On Being Pro-Choice
If there is anything we probably don't need in the Year of Our Lord 2019, it's a dude pontificating on abortion. And, yet, we find ourselves, at least in the United States, in a place where the issue has absolutely come to a head, in the form of a serious of extremely severe restrictions on abortions passed in Georgia, Alabama, and my home state of Ohio. In that light, I think everyone has some sort of obligation to indicate where they stand. And I think it is particularly incumbent on people of faith, and especially Christians, to talk about where they stand, as the motivating force behind these moves has been explicitly Christian in its framing.
A couple of years ago, I wrote a piece that described what I think is a more constructive framework for thinking about the philosophical issues behind abortion. I stand by what I wrote there, but upon re-reading it I noticed that I never committed to a particular position. So, here it is--for the reasons set forth in that piece, I think abortion, while not the optimal outcome, is morally acceptable under any circumstance up to the the point of quickening, and is morally acceptable at any time up to birth if the pregnancy poses a severe risk to the health of the mother, or where the child will be non-viable upon birth. Consequently, at a minimum, abortion should be legally available under those circumstances. While this position is not as expansive as some, I think most would agree that it qualifies as a pro-choice position.
But it would be wrong to say that the framework was the thing that drove my position. Instead, it was the other way around--I was never completely comfortable with the uncompromising pro-life framework I had absorbed via post-JPII Roman Catholicism, and my discomfort increased consistently over time. The framework was a structure for making sense of my underlying pro-choice intuition.
There are two conversations that I have had in my life, both with women, that have formed that intuition. The first was in college. I was sitting in a coffee shop with a woman I knew, and had sorta-kinda dated (as one does when you are 19), alongside a friend of mine. Somehow, the topic of abortion came up, and the two men in the conversation wanted to talk about the issue in thoughtful, philosophical terms (again, as one does when you are 19). She, however, cut right through the fog of this pseudo-profound discourse when she gave her take. "I want it to be legal as long as I might want one, but then when I get older and won't need it anymore, I'll push for making it illegal because I think it's bad."
The two men sitting at the table were stupefied by this response. To this day, 20+ years later, my friend calls it the most evil thing he has ever heard anyone say. But, it was deeply, profoundly revelatory. We often imagine, and the folks on the self-identified "pro life" side of the equation try very hard to further this vision, that the abortion question is driven by a kind of Solomonic analysis of the nature of human personhood. But, in many, many cases, that's not what is going on at all. What's going on with abortion is a discourse about power. The woman I knew in college was from an extremely wealthy family, on her way to being wealthy in her own right. For her, the question of abortion was in no sense about "what should we do," but entirely about "what can I do." What was important to her was the ability to exercise power over her own situation, but almost as important was the ability to exercise power over the situations of others.
It dawned on me in that coffee shop that, as a practical matter, there will never be any meaningful restrictions on people like her obtaining an abortion. Even if it were to be technically illegal in the state that she lives, she easily has the resources to go to another state. And even if it were to be illegal across the country, she could go to Canada, or Europe, or pay some doctor to say it was medically indicated, or whatever artifice was necessary to get it done. And even further, if somehow someone found some way to actually make bans stick for someone like her, you can be assured that all of the sudden prominent people would be talking about how "extreme" and "unfair" such laws and decisions are, and they would be swiftly walked-back.
No, the abortion debate is not about whether women like her will be able to get abortions; the abortion debate is about whether women without the means or connections or social capital will be able to obtain abortions. And there is a significant segment of people who would crowd under the pro-life banner that understand this perfectly well, for whom this is really the point of the whole exercise. Men push abortion bans because they can exercise power over women, and protected women go along with it because they know it won't really apply to them. Either way, this is about power, and who has the power.
The abortion discussion is about power, or at least a form of power, in another way, and this gets to the second conversation. This conversation was in law school with a classmate, and was about birth control and the Roman Catholic Church's opposition to birth control. She asked me to explain the RCC's position, which I tried to do, pointing out where I felt it didn't hold up. After a pause, she said "so this is really about the idea that a woman should be always subject to her biology." In the immediate moment, I thought "well, not quite, you are kind of missing the point." But I have come to realize that I was wrong; she hit upon the true heart of the matter, and I was missing the point. Because that is exactly what the birth control discussion is about, and it is what the abortion debate is about.
Our sense of self is predicated on the notion of our autonomy. As I sit at my desk and type these words, I direct my fingers to press the keys to make the insubstantial thoughts become real. My sense of self is more expansive than my physical body, but it is unavoidably intertwined with my body, and the ability of my self to exercise control over my body. Psychologically, the sense of control over one's own body and losing control over it, is a pressure point. Much of the joy that comes from athletics and other sorts of physical activities is found in the ability to get your body to do precisely what you mind and self tell it to do. On the flip side, the idea of losing control of your body, having it act in ways that you don't intend, or even in ways counter to what you intend, is a source of fear. If I don't have control over my body, what do I have? Bodily autonomy is, in important sense, our first freedom.
Now, everyone understands that there are practical limits to how much control one has over one's body. We have physical limitations of various sorts, either permanent or temporary. But it is generally seen as a good thing that we have developed various techniques to overcome or reduce those limitations. In fact, the entire discipline of medicine, seen from the maximum possible remove, is about facilitating our ability to exercise control over our bodies. When we get sick, we lose that control--our bodies start doing things that we don't want them to do, and we can't stop them. Medicine then steps in with techniques to allow us to re-assert control over our own bodies. To take an utterly trivial example, I have found myself in the last few weeks unable to get the pressure in my Eustachian tubes to equalize properly, resulting in blocked ears and reduced hearing. My ears are not doing what I want them to do, something I know they can do because they have done it before. Medicine steps in with a set of techniques which (in principle--it hasn't worked very well so far) allow me to reassert control over the functioning of my body. This is generally seen as a good thing.
This principle is basically unchallenged in our broader culture until to comes to reproduction. I've talked about the special pleading involved in sex before, but it's actually much more specific than that. In no other context does anyone seriously assert that people cannot and should not exercise autonomy over their bodies in the way that it is asserted that women may not exercise autonomy over their reproduction. No one will ever tell me that I can't try to unblock my ears because "that's the way your biology works." I am allowed to try to unblock my ears because it is my body, my choice. And yet the pro-life movement makes an intervention to say that a woman cannot exert control over the functioning of her body, notwithstanding that the means to exert control exist and are effective.
Now, the response to this is that there is another value at issue, the fetus/baby-to-be. And I agree that there is and should be a balancing between these interests. But I do not see any recognition on the part of the pro-life movement that the autonomy of the woman to control her own body is a value that needs to be recognized. I don't see any balancing on the pro-life side. It seems to be that the irreducible core of the pro-life movement is the claim that a woman forfeits the entitlement to bodily autonomy when she gets pregnant, no matter the circumstances under which that comes to pass. In other words, a woman is only an autonomous entity in the way a man is an autonomous entity insofar as she is not or does not become pregnant. Her autonomy, and thus her personhood, is conditional in a way that mine is not.
This is why rape and incest exceptions strike at the emotional heart of the abortion issue. It's one thing to argue that a woman forfeits her autonomy as a result of other autonomous decisions--I don't agree with that, but you can make it. But to say that the violation of her autonomy in one way can result in the prolonged violation of her autonomy in this other way starts to look like women have autonomy only when others, especially men, feel like granting it. It goes again to the notion that men are real people with real rights, and women are people in this lesser, much more contingent, way.
All of this is a long winded way of saying that I understand where women are coming from when they say that abortion rights are fundamental to any notion of women's equality, and I agree. If others can control my bodily autonomy in this deeply personal and profound way, what else are they going to be able to control? And, no, advocating for economic support for mothers and families generally, or specifically in difficult situations (the standard prescription from progressive pro-life people), doesn't address or alleviate this concern. When the pro-life movement, in the main, opposes all forms of reproductive autonomy, and opposes women's leadership in their respective religious communities, and advocates for a vision of gender and gender relationships that prioritize the difference between the genders (which, as similar systems with regard to race teach us, always inure to the benefit of the privileged side of that divide), it is reasonable to conclude that the fact that abortion restrictions call into question the equality of women is a feature and not a bug for the majority of the pro-life movement. This looks like a piece of a broader program.
And, once again, we have to situate this in context of the first story. Women with money and influence and power will be able to protect their autonomy, and have those around them protect their autonomy. Rich and powerful women get to be real people, while regular women get pushed to the Phantom Zone. Given all of the ways in which money and social power denigrate and dehumanize those without those traits in our society, I am simply not willing to sign up for a program that provides yet another way for rich people to get over and poor people to get screwed. We have far, far too much of that as it is.
I don't pretend that any of this is ground-breaking or innovative--others, especially women, have said all of this much better than I have, or can. But it reflects how I have come to see the issue. In the end, the autonomy and humanity of women must have priority in these discussions, and the modern pro-life movement does not meaningfully engage with or value these priorities. Until they do, and I am not holding my breath that they will, I will not be on their side.
A couple of years ago, I wrote a piece that described what I think is a more constructive framework for thinking about the philosophical issues behind abortion. I stand by what I wrote there, but upon re-reading it I noticed that I never committed to a particular position. So, here it is--for the reasons set forth in that piece, I think abortion, while not the optimal outcome, is morally acceptable under any circumstance up to the the point of quickening, and is morally acceptable at any time up to birth if the pregnancy poses a severe risk to the health of the mother, or where the child will be non-viable upon birth. Consequently, at a minimum, abortion should be legally available under those circumstances. While this position is not as expansive as some, I think most would agree that it qualifies as a pro-choice position.
But it would be wrong to say that the framework was the thing that drove my position. Instead, it was the other way around--I was never completely comfortable with the uncompromising pro-life framework I had absorbed via post-JPII Roman Catholicism, and my discomfort increased consistently over time. The framework was a structure for making sense of my underlying pro-choice intuition.
There are two conversations that I have had in my life, both with women, that have formed that intuition. The first was in college. I was sitting in a coffee shop with a woman I knew, and had sorta-kinda dated (as one does when you are 19), alongside a friend of mine. Somehow, the topic of abortion came up, and the two men in the conversation wanted to talk about the issue in thoughtful, philosophical terms (again, as one does when you are 19). She, however, cut right through the fog of this pseudo-profound discourse when she gave her take. "I want it to be legal as long as I might want one, but then when I get older and won't need it anymore, I'll push for making it illegal because I think it's bad."
The two men sitting at the table were stupefied by this response. To this day, 20+ years later, my friend calls it the most evil thing he has ever heard anyone say. But, it was deeply, profoundly revelatory. We often imagine, and the folks on the self-identified "pro life" side of the equation try very hard to further this vision, that the abortion question is driven by a kind of Solomonic analysis of the nature of human personhood. But, in many, many cases, that's not what is going on at all. What's going on with abortion is a discourse about power. The woman I knew in college was from an extremely wealthy family, on her way to being wealthy in her own right. For her, the question of abortion was in no sense about "what should we do," but entirely about "what can I do." What was important to her was the ability to exercise power over her own situation, but almost as important was the ability to exercise power over the situations of others.
It dawned on me in that coffee shop that, as a practical matter, there will never be any meaningful restrictions on people like her obtaining an abortion. Even if it were to be technically illegal in the state that she lives, she easily has the resources to go to another state. And even if it were to be illegal across the country, she could go to Canada, or Europe, or pay some doctor to say it was medically indicated, or whatever artifice was necessary to get it done. And even further, if somehow someone found some way to actually make bans stick for someone like her, you can be assured that all of the sudden prominent people would be talking about how "extreme" and "unfair" such laws and decisions are, and they would be swiftly walked-back.
No, the abortion debate is not about whether women like her will be able to get abortions; the abortion debate is about whether women without the means or connections or social capital will be able to obtain abortions. And there is a significant segment of people who would crowd under the pro-life banner that understand this perfectly well, for whom this is really the point of the whole exercise. Men push abortion bans because they can exercise power over women, and protected women go along with it because they know it won't really apply to them. Either way, this is about power, and who has the power.
The abortion discussion is about power, or at least a form of power, in another way, and this gets to the second conversation. This conversation was in law school with a classmate, and was about birth control and the Roman Catholic Church's opposition to birth control. She asked me to explain the RCC's position, which I tried to do, pointing out where I felt it didn't hold up. After a pause, she said "so this is really about the idea that a woman should be always subject to her biology." In the immediate moment, I thought "well, not quite, you are kind of missing the point." But I have come to realize that I was wrong; she hit upon the true heart of the matter, and I was missing the point. Because that is exactly what the birth control discussion is about, and it is what the abortion debate is about.
Our sense of self is predicated on the notion of our autonomy. As I sit at my desk and type these words, I direct my fingers to press the keys to make the insubstantial thoughts become real. My sense of self is more expansive than my physical body, but it is unavoidably intertwined with my body, and the ability of my self to exercise control over my body. Psychologically, the sense of control over one's own body and losing control over it, is a pressure point. Much of the joy that comes from athletics and other sorts of physical activities is found in the ability to get your body to do precisely what you mind and self tell it to do. On the flip side, the idea of losing control of your body, having it act in ways that you don't intend, or even in ways counter to what you intend, is a source of fear. If I don't have control over my body, what do I have? Bodily autonomy is, in important sense, our first freedom.
Now, everyone understands that there are practical limits to how much control one has over one's body. We have physical limitations of various sorts, either permanent or temporary. But it is generally seen as a good thing that we have developed various techniques to overcome or reduce those limitations. In fact, the entire discipline of medicine, seen from the maximum possible remove, is about facilitating our ability to exercise control over our bodies. When we get sick, we lose that control--our bodies start doing things that we don't want them to do, and we can't stop them. Medicine then steps in with techniques to allow us to re-assert control over our own bodies. To take an utterly trivial example, I have found myself in the last few weeks unable to get the pressure in my Eustachian tubes to equalize properly, resulting in blocked ears and reduced hearing. My ears are not doing what I want them to do, something I know they can do because they have done it before. Medicine steps in with a set of techniques which (in principle--it hasn't worked very well so far) allow me to reassert control over the functioning of my body. This is generally seen as a good thing.
This principle is basically unchallenged in our broader culture until to comes to reproduction. I've talked about the special pleading involved in sex before, but it's actually much more specific than that. In no other context does anyone seriously assert that people cannot and should not exercise autonomy over their bodies in the way that it is asserted that women may not exercise autonomy over their reproduction. No one will ever tell me that I can't try to unblock my ears because "that's the way your biology works." I am allowed to try to unblock my ears because it is my body, my choice. And yet the pro-life movement makes an intervention to say that a woman cannot exert control over the functioning of her body, notwithstanding that the means to exert control exist and are effective.
Now, the response to this is that there is another value at issue, the fetus/baby-to-be. And I agree that there is and should be a balancing between these interests. But I do not see any recognition on the part of the pro-life movement that the autonomy of the woman to control her own body is a value that needs to be recognized. I don't see any balancing on the pro-life side. It seems to be that the irreducible core of the pro-life movement is the claim that a woman forfeits the entitlement to bodily autonomy when she gets pregnant, no matter the circumstances under which that comes to pass. In other words, a woman is only an autonomous entity in the way a man is an autonomous entity insofar as she is not or does not become pregnant. Her autonomy, and thus her personhood, is conditional in a way that mine is not.
This is why rape and incest exceptions strike at the emotional heart of the abortion issue. It's one thing to argue that a woman forfeits her autonomy as a result of other autonomous decisions--I don't agree with that, but you can make it. But to say that the violation of her autonomy in one way can result in the prolonged violation of her autonomy in this other way starts to look like women have autonomy only when others, especially men, feel like granting it. It goes again to the notion that men are real people with real rights, and women are people in this lesser, much more contingent, way.
All of this is a long winded way of saying that I understand where women are coming from when they say that abortion rights are fundamental to any notion of women's equality, and I agree. If others can control my bodily autonomy in this deeply personal and profound way, what else are they going to be able to control? And, no, advocating for economic support for mothers and families generally, or specifically in difficult situations (the standard prescription from progressive pro-life people), doesn't address or alleviate this concern. When the pro-life movement, in the main, opposes all forms of reproductive autonomy, and opposes women's leadership in their respective religious communities, and advocates for a vision of gender and gender relationships that prioritize the difference between the genders (which, as similar systems with regard to race teach us, always inure to the benefit of the privileged side of that divide), it is reasonable to conclude that the fact that abortion restrictions call into question the equality of women is a feature and not a bug for the majority of the pro-life movement. This looks like a piece of a broader program.
And, once again, we have to situate this in context of the first story. Women with money and influence and power will be able to protect their autonomy, and have those around them protect their autonomy. Rich and powerful women get to be real people, while regular women get pushed to the Phantom Zone. Given all of the ways in which money and social power denigrate and dehumanize those without those traits in our society, I am simply not willing to sign up for a program that provides yet another way for rich people to get over and poor people to get screwed. We have far, far too much of that as it is.
I don't pretend that any of this is ground-breaking or innovative--others, especially women, have said all of this much better than I have, or can. But it reflects how I have come to see the issue. In the end, the autonomy and humanity of women must have priority in these discussions, and the modern pro-life movement does not meaningfully engage with or value these priorities. Until they do, and I am not holding my breath that they will, I will not be on their side.
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