Secular Pro-Life has published an article of mine under their paid blogging program.

 

Some further thoughts on the SPL blog post

From the post: In relation to issue 3 above, pro-lifers often point out that legal abortion is called “pro-choice,” and then proceed to object (as at 15:43 in the video) “It’s not pro-choice when we feel like we have no choice.” This quip does make a good point about social conditions, but it is framed as if it demolishes either the term “pro-choice” or the pro-choice policy; and does it really succeed in doing either? I think that all this argument really does is to play on two different meanings of the word “choice.” There is no real inconsistency here in pro-choicers’ position.

The fact that for many teenaged girls, especially, under present social conditions, it would be disastrous to have a baby (that is, having a baby is not a palatable “choice,” since it means financial ruin or rejection by one’s family or beatings from one’s boyfriend) hardly proves that allowing abortion (known as the “pro-choice” social policy) is a flawed position. If anything, the fact that for many girls there is no palatable alternative bolsters, in itself, the case for allowing abortion.

Then from the pro-choice side we regularly hear a guilt-by-association argument that could be called the “pro-birth argument.” The argument goes, in effect, “Because many who identify as pro-life on abortion hold obnoxious positions and harm women’s interests on other issues, the pro-life position on abortion must also be obnoxious and harmful to women’s interests.” On the panel, this was the argument on which Pamela Merritt mainly relied (though she did refer, more briefly, to some other arguments).

Merritt certainly argued convincingly and memorably that many pro-life politicians are destructive in many ways to the well-being of the female gender (and everyone else). But what does that really prove in terms of whether abortion is moral, whether abortion should be legal, or whether a feminist should be pro-choice or pro-life? As an argument against the pro-life positions even of the Missouri politicians she focused on, hers was an ad hominem, and against the pro-life positions of three of her fellow panelists, it was a strawman as well.

In order to defeat the pro-life position, one has to defeat the most ideal version of it. If pro-choicers were able to defeat the most ideal version – namely, the consistent pro-life position – they would certainly do so. If they try to defeat a tarnished version of the pro-life position, it is simply an admission that they are unable to defeat the ideal one. It should be possible to make pro-choicers see that and hence to abandon that argument.

And when she said that, things came to a head. Aimee Murphy suggested that the word “person” could be dispensed with, since “if we’re talking human rights” what we want to know is who is a human. “At the moment of fertilization you have two human gametes; they fuse; it’s a member of the same species.” Merritt tried to dismiss that with “We’ve got science on one side, we’ve got science on the other side,” but Murphy shot back, “Do you have an embryology textbook that can back that up?” Merritt replied, “For every textbook that you have, there has been a textbook produced on the other side.” The two were not in a situation where they could immediately produce their documentation, so that discussion ended there. But I think that anyone who does delve into the documentation will decide that Murphy won that debate.

Personally I think we could even avoid debates about present humanity by asking simply, “At what point in development will we, if we kill it, deprive an individual organism – whatever name we may give to that organism – of the conscious human life it would likely have had in the future?”

Under The highlights, for me, in the blog post, I provided a quote from Destiny Herndon-De La Rosa. Another good one at 78:08: “In gaining our liberation, I believe we have taken that same oppression and passed it down to the unborn being. . . . We should be the ones speaking up and saying we will never view any member of the human family as property, especially the weakest and most vulnerable among us.”

Klein-Hattori and Merritt found their stereotypes of pro-lifers exploded. Merritt said at 90:20 “What you’re describing is not pro-life that I experience and that millions of people experience . . . [it] is really blowing my mind.” Klein-Hattori said at 67:40 “One of the things that has me most excited is to hear the way that the pro-life women up here are talking.”

She went on, “To say that we do need to remove all of these things, to dismantle and rebuild a world . . . that’s fantastic . . . whether abortion rights have to stay central, I believe that they do. . . . the way that people talk about abortion is socially constructed. . . . all of this is socially constructed.” But this would mean that her view that abortion should be normalized is also socially constructed; so how can we decide to normalize it? While I agree that we need to dismantle patriarchy and white supremacy, how can she be sure that we do not need to dismantle Planned Parenthood supremacy? This must be a common type of question, so no doubt postmodernist philosophy has some answer.

 

A topic for another time is the stigmatization of abortion, criticized by Merritt at 72:42. If abortion is barbaric but most of the women involved are victims, is there a way to be honest about the barbarity without doing further damage to countless women?

 

If “the winning future for the pro-life movement is . . . young, feminist, and disproportionately people of color,” as Prof. Charles Camosy has written, that event may have had an importance that is hard to estimate.

The event merited at least a PhD thesis, but space did not allow.

Other articles on the event:

Both sides on abortion debate ponder if pro-lifers can also be feminists

How abortion divides the feminist movement

Feminists and pro-lifers can join forces – and why they should

 

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Some future posts:

Life Panels

A Trade-Off of a Sensitive Nature

Unborn Child-Protection Legislation, the Moral Health of Society, and the Role of the American Democratic Party

The Motivations of Aborting Parents

Why Remorse Comes Too Late

The Kitchen-Ingredients Week-After Pill

Unwanted Babies and Overpopulation

The Woman as Slave?

Abortion and the Map of the World