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Notes -
Crossposted at https://medicalstory.substack.com/p/none-dare-call-it-domestic-violence since I've decided to keep a list of my long posts there.
This is an essay whose intended audience is people who are already against abortion.
We are losing. We lost an election in Kansas by 18 percentage points. Right-wing radio seems to have decided the talking point is that it will still be easy to travel for abortions post-Roe.
The argument we are losing to is the “none of the government’s business” argument. This argument is the same one that kept the government mostly out of domestic violence situations until less than a half century ago. (There is a book – a very good book for those who like biographies - “A Private Family Matter: A Memoir” by Victor Rivas Rivers about growing up with a violent and abusive father. The title derives from what the cops told Rivers to dismiss him when, as a teenager, he finally got the courage to go to them for rescue for his situation.)
Abortion is literally domestic violence – it is intra-family and it is violent. So the pro-choice side is using the domestic violence defense for literal domestic violence.
It works for them because our side doesn’t call it out as such – there is already a meme, even among libertarians, that the government should protect domestic violence victims. We avoid accessing the meme because we are afraid our opponents will run away screaming (which is bad when there’s an imminent election) or, worse, run towards us screaming (and bring the Eye of
SauronCancel Culture upon us). I think this is true even, perhaps especially, for the professional political marketing class.Epistemic status: I am both more confident than I should be given the evidence, but less confident than the tone that comes across as a re-read this. While the desirability of fighting abortion is beyond the scope of this essay, I very much want to be as effective as possible in fighting abortion, so I want to hear from people in the intended audience who disagree.
Some justification:
I’ve been on and off active in the pro-life movement during my life. Through this, I’ve had a fair number of discussions with the general public about their views on abortion, especially those that disagree with me. Some people argue that the fetus isn’t an entity with moral standing and right, so killing one is fine. I understand where these people are coming from. I disagree, but I understand. I don’t think this is a winning argument for the pro-choice side, or else they wouldn’t have abandoned its use a couple decades ago.
A few argue that the fetus is an entity with moral standing but having pregnancy or baby is such an imposition on the mother that abortion is ok. I still understand where these people are coming from. I absolutely don’t agree (although I do think we should work on making life easier for the mother), but I still understand. I am quite sure that this argument would never take with the general public, despite its attraction in academic settings.
But there’s one common take that has baffled me for a long time – the one that goes something like this: “Yes, abortion is killing an innocent baby and wrong, but I don’t think it would be right for me to tell (other) women what to do/choose/decide.” This had always baffled me, until I recognized it in the past few months as the domestic violence defense.
I don't know why you would weaken the argument against abortion by calling it domestic violence instead of murder.
It's murder, a mother is killing her own helpless baby. You don't need to get more complicated than that about it.
But then why are there so many people who believe the mother is killing her helpless baby, but still think the government should stay out of it?
I don't think we should contradict anyone who says it's murder. My point is that accessing the domestic violence meme is a way of getting across to these people why the government should get involved, even though it's intuitively personal on some level.
In fairness there is also an amazingly high degree of sympathy for mothers who murder their children after birth too, to the extent that they're often portrayed as tragic victims themselves. The "women cannot fail, only be failed by society" thing is incredibly strong, and causes all kinds of weird distortions to the usual moral calculus.
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Imagine if I said "spanking is domestic violence", or "Forced schooling is domestic violence", or "vaccinating children is domestic violence". Are these also, therefore, bad? None of these have anything to do with the reason people dislike domestic violence, which is "men beating women, which is very bad, women are vulnerable and easy to abuse because mumbles, feminism, etc". Non-central fallacy, worst argument in the world, abusing taboo ideas! <X right wing issue> isn't actually the same thing as <Y left-wing issue against vulerable minority victims>. Transitioning isn't child abuse. Gun rights aren't critical for black people fighting cop racism. Capitalism isn't good because it uplifts poor people. Please defend your claims on their own terms, in ways that make sense, instead of picking a vaguely related idea that everyone gets mad about and saying they're the same. It doesn't even work - you're just playing on the same 'we must help the oppressed omg!!' approach that you're losing to anyway.
Spanking (of children as punishment, not the other kind) is domestic violence.
The almost-perfect negative correlation between support for legal abortion and support for legal spanking of children strongly suggests that the "abortion is domestic violence" argument is not being made in good faith. To be fair to MedicalStory, I don't think he is suggesting making the argument in good faith - I think he is suggesting it as a way of arguing in the opponent's language in order to persuade across a cultural barrier.
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The first one is, and for the same reasons. (Except between consenting adults.)
The variety of examples is so anyone will disagree with some of them - a 'conservative anti-vaxxer' would object to the first but agree with the third, for instance.
The point is - spanking is 'domestic violence' if spanking is bad. Forced schooling is bad if school is bad. Giving a child a vaccine is violence if ... vaccines are bad. Saying it's 'domestic violence' doesn't add anything beyond a strong signal that 'this isn't okay' and 'you are abusing your power to hurt people', but you can only do that if the action itself is bad.
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It isn't exactly my position, but closest to it out of three you outline. Basically, it builds on observation that sometimes one genuinely must choose between some evil or another, and the government action to ban another doesn't necessarily help. Abortions are bad, so people cry that the state must do something; banning abortions is something, but what are its consequences?
On the topic of "domestic violence defense": I would say that most of time in Western history, a government action against domestic violence could have been detrimental for the core purpose of family (material conditions of upbringing or children; managing the household; transmission of property to the next generation), because legal proceedings would have removed an important adult from the family. Only with a bunch of other modern solutions to social fabric, the government action and prosecution of domestic violence makes sense. Incidentally it makes families less important and fundamental. (And frankly, sometimes the modern system can be abused by one party by casting as abuse or violence many things that are not.)
Abortion once came up in presence of my grandmother when she still was lucid. I had previously never discussed anything sexuality-related topics with her because of sort of decorum and religious upbringing. I was gobsmacked when she very matter-of-factually started recalling ages-old gossip about a neighbor who died from home attempted abortion related to infidelity case during the aftermath of WW2.
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I think most people who are conflicted about abortion can imagine any number of horrible situations in which an abortion feels like the lesser of two evils, or at least where one can empathize with someone for deciding that it is. And I think a lot of people recognize that horrible situations like this are best left to the people involved directly, rather than having the state interfere with a one-size-fits-all rule that cannot possibly take into account the nuances of the situation. All happy pregnancies are alike; each unhappy pregnancy is unhappy in its own way.
Reproduction is fraught and messy. There are serious risks to the mother, serious risks to the baby, potential for lifelong disability or death for either or both of them. There are babies born with severe birth defects, babies who are born already doomed to die in the days or weeks that follow, babies that leave behind a tiny corpse and a gaping hole in their parents' souls even before their mother has finished recovering from the physical trauma in the hospital. Parenting is a long-term all-consuming physical and financial commitment unlike any other, and there is raw horror at the prospect of being dragged into that kind of a commitment. Adoption is possible, but it carries all of the physical risks of childbirth plus extreme short-term and long-term emotional trauma. Horrible complications of all kinds can arise: a spontaneous twin or triplet pregnancy; one twin or triplet beginning to absorb another; the uniquely agonizing prospect of extreme pre-term birth; a late diagnosis of trisomy; preeclampsia, gestational diabetes, complications from drug or alcohol use while pregnant; developmental defects like micro-, hydro-, an-, or any other type of -encephaly. Even mid to late term miscarriages, which are a dime a dozen really, are the source of intense familial pain that never fully heals.
There's deep and raw horror to the human condition, plenty of times when the veil of abstraction breaks and biology becomes abomination, and the veil is thinnest at the start and end of life. People who are into or beyond normal parenting age will have friends who have experienced all manners of horror and speak of it reluctantly and only with those who are very close, and can only speculate how many more have experienced similar, or how bad it really was.
When I see posts like yours -- "but abortion is murder, so therefore..." -- I disagree, but my most salient emotional reaction is one of recognition... specifically, recognition of innocence, innocence of the potential horrors. The power of the message of not coming between a woman and her doctor is explained by the segment of the electorate who has had a glimpse of these horrors. It is a sizable segment, bigger than you might think.
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I'm pro abortion and I've never understood people who say this either. I think the best explanation is that people who say this are being disingenuous. I think it's more likely that they don't really view the fetus as morally equivalent to a baby but they know that's a tricky thing to convince someone of and it's hard to draw precise moral lines so they try to sidestep the argument, personally I view this as cowardly, dishonest and detestable. So although we're on different sides of the abortion debate we're on the same page about people who make this specific argument.
It's both a little trick that's selectively used in cases where they agree with the conclusion and something they actually believe in a vague sense - vaguely like "this is a woman, i am a man, i am privilege, i cannot disagree with her , because it's socially unacceptable and hurts oppressed person". It's usually not knowingly or intentionally disingenuous.
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I don't make that argument, but a more sympathetic rendering might be something like "Yes, abortion is killing an innocent baby and wrong, but I don’t think the government should investigate and prosecute abortions." Someone saying that would still have to make the argument about why the government should be able to investigate and prosecute some violent crimes and not others, but it's not insane to say either that establishing facts about an abortion are harder than other killings; that abortion investigations are more traumatic to the target than other types of investigations; or that pre-birth children have a lower moral worth than post-birth children (despite still having moral worth) such that the costs now outweigh the benefits.
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I find it difficult to take the Lovecraftian take on reproduction seriously when you compare modern, first-world procedures and outcomes to the universal norms just a few hundred years ago. Hundreds of generations of women went through far worse.
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Indeed, the horror that we might be forcing a woman to endure a terrible situation is awful, indeed. On the other hand, the horror that we're slaughtering innocent babies is awful, too. I don't think anti-abortion activists are "innocent to potential horrors", they're in fact very aware of a different horror.
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"I should be non-judgmental when it comes to the behavior of oppressed/vulnerable people"?
This is not a rationale that I endorse, but it seems plausible to explain that argument.
I'm skeptical of this because I rarely see anyone extend such charity to an actual baby killer (ie a mother who smothers her newborn). No matter how vulnerable of a situation she was in.
It might not be intentional deception though. Someone else made a point that the abortion debate is complicated enough that most people simply can't grok the nuances enough to even have a well thought out position.
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The abortion debate in my opinion is the single noisiest debate there is. I feel overwhelmed when I think of the magnitude of the gap in inferential distance between the two sides and that there are so many edge cases and irreconcilable moral/semantic distinctions across multiple layers of the debate. Its like;
Level 0: Does God exist?
Level 1: What does it mean to be alive?
Level n: Can we agree that abortion is killing a baby or not?
Level TANGENT: Is killing wrong all the time?
Level >n: Can we agree that abortion is right/wrong in some circumstances?
Level >>n: Can we agree that abortion is good/bad on net?
Level >>>>n: What should the government do with that conundrum?
Most people are not armed with the IQ, the clarity of mind, the understanding of logic, ethics, philosophy, etc. To even flesh out their own points let alone their opponents points. And have those points not only be consistent across the levels of inference, but be consistent with other beliefs and moral intuitions they hold.
The sentiment you are describing above is one such instance of that. People being made to have an opinion on something they have no business having an opinion on. It's all noise and no signal.
And I say this not because I disagree, but that statement is just about incompatible with any set of moral intuitions just about anywhere. Either killing babies is wrong and we don't do it, or killing babies is okay and its okay to kill children too under the consent of the mother, or its not killing babies because its okay and killing babies is not okay?
This is a debate that only Buddha, Jesus and Mohammed can solve. Not the debate 101 class (even if they're from Harvard) and least of all policy makers.
I'm just waiting for technology that can sustain a baby at any point of development outside of the womb to become viable, cheap and widespread. The only other option is to resurrect God, playing God might be the next best thing.
I'm skeptical that this would change the contours of the debate much. Most of the on-the-ground pro-choice arguments are about the negative effects of raising a child on the woman. If all of a sudden would-be mothers weren't obligated to carry the child, there'd still be a bunch of salt about being responsible for the post-fetal child (see: legal paternity surrender/paper abortions). And the principled bodily autonomy argument would still stand: extracting the fetus for the incubation chamber would still be invasive of the childbearer's body (though perhaps no more so than an abortion itself).
Extracting a first trimester fetus would presumably be a lot less invasive than giving birth, though. I agree that artificial wombs would not settle the abortion debate, but I do think they'd settle several of the arguments that motivate the debate -- although certainly not all of them.
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This feels like it's just calling someone a baby killer with extra steps. I don't see how this would be more persuasive for people that already think abortion is baby killing than just straightforwardly saying that it's killing a baby. Likewise, it's obviously not going to persuade very many pro-choicers because they have already demonstrated that they're not buying the baby killing claim.
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Could you describe more what you found baffling about it? My impression is the underlying sentiment ("X is morally bad but it would be inappropriate for the state to punish people for doing X") is quite common, though people will fill in disparate things for X. Is it just that "killing an innocent baby" is so obviously wrong, in your evaluation?
"X is morally bad but it would be inappropriate for the state to punish people for doing X" is common and I believe it in certain contexts.
"X is killing an innocent person but it would be inappropriate for the state to punish people for doing X" is more like the framing that baffles me, and doesn't seem to be used in any other setting (except war, now that I think of it - but it doesn't seem correct to me that these people are bringing up the same meme that applies to war). My point was not about my morality, it's about what other people's morality is on other issues.
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Abortion is not domestic violence. Abortion is abortion. It is a unique issue with unique circumstances. So it will required a tailored set of policies to satisfy enough the stakeholders.
So it tree logging. So I guess performing abortion is like chopping down a tree. Or mowing a grass.
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But you're just using the way in which domestic violence is "very bad", which is something about how women are vulnerable and get really hurt, but that doesn't apply at all to abortion. Also, murder is worse than domestic violence, and abortion is domestic violence 'only because' aortion is murder, so how can this help?
Yelling at a child when they're about to put a fork in an electrical outlet and you're 100 feet away from them is literally hurting a child's feelings. But - it isn't ... bad.
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By the logic in your last sentence a lot of things not typically considered violence would fit the definition. Let's say you have surgery to destroy a tumor. The tumor is "something" and the surgery is a behavior that destroys it, is that violence? if you say yes your definition is broken, thats not how people use the term
Why do people keep making this argument? "My enemies, who I also think are lying hypocrites, made <ridiculous and unjustifiable claim>. And my claim is slightly better than theirs, so I get to make it, and you can't object it's nonsense."
...Because it's a straightforward appeal to justice? If the bar for accepting claims is low, then why should I volunteer for a higher bar than is generally applicable?
"Those other guys are jumping off of bridges. Why shouldn't I be able to do that too?"
Because the point of 'accepting claims', in this context, is to actually figure out if abortion is good or bad, what relevance that has to law, and use that knowledge and the way one comes to it in other areas as well. "Abortion is domestic violence" doesn't mean anything other than "i don't like abortion for some other reason", and throwing terrible justifications at each other is pointless. Believing it makes you dumber, and less able to figure out the right approach to abortion, and anything else. What about children transitioning? Domestic violence! AI art? Theft from the WORKING CLASS. Banning affirmative action is LITERALLY jim crow. TheMotte isn't a TV ad for a state senate race, and the latter shouldn't even exist.
I'm not saying the domestic violence argument is the best ever, but your claim here is flatly untrue. The basis of the analogy is the claim that abortion, like domestic violence, is violence within a context where there is a special duty of not committing violence, specifically, within the family. You may disagree with this claim for any number of reasons, but it is not contentless.
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You can make a good case that a bit of further nuance is needed, but here's a different example: an amputation. Cutting off Joe's foot would be very violent in some contexts (assault/maiming), but not generally considered violent in others (surgical removal of a gangrenous foot).
In the case of surgery, you could view it as "intending to hurt Joe's foot" or "intending to help Joe." In the case of maiming, there is clearly an intent to hurt, regardless of whether you're looking at Joe or Joe's foot.
But wouldn't that apply to abortion as well? The way I see it is if you count the fetus as an agent abortion is violence if you don't it's not so just calling abortion violence is assuming the conclusion. It's perhaps good rhetoric to rally people who are already pro life but it's not really an argument.
I think there are three problems here.
First, argument-by-analogy is a poor strategy generally, because analogies often work as an attempt to explain a position, but not as an attempt to persuade. If you're trying to persuade, the other person can always point out differences between the object case and the analogy (there are always differences, otherwise it's not an analogy), and then you're just arguing over whether a given difference is material.
Second, abortion is an unusually distinct object case. In most cases, you can say "this is really close to that, so we should treat them similarly" and objections concern whether you're jumping an important line in the process. But there aren't other object cases that are "pretty close" to abortion; when you're comparing it to a different thing, it's not hard to come up with multiple distinctions that might justify different treatment.
Third, the fundamental values involved in any given position in the abortion context are right there. There just aren't many inferential steps from values to policy for mistake theory to have room to maneuver; it's all conflict of values. At that point, it's down to persuasion that one set of values is preferable to another, and appeals to, say, emotion or aesthetics are perfectly valid argument types.
Huh? How are these different? If you listen to political speeches or debates, both often attempts to persuade, there are tons of analogies.
Let's say I'm making an argument, and the other person doesn't understand what I'm getting at. Quite often, I could use some shared reference point as an analogy to make my line of argument more clear.
Alternatively, I'm making an argument, and the other person firmly disagrees. I could use an analogy, but it usually won't be persuasive, because analogies are never perfect 1:1 matches to the original subject, and the other person can just say, "oh, your analogy is different here and that's a material difference, so your analogy is flawed and not good support for your position."
it's rare for someone to disagree, hear an analogy, and respond, "oh, I was wrong the whole time, but now I agree." If the other person was on the fence beforehand, and not committed to disagreeing? Might work.
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Female circumcision: domestic violence or not? Is a baby more similar to healthy tissue or to a tumor?
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This is essentially the same argument isn’t it? Abortion may or may not be morally wrong, but forcing a particular choice would violate the mother’s bodily autonomy, so we think it’s for her to decide.
So it is murder in the first degree after ~22 weeks/viability?
… maybe?
If at some point the baby can be "aborted" via C-section, I don’t have any objections to mandating it be done that way.
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Can't reduce it down to be quite that simple, as there are enough possible variations that might be relevant.
Because you can make an argument that the woman already 'decided' when she agreed to and participated in unprotected sex with a guy.
Or we argue that women don't understand that pregnancy is a risk of sex, which is pretty demeaning in it's own way.
And obviously if she did not agree to it, she was raped, and that DOES violate her bodily autonomy.
And, going further, if the argument is about bodily autonomy, should a woman be allowed to agree to unprotected sex for the purpose of procreation, take affirmative steps to increase the odds of pregnancy, get pregnant, willingly carry the fetus with the stated intent of giving birth, then around 3 months (12 weeks) or so into it just changes her mind and decides "nope, my body my choice. Disregard the fact that I made a different choice several times before now" and get an abortion?
And in that scenario, does the father's interest come into play at all, since he was relying on her to carry her end of the 'bargain' and bring the fetus to term?
I'm not trying to engineer 'gotchas,' I'm just pointing out that reducing it to bodily autonomy does not settle the full moral question here, unless you bit the bullet and say abortion should be available 'on demand and without apology' in all cases.
Which almost nobody actually believes.
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The first is a question of moral good, either utilitarian or deontological argument in nature. Either the imposition on the mother causes greater moral harm in the utilitarian calculus than the moral harm of killing the fetus, or it deontologically takes a higher precendence than the fetus' life.
The second is a question of jurisdiction. The claim is that it doesn't matter whether you believe the abortion itself is morally right or wrong, it's not you or the government's job to impose your view of morality on someone else.
So it's sort of a distinction on meta levels. Claim 1 is that both abortion and not-abortion are morally acceptable in some semi-objective sense, so the woman to have the object level choice of abortion as people do in any choice when both options are acceptable. Claim 2 is that morality is subjective, so each woman can decide for herself whether abortion is wrong or not, and then decide to do it or not based on her own internal morality.
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