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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   31256 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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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 Sauron Cancel 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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