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I wonder if any of you sometimes feel that someone of the outgroup just made a good move or just a good point (in other words, produced useful propaganda) in the culture war that takes you by surprise. A long time ago I noticed some liberals quoting a statement from a Christian pastor regarding abortion and I now decided to trace it back to the original source. According to Snopes it’s from pastor Dave Barnhart of the Saint Junia United Methodist Church in Birmingham, Alabama in 2018:
"The unborn" are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don't resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don't ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don't need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don't bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn. It's almost as if, by being born, they have died to you. You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus but actually dislike people who breathe.
Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn.
I have to say that even though I doubt I’d ever agree with him on these issues, it sounds kind of…witty? Snappy? Clever? It all comes across as on point. It feels like I wouldn’t know how to respond to it. If I had to find something about it to nitpick, the only thing I can come up with is that the people who usually resent the patriarchy, condescension and political incorrectness are normally suburban middle-class college-educated white liberal culture warriors and their mulatto allies of similar backgrounds, not any of the groups the pastor mentioned, especially not widows. I can’t even tell why he brought them up at all; maybe it seemed to be a better idea than to bring up single mothers. And I might also argue that yeah, advocating for groups that are morally complicated as hell is probably not a good political move. Which also makes me sound kind of an asshole though.
Like a lot of these political and cultural debates it's just people grappling with Philosophy 101 concepts without the tools or vocabulary needed to really engage beyond a surface level (maybe intentionally). In this case it's a motivated rehash of "Doing vs. Allowing Harm" https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/doing-allowing/
The classic example is:
The abortion case is only complicated by the question of whether or not destroying a fetus is "doing harm". If you agree that it is, then an abortion is clearly morally wrong as just about every ethical system agrees that "doing harm" is wrong.
It's practically a non sequitur to bring up "allowing harm" to try to make an accusation of hypocrisy here as it is in no way obvious that doing and allowing harm are morally equivalent. Philosophers have spilled oceans of ink debating the question, and it's extremely unlikely that people who disagree on whether an abortion is "doing harm" or not will agree on the "Doing vs. Allowing Harm" question.
I don't think that last part is true.
Virtually every ethical system allows for "doing harm" in a number of circumstances, whether it is a doctor cutting off an arm to save a person's life, a military killing enemy combatants, or killing animals to eat them.
In fact, the most famous philosophical thought experiment around abortion, Judith Jarvis Thomson's violinist is specifically constructed to argue that even if abortion is doing harm to a human being, it would be morally permissible. (Personally, I think the thought experiment really only succeeds in arguing for abortion in the case of rape, but that's neither here nor there.)
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