I posted about Obama, abortion, and irreconcilables yesterday. As coincidence would have it, a major anti-abortion campaign has descended on Pasadena City College this week. At strategic points around campus, activists have erected massive billboards depicting the fetus at various stages of prenatal development. Several dozen young people, clean-cut and mostly white, clad in shorts and t-shirts, are manning the displays with literature and a willingness to talk. Yesterday, these huge set-ups attracted large crowds, drawn to the brightly colored, highly controversial images. As I walked on to campus this morning, the displays were being erected once more; this is presumably part of a week-long campaign.
(UPDATE: I’ve learned that our visitors this week come from the Wichita, Kansas outfit called Justice for All. Their website — with exact reproductions of the images they have on campus this week – is here. Warning: May be triggering for many. A visit to the JFA site makes clear they are tied to conservative Protestant evangelicalism, advocating abstinence until marriage. JFA is closely linked with Stand To Reason, the Southern California apologetics group; STR’s statement of faith is here. JFA has been sued before over their displays, and a lawsuit is ongoing in Texas after a display at UT Austin.)
This often happens this time of year. Christian colleges and universities that finish their terms in early May free up committed young activists to descend on public colleges and universities that won’t finish up until June. What a fine thing it must be to be able to tell one’s friends that one is spending the summer campaigning and witnessing for life, bringing the “truth about abortion” to the ignorant, the misled, and the Great Unsaved! I’m a bit snarky, but also empathetic. I’ve been part of similar marches and campaigns, and unlike most people, have adult experience with being on both sides of the abortion issue. (Pro-choice, pro-life, and pro-choice once more.) I know how easy it is to move from passionate conviction to righteous indignation to dehumanization of one’s opponents.
On a day like today, I have no interest in wading out onto the quad to engage one-one-one with these folks. My main concern is for the emotional welfare of my students, particularly those who have had abortions. (I can think of four young women currently on this campus who have confided in me that they have made that particular choice. I’m under no illusion that everyone who has had an abortion shares the story with me, and as a result, can only assume that a substantial percentage of my students have terminated a pregnancy.) The activists have set up their displays in such a way that it is difficult to enter or exit our main buildings without seeing these graphic and troubling images; I am eager to make myself available (and I know I speak for my feminist colleagues when I say that they are also available) to students who want to process through their feelings.
If I were to engage with the activists, I wouldn’t debate the issue of when life begins. The answer to that question is so weighted with theological conviction and emotional intuition that the chances of achieving a happy universal consensus are nil. (See yesterday’s post about the inevitabilty of irreconcilables.) Rather, I’d prefer to focus solely on policy. What laws do they want changed? What punishments would be appropriate for women who seek abortion? What punishments would be appropriate for doctors who provide abortion? What expectations do these activists have that ending legal abortion will also end illicit pregnancy terminations?
President Obama rightly pointed out that most Americans have contradictory views. Many Americans, an increasing number, are “pro-life.” The anti-abortion movement is winning the battle to convince folks that a fetus is a human being. But they aren’t winning elections; just last fall, pro-life propositions were resoundingly defeated in Colorado, South Dakota, and in California. The reason for this apparent disconnect is that a great many people find abortion abhorrent, but are reluctant to ban the procedure in all instances. Most Americans can imagine their own daughters or little sisters getting raped, after all; few Americans would want to force a woman to carry such a pregnancy to term.
So the question I would have for my pro-life friends is about policy. What specific policy recommendations do you call for? If doctors continue to perform abortions once it has been made illegal, what charges do you intend to bring against them? What crime do you think a woman ought to be charged with if she seeks an abortion? If you believe that women are “victims” of abortion, do you see them as emotional children who cannot be held accountable for their actions? Do you think penalties should be enhanced for women who seek more than one abortion over the course of their lifetimes?
The issue of when life begins is, I think, more or less a moot point. Even if we concede (and I do not concede this) that life begins at conception, what specific policies and coercive tactics ought to be adopted to protect that embryonic life? In the public square, those of us who hold strong views need to bring tangible policy solutions to the table. And this, of course, is where the pro-life movement loses traction with the American people. 51% of Americans may describe themselves as pro-life, but that doesn’t mean 51% of Americans want abortion to be outlawed, or want clinic workers charged with murder. Americans, in other words, seem to be increasingly pro-life in their private moral views and resolutely pro-choice in terms of their views on public policy. (This explains why parental notification initiatives have failed three times in California, despite the fact that most Californians think teens should talk to their parents before seeking an abortion.) We lean increasingly to the right philosophically, but increasingly left in terms of practicalities.
But today, my thoughts are not about politics or philosophy. My thoughts are with the young women on this campus (statistically, on a campus with more than 15,000 women, there are thousands who are have had or will have an abortion) who will come face to face with these graphic displays today. My prayers are for them, my office door (as I told my women’s studies class this morning) is open to them. And I’m choosing to remain cheerfully civil to those whose views are different from my own.
I read somewhere not-too-long-ago that somewhere in the neighborhood of 40% of all American women would have an abortion at some point during their reproductive lifetime… [sorry, I don't have a link - I'll leave that up to someone more Google-proficient than I am]
I don’t know how that statistic translates at the college-student level; I only wish the topic weren’t so emotionally charged so you could more easily debate the facts… And you’re absolutely right, Hugo, that the issue is NOT about human life; it’s about female bodily integrity.
Concerning “female bodily integrity,” I continue to be at a loss at how so many liberals/progressives can believe strongly in individuals’ responsibility to the collective or community, as well as can desire to bring more and more people into the mainstream of society (with the corresponding privileges and rights accorded to the mainstream), yet when it comes to abortion they become raging libertarians, making the freedom of the individual the highest good. Such a stance seems at odds with progressive values. Needless to say, I consider myself to be a pro-life progressive. But, Hugo, you do raise good questions in this post.
I came across your blog when research Naomi Wolf’s “The Porn Myth.” Kudos. Sorry about Newcastle’s current state; I hope they win this weekend and drive Hull to the relegation zone. (I personally am a Gunner.)
51% of Americans may describe themselves as pro-life, but that doesn’t mean 51% of Americans want abortion to be outlawed, or want clinic workers charged with murder.
The problem, as has been pointed out on several other blogs, is that what pollsters/politicians mean by “pro-life” and what pollees assume it means can be wildly disparate. I mean, I’m pro-abortion, but I might consider myself pro-life because I’m anti-death penalty (and unaware of the “official” meaning).
Polls really need to start including a definition of terms page.
Concerning “female bodily integrity,†I continue to be at a loss at how so many liberals/progressives can believe strongly in individuals’ responsibility to the collective or community, as well as can desire to bring more and more people into the mainstream of society (with the corresponding privileges and rights accorded to the mainstream), yet when it comes to abortion they become raging libertarians, making the freedom of the individual the highest good.
Well, many of us aren’t automatically anti-libertarian, and it’s not all that common that I’ve heard of liberal people saying that the responsibilities to the community are the most important responsibilities as citizens. To me, the only civic responsibilities that should be outright mandated (as opposed to those that should be encouraged but optional, like voting or getting involved in civic matters) are paying taxes and not outright harming society(which almost always means harming other individuals). I don’t think abortion harms society. Whether anyone else thinks it does might depend on various beliefs they hold, but simply saying “you need to be pro-life because you need to value the community” is unpersuasive to me because it doesn’t logically make sense.
Bonnie Prince Charlie:
Our society has collectively decided that bodily integrity is much more sacrosanct than – for example – economic integrity. The government cannot require you to give up your spare kidney, or your bone marrow, or a skin graft, or your blood, even though there are at this very moment people in our society dying because you have made that selfish choice regarding your body. I personally agree with you: I think would be interesting and intellectually profitable to re-open this question, and have a passionate discussion about the currently sacrosanct nature of bodily integrity – as a thought-experiment, if nothing else. But until that time, and until you personally are donating various parts of your body at regular intervals, the pro-choice position is the only one that is logically consistent and also consonant with our other societal values and mores concerning the body.
Bonnie Prince Charlie:
I also wanted to mention that I think you’re giving your fellow pro-lifers a bit too much credit. I’m perfectly willing to consider the possibility of pro-life progressives. Yet it cannot be denied that the vast majority of American pro-lifers are economic and social conservatives, who simultaneously vote to undo Roe v. Wade while voting down the social programs that would make it feasible for women to carry their fetuses to term. This makes it extremely difficult to take it on faith that pro-lifers are actually motivated by their concern for babies, and it leads the more cynical to suspect that the actual aim is to punish women for having sex (the common exceptions for rape and incest support this idea). I’m certainly not accusing you of this, but I do think that it’s important not to frame abortion solely as some sort of academic moral or philosophical question, divorced from today’s socio-economic realities, and contemporary cultural mythologies about sexuality and gender.
This is why I think that Hugo’s questions to the protesters, described in his post, are such a good idea. They help ground the discussion in actual legal and policy possibilities rather than lady-or-the-tiger flights of abstract philosophical speculation. Great post, Hugo!
Thank you so much for posting this. I am a student at PCC, and was troubled by what I saw. I have friends that have made this choice, and I too, could only think about how girls on campus must have felt to be bombarded by these images. I really didn’t feel good about this issue being presented this way on my campus. Given their approach, it’s clear that the participants were not there to discuss or educate, which is what bothers me the most.
english_rosebud-
Bodily integrity has often been compromised for the “the greater good.” Just ask a Vietnam era veteran who had a bad draw in the lottery.
Johanna-
Images are used because they work. They make things real. That’s why PETA shows pictures of some of the horrific conditions in industrial farms.
Hugo – ‘pro-life in private, pro-choice in the voting booth’ pretty much sums up exactly how I feel about it. Thanks for posting…
davev-
1) most Americans at this point would be against drafting people into the military.
2) and the lack of success of pro-life initiatives at the polls suggests that people aren’t convinced that banning abortion supports the “greater good” anyway. Actually, I fail to see how the Vietnam War promoted the greater good either, having met a bunch of kids who’ve been injured by all the undetonated munitions we left in the area.
Maybe I should have taken pictures.
The labels are really very inadequate.
Many people who think abortion is a moral horror (raises hand), nonetheless think that it shouldn’t be against the law (raises hand). Abortion is like narcotics – it’s not something society should encourage and support, but the consequences of attempting to ban it are worse than the consequences of tolerating it in a disapproving way. So for pragmatic reasons, we should let people run their own lives.
So am I pro-choice, or pro-life? I think abortion should be legal – but I have no problem whatsoever with democratically deciding that the government won’t pay for poor women’s abortions with tax money, or with laws that require parental notification, and so forth.
Ben –
The `bodily integrity’ pro-choice argument — one of the two pro-choice arguments so common that most people don’t even know where they originated — can be traced more or less directly back through a famous paper by the philosopher Judith Jarvis Thompson, `A defense of abortion’, published in the first issue of the journal Philosophy and public affairs in 1972. Thompson uses an analogy to an comatose violinist to argue that, even if we grant a developing fetus full status as a person, a pregnant woman’s inalienable right to control her body trumps the fetus’ right to life.
The worry that Bonnie Prince Charlie has about this argument shows up in the second half of Thompson’s paper, where she argues, in effect, that individuals have no obligations whatsoever to make sacrifices for the sake of each other’s lives. She imagines a situation where she lays dying in a bed, while Paul Newman stands on the other side of her room. All he has to do is cross the room and touch her forehead to save her life, but Thompson maintains that Newman has no obligation to do so.
I’ve therefore come to regard her position as fatally flawed, and I think progressives are far too enthusiastic to make this argument without thinking through its implications carefully. My preferred argument for my own moderate pro-choice stance is that a functioning neo-cortex is necessary for a human being to count as a person (ie, for a human being to have a right to life), and hence for abortion to be morally impermissible. This implies that almost all abortions are morally permissible — the only remotely common cases not covered directly by this argument are ones in which complications (such as pre-eclampsia) mean carrying an otherwise healthy and normal pregnancy to term would threaten the life of the pregnant woman.
english_rose –
it cannot be denied that the vast majority of American pro-lifers are economic and social conservatives, who simultaneously vote to undo Roe v. Wade while voting down the social programs that would make it feasible for women to carry their fetuses to term
I would at least question this claim. I know many anti-abortion progressive Catholics who take the Doug Kmiec line that the best way to effectively reduce the number of abortions is through progressive economic and social policies. Indeed, the Gallup results that promoted Hugo’s post, combined with broad support for progressive economic and social policies, suggests that there may be a sizable contingent of anti-abortion progressives.
This doesn’t mean that I think your claim is false. I’d just like to see poll evidence confirming it.
It irks me that they label themselves “pro-life” as if I am “anti-life”! Just because I support a woman’s absolute right to terminate a pregnancy, doesn’t mean that I advocate or like the idea. Is a fetus a human being? Of course it is! But I believe a woman’s “right to life” and the ability to control reproductive impacts on her life trumpts those of a fetus. “pro-life” needs to be replaced by some other phrase because it’s misleading and disgusting.
Katie.
Congratulations on your courage once again.
Not many pro-choicers will admit what you did and say that it’s still okay.
The argument that the …whatever pro-choicers call it… isn’t a person has been abandoned by the choice side. They didn’t have a press conference and say so. They just quit arguing about it, seeing that they haven’t a leg to stand on.
They have your view without actually admitting it.
Davev-
I know why they erected those disturbing displays, thanks. My problem is that they claimed to be there to “educate” students about this issue and they clearly were not. As a student, I feel that this is poor use of my campus, and yet another lost opportunity to dialogue and learn from one another.
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Richard, I know lots of pro choice people who would admit that a fetus is human and are still supportive of abortion rights. Certainly, I am. I’m pretty militant about it and support abortion rights (or any other reproductive choice a woman makes), by any means the woman and her doctors decide is best, up to the moment natural labor begins. I honestly don’t care whether a fetus is human or not (which is is) or when anybody defines personhood, or whatever else. If it is in my body, I have the absolute right to get it out, by whatever means is least invasive and most acceptable to *me*, and if it dies in the process, then oh well. I’m really not that bothered by it.
I am going to try to stay out of this argument because Im not sure I can keep myself civil enough to stay on the good side of Hugo’s thin red line, so I won’t try. I will just say this, though. If you are personally opposed to abortion but still think it should be legal (beyond extreme cases like the life of the mother, nonviable fetuses, etc.) then do not flatter yourself: you’re pro-choice. To be pro-life, in the commonly used sense of the term, means that you think (as I do) that aside from extreme cases, abortion (even in the first trimester) should be tolerated neither legally, nor morally, nor socially in a decent society.
If you don’t like the term ‘pro-life’, then I’m happy to use the word ‘anti-abortion’, or ‘anti abortion rights’ or whatever to describe myself.
I dislike the term ‘progressive’, but I certainly hold to quite socialistic views on economics, and I voted for Nader last fall (who at least was slightly less exuberantly pro-choice than Obama); most of the Catholics I know are also pro-lifers who voted for Obama.
As for the question on penalties for those who seek abortions, my suggestions would be: nothing or maybe just token penalties for the women involved, severe and draconian punishments for the doctors. And when I say draconian, I mean draconian.
“Token” penalties for the women, Hector? What about a woman who, say, gets a kit off the internet and does menstrual extraction to self-abort? Google it. What then?
You’re very quick to deny the rationality and agency of pregnant women, which tends to be a trademark of many social conservatives. If women are rational creatures, hold them accountable for their choices. Or do you describe to the patronizing “poor innocent dears” school of pro-life activism?
“Not many pro-choicers will admit what you did and say that it’s still okay.”
Pretty much all pro-choicers will admit that a human zygote, embryo and/or fetus is human. As a matter of fact, I have yet to hear or read one state that it is not. This is one of the more bizarre assertions made by pro-life folks on a regular basis; I can only imagine they cling to it like Saran wrap because it enables them to pretend that pro-choicers are only pro-choice due to wilful self-deception about Teh Real Meaning and Consequences of Abortion (!!!).
Hugo–I grew up in Kansas, and yes, they are obsessed there, utterly, with abortion. Besides the fact that Kansas in general is an obsessively red state that hasn’t voted for a Democrat in a presidential election since FDR (except for one guilt-trip blip after the Kennedy assasination forty years ago) including this last one–I expect it has something to do with Dr. Tiller.
Folks, I’m deleting from the moderation queue all those comments that seek to make this thread a discussion of the merits of abortion. This is about how people vote and reason about abortion; this is not a forum for rehashing the old arguments we’ve all heard a time or nine.
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Hugo, Hector’s no dummy, so I’m assuming it’s part of the “good PR” school of thought. People get uneasy if you start talking about sending them, or their wives, or their sisters or daughters, to prison for life because they got an abortion. Therefore, ignore the women and pick on the doctors.
All he has to do is cross the room and touch her forehead to save her life, but Thompson maintains that Newman has no obligation to do so.
This is true in all other areas of law in the United States. Unless I have a special duty to you (say, I’m your parent), or I put you in peril, I have no obligation whatsoever to be a good Samaritan. Paul Newman breaks no law by standing there twiddling his thumbs.
Cynical me says that most Americans want to be able to have abortions when it’s convenient for them, but don’t want abortions for all those other people, who were clearly careless and don’t deserve it.