Posted on 02/27/2006 2:46:42 PM PST by dukeman
America has been embroiled in a seemingly endless debate over the issue of abortion for four decades now, but the most fascinating dispute on this issue may now be among those who consider themselves, in one way or another, advocates of abortion rights.
An unprecedented view into this debate is available on the pages of Slate.com--a prominent Web site that features some of the liveliest reporting available anywhere today. Nevertheless, this exchange between writers William Saletan and Katha Pollitt did not begin on the Internet, but in the pages of The New York Times and The Nation.
Saletan fired the first salvo, suggesting in an op/ed commentary published in The New York Times that pro-choicers should admit that abortion is "bad" and that those who support abortion rights should work toward a truly dramatic reduction in the total number of abortions.
Saletan's argument is not exactly new, either for himself or for the movement he supports. In his 2004 book, Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War, Saletan offered some of the most incisive and perceptive analysis of the national abortion debate. In essence, Saletan argued that America has settled on a fragile consensus he described as "conservative pro-choice." Americans are quite squeamish about abortion itself, but have resisted efforts to eliminate access to abortion altogether.
Even those who disagree with Saletan must take his argument seriously. Those of us who yearn to see America affirm the sanctity of all human life, born and preborn, must acknowledge that we have much work to do in terms of changing public opinion--the task of reaching the hearts and minds of millions of individual citizens.
That process of reaching hearts and minds is Saletan's concern as well, even as he is a strong defender of abortion rights. As he sees it, support for abortion rights is diminishing as the pro-life movement has been largely successful in focusing upon the moral status of the fetus and the objectionable--even horrible--nature of abortion itself.
Writing on the thirty-third anniversary of Roe v. Wade, Saletan boldly argued: "It's time for the abortion-rights movement to declare war on abortion."
That was a rather amazing statement, and Saletan clearly intended to catch the attention of abortion-rights advocates.
"If you support abortion rights, this idea may strike you as nuts," Saletan acknowledged. "But look at your predicament. Most Americans support Roe and think women, not the government, should make abortion decisions. Yet they've entrusted Congress and the White House to politicians who oppose legal abortion, and they haven't stopped the confirmations to the Supreme Court of John G. Roberts Jr. and . . . Samuel A. Alito Jr."
In terms of political analysis, Saletan reminded his pro-choice readers that abortion may have been a "winning issue" for their side sixteen years ago, but no more. "You have a problem," he advised.
His candid analysis was offered so that the pro-abortion movement might awaken from its slumber. "The problem is abortion," he summarized. In order to make his point, he raised the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act and the Unborn Victims of Violence Act--both passed overwhelmingly by Congress and signed into law by President Bush--and reminded: "And most Americans supported both bills, because they agree with your opponents about the simplest thing: It's bad to kill a fetus."
Significantly, Saletan then offered his own moral analysis. "They're right. It is bad," he confirmed. "This is why the issue hasn't gone away. Abortion, like race-conscious hiring, generates moral friction. Most people will tolerate it as a lesser evil or a temporary measure, but they'll never fully accept it. They want a world in which it's less necessary. If you grow complacent or try to institutionalize it, they'll run out of patience. That's what happened to affirmative action. And it'll happen to abortion, if you stay hunkered down behind Roe."
Instead, Saletan argued that the pro-abortion movement should coalesce around an agenda of lowering the total number of abortions and increasing the use of contraceptives.
All this was just too much for Katha Pollitt, a fire-brand liberal who serves as a regular columnist for The Nation, one of America's most influential journals of liberal opinion.
Pollitt was shocked--absolutely shocked--that Saletan was ready to speak of abortion in moral terms. This is a move she emphatically rejects. "Inevitably, attacking abortion as a great evil means attacking providers and patients. If abortion is so bad, why not stigmatize the doctors who perform them? Deny the clinic a permit in your town? Make women feel guilty and ashamed for choosing it and make them sweat so they won't screw up again?"
Furthermore, she warned that abortion might soon "join obesity and smoking as unacceptable behavior in polite society."
Taken by itself, this is a truly amazing comment. At the very least, it suggests that, in Katha Pollit's social circle, obesity and smoking are taken as genuine moral issues, when abortion--the killing of an unborn human--is not.
But there's more. Consider this statement: "The trouble with thinking in terms of zero abortions is that you make abortion so hateful you do the antichoicers' work for them. You accept that the zygote/embryo/fetus has some kind of claim to be born." Did you get that? Any honest reading of her words would lead to the inevitable conclusion that Pollitt believes that the unborn human has no "claim to be born."
Pollitt was responding directly to Saletan's op/ed in The New York Times. In her view, Saletan was simply giving away the store by admitting that abortion was indeed a serious moral issue and that it is a "bad" reality in and of itself.
From their initial exchange in the Times and The Nation, Saletan and Pollitt continued their debate at Slate.com. Their exchange took the form of lengthy letters addressed to each other, with Saletan first clarifying what he really intended to say as he argued about abortion in moral terms. "I'm no fan of the language of sin," he clarified. "But I don't see why we have to shrink from words like good and bad. It's bad to cause a pregnancy in a situation where you're going to end up having an abortion. It's bad to cause a pregnancy in a situation where you can't be a good mom or dad. Our high rates of unintended pregnancy and abortion are a collective moral problem. If we don't want the government to tell us what to do, we'd better address the problem individually."
Beyond this, Saletan also told Pollitt that his purpose was not to create a movement that would combine pro-choicers with the pro-life. Instead, "I'm trying to form a coalition with the public," he suggested.
Saletan is an ardent supporter of abortion rights, but he positions himself in something of a centrist position--at least his position looks somewhat centrist with Katha Pollitt as background. He is concerned that when Pollitt dismisses any claim to life on the part of the fetus, she confuses the fetus with the zygote, "alienating people who see the difference and might support us if they realize we care about it." This is an interesting move, and a move I believe to be destined to fail.
Why? Because Saletan's effort to suggest that the fetus might have some claim to life while the zygote evidently does not, is based in no clear or compelling scientific definition of life. The human continuum begins with the union of the sperm and the egg and continues throughout gestation and life until natural death. At no point along this continuum does the life suddenly "become" human. Such arguments are based upon convenient abstractions or arbitrarily chosen capacities or characteristics. Pollitt's position is truly abhorrent and radical, but it is at least consistent.
Responding to Saletan, Pollitt accuses him of offering no real rationale for why abortion should be seen as "so outrageous, so terribly morally offensive, so wrong." She is willing to speak of abortion as a "difficult" decision, but that is about all. She explains that opposition to abortion is really an extension of an effort to deny sexual freedom to women, and to stigmatize sex outside of marriage. She identifies this with what she sees as the nation's "already broad, deep strain of sexual Puritanism, shame and blame."
Responding to Pollitt, Saletan clarified his position: "This is why I use the word 'bad.' It upsets many people on the left, but for the same reason, it wakes up people in the middle. It's new, and in my opinion, it's true. (I don't use the word 'wrong,' because to me that implies a prohibitive conclusion. 'Bad' is a consideration. Abortion can be a less-bad option than continuing a pregnancy. In that case, it's bad but not wrong.)"
Pollitt remained unmoved. "Morality has to do with rights and duties and obligations between people," she insisted. "So, no: I do not think terminating a pregnancy is wrong. A potential person is not a person, any more than an acorn is an oak tree. I don't think women should have to give birth just because a sperm met an egg. I think women have the right to consult their own wishes, needs, and capacities and produce only loved, wanted children they can care for--or even no children at all. I think we would all be better off as a society if we respected women's ability to make these decisions for themselves and concentrated on caring well for the born. There is certainly enough work there to keep us all very busy."
In the end, Saletan appeared to have retreated somewhat from his argument about the moral status of abortion, but the very fact that he addressed the issue so clearly and candidly is telling in itself. As for Pollitt, she was eventually willing to admit that abortion is "icky." As she explained this term: "I think that expresses rather well how lots of people feel about abortion: They may not find it immoral or want to see it made illegal, but it disturbs them. It just seems like a bad thing."
Why should pro-lifers pay attention to this debate among advocates of abortion rights? The answer to that question is simple--the exchange between William Saletan and Katha Pollitt demonstrates the inherent weakness of the pro-abortion argument, or its pro-choice variant. Lacking any objective definition of human life and the status of the unborn, the pro-abortion movement is mired in a pattern of endless internal debates and confusions. Saletan's argument is less radical than Pollitt's, but his position is morally arbitrary, based more in pragmatic concern than in moral philosophy.
In any event, the exchange between William Saletan and Katha Pollitt indicates that the pro-abortion movement knows that it has work to do in reaching the hearts and minds of Americans. The pro-life movement had better remind itself of the same challenge. Both sides are locked in a race to reach the hearts and minds of those still stuck in the middle.
I love these idiots.........there is absolutely no relationship whatsoever between abortion and obesity or smoking in regard to polite society. Her ideas of "choice" are mindboggling to say the least.
I'll stick to my cigarettes and junk food, and polite society.
The fullness of human life comes from the realization of humanity in its fullest. The metaphysical decision that humanity is full at any one point is a difficult and incomplete base to build a morality off of. Just one simple example, if a huamn fetus missed some chromosones or otherwise didn't meet some criteria of "sperm joining egg", would it be considered full or not? Recognizing helplessness is only part of empathy. A fetus of another animal is just as helpless.
I fail to see a problem with this. It is a statement that practically jumps off the page and leads me to believe that in her heart, she knows the truth.
Life is full of lines. That the particular line of fertilization is considered significant is not simply because its a metaphysical or scientific line.
True, empathy can be "incredibly subjective". But people who say that are generally undervaluing it either because they have plenty but rationalize their morality on other bases, or they have little and need a metaphysical support (or crutch) for their morality. Empathy is incredibly important, but I'll read the paper and respond as best I can.
Read the paper. The quick and dirty summary is that brain scans have shown that moral decisions are a combination of rational utilitiarianism and empathy as well as social awareness. Basically, a rational component and an emotonal component. Remove either one, in my opinion, and you wind up with defective human morality. You might want to go up a level and look at Dr. Greene's web site. He tries to build a moral system based on what his studies show that you might find interesting (I'm not endorsing it and don't personally agree with it -- but it is interesting).
Empathy for a block of foam is entirely possible if you know that the block was a human you had empathy for and has the potential to become a human again.
So potential is sufficient for empathy, thus one can feel emotionally attached to a foam block, correct? Part of the shift that happens during fertilization is a huge shift in potential.
Speaking of potential, I don't think empathy is strictly based on it.
I never said it was. But you can't ignore it, either.
I empathize with the pain of an old person who is dying as much as a young child with a fatal disease.
I suspect your empathy is more complex than that. Unless you are inhumanly objective, I suspect you have more empathy for friends than strangers, people you like than people you don't like, and so on. A mother who has undergone three years of fertility treatment might feel an incredible amount of empathy for her child seeing a picture of a single fertilized egg while a mother carrying an unwanted child fathered by a man she hates might feel no empathy for the baby even after it is born. That's an incredibly fluid basis upon which to build your morality.
If anything I empathize more with old person who has a life of humanity built up in him.
So you'd still prefer the life of one person over another, you'd just favor the old person over the young person, right? So what you are advocating, instead of a threshhold of personhood, is an ongoing process were an old person is always more human than a younger person?
It is not at all true that my empathy would lead to euthanasia.
Don't make the classic liberal mistake that it's your empathy that will get to rule. You need to consider prevailing empathy. And prevailing empathy is not, in my experience, what you are describing. You can complain that prevailing empathy is defective but then you've got a might big uphill battle ahead of you to change the world to think like you do.
The monkey fetus is an interesting point. Obviously my moral structure is based on empathy but is built by reason. The only way I can compare the pain of an animal being killed with the pain of a starving human is a higher level value judgement based on reason. I have empathy for both, but would obviously choose to give food to the human. My own choices are somewhat hypocritical as I am not starving, could live on vegetables, yet choose to eat meat.
The reason upon which that empathy is based is not present until well after birth.
But back to the monkey fetus, I think one answer could be in the appreciation of the humanity of the human mother and child together.
What is "humanity"?
A deformed child or deformed fetus will gain more of my empathy as I feel some of the same pain.
Why would they gain more empathy if they have a less human-like form and possibly a less human-like mental capacity, when you claim those are critical for empathy?
Again, I don't believe that can lead to euthanasia unless there are higher level interests forcing a certain outcome or a poorly developed sense of empathy. Again, it's incredibly important to learn and be taught to empathize.
Empathy cannot be seperated from utilitarianism any more than utilitarian thinking, much to the annoyance of die-hard utilitarians, can be seperated from empathy and emotion. Decisions are a combination of both and trying to get rid of either will create a monster, not a better human. Nature or God has given us this dual natured morality for a reason.
I think you misunderstood what I said about reason. I am not empathizing with reason, I am combining empathy with reason.
I will answer that separately. I understand that liberalism uses the notion of emotion based moral (and other) decisions. Fundamentally my morality is liberal, but it is in no way based on "prevailing" empathy. Empathy is an internal emotion that lets us feel the pain of others, that's it. There's no such thing as group empathy, and any description I made that suggests that is unintentional. A morality that is group based must by necessity be metaphysical (based on common descriptions of observable reality) even if that is a rationalization by individuals of their own individual empathy.
Agreed. The paper is interesting, but my first impression from my preexisting knowledge and biases is that the measurements they are making are so incredibly crude as to be almost useless. On the other hand, it is immensely interesting that emotional and rational decision processes can be distinguished on the physical level. It obviously deserves a better read.
It is human potential recognized by empathy of the human form and function and rational understanding of the meaning of future human potential (the value of creating, loving, producing, etc).
Why would they gain more empathy if they have a less human-like form and possibly a less human-like mental capacity, when you claim those are critical for empathy?
The empathy is feeling the pain that they feel being crippled in some way. But higher level reason leads to the understanding that they feel joy rather than pain even with relatively small accomplishments. I would always have more empathy for them even if a fuller person had more utilitarian value.
The problem I'm having with that is that you seem to ultimately be relying on empathy more than reason without accounting for the fact that empathy is not only subjective but sometimes gives the wrong answers just like reason, alone, does.
Properly developed empathy almost never gives wrong answers.
They are good enough so that the researches can fairly accurately predict what sort of decision an individual is going to make based on watching which parts of their brain light up. Hardly useless.
Here is a mainstream media non-scientific article on the subject that tosses out some of the names involved in this research which should help with your Googling.
On the other hand, it is immensely interesting that emotional and rational decision processes can be distinguished on the physical level. It obviously deserves a better read.
There is a lot more to the research than the single article.
y refusing to act personally and directly to save lives, people may be demonstrating what Greene calls "the byproduct of a Stone Age neurological structure" that programs us to avoid killing. This is why a choice sometimes feels good--like an absolute truth--when it may be morally wrong.
"Stone Age" is a biased term. Comparing flicking a switch to kill one person versus pushing one person involves different motor processes, motor skills, preparatory planning for the motor processes, etc. There's a lot more to the difference than "Stone Age programming" that avoids active killing. In any case these decisions are hardly useful demonstrations of empathy since it exists in spades for all the parties in all the situations. The only difference in my opinion is variations in utilitarian logic.
Well, that wasn't my point. My point is that a lot of liberal theories lean toward centralized and universal solutions because they seem to always imagine a sensible person (who just happens to think just like they do) being in charge of making all the decisions. That's why they don't work with real people. Yes, a benevolent dictator distributing things for the maximum good for everyone sounds wonderful so long as you imagine the dictator is benevolent. Once you realize that there is no way to guarantee the dictator will be benevolent or remain so even if you succeed in putting a benevolent dictator into power, the dictatorships and authoritarian governments that seem to appeal so strongly to liberals lose their luster and seem like bad deals.
My point is that empathy as the basis for morality is only useful if empathy produces fairly consistent results between individuals but it doesn't, even if two people are applying the Golden Rule with perfect precision. For example, if I were lying on the ground dying from a fatal wound, I might want to live every last minute of my life, no matter how painful, while you might prefer to be put out of your misery with a merciful shot to the head. If we both apply the Golden Rule to a wounded person that we feel empathy for as if they were ourselves, I'll let them suffer and die naturally while you'll put them out of their misery. Either one of us might be wrong and not doing what the person actually wants if they can't communicate that to us. One person might prefer to be dead rather than being brain damaged and confined to a wheelchair while another would want to live. They would make very different decisions for others, even if they were making the decision they'd want applied to themselves. Their empathy is perfect but it leads them to very different decisions.
That was my point about empathy and pregnancy. A pregnant woman who has spent years trying to get pregnant who loses her first trimester baby in a car accident may consider it murder while a woman on her way to abortion clinic may not care. And put those two women on a jury to make a decision about what happened to a third woman and their empathy will have less to do with how the third woman feels and more do to with how they feel. The empathy can be perfect and the decisions different.
You are presuming that empathy will produce consistent moral assessments but it won't, because people don't make consistent moral assessments of their own actions toward others and of others toward them, so they certainly aren't going to consistent when dealing wholly with others.
Fundamentally my morality is liberal, but it is in no way based on "prevailing" empathy.
My point is that is should be if you want to rely on empathy. That's as close to a common or singular morality as you are going to get out of empathy.
Empathy is an internal emotion that lets us feel the pain of others, that's it.
It's far more complicated than that, which you can find if you look in either autism or the behavior of sociopaths, two different manifestations of problems with empathy. Empathy is about being able to put yourself into the position of someone else to see things from their perspective. It does not necessarily have to do with pain, though it might.
There's no such thing as group empathy, and any description I made that suggests that is unintentional. A morality that is group based must by necessity be metaphysical (based on common descriptions of observable reality) even if that is a rationalization by individuals of their own individual empathy.
I'm not sure where you are trying to go with that line of argument.
46 million dead...
That's why his peer-reviewed scientific journal articles are more careful in their wording. You should stick to them if imprecise vernacular bothers you.
Comparing flicking a switch to kill one person versus pushing one person involves different motor processes, motor skills, preparatory planning for the motor processes, etc.
That's not why the moral decision is different and they have other tests. You are getting hung up on the particulars looking for an "out" that proves the conclusions are wrong rather than looking at all the evidence that they are right.
There's a lot more to the difference than "Stone Age programming" that avoids active killing.
And what differences are those? From a purely utilitarian standpoint and an entirely objective standpoint, the trade of one life for five is identical whether you passively kill the one person or actively kill them. Why are they morally different?
In any case these decisions are hardly useful demonstrations of empathy since it exists in spades for all the parties in all the situations. The only difference in my opinion is variations in utilitarian logic.
You seem to think that empathy is binary. Part of the point of the research is that it's not. It comes in degrees and the degree at which one feels empathy for one victim or another and other emotional factors balance by degree against utilitarian considerations that may be strong or weak.
During the famines caused by Mao's "Great Leap Forward", Chinese parents created the practice of "yi zi er shi" ("Trade kids, then eat"). The reason for this practice is that no parent wanted to eat their own children but they could bring themselves to eat a neighbor's child, thus they'd swap kids so that they wouldn't have to kill and eat their own. The empathic shift from your own familiar child to someone else's less familiar child was enough for them to tilt the balance of their moral calculus from empathy (to prefer death over eating your own kids) to utilitarianism (to prefer eating a neighbor's kid over dying). It wasn't that these parent's didn't have any empathy (they didn't want to eat their own kids, nor likely their neighbor's kids, either) but the utilitarian pressure for cannibalism (the alternative being starvation) was so strong that it could overcome the empathy for a generic child even where it couldn't overcome their empathy for their own child. And even then, their empathy for their own child was less when their death was passive (at the hands of a neighbor) rather than active (killing them with their own hands).
There are examples like this all around us and throughout history. You can laugh at Greene's use of the term "Stone Age" all you want, but there is an empathic difference between strangers, friends, and family, those we can see and those we can't, and whether we actively do a wrong to someone else or passively let it happen. And it has to be that way. If I felt as much empathy for every human on Earth as I feel for my family or even friends, I'd be unable to function from grief, given the horrible ways that people die every day. I can't care about the whole world with the care I give my family. But that's also why no person should be able to make subjective moral decisions. The result easily becomes some variant of "yi zi er shi". Would I sacrifice the life os some faceless Chinese political prisoner to get an organ my wife needed to live? I'd like to think I wouldn't but it's not an easy decision nor a clear one that you'll get concensus on.
Again, the left trips over gross inconsistantcies in its professed "principles".
Late term abortions (infanticide) are good, executions of convicted murderers are bad.
Abortion may be "bad" if the term bad is properly redefined to suit their current needs. But it cannot, to them, be inherently bad. Morality is defined by external variables, not by the act itself.
Genocide in Iraq is no problem, [arguably] rough treatment of terrorists is bad.
Death in military actions instigated by the left are fine. The same behavior by a republican is illegal and immoral (you gotta love it when the libs claim the moral high road).
There is no moral foundation to their arguments because their beliefs are based on expediency. Morality is consistant. The entirety of liberalism is rooted in situation ethics (an oxymoron if ever there was one) and dual standards of proscribed behavior, one for those making the rules (them) and one for those that are expected to follow those rules (us, the great unwashed).
I propose a liberal solution which is to instill a proper sense of empathy that would result in a deep respect for human life. Granted my empathy based approach will still result in the loss of millions of human lives, but they would primarily be of the one-celled or few-celled variety with no human shape or form, no human functions, no ability to feel pain, etc. Absolutists will despise this approach and call it utilitarian. But it is emphatically not utilitarian, it is based on the deepest possible respect for human life which is the respect derived from the deep, ingrained emotion of empathy.
Not to mention the death penalty, which is a really late abortion that improves the quality of life.
We will win this fight. It will take awhile, but momentum is on our side. Abortion is an ugly business, and more people are beginning to realize it.
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