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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'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.
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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