jingle/
So really I don’t know what’s your problem. My experience has been that you don’t always handle disagreement gracefully, but it’s not even you that I disagree with here.
someone who works for their money 09.03.24 at 4:05 pm
@LFC #48 – yes, it is a bit of a jest, as you may have noticed from the hyperbole in that paragraph, but i suggest that the real piece of evidence suggesting stephens (and pamela paul writing about trans people) is what “the NYT” Actually Believes is the enormous paychecks they offer for them to say shit on par with your average racist uncle facebook minion meme feed.
JHW 09.03.24 at 7:27 pm
It’s a tiny point (though potentially relevant to the larger issue), but Henry Farrell at 53 misstates the history of same-sex marriage in the United States. Taking out the states that got it by federal court order, even in 2015 only twenty states had marriage or civil unions, and except for Iowa and New Hampshire were all fairly blue, and mostly concentrated on the West and the Northeast. (Same-sex marriage was legalized in Utah by the Tenth Circuit, after the US Supreme Court denied review of that court’s ruling in October 2014.) The Supreme Court in Obergefell invalidated what was still decidedly the majority approach in the states, and the one dominant in wide swathes of the country.
The difference between Obergefell and Roe v. Wade is that many people sincerely believe that abortion is wrongful killing and there is no secular trend toward that belief going away. People absolutely believe this sincerely and the people who believe it sincerely provide most of the activist energy for the pro life cause. That people also acknowledge countervailing interests (such as the harm of forcing a rape victim to carry to term) doesn’t negate the sincerity, though of course the hard-line activists tend not to favor exceptions for rape (and would ban IVF too if they could). Whether Republican politicians themselves sincerely believe this is another question; the nature of the relationship between the conservative movement and attitudes about abortion is complicated, as Harry alludes, and it’s probably true that part of what drives abortion’s left/right valence is attitudes toward abortion, not any deep left or right commitment to whether fetuses are persons.
It’s experience with bans in the modern era that tends to drive a moderate pro choice consensus, as happened in Ireland. What Roe did was save pro-lifers from that political problem for 49 years. Now they have to deal with it. They don’t seem to have any good ideas. I don’t think they will abandon Trump, because what’s their alternative? But his weakness as an option for them is reflective of their political weakness.
JHW 09.03.24 at 8:18 pm
“Henry Farrell at 53” should be “Harry at 53” (my apologies to both)
“attitudes toward abortion” at end of second para should be “attitudes toward feminism/gender”
Need to stop writing these on my phone where it’s hard to look over before submitting.
Harry 09.03.24 at 9:24 pm
Thanks for correcting me JHW (and… people used to constantly confuse me and Henry in the earlier days of the blog — its nice having it happen again!). I think everything in the second and third paragraphs is right, and find it helpful to have it stated that way. As someone said when Dobbs was decided, the point of a culture war is not to win it: Dobbs deprived the Republicans of a substantial victory in 2022, negating the benefit they should have enjoyed from the school closings.
For what it’s worth, I do think there’s an explanation for why so many people continue to think abortion is wrongful killing: it’s a reasonable, if wrong, thing to believe, whereas there just aren’t reasons for thinking that homosexual sex is morally any different from heterosexual sex. Having spent 30+ years professionally engaging with the arguments for and against the moral permissibility of abortion I find it perplexing that so many people are so confident in their beliefs and think that the people who disagree with them are not at all responsive to reason. And unlike JH I think it is perfectly sensible to think abortion is wrong and should be legal (and indeed I think about half of people in US surveys who think abortion is wrong think it should be legal).
On the contrast between the legal status of same-sex marriage and abortion pre-Roe/Obergefell: again thanks for the correction. Even so the difference is big: pre-Roe I think abortion was illegal except in cases of rape, incest, or in which pregnancy would lead to permanent physical disability of the woman in all but 4 states (Hawaii, Alaska, Washington, NY), and in most states it wasn’t even legal in those cases. Even that situation was a liberalisation from a few years prior, mainly through legislation, not judicial fiat.
joeyjoejoe 09.03.24 at 9:30 pm
None of your declarations are remotely correct.
“Pro-choicers have always argued (clearly correctly) that a lot of the energy behind the pro-life position is not really pro-life, per se, more anti-something else.”
There is no evidence for this. Your examples (see below) flat out don’t make any sense.
“Yes, there are some who sincerely believe – probably on religious grounds – that personhood begins at conception, hence deserves protection from that point. But very few really believe that, because the position has extreme implications few find acceptable (no IVF, no exceptions for rape or incest and probably not always even in the case of the life of the mother, and abortion should almost always be punished as murder.)”
The entire anti-abortion view is based on the idea that personhood begins at conception. In order to prove that pro-life folks are insincere, you are creating weird logical inconsistencies that don’t exist. Just as I can be anti murder but pro military killing, and pro killing for self defense, and pro dangerous jobs that occasionally result in death (and pro driving cars even though sometimes people die in them), I can be anti-abortion without committing myself to no IVF, or excepions for rape, health of mother, etc. Logical inconsistency doesn’t require conscious hypocrisy. Life is fuzzier than that, in every values system.
“Also, if pro-lifers really felt this way they probably would be more in favor of social support for mothers who might choose to carry to term if they had better prospects for a better life for themselves and their future child.” Completely and utterly not true. I can be against murder, but utterly indifferent to the social condition of murders. I can be anti-abortion, and utterly indifferent to the social condition of mothers. This is an utterly specious argument.
“The proof that this attitude is common is the ready combination of anti-abortion but pro-IVF attitudes. A married mother seeking to have a child is not disgusting.”
What is this even saying? Of course having a child is different from killing a child. Its not even remotely inconsistent to be anti-abortion but pro IVF.
“Last but not least, many pro-lifers clearly find the sort of sexual freedom that goes with the right to abortion a standing affront to rightful patriarchal authority and control.”
How do you know? You’ve been in the echo chamber of academia so long, you can’t even recognize terrible arguments.
Joe
J, not that one 09.03.24 at 9:53 pm
@59 I believe pre Roe it was possible to get a legal abortion in many states if a physician agreed it was medically necessary, for reasons of either physical or mental health.
And although illegal, abortions without medical approval were common enough to have led to growth in public sentiment in favor of legalization. Published fiction bears out that women who had abortions were not universally demonized (movie and TV censorship would probably not have allowed similar depictions until fairly late).
What we’re seeing is the use of modern state surveillance to impose restrictions on activities that would have been let go by in the old days (when they would also have been less efficacious and would have come from folk practices rather than science), or on activities that laypeople find difficult to distinguish from “abortion” but are not abortion.
There’s a time and a place for debating people about what they should believe about ethics vis a vis abortion. What they do with their “change of mind” when they return to the community that asks them to live a certain way may be less clear than one would like. Some of us perhaps don’t see the point of sacrificing our emotional stability, trying to persuade ourselves that “they don’t really mean it” or “there must be a way I can talk better so they’ll listen to me.” And it’s very unclear why this is the right time to have that discussion at all.
Harry 09.03.24 at 10:31 pm
“@59 I believe pre Roe it was possible to get a legal abortion in many states if a physician agreed it was medically necessary, for reasons of either physical or mental health”
I don’t have the documentation to hand but I researched this pretty carefully last spring, and what I said is what I found — for reasons nobody needs to know I got it scrutinized by several law professors, Planned Parenthood, Wisconsin Right to Life, and the Legislative Bureau, none of whom picked me up on it. But I’m not an expert, and we all might have gotten it wrong.
What I do know is that opposition to abortion is pretty new, and laws against it are very new (originating basally in the 19th century). From the histories of childhood I’ve read apparently even the RC church, historically, was pretty lenient about abortion, and even infanticide.
Suzanne 09.03.24 at 10:58 pm
@ 50:
The NYT makes a point of including in its op-ed pages a number of writers the editorial board does not agree with, the point being to enable its readers to sample a few conservative voices, within the limits of their palatability to a mainly liberal readership. The Wall Street Journal used to publish Alexander Cockburn for similar purposes – a left-wing writer who was frequently critical of liberals. Stephens is a Never-Trumper.
Re: the OP – Trump isn’t trying to pivot to pro-choice. The problem he faces on the abortion issue is the same one all Republicans who have to appeal to moderate voters are facing. What they would like to do is say, “The Supreme Court returned the issue to the states, which is where it should be and please let’s talk about something else” and leave it at that, but when, say, Arizona passes a ban that dates back to 1864 or the Alabama Supreme Court declares that frozen embryos are people with all that implies, the ensuing horrible publicity makes that position extremely difficult to defend.
Note: The Arizona ban was stayed by the courts and has been repealed, while the governor of Alabama hastily signed a bill protecting couples using IVF, but the damage was done.
PatinIowa 09.04.24 at 1:18 am
The first time someone in the pro-life movement objected to Roe v. Wade by saying, “I believe the issue should be left to the state legislatures,” that person was lying through their teeth. As soon as it looked like they can get away with it, they went for national bans and constitutional amendments defining life as beginning at conception. We’ve seen it over and over.
Consider the following statement by a supposedly plausible candidate for the Republican nomination for president, “you actually have post-birth abortions and I think that’s wrong.” He is the sitting governor of the state of Florida, squarely in the mainstream of the pro-life and conservative movements.
The pro-life movement and its allies forfeited any right to be taken at its word decades ago. (Including, by the way, its claims that it has little or nothing to do with the low key terrorist campaign against abortion providers and clinics that’s been going on since the late seventies.)
I don’t think pro-life voters will balk at Trump lying about his commitments any more than they have at any of the other politicians consistently and systematically lying about–for example–reversing medical abortions, depression after terminating a pregnancy, breast cancer and abortion, and so on. They’ve been going along with it for a very long time. I don’t see them stopping any time soon.
PatinIowa 09.04.24 at 1:24 am
Joe at 60
“The entire anti-abortion view is based on the idea that personhood begins at conception.”
Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas would like a word.
J-D 09.04.24 at 2:14 am
I notice that you tell us that you could be without telling us whether you are.
J-D 09.04.24 at 5:59 am
‘… within the limits of their palatability …’
Just so.
They may print points of view they don’t agree with, but (by definition) they don’t print points of view they find unpalatable. If they print it, they’re confirming that, even if they disagree with it, they consider it to fall within the limits of what’s palatable.
What’s more, if they think a point of view has been sufficiently aired so as not to merit further attention, then by definition they won’t print it; so by printing it they’re confirming that they consider it has not yet been sufficiently aired and merits further attention.
In both respects they may be right! I expect they are right some of the time! What they’re saying about the opinions they print may be right! But by printing those opinions they’re still saying something about them, even though it’s not always ‘we agree with this’.
J-D 09.04.24 at 6:22 am
I don’t know about European countries, but here in Australia, although there has now been legislative change in all jurisdictions, it lagged behind judicial interpretation. Relevant State laws said that it was an offence to ‘procure a miscarriage’ unlawfully; a key change in practice happened when courts started explicitly considering the question of how much the word ‘unlawfully’ restricted the scope of offence, and then interpreting it to mean that an abortion could be carried out ‘lawfully’ for reasons which provided, in practice, such wide scope that it would, in practice, be difficult for a prosecution to prove that an abortion had been carried out ‘unlawfully’. In practice, before these court rulings, abortion was treated as being generally a crime (although, as in some other parts of the world and with some other crimes, a crime which the police could sometimes be–shall I say, ‘induced’?–to ignore); in practice, after these court rulings, the way became open, in most cases anyway, for abortion without fear of the criminal law. The legislative changes which confirmed this came later.
Tm 09.04.24 at 8:13 am
Joe 60: “I can be anti-abortion, and utterly indifferent to the social condition of mothers.”
Thanks for stating this so clearly. Life is “fuzzy” as you say and people hold incoherent views all the time. But you cannot care about the life of fetuses and also be indifferent to the social conditions and health of their mothers. These (purported) views are inconsistent.
Pat 64: Not just DeSantis, Trump himself made this claim about “post birth abortions” and the press response was “meh”. It’s absolutely amazing how Trump, despite being entirely clear about his hate for women and their rights and his constant lies that serve the purpose of demonizing women and his explicit statements about wanting to see women punished still gets this kind of press treatment as if his views about abortion were a mystery that will never be solved. To be clear, he doesn’t care about abortion as such but he hates women and that will guide his policies.
Amazing also that while the press constantly tries to find signs of a “softening” or “pivot” of Trump’s abortion stance, nobody calls him a flip-flopper even after he made contradictory statements about the Florida vote within 24 hours.
https://presswatchers.org/2024/08/fact-checking-does-a-hopefully-fatal-face-plant/
Anna M 09.04.24 at 11:02 am
Harry, 53
Thanks for the reply – I’m am writing in a hurry, but will try to respond a bit:
I’m not sure I was disagreeing, so much as offering a comment?
Perhaps, but in terms of voters I would note that while the levels of support for abortion bans in the US has been relatively stable, this is seems also true of other countries too (e.g. in the UK it appears that for 50 years after 1967 the % of people thinking abortion should be always illegal was roughly quite similar). So while “how you do things” likely has some impact on “how they are accepted”, I’m not sure that this is a more convincingly complete explanation then “political/social exploitation of wedge issue is useful as it attracts core single issue voters but does not repel many of the rest of the base” – that is to say, I am not so much disagreeing as I am sceptical of this explanation (and the implication that had the decision been passed through political / referendum routes that it would be less contentious).
Well, perhaps I over-infer, but it seems to me that you have spent time and effort to understand conservatives and their positions and reasoning? Yet in your opening paragraph you stated that the position of the leader of a presumably left-leaning organisation was “peculiar”.
I confess I didn’t find it so – taking it as essentially “harm mitigation in the short term with the understanding the system is fundamentally problematic “ which (while by no means universal) is a not uncommon sentiment within left revolutionary organisations (for example “we support trade unions as a tool to empower workers while believing we should move to a system where they do not exist”, etc.).
Consequently, I found the reaction of you and your friend in SF as described rather odd, particularly given that you don’t seem to have followed up by trying to contextualise (in the way that you appear to when engaging with conservatives / positions). Perhaps I communicate poorly here, but it just seems unusual with respect to the approach you normally seem to propose – particularly given the contrast with your concluding remarks regarding abortion protestors being “real people” and “not caricatures”, which seemed to highlight a difference in how you engaged with those different groups? Of course, there is no justification needed and I may be missing context, but it just struck me as a bit of a a disparity – this was not intended as a criticism or comment on you (no-one is owed your time, of course), but more an observation that perhaps further engagement might have reduced the percieved “peculiarity”.
Respectfully, I said nothing about protestors and their demographics – what I said was conservatives and their interlocutor’s demographic. The point I was trying to (unsuccessfully?) humorously suggest was that people can behave differently depending on situation or whom they interact with – and so trying to form a basis of psychological attribution from generalisations or personal experience seems pretty unlikely to be useful. You may (or may not) know people who claim to be believe abortion is wrong but should be legal, yet nevertheless vote for a political party which will restrict / outright prevent abortion – it seems to me that that shows a difference between stated personal belief and action. That is not to say that the difference is necessarily unjustifiable from their perspective (e.g. maybe they value other things more, agree with increased restrictions but not a total ban, or hold some other position), but only to note that personal beliefs are not necessarily fully reflected in voting (and subsequent politics). This was intended to lead into my point about how discussion of “motives” seems less likely to be fruitful than discussion of “actions” and how those affect material conditions – I cannot assess whether “conservatives” are “good”, but I can assess “are people supporting [political parties who enact policies which cause] harm?”. Again, perhaps I didn’t communicate this sufficiently.
Harry 09.04.24 at 1:58 pm
Anna — thanks for that patient reply (if you’re that patient when in a hurry, you must be ethereal when not). Now I see what you were reacting to!
I’m also in a hurry — first day of class, and a major correction needed in my syllabus. But two things about the RCP:
First, it would have been easy enough for them to have a slogan like NOW’s: Keep Abortion Legal. It was the specific, unnecessary, reference to Roe that amused us. Partly because…
Second, I was active in the far left in California for many years, which meant regularly encountering RCP activists and the RCP. It is, in fact, and behaves like, a cult (other people here who’ve had dealings with them will back me up). Complete with a cult leader, the son of a California judge whom they treat as a Christ-like figure and used to pretend to be in exile in Paris (I dunno whether he still does). It was also, in my California days, fiercely homophobic, the only left group I knew that had a rule that it’s members shouldn’t beat up gay people, even though being gay was a bourgeois counter-revolutionary deviation (the other left groups I knew had members who had no inclination to beat up gay people, so no rule was needed). I read that it now welcomes gay members, but only since 2000, which is a little late for my taste. So it’s true that I don’t exercise much charity to them. But they’re not representative of the left (not even of the far left — if it had been FRSO (does FRSO still exist?), or LRS (googling, I see that the remnants of LRS merged with FRSO after LRS disbanded, so FRSO does exist, which I’m glad of), or even SWP, I’d have reacted differently). I’m not often dismissive of people I disagree with, but in this case the dismissiveness is grounded in quite close acquaintance. It’s an indication of how out of it I am that I didn’t bother explaining any of this because I carry around in my head the utterly stupid unstated assumption that everyone else has spent hours having their spirits crushed by RCPers saying disruptive and stupid things in meetings and at demonstration. I’m glad for you that’s not true!
I don’t particularly recommend this if you’re in a hurry, but you can read about Chairman Bob, and get a flavor of his greatness, here: https://revcom.us/en/bob_avakian
Thanks again, for clarifying. And don’t spend too much time learning about chairman bob…
SusanC 09.04.24 at 5:13 pm
@Harry.
The British incarnation of the Revolutionary Communist Party has something of a bad reputation among the left… (And then they went on to form Spiked, and gave us the curious phenomenon of self-styled libertarians with Stalinist tendencies … Yes, I know, I’m astonished that can exist)
Suzanne 09.04.24 at 5:41 pm
@68: “What’s more, if they think a point of view has been sufficiently aired so as not to merit further attention, then by definition they won’t print it; so by printing it they’re confirming that they consider it has not yet been sufficiently aired and merits further attention.”
I doubt they micromanage their regular columnists to that extent, but yes, if they run a piece on a given topic from an outside writer it’s likely because they think it will interest their readers one way or another and you may well draw some conclusions from that.
steven t johnson 09.04.24 at 6:07 pm
joeyjoejoe@61 My position is that the notion personhood begins at conception is unreasonable. This is I think very much a minority view at CT. I don’t know if, much less when, a fetus does become a person, but nor does anyone else. My tentative suggestion is that if a doctor would not schedule a C-section for the mother’s convenience, or even health, then the fetus is not a full person. No advocate for forced pregnancy can point at the alleged victim, they can only point at the woman. Ignoring a live person for a hypothesized one is perverse, to my taste.
The supposedly manufactured “weird” inconsistencies are merely deductions from the fundamental irrationality of personhood at conception. The objection that advocated for unwanted children need not be logically consistent is the declaration they need not be reasonable. It’s guaranteed they are holier than I am but I’m far gone enough I do not accept this imposition as an argument. I concede that no one is entirely consistent but indifference to how inconsistent is, again, itself unreasonable.
Lastly, acknowledging it’s likely we all get carried away with imputing motives to whole groups of people, despite the absence of collective minds or mental telepathy, consider this: “I can be anti-abortion, and utterly indifferent to the social condition of mothers.”
This does not make a case against speculations about misogyny etc. It’s closer to a confession.
politicalfootball 09.04.24 at 7:42 pm
joeyjoejoe makes a point that I think is underappreciated.
The entire anti-abortion view is based on the idea that personhood begins at conception. … I can be anti-abortion without committing myself to no IVF, or excepions for rape, health of mother, etc. Logical inconsistency doesn’t require conscious hypocrisy. Life is fuzzier than that, in every values system. … Its not even remotely inconsistent to be anti-abortion but pro IVF.
Placing value on coherent discussion is itself a value. If you don’t share that value, then there is zero problem with the view that personhood begins at conception and that it is appropriate to engage in the mass murder of persons to create the possibility of the birth of a person.
The relevance of logical consistency can’t be assumed. In fact, we see again and again that it doesn’t matter at all. As joeyjoejoe says, “Life is fuzzier than that.”
Once you accept the premise that logical consistency has no value, it is completely logically consistent to ignore logical consistency. Moreover, you can do this while asserting correctly that your views are logically consistent.
A lot of otherwise smart people fail to recognize this. I think that’s one reason you see so much puzzlement over the Trump phenomenon.
Chet Murthy 09.05.24 at 12:13 am
“Fetal personhood” doesn’t get you diddly-squat. Routinely we let real-life living persons die, b/c they don’t have enough money, or can’t get a kidney, or whatever. All the damn time that happens. Until men are press-ganged on the street into hospitals to check their histocompatibility (I think that’s what it’s called) and when they’re compatible with a person who needs a donation, then that donation is extracted regardless of what the man wants, including for a kidney, until that is -routine-, this idea that somehow “Fetal personhood” constrains the gestating female to be enslaved for the entire gestation period is …. absolute bullshit.
So what I mean is, for every one of these gestation slavery assholes, the right question is: how many body parts have you donated to needy recipients, and how many other gestation slavers have you compelled to do the same? Is it a condition for membership in your organization? In your church? In all your groups? And that better go the same for all the children of these gestation slavers [yes, we would see that as disgusting, but it’s consistent with their theology] B/c if it isn’t, you aren’t living your theology.
And we know none of them are living their theology.
Harry 09.05.24 at 3:36 am
SusanC — I know the British RCP and their history well. Also I think a cult — certainly they operated like that when I knew them on the left and its very hard otherwise to explain their transformation. That said, someone very close in their orbit took classes from.me when I taught in London and he was very smart and and I liked him a lot.
But. The two RCPs are quite unrelated. The US one is Maoist; the UK one came out of Trotskyism.
wacko 09.05.24 at 7:09 am
Should Donald Trump turn pro-abortion, will the liberal establishment turn uncompromisingly anti-abortion? Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen.
Tm 09.05.24 at 2:11 pm
wacko, you have earned your nym ;-)
Harry is this the offspring of your Trotzkyist RCP? Heard about it, seems really like a cult.
https://kommunismus.ch/
https://derkommunist.de/
J, not that one 09.05.24 at 3:54 pm
“ But for a certified patriarchal authority figure – someone whom no one would accuse of being shy about asserting power over women: he’s known to have assaulted them! – to give this freedom back to women, in a lordly, dispensing way, after wresting the privilege of doing so back from the Supreme Court, by main political force, by the power of his judge picks, and in exchange for some measure of support for him from women – well, that looks like recovery of the natural order of things. If women would thank conservatives for providing the right to abortion, then conservatives could be reconciled to it.”
I’m not sure this is so far off. It’s important to be clear about what’s good and bad. But it’s also important to be merciful to people who fall short. It’s not, also, so important to be logically consistent. It’s not important, either, to be really knowledgeable about how babies are made. It’s just important to be good (enough) and not to rock the boat (because the boat is what saves everyone from drowning, I.e. being too bad). So. If there are women, children, people generally, who would suffer because someone has been too logically consistent or too curious about science or both, a good society would be merciful to them (a sane person would be merciful to herself) and break a few laws in secret and without conceding there might be something wrong with the principles being proclaimed. QED.
Now I’m going to take a shower.
Alex SL 09.06.24 at 3:36 am
Just wanted to express full support for what steven t johnson wrote at 75 and accordingly disagreement with politicalfootball at 76. Yes, indifference to logical consistency is an admission that one isn’t arguing in good faith, and indifference to the social condition of mothers is a confession that one’s opposition to abortion is entirely based on misogyny.
The problem with seeing intellectual coherence and consistency as a “value” that we have to accept not everybody shares is that it isn’t so much a value as a pre-condition for having any meaningful conversation between sentient beings in the first place. Those who reject the need to make sense are not fellow humans whose legitimately divergent values I have to respect and find compromise with, they are either insane or trolls or charlatans who should not be trusted. Either way they do not have anything meaningful to add to conversations or collective decision making. They have declared themselves somebody who must be ignored and excluded as a first step before a productive conversation between people who hold different values can even begin.
Sadly, that rarely happens. Charlatans and trolls abound, and I assume it serves some people very well that certain conversations get perennially bogged down in Insane Troll Logic.
Anna M 09.06.24 at 8:41 am
Harry, thanks for finding the time to reply and providing an explanation, I much appreciated it!
MisterMr 09.06.24 at 9:19 am
The problem of the “consistency” thing is that it doesn’t work so neatly in the real word because in the real world generally we have tradeoff between principles.
Example: in principle I have freedom of expression; in pratice there are other interests so that if I engage in, say, hate speech, or if I produce pedopornographic material, this ledes someother people’s rights so I can’t: my freedom of expression is limited by other people’s rights, there is a trafdeoff.
So in this logic one can have, e.g., personhood of the fetus since conception and yet accept abortion if pregnancy is dangerous for the life of the mother (tradeoff between mother’s right and fetus’ rights), but e.g. not if the mother doesn’t want the child for other reasons like rape (the tradeoff is now supposedly at the advantage of the fetus).
This position above is not inerhently inconsistent because it involves tradeoffs, however if you treat it as simply “is the fetus life sacred, yes or no” question it looks inconsistent.
But very few moral questions in the real world can be answered with a straight yes or no, because there are almost always tradeoffs.
My position is that abortion should be legal up to a certain point (say, the first 90 days after conception), and then after that only for serious danger for the life of the mother.
This is based on the idea that the fetus has some “personhood”, the more so the more it grows, and therefore there is a tradeoff between mother’s right and fetus’ rights.
Although overall this is a pro abortion position, I see that many of the arguments here and in other similar threads would rule out my position, precisely because they want tu rule out fetus personhood in principle, so that no trade off is involved.
John Holbo @24 says that it is unknowable when a fetus gets personhood. Unless we treat personhood as a metaphysical thing, it actually depends on when we want to attribute personhood to the fetus, but if the answer is “it is unknowable”, and if personhood involves human rights, then this “I don’t know” implies that at some point in time of the pregnancy there has to be a limit on abortion.
wacko 09.06.24 at 9:57 am
@Tm 80,
Thanks; I hope I have. You see, most of the liberal common wisdoms have already changed to their opposite. What happened to the “melting pot”, “remedy for bad speech is more speech”, “color-blind”, “be skeptical and question authorities”, “peace and compromise”?
Any minute now I expect liberals to get outraged at baby-killing abortionists. It disproportionately affects minorities!
J-D 09.06.24 at 11:16 am
If you think that abortions outside those limits should not be legal, what do you mean by ‘not legal’? Do you mean that they should incur criminal penalties? If that’s not what you mean, then what?
MisterMr 09.06.24 at 11:30 am
@J-D 86
You actually already sked me this thing some time ago.
Yes I think they should incur penalities, the gravity of the penalty is an open question.
The same logic on placing a fine on people who drive above the speed limit.
I also support mandatory vax and penalties on people who refuse to be vaxed.
steven t johnson 09.06.24 at 2:57 pm
MisterMr@84, 87 fails to explain how the birth of an unwanted child is a moral good at all, much less why such a tragedy should be promoted by the state.
politicalfootball 09.06.24 at 5:19 pm
Those who reject the need to make sense are not fellow humans whose legitimately divergent values I have to respect and find compromise with
To be clear, I was counseling neither respect nor compromise, but rather advocating for the level of comprehension and understanding that is necessary for proper contempt.
If you aren’t going to compromise, you need to understand the thing you aren’t compromising with. In this case, it is a compromise to engage at all with joeyjoejoe’s ideas in a respectful, logical, intellectually consistent fashion.
Note that I did not address my own comment to joeyjoejoe.
somebody who prefers unsafe, illegal, common things 09.06.24 at 9:21 pm
MisterMr@84 purports to offer a tradeoff, in his values. A common enough position. if there is sufficient risk to the mother then the fetus’s interests may be overcome. but not otherwise! the following question, to me, is not J-D’s “what shall the punishment be?”, because of course, to the anti-abortion position, no punishment is too severe. or there might be a smaller punishment! but severe enough to make people comply, of course. we can fantasize about what that might be all day.
but the often-proposed compromise deadline of “90 days from conception” or some other time-related deadline doesn’t reflect MisterMr’s purported principle. nobody can identify the date of conception that clearly (remember, conception doesn’t happen immediately when you have sex!) and around one fourth of pregnancies in America aren’t even detected until after that time has already passed. worse, this kind of deadline actually throws the allegedly traded-off “risk to the mother” out the window because if the risk arises on the 91st day, too bad, from there on out, the state will decide if the risk is high enough, hope you are wealthy enough to hire a good lawyer to drop every other case and try to prove the risk is high enough for you to get an abortion before the risk comes to pass. (just kidding, this system will never be applied to the wealthy. remember, you don’t have to actually follow the money to know this because it’s literally the same organizations most of the time.)
the only way to actually make MisterMr’s purported tradeoff work is simply to adopt the pro-choice position – “the mother should assess the risk of the pregnancy and they get to decide if they continue it” this respects both mothers who are more risk averse, and those who are less. but this position leaves the door open for the cryptid to slip through, into the shadows. this allows Sluts Who Live In The City Who Just Fuck Whoever They Want For Fun to Get An Abortion If They Get Pregnant, because all pregnancies, and all deliveries, carry with them some risk of a negative outcome. a tragedy may of course occur at any time. but should the state intentionally inflict it on someone, or should we respect a person’s own assessment and determination of their health risks? anti-abortion folks want to give this power to a cop with 9 guns, a steroid habit, a Three Percenter bumper sticker, and a Punisher balaclava after 90 days, or 42, or 14, or immediately. pro-choice folks think women themselves should make that decision.
MisterMr seeks to have the state forcibly pull the handle on the risk-to-the-mother slot machine if a lady seems too reluctant and the odds seem – to the state – to be good. “ah, sorry kid, you lost this baby and can now never have another, too bad. here’s a ruinous medical bill that will permanently bankrupt your entire family, and a lifelong disability that will cause the remainder of your long days to be in physical and mental agony when you attempt even the ordinary actions of everyday life” says the kindly cop at the discharge desk. “oh ah we need that wheelchair back, you can crawl to the bus stop, right?”
these sacrifices – and many worse – are indeed the measures society must undertake to secure itself against the Slut Who Lives In The City And Just Fucks Whoever She Wants For Fun And Gets An Abortion If She Gets Pregnant. she lurks just outside the walls. we must reinforce ourselves against the danger she poses….maybe move the deadline back from 90 days to 89. or maybe even 79! yes. she’s probably coming in for those abortions on the 79th day. that’s when i heard that noise outside…it wasn’t a dream…it wasn’t…
KT2 09.06.24 at 11:24 pm
MM @87 “Yes I think they should incur penalities, the gravity of the penalty is an open question.
The same logic on placing a fine on people who drive above the speed limit.”
Is this just a mistake, a category /logical / fallacy error, or personhood of me driving, ala corporatiions have personhood too???
MisterMr 09.07.24 at 8:04 am
@steven t Johnson 88
”how the birth of an unwanted child is a moral good”
If I think the fetus has personhood, then abortion itself is bad (a badness that should be balanced against mother ‘s rights so up to a certain point abortion is still OK)
@somebody 99
The 90 days limit is how it works in Italy (and I think in some other european states) so it is somehow workable. Pregnancies that are dangerous for the mother after 90 days can still be terminated.
That said, my point wasn’t to toot my position (though I did) but just to note that the “logical fallacies” attributed to the other side might be a case of tradeoffs rather than pure logical fallacies.
qwerty 09.07.24 at 8:55 am
88, steven t johnson, have you ever read Crime And Punishment?
J-D 09.07.24 at 10:00 am
I have never pretended to have an eidetic memory.
Why? What good do you think that will do?
J-D 09.07.24 at 10:07 am
That’s not my question. To repeat my own position, it is that there should be no criminal penalties for terminating pregnancies. That’s why I desired clarity on whether MisterMr disagreed with me on that point.
Repeating myself again, the reason I oppose criminal penalties for terminating pregnancies is that they do harm but no good, which is why I desire clarity on whether MisterMr diaagrees with me about that.
Harry 09.07.24 at 2:17 pm
“MisterMr@84, 87 fails to explain how the birth of an unwanted child is a moral good at all, much less why such a tragedy should be promoted by the state”
Maybe I can explain how it could be a moral good, and maybe not even a tragedy. Some people reading this site, most of them older, know perfectly well that if abortion had been legal when they were conceived, they’d have been aborted (some because they have been told it to their face). I know a lot of people who have lived good lives — enjoyed their lives all things considered, contributed to society, brought joy and meaning to others, including their parents — who would have been aborted if it had been legal at the time. So do you. So maybe that helps you see that there might, sometimes, be something morally good about the birth of a child, even if it is unwanted, and even though, all things considered, you think it is morally better for them not to have been born because the birth was unwanted, and think that such events should not be promoted by the state.
I am one of those people, by the way.
MisterMr 09.07.24 at 7:26 pm
@J-D 95
Like all other cases of penalties, the “good” happens when a woman doesn’t abort (or aborts earlier when the fetus has less personhood in my view).
So it is true that when the penalty happens it has no positive value, because the value is in the deterrence.
This is the same like all penalties, like a fine for speeding while driving (the fine itself doesn’t do good, but the deterrence does).
@Harry 96
The same happened to my mother, so indirectly this might influence my opinion. But my reason is different: since personhood is something that doesn’t really exists, but is the base of our system of rights, I think we hould have an extensive definition of it.
Tm 09.07.24 at 10:04 pm
MisterMr you recognize that your 90 day position is entirely arbitrary and not based on any principle or empirical evidence right? Seems like messing with other people‘s reproductive rights should require a better reasoning than „nobody knows whether fetuses are persons so let’s set an arbitrary deadline“.
I think you misconstrue the charge of inconsistency. „Pro life“ abortion opponents in the US and elsewhere have time and again demonstrated utter indifference toward the right to life of women and children after birth. Numerous cases have been documented after Dobbs (and also in other countries with strict abortion bans like Poland) of women nearly dying because they were denied life-saving healthcare. Abortion opponents often oppose contraception and sex education even though they are known to reduce the incidence of unwanted pregnancy and hence abortion. And so on.
In the US, the states with abortion bans are exactly the states with the highest maternal and child mortality, the poorest prenatal care, the least parent and child friendly laws, and so on.
And then there is this:
https://www.guttmacher.org/2024/05/clear-and-growing-evidence-dobbs-harming-reproductive-health-and-freedom
https://healthjournalism.org/blog/2024/07/infants-dying-women-at-risk-medical-literature-describes-wide-ranging-consequences-of-dobbs/
https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2024/analysis-suggests-2021-texas-abortion-ban-resulted-in-increase-in-infant-deaths-in-state-in-year-after-law-went-into-effect
Tm 09.07.24 at 10:17 pm
Harry: „ Some people reading this site, most of them older, know perfectly well that if abortion had been legal when they were conceived, they’d have been aborted“
I‘m … flabbergasted by that kind of reasoning. I’m sure there’s a name for that logical fallacy? There must be.
You recognize that the same „logic“ applies equally to contraception? If my parents hadn’t been „good Catholics“ they might have used contraception and I might not be here. True story! I’m a fifth child. I’m fine with the fact that I happen to have been born as a fifth child. It follows that:
– Contraception should be illegal or at least discouraged
– It is morally imperative that everybody have at least five children!
That’s what you call a serious moral argument?
J-D 09.08.24 at 3:25 am
I don’t know whether the evidence supports the conclusion that imposing criminal penalties for the termination of pregnancies discourages people from terminating pregnancies. It’s possible it does; I don’t have evidence that it doesn’t; but it’s the argument that there should be criminal penalties which needs evidence that it discourages people. Maybe you’ve got that evidence; if so, you haven’t yetshared it with me. However! Even if it were true that criminal penalties discourage people from terminating pregnancies, how is that good? Who is that good for? As far as I can tell, discouraging the termination of pregnancies (in those cases where the people who are pregnant want those pregnancies to be terminated) does no good to anybody.
Harry 09.08.24 at 3:54 am
“I‘m … flabbergasted by that kind of reasoning. I’m sure there’s a name for that logical fallacy? There must be”
Not sure what it is that’s bothering you here. I wasn’t making an argument against abortion at all, let alone that it should be illegal, or even discouraged.
Is it that you think the born person is not relevantly related to the fetus that became them? That’s plausible, and the casual counterfactual does indeed assume a certain kind of metaphysical identity between the born person and the, lets say, 3 month old fetus that became it. But that’s not essential to the point I’m making which could have been put more straightforwardly — that the life of the person that was born as a result of an unwanted pregnancy coming to term could, sometimes, be a good thing. You agree with that I think (you don’t strictly imply that you do, but there is an implicature I think, and anyway, not to agree with it is quite eccentric).
By contrast with the thought that the baby might be identical with the fetus that became it, it is completely implausible to identify the baby with the unfertilized ovum that preceded conception, so implausible that nobody (I think) believes it. (Catholics, who have a semi-coherent though not at all plausible rational for thinking contracepted sex is wrong don’t believe that the person who is born is identical with the unfertilized ovum). So, no, the logic very obviously doesn’t at all have the implication that you seem to think it obviously does. For what its worth, I don’t think people are identical with the newly fertilized embryo, but I don’t think it is at all implausible that they are identical with the 3 month old fetus that became them. Not obvious that they are, for sure, but not crazy, which is what you seem to imply. Anyway, puzzled by your outraged reaction to a pretty unexceptional thought.
Alan White 09.08.24 at 5:43 am
Harry, a counterpoint about lost lives through contraception/abortion/ spontaneous miscarriage early or late. I think it could be argued that the proportion of sinners versus saints in this world would not easily favor an overall utilitarian analysis of good over evil about lost souls due to these phenomena. At the very least that is arguable looking at the world playing out both in the past and now.
Tm 09.08.24 at 9:03 am
Harry: ä„the life of the person that was born as a result of an unwanted pregnancy coming to term could, sometimes, be a good thing.“
I’ll try again. This is essentially the Beethoven argument that abortion-banners used to make: wouldn’t it be sad if Beethoven hadn’t been born because his mother had reasonably decided to have an abortion? The answer is that if Beethoven hadn’t been born, we wouldn’t know to regret his not having been born. Likewise if I hadn’t been born, I wouldn’t be in a position to regret my nonexistence. The whole premise is meaningless.
Furthermore it is totally irrelevant whether the mother decided on an abortion or used contraception or had been abstinent. The result is the same: if Beethoven, or I or you, were never born, nobody would be in a position to regret his or my or your not having been born. Nobody, that is, except for the potential mother. But she doesn’t regret it because it was her decision (it would be different if it was a miscarriage!)
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Great_Beethoven_fallacy
I would add that the argument is structurally identical to the Natalia’s claim that every baby not born is an ill to be regretted. If taken seriously it calls for discouraging contraception. You Harry brushed this implication aside but it is inescapable. I’ll get personal again. There is no doubt that my mother would have been much better off with fewer than five children. Had she made that very reasonable decision to use contraception after the fourth or third or second child, I wouldn’t exist. It’s an incontrovertible fact. Ex post I do exist and I cannot imagine not existing. But many other potential humans do not exist because of the availability of contraception. Finding this regrettable is absurd.
Tm 09.08.24 at 9:05 am
„Natalia’s claim“ – natalist claim of course. Thanks autocorrect!
MisterMr 09.08.24 at 10:57 am
@TM 98
“MisterMr you recognize that your 90 day position is entirely arbitrary and not based on any principle or empirical evidence”
Yes, though I don’t really understand what you mean by empirical evidence. What empirical evidence do you have that you or I have “personhood”? You don’t have any because personhood doesn’t exist metaphisically, it is just a status that we recognize. Why do you think that a more restrictive definition of personhood is better?
@J-D 100
“I don’t know whether the evidence supports the conclusion that imposing criminal penalties”
Please note that i didn’t use the word “criminal”, and I nowhere said that penalties should be harsh.
I honestly don’t understand if you are serious of if you are trolling (I would assume trolling but probably not since you’re not a trolling guy): why do you think that penalties exist generally? Do we impose penalties just for sadism? Or is this because they are a form of deterrence? I mean the whole legal system in all the world is based on the idea of deterrence, why are you making an issue of this here?
Harry 09.08.24 at 1:51 pm
I was answering this question:
““MisterMr@84, 87 fails to explain how the birth of an unwanted child is a moral good at all, much less why such a tragedy should be promoted by the state””
which is not at all a question about counterfactual regret. The question assumes the actual birth of an actual child (not counterfactually at all actually because there are plenty of actual examples). It doesn’t ask what justifies the state in forcing that to happen or anyone in encouraging that to happen (and I assume in my answer that nothing does), it just asks what is morally good about it, and you seem to agree with my answer. Your response is responsive to some things that you think other people think, but not at all to what I said. The problem isn’t my reasoning, but your determination to read me as saying something I’m not saying, which is of course your right and something that should not be prohibited though, perhaps, discouraged.
Alan White, on the other hand, is responsive to what I said and thinks it may not be true because the good of good people is more than cancelled out by the bad of bad people (the latter being more numerous). I don’t actually agree with him, but… even if he’s right, at least sometimes unwanted births result in good people (and I would guess not much less often than wanted births, but who knows). If he’s right then, still, in some cases the birth of an unwanted child is morally good in one way.
qwerty 09.08.24 at 2:14 pm
“The answer is that if Beethoven hadn’t been born, we wouldn’t know to regret his not having been born. ”
Why, knowing the number of abortions over a certain period, it shouldn’t be difficult to estimates the number of unborn Beethovens, as a result.
Harry 09.08.24 at 2:50 pm
Maybe it helps to notice that the implied question was not “What is bad about a wanted abortion?” but “what is good about an unwanted birth?”. There’s nothing unreasonable or illogical about answering “nothing” to the first question, but “something” to the second. (The same is true even if the second question were “What would be good about an unwanted birth?”, which is wasn’t),
steven t johnson 09.08.24 at 2:54 pm
Harry@96 writes “Maybe I can explain how it could be a moral good, and maybe not even a tragedy.” Yes, it is possible for living people to rise above tragedy. That does not make the birth of an unwanted child a moral good, merely an undefined hypothesis of a potential future good. In the context of a thread about state prohibition of abortion, this is not an answer.
Reframe: Many women are anti-abortion and faced with an unwanted pregnancy self-enforce the prohibition. She mans up, excuse the phrase, and takes her punishment. (And yes, for this discussion it is useful to think of pregnancy as a punishment.) If subsequently the mother fails to rise above this and the poor child is handicapped in life and fails to rise above these handicaps, that is indisputably merely a potential future evil. The unconscious assumption that these merely future potential evils somehow don’t count, while mere future potential goods do, is special pleading at best. But is an unwanted pregnancy really the philosophical equivalent of an earthquake in Lisbon?
The argument is simply not compelling. I tend to think of these vast clouds of undefined hypotheticals as smoke clouds. Yes, smoke may indicate fire…but it may be a smoke bomb hiding the movements of enemies. In this case, the opposing camp is still so far as I can tell the assumption that there is another equal person who is the victim of abortion and who must be protected by the state.
Nonetheless, it is an absurdity to think a cell, even an implanted cell in a uterus, is a person, and no one knows when it becomes a person. After birth, you can’t point to the child and say, this is the victim. Before, you can only point at the mother yet somehow defy her personhood to force her to bear an unwanted child, in the name of that abstraction. The fact that today’s ultrasounds can show something is not the same thing as showing a actual person. People can live when supplied with food, clothing and shelter. Reducing a woman to food, clothing and shelter for a hypothetical person I hold to be a moral evil. (And yes, compulsory natialism is lurking behind the smoke, I think.)
Refusing abortions when a Caesarean will produce a child who can live is the gray area. The thing about that is, when is it moral for physicians to routinely performs such procedures then take away the infants? It is much later than ninety days (to revert back to MisterMr’s failed compromise.) My guess is that most women have either reconciled themselves to an unwanted child long before that point, but that’s only a guess.
Compounding all this is vagueness about what “unwanted” means? Unwanted may and often does mean unable for physical or financial or even emotional reasons, not just frivolity and other failings of character. But even for such women, imagine for example, the case of a woman who doesn’t want her wealthy husband to realize she got knocked up at an orgy, might be called unfit mothers. Forcing the birth of an unwanted child to an unfit mother?
If we want to get all metaphysical with vast volcanic eruptions of ash (those undefined hypotheticals) refusing to take all embryos from women who don’t want to be pregnant any more and putting them into the local obgyn’s artificial wombs is the true crime? That’s a plausible a condemnation I think as the claim that compulsory pregnancy after some implausibly justified period is potentially a moral good.
steven t johnson 09.08.24 at 2:56 pm
Of course, the proofreader is incompetent. It’s “can point to the child and say, this is the victim.”
Harry 09.08.24 at 3:11 pm
Not sure I really understood all that, steven. I now think, though I’m not sure, that by ‘moral good’ you mean something like “all things considered morally better than the alternative”, which is not what I took your original question to mean — my read was that you were “in any way morally good”. Read the first way my answer was inadequate; read the second (which is how I made clear I was reading it) you seem, like Tm, to agree with my answer.
steven t johnson 09.08.24 at 3:56 pm
By moral good, I included both “good” people and happy (enough) people and people who achieved a place in the world (not all do) so can be conceived as productive or useful to posterity (this is a low bar, a grocery worker in the produce department is productive and useful.)
In the formulation @108 ““what is good about an unwanted birth?”…“something”
I do think it is unreasonable to assert a merely potential future good outweighs an indubitable moral evil, namely compelling a woman who doesn’t want to, to have an unwanted child.
Women are capable of making the decision either way and the compelling state interest in the long run is to provide what assistance they can to their choices. (Political ad for socialized health care here.) Natalists should be assured that the need for progeny for survival in old age will eventually play its role in women’s decisions. Raising their “pay” for motherhood to previously inconceivable levels?
MisterMr 09.08.24 at 5:53 pm
@Steven t Johnson 109
According to the british NHS the fetus could survive at 24 weeks:
https://www.nhs.uk/pregnancy/week-by-week/13-to-27/24-weeks/
That is roughly 170 days. If your argument is that 170 days is a more reasonable cutoff than 90 days, I can live with it.
Harry 09.08.24 at 7:09 pm
“I do think it is unreasonable to assert a merely potential future good outweighs an indubitable moral evil, namely compelling a woman who doesn’t want to, to have an unwanted child.”
My examples were of actual, real, good lives that actual real people have experienced. The rate of abortion went up quite a bit after it was legalized: many many people who were born before that have had full lives which are good. They’re not merely potential but, now, actual.
And I was very careful not to claim anything at all about their value relative to the value of someone being forced to bring a pregnancy to term, or even about what it’s reasonable to believe.
It might be worth noting that for many centuries there was a disagreement among Christians (and even among Catholics) about when fetuses were ensouled (became persons). Aquinas, following Aristotle (as so often) says between 40 and 80 days depending on sex (why is sex relevant? God knows if you’ll forgive the pun). From what we know about fetal development, the idea that fetuses come to have some sort of moral status around 3 or 4 months seems reasonable, though so does the idea that it isn’t till significantly later. I’m always impressed with the absolute confidence people have that moral status begins at conception, and the similar confidence other people have that is doesn’t start till close to birth or birth (or at 40 or 80 days). Impressed in the sense that I just don’t understand how someone can be so confident in something so difficult to know.
On viability outside the uterus — I think that’s a reasonable thing for the law to take account of. Unlike MisterMr I can’t be totally satisfied with that, because I think of personhood as not merely a legal fiction but also a moral reality, and viability varies with the prevailing level of technology (which I don’t think moral status can even though legal status could).
real steven t johnson 09.08.24 at 7:17 pm
The only “moral good” there is, is what’s in the interests of the working class. What brings the revolution closer. Wishes and notions dictated by false consciousness of individuals have no value whatsoever.
J, not that one 09.08.24 at 10:56 pm
Since the OP began with a discussion of practical politics – which party someone with reasonable anti-abortion beliefs should support in the US today – it feels strange to me how far this discussion has veered from what’s actually going on in the US.
In the US right now every place that has restricted access to abortion has defined abortion to include ending a pregnancy in which the fetus is beyond all question deceased, and in which the life of the mother is at risk from the pregnancy continuing.
In the US right now every place that has restricted access to abortion has defined abortion to include a pregnancy in which the mother is bleeding to death and there is literally zero probability of the fetus surviving.
And here we are discussing whether, if it turned out to be the case that a 10-week embryo was life in the appropriate sense, it would be possible to vote for the party that is doing those things.
Five years ago if someone had said “nobody is going to do that, you’re exaggerating,” I might have shrugged and walked away. In 2024 that’s not an acceptable response.
Alan White 09.08.24 at 11:21 pm
“Alan White, on the other hand, is responsive to what I said and thinks it may not be true because the good of good people is more than cancelled out by the bad of bad people (the latter being more numerous). I don’t actually agree with him, but… even if he’s right, at least sometimes unwanted births result in good people (and I would guess not much less often than wanted births, but who knows). If he’s right then, still, in some cases the birth of an unwanted child is morally good in one way.”
Agreed Harry, though of course any such particular evaluation must always be ad hoc.
steven t johnson 09.09.24 at 12:18 am
MisterMr@113 links “By the time you’re 24 weeks pregnant, the baby has a chance of survival if they are born. Most babies born before this time cannot live because their lungs and other vital organs are not developed enough.
The care that can now be given in baby (neonatal) units means more and more babies born early do survive. But for babies born around this time, there are increased risks of disability.”
I’m sorry, but I think that a doctor who would give a woman tired of being pregnant a Caesarean at 24 weeks on the grounds the poor thing would have “a chance” is a Mengele.
My position is in no sense a bar against abortion. Toying with the idea of forcing a C-section in lieu of abortion, that is, terminating the pregnancy at the woman’s choice, is not toying with the idea of prohibiting choice on pain of criminal penalties. Also, forcing the woman to undergo a medical procedure like a Caesarean, while morally equivalent to forcing a woman to undergo childbirth, makes the nature of the proposed ban too evident, I suspect. But to be candid, I tend to think of childbirth as a kind of medical procedure already. Maybe I’m too squeamish or cowardly to have an opinion?
Harry’s responses are evidently too clever for me. I thought there were actual examples of people whose unwanted births were tragedies but evidently I’m wrong.
J-D 09.09.24 at 12:59 am
I don’t know what difference you think it makes if the penalties are applied by law but are not described as ‘criminal’. I don’t think it makes any difference. If you don’t want to call them ‘criminal’ for some reason, I’ll stop using that word: it doesn’t affect my point.
I don’t know why penalties exist generally. I know it’s not true that the whole legal system in all the world is based on the idea of deterrence; I know that many people think that the system of penal law (which is only one part of the law, although an important part) is based on the idea of deterrence, but I don’t know that it’s true. I have read a little about the history of law, but not enough to justify definite conclusions about what ideas the system of penal law is based on (or whether it’s based on ideas at all).
But all of this is beside the point! My point is this:
If somebody argues that legal penalties for abortion (or for some abortions) are a good thing because of their deterrent effect, then there are two things they should be able to give some good reason for thinking to be true: (1) that penalising the termination of pregnancies does in fact discourage people from terminating pregnancies; (2) that it is a good thing to discourage people from terminating pregnancies (in at least some cases). Even if it turns out that (1) is true, what about (2)? If you discourage people from terminating pregnancies, who does that benefit? As far as I can tell, the answer is ‘Nobody’.
J-D 09.09.24 at 2:11 am
I arrived well before this time at the following two conclusions, and I arrived at them independently of each other–so in my thinking they’re separate:
there’s no good reason for laws which penalise the termination of pregnancies;
there’s no good reason to vote for a Republican.
MisterMr 09.09.24 at 6:33 am
@J-D 199
On point (1), I see you are posing the question really, the answer is “it is extremely obvious that it works”, on point (2) the answer is “the fetus, that if we accept it has some personhood is a subject whose benefits we should take in account”.
Tm 09.09.24 at 7:16 am
Harry 108: “Maybe it helps to notice that the implied question was not “What is bad about a wanted abortion?” but “what is good about an unwanted birth?”. There’s nothing unreasonable or illogical about answering “nothing” to the first question, but “something” to the second.”
We are having this exchange in the context of a discussion about abortion. You are now leaving the question of abortion aside and insisting on a different discussion. Maybe stj’s way of putting the question and using the term “tragedy” at 88 made this distraction possible. In the context of abortion, the second part of his question is more relevant, namely why the birth of unwanted children “should be promoted by the state”. I think you and I agree with stj that it shouldn’t and we could leave it there.
I still think that you are essentially promoting the Beethoven fallacy. Speculation about whether a potential human will live a good life or not is utterly pointless. Using the speculative potential of a good life as a moral argument seems wrong to me (see also https://crookedtimber.org/2023/07/30/against-the-repugnant-conclusion/).
Anna M 09.09.24 at 8:42 am
Again, apologies for poor phrasing in advance, but just to quickly offer some concepts:
As previously noted, I find the question of personhood rather an odd one to raise. If someone were to sneak into my house at night and hook themselves up to my kidneys for their health, I think (would hope?) most people would agree I should be able to unhook them – even if doing so were detrimental to their health. While some might argue that it would be a “good thing” (noble, moral, etc.?) to not do that and allow someone else use of my body even at the detriment of my health, I do wonder how many people would argue that it would be a “bad thing” to reject the usage.
I don’t take Harry as arguing against abortion per se, but rather making a “philosophical argument” regarding morality of abortion – and that it should be legal even if immoral due to contrasting rights, similar to other “I disagree with X but defend your right to X” positions (I am happy to be corrected if wrong on this). But he does raises the argument that there are people who have led good lives, who would otherwise have been aborted, and suggests that that represents a “moral good”. I wonder if then he would accept that those who have led bad lives (for themselves and/or others), who would otherwise have been aborted, would represent a “moral bad”? If so, how does this balance – and if not, why not?
Finally, I will say this – again, I am not overly concerned with belief but rather material conditions. If someone wants to sit at home thinking that people who have abortions are committing immoral acts then it really doesn’t bother me. My objection is when they stand outside clinics trying to shock and horrify, or lobby for legislation to reduce access to healthcare, etc. in an effort to enforce their beliefs on society. Even if you don’t take my positions (healthcare should be universal, abortion should be for everyone), then it might be worth considering that currently there seems to be an effort to restrict reproductive freedom –if you take the “abortion is wrong but should be legal” position (something I object to in principle but accept in practice) then you should be examining which part of that position is most under threat right now: the “abortion is wrong” or the “should be legal” (and with that in mind, directing your efforts towards protecting that which you claim to uphold).
Of course, personally I think the entire system is unsustainably corrupt, and will inevitably crumble under the inherent contradictions, causing immense suffering in the process – but that is, I recognise, a more fringe position!
SusanC 09.09.24 at 10:34 am
Matthew Yglesias on Twitter: “The four kinds of Trump voters in terms of what they hope he is lying about.” touches on the same issue, I think.
J, not that one 09.09.24 at 5:38 pm
I wonder if Anna M lives in the United States. She leaves out all the most important political groups: parties, elected officials, and voters. And suggests that if the people with wrong beliefs would just stay out of people’s faces, they could have no effect on society, when in fact those people are already in power in much of the country.
There are several good reasons to care about others’ beliefs. One might want to persuade them to have better beliefs because one thinks a society with fewer bad beliefs is a better society. One might want to persuade them to vote for one’s own political party and candidates, or to take their support away from another party. One might want to persuade members of one’s own party to take a particular position on some issue. One might want to recognize what rhetoric voters will respond to, and when the opponent’s beliefs represent a danger. One might want to know what the members of one’s own party already agree with. Or one might simply want to make a better effort at making fun of them.
One might even want one’s own beliefs to be listened to! (I know, that’s so awkward.)
When the Nazis are coming to power and a polite religious person comes to you and says “but aren’t they against abortion, shouldn’t I support them?”, one might want to make it very clear that you don’t really care and would prefer to be talking about something else, before moving on to a less practical question. The idea that the only interesting question about abortion is fetal personhood, the right of one person to use another’s body, etc., is very, very underdetermined and is at the heart of the unwillingness of the anti-rights faction to move in any direction but farther right.
Anna M 09.09.24 at 6:56 pm
J, not that one, 125
You seem to be arguing very strongly against positions I do not hold and views I have not expressed?
No, in fact I did not suggest that. What I suggested was that I care less (note “less”, not “zero”) about beliefs than the impact of those beliefs. That is to say, I would care less (again, please note the use of “less”) about someone holding a belief if (note the conditional “if”) that had no impact on the material conditions of others. The fact that those beliefs do affect others (through, as you say, politics, etc.) is where I do have the problem. I realise I am not the best at writing, but I thought that clear from the sentence “My objection is when they stand outside clinics trying to shock and horrify, or lobby for legislation to reduce access to healthcare, etc. in an effort to enforce their beliefs on society“. Perhaps I need to be more clearer in future?
Yes? I have not suggested that there is no reason to care about others’ beliefs. In fact, I think I have been quite explicit that it is important to care about others’ beliefs (for example, because they do inform actions!).
Well, a lot would depend on the person I was interacting with. But given that I would prefer Nazis not gain power, I would probably not seek to “move on to a less practical question” but instead try to find a persausive argument for opposing Nazis. That might involve discussing abortion in detail, or might not (depending on what they found persausive). Without actually being in that scenario, I have not enough information to suggest the best course of action.
I have not said that, and would greatly appreciate it if you didn’t paint me with positions which are not my own.
What I have said is that if someone were to believe that abortion is wrong but should be legal (which seems to be a position a non-zero number of people hold), then it might be useful for that person to look at whether the part of that formulation most in danger is the “should be legal” or the “is wrong” part. That is, contrasting legal restrictions on “the ability to obtain abortion” (which I am under the impression are a lot) with the legal restrictions on “believing abortion is wrong” (which I am under the impression is near-or-at zero).
Of course, it is possible that that person might say “well, I don’t care”. Of course, it is also possible that person might say “well, I don’t care” to any number of arguments. They might even say that to “Nazis are coming to power”. I am not suggesting a definitive approach to uniting all people under a common banner – I am suggesting one possible argument that some people (probably not all, but possibly not none) might find persausive. But no-one is under obligation to believe this is the best (or even a good) suggestion.
Yes, I would quite like my own beliefs to be listened to. Maybe you could try to do that in future?
Tm 09.09.24 at 7:02 pm
It’s instructive to read the text of some of the reproductive rights amendments recently approved by voters in several US states. They are quite far-reaching and seem to represent the majority view outside of the most conservative regions.
https://ballotpedia.org/Abortion_on_the_ballot#By_year
somebody who liked hot topic girls in school and knew around a hundred adults who thought they should be put into church-run mental facilities 09.09.24 at 8:57 pm
To the point of J-D at #119 (and others), it suffices to point out that a punishment regime which enforces gestational slavery on an ever widening group of woman under ever more onerous civil and criminal punishments should not, in practical terms, be evaluated by who it will do good for, but who such a regime will harm. harm to the right person is the principle – specifically, harm to the Slut Who Lives In The City And Just Fucks Whoever She Wants For Fun And Gets An Abortion If She Gets Pregnant.
if you point out that most women who get abortions are already mothers, who have experienced pregnancy and have a full understanding of its risks and impacts from the start, and do not wish to destroy their family and deprive their children of a mother by rolling the dice on a risk like another pregnancy, the anti-abortion people simply mumble something and look away and mutter that it doesnt count, this isnt real, this is just special pleading, surely an exception could be crafted, perhaps an application to a judge or jury or perhaps Governor Dogstrangler could commute her sentence if they attend churches that are similar enough, and so on. there was even a pro-life activist who testified recently that actually if you think about it, abortions for rape or incest aren’t abortions at all.
she is stupid, from a medical point of view, and professional thinkers may tut tut and conclude she is completely unprincipled. but they are not correct. her principle is her opposition to, and loathing of, the great american cryptid, the Slut Who Lives In The City And Just Fucks Whoever She Wants For Fun And Gets Abortions If She Gets Pregnant. the anti-abortion agitator is willing to sacrifice other women (never themselves) and other families (never their own) as collateral damage to punish this beast, to try to bring her to heel. if some kind of compromise is reached (casey was this, in practice) where the authorities prohibit abortions in a carefully circumscribed realm only meant to catch the Slut Who Lives In The City, in a short time everyone correctly sees that it isn’t a limit at all because somehow the cryptid has eluded them yet again. So the prohibitions must be enlarged, and enlarged, and enlarged, and the punishments made greater, and greater, and greater, until the collateral damage to mothers and families is so horrible that we MUST be destroying the Sluts too, surely. and this will satisfy them…for a moment…. until the dark hours of the night come yet again, the nightmare, the panicked awakening, eyes searching the shadows….surely she’s out there…maybe that girl i saw at starbucks today…her hair LOOKED like she was one…right?!
J-D 09.10.24 at 12:34 am
Even the most cursory attempt to search for information about deterrence suggests that it is not as obvious as you think it is.
I don’t know what reason you have to think that a fetus benefits when a pregnancy is not terminated. That’s not clear to me.
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