Why I Am Not Pro-Life (But Not Pro-Choice Either)

This post has been kicking around since last month, when a lot of fine bloggers were putting forward their defenses of abortion rights as part of "Blogging for Choice" Day. As it had been quite a while since I'd last written about abortion, I considered putting together a contrary post, titled "Why I Am Pro-Life." But I couldn't, because I'm not.

I've probably called myself "pro-life" in the past, maybe way back when I was in high school or an undergraduate. But I have no specific memory of doing so, and I wouldn't today. Part of this is, simply, because I'm not the hardline, simplistic, killing-a-fetus-is-murder opponent of abortion that I was raised to be. (Reading The Cider House Rules will do that to a person.) Do I still want to deter abortion, including--but not limited to--limiting abortion rights where I think best? Yes, definitely; the revulsion I feel towards the concept is still there. When I first learned about what an "abortion" was as a child, the mental image in my (ten-year-old, perhaps?) mind was of that of doctor wielding a butcher knife, stabbing a baby within a mother's womb...and frankly, the straightforward medical facts of what an abortion involves don't lead me to feel that that disturbing image is in any principled way flawed.

But while I would insist that is both impossible and irresponsible to pretend that such sentiments and feelings either could or should be excluded from political discussions, I also acknowledge that you have to be able to at least provide some reasoned account of the roots and parameters of one's revulsions for political purposes; standing alone, they provide few details and fewer answers. As time went by, the answers provided in particular by hardline abortion opponents, the one's who for reasons of religious doctrine or natural philosophy have determined that a fetus or embryo is fully human from the moment of conception, became less and less satisfying to me, both logically and theologically. And, perhaps most importantly, as I came to value more and more the (just as often left-leaning as well as "conservative") arguments for a genuine culture of life, I became similarly disturbed at the fetishism and obsessions often displayed on the "pro-life" side. A comprehensive and decent affirmation of "life" at all levels is a worthy ideal, but it lends itself idolization. One does not automatically reject moral realism and truth by realizing that reducing one's notion of life to the simple question "just when does it begin?" hardly does justice to the whole phenomenon. Opposing abortion is definitely a part of doing justice to it, but only a part.

So, I don't use the phrase "pro-life"--it's limiting, often inaccurate, and does the debate little good. The attachment of many opponents of abortion rights to it is, I think, symptomatic of one of the larger problems in the debate: the desire on their part to stigmatize the act of abortion as always and uncomplicatedly a crime against a living being--an act of murder, in essence--is at least partly reflective of the desire to get around the reality that millions of women (and, indirectly, men) choose abortion every year. Far better to address the thing itself, rather than the context within which the thing arises, is quite often the underlying, unconscious thinking here, I suspect. And which is, of course, the same sort of underlying thinking that led millions of basically decent people in the 19th-century to oppose slavery, but feel no need to reflect upon their own racism, or the social and economic structures that they benefited from and which kept freed slaves and their descendants from enjoying any sort of real equality with whites for over a century. That's not to say that ending slavery wasn't a legitimate end in itself; and by the same token, I wouldn't say that facts about the real viability of unborn babies are irrelevant to legislation on abortion. For certain they are not. Yet one should not get away, as some pro-lifers seem to want to, from the central point that it is the context of choosing that matters most. The medical knowledge that makes abortion possible is not going to go away; all that can be affected by agitation over the issue are the circumstances under which the desire, the wish, to make use of this knowledge is to be considered justified, or regulated, or permitted, or condemned, or denied. And that means talking about choice.

You have to hand it to advocates of abortion rights: the rhetoric of choice is perfect for advancing their cause in the modern world. Who doesn't want more choices, after all? Or, more particularly, who wants "the state" or "the government" or "fascist Christians" (they're all pretty much the same to the abortion lobby in this day of Bushist theocracy, right?) to make choices for you? Nobody does, that's who. Abortion as a supremely individualistic, personal, private, even affirmative act makes perfect sense--you control your own body, you determine your own sex life, you weigh your own feelings, you chart your own future...it all fits together. The availability of abortion is a technology, a tool; it gives you more options, it leaves open more doors you can go through--or go back through, if a relationship or opportunity or lifestyle doesn't appear to be turning into what you thought it would back when you first chose it or unthinkingly went along with it. And please, let's not get waste our time talking about how depicting "choice" in such terms is terribly harmful and/or disrespectful to those obviously and indisputably tragic cases when abortion arises as an option in the contexts of violations like rape; I will quite willingly shut the hell up and listen with an open mind if someone wants to attempt to explain to me why it is they believe that any possible form of democratically determined, revulsion-grounded abortion restrictions (parental notification laws, mandated counseling and waiting periods, etc.) will always weigh terribly and entirely upon exactly those women who are most in need of society's protection, but I have little patience for people who wish to pretend that the alignment of abortion rights with "choice" is somehow wholly and solely tied up with those awful few cases. Because it's not; in the minds of the overwhelming majority of abortion-rights advocates, it's about allowing people--almost always white, middle- and upper-class, secular people--more and freer sexual choices than previous generations enjoyed. Being able to rely on a technology that makes it somewhat easier to choose whether or not to have the baby, or to marry the guy, or to stick with the relationship, or to remember last night, or to finish the degree, or anything else, also means it's somewhat easier to choose more sex, period. (Let us praise the honesty of Matthew Yglesias here: "That legal abortion encourages premarital sex is feature, not a bug.") And again, what could be more modern than that?

Nothing, I suppose, if you're of the (in some ways almost misogynistic, if you think about) opinion that the biologically male model of sexual behavior--that is, being able to have intercourse often with no physiological or (one hopes?) psychological consequences whatsoever--is normative and ought to be available to everyone regardless of gender and indeed ought to be enabled through legal guaranteed rights. And there's equally nothing wrong with it if you view one's sexual choices as indistinguishable from any other set other commodified choices, ideally having no ramifications on one's living arrangements, extended family, position in society, obligation to future generations, unacknowledged dependence upon unwritten moral standards, involvement in collective goals, etc. (And no, I haven't plucked that list out of thin air; while it would be, of course, ludicrous to claim that every single sexual act that evades or ignores its own inherent and/or conventional consequences and obligations is therefore a crime against civilization--human beings would have never made it out of the hunter-gatherer stage if such were the case--anyone who maintains the opposite and equally ludicrous view that, all things being equal, women and men ought to be able by right to enjoy sex without their futures or thoughts or relationships being messed up by any of that communitarian crap in any way, clearly has only ever had sex on the starship Enterprise's Holodeck.) Obviously, I think both of those beliefs pretty flawed on their own terms. But if you do nonetheless believe either of those things, however slightly, however unconsciously, then at the very least one really ought to consider how the embrace of such a plainly individualistic ethos might, say, infect one's other political commitments.

Two excerpts here, both which refer to experiences which took place during counter-protest "defenses" at abortion clinics by abortion rights advocates. One comes from an e-mail sent to me by Crooked Timber blogger (and atheist lefty) Harry Brighouse, used with his permission; the other from an essay by DePaul philosophy professor (and atheist Maoist) Bill Martin, titled "A postsecular contribution to the debate on abortion," from his book Politics in the impasse: Explorations in postsecular social theory. First Harry, responding to a comment I made about the way mainstream liberals sometimes get in the way of religious and atheist leftists from connecting with one another:

[I should tell you about] my experiences at abortion clinic defences in the late 80's and early 90's. I used to be much more confident than I am now that abortion was permissible, and was in a milieu which participated in the defences--I must have gone to 15 or so in my time. I HATED them for several reasons. The most striking were these--I hated being in a demonstration in which the police were on our side; I hated being in a demonstration in which my side was visibly composed of wealthier more privileged people than the other side; and I hated the fact that I knew that, my socialist contingent excepted, the people on my side were less committed to my ideals of social justice than many of the leaders of the other side; who were often leading lay Catholics and Catholic priests whom I'd seen at meetings and demonstrations in support of our Central America work and helping to organise community support for strikes of low paid workers (this was in Southern California)--you never saw the NOW or NARAL people at such things.

Now, from Bill Martin:

Most people in the anti-abortion movement associate the pro-choice movement with the middle class. This is not entirely accurate, but I think that the dominant rhetoric of the pro-choice movement is very much a product of the middle-class point of view. This is mere empiricism, of course, but I might mention some things I've seen at various pro-choice demonstrations. At a demonstration at the state capitol in Topeka a few years ago, a woman was carrying a sign that said, "Choosy mothers choose choice." That seems to sum up the whole consumerist ideal right there. Although some fellow demonstrators said that they found this slogan "cute," I found it disgusting—just the sort of thing that says that, out of concern for "my choices," I don't want to deal with any of the hard questions that should be at the heart of the abortion controversy....[T]he point is that the rhetoric of choice is embedded in a general ideology that has it that there can be no larger struggle over values. Of course, in one sense, that is true—in an anti-participatory society such as the one we live in, there certainly is not going to be any substantive official debate over values. But the rhetoric of choice simply accepts this state of affairs—and therefore has nothing more substantive to tell the people who are genuinely concerned about the moral questions of abortion than, "don't tell me what to do"—accepting that the best solution is simply for each person to be able to decide what they want, in the atomistic isolation and serialization that is the stock-in-trade of anti-participatory society....

Many people in this society who identify themselves as conservative are worried about a society, and especially an economy, that seems to simply rip up the fabric of life for no good reason. Many of these conservatives who take their frustration and resentment in the direction of fascism (whatever it is officially called) do not see the ideology of "just do what you want" as any kind of alternative to a community structure. And, in fact, for that part of this group who are not wealthy members of the middle class, the ideology of choice can't have any great appeal, because these are people who are not used to having all sorts of choices in the first place. The liberal response is to simply see this as an impoverished form of life, and to treat these community-minded poor and/or working-class people as ignorant....[But] when I see poor and/or working-class people lined up in the anti-abortion ranks, I see a willingness to sacrifice over fundamental value questions that I do not see on the side of the rhetoric of pro-choice. I see an engagement with values that is denied by the pro-choice rhetoric. Frankly, I'd rather argue and struggle over what our values ought to be with someone who believes in values than with some "choice" advocate who doesn't, who isn't primarily motivated by values....

I wouldn't want to pretend that either Harry or Bill Martin (whom I the good fortune of meeting with a couple of times, long ago; he was visiting BYU because he was fascinating by the "illiberal" elements of Mormonism) are on my side in this debate. Clearly, both are at least a little troubled by abortion, if only because, as best as I can tell, they recognize that the defense of abortion rights as first and foremost a personal choice very clearly enunciates a particular (and close-mindedly liberal) position regarding a host of complicated issues arising from sex, family life, parentage, cross-generational obligations, the raising of children, etc.--and that all of those things are, contrary to beliefs of some egalitarians, inextricably tied up with achieving a just, fair, and loving society. Yet both, so far as I know, still basically believe that abortion rights are worth defending because of the never-entirely-sharable-or-transferable costs which opposing them would sometimes force onto certain classes of women. (And in case it's not clear, let me say again: I completely agree that the fact that many opponents of abortion rights care not a whit for addressing the costs their policy preferences would have on the social fabric through greater education and social spending is simply despicable. And the fact that even greater numbers of abortion opponents are unwilling to think critically about the way the alienating, disposable, work-and-play-centered as opposed to family-centered pace of modern life has exacerbated inequalities in the set of mutual relations and responsibilities between women and men which they envision is just as bad. As Stanley Hauerwas has observed (via Kim-loi Mergenthaler), "if you think that you can be very concerned about abortion and not concerned about the privatization of American life generally, you are making a mistake.")

Having rejected the simplistic judgment that "abortion = murder" in (almost) all its variations, I can't dismiss what I assume to be Harry's or Professor Martin's ethical concerns. I struggle in trying to figure out what, if anything, I can or should do with my revulsions; and I suppose the consistent majorities of Americans who say that, while they don't want abortion outlawed, they are still are bothered by it and would like it to be rare, are in my same boat.

The rhetoric of choice, of course, provides an easy recourse here: "You say you feel revulsion at the thought of abortion? Great! I don't. So how about we pass laws that allow you to follow your revulsions and not have an abortion, and me to follow my lack of revulsions and perhaps choose one if I'm so inclined, and everyone's happy?" A wonderful response, that. Except that to affirm it is to affirm the sort of comfortably pluralistic world--a world which above all follows the preferences of those psychologically and materially in a position to benefit from the safe navigation of that pluralism--which abandons the engagement over values and the effort to build something common, something shared. Choice, as an ideological priority, is rather commercial: it is about managing one's options, about taking care of business. The matter of which choices are right or wrong, which are to be valued and made plentiful and which are to be hopefully turned into an option which--as Hillary Clinton put it--"does not ever have to be exercised," requires more than liberal privacy and individual preference can provide. It requires collective engagement, and a willingness, perhaps, to "sacrifice over fundamental value questions." Simplistic "pro-life" mantras surely won't get you that, but treating the whole matter of sex and family and life as--at least as it manifests itself in the lives of the large majority of those who appear to actually do most of the marching under the "pro-choice" banner--something which, well, gosh, you just have work it out for yourself in the moment, gets you even less.

I'm not a pro-lifer. I'm a Kansas voter now, and I was happy to see Phill Kline booted out of the attorney general's office. But neither does that mean I think Wichita's own George Tiller ought to get a pass, just because in our present world I can't see my way clear to dismissing him as evil incarnate. What he does is, to be sure, at least in part, revolting. Trying to spread and strengthen and situate that revulsion, and working to responsibly and democratically incorporate it into the shared norms and laws of our society, is complicated and difficult, with numerous political and legal challenges along the way. Maybe it won't ever happen; maybe it's a foolish and indefensible goal. But at least, in trying, I'm engaged in a genuine social project--whereas the rhetoric of rights and choice is mostly non- or even anti-social. Not that that hurts it as a movement in contemporary, non-participatory, my-your-own-business America; anything but, in fact. Still, it's a point for liberal defenders of abortion rights to keep in mind, next time they wonder why so few people from the office or the grad seminar show up to walk the picket line with the janitors.