Abortion, a Right, a Wrong, or Both?
If human life begins anywhere, it begins in the creation of an individual genome and a protoplasmic being at the moment of fertilization, so it is morally wrong to abort a pregnancy. Because a human is a special being, we rightly consider it wrong to end the life of one. But if being a free person means anything, it means that we have the right to control our own body, so it is morally wrong to force an unwilling potential mother to continue a pregnancy she does not want. Because a human being is a special being, we consider it wrong to take away the freedom of one.
Given the contradiction between the interests involved, it is understandable that an unwanted pregnancy is something of a legal and ethical battlefield. It might seem that a public compromise to the fact that abortion is ethically wrong, but legally necessary, could create consensus, but there are practical and political issues that prevent such a social accord.
On a practical level, to hold that abortion is morally wrong means that as a society we should try to do all we can to reduce their numbers. But where abortion is rare the infrastructure needed to make it available to women who choose it tends to diminish or disappear. In our polarized views of the issue we tend to create geographic zones where abortion is provided in a dignified and readily available fashion and where it is not. Another practical issue that is just as critical is money. There are close to 2,000,000 abortions per year in the US (several states, including California, do not report abortion statistics, so the actual number of abortions is unknown), and two-thirds of women who have abortions report that economic resources are a factor in their decision. (This figure is no doubt higher for African-American women in light of racial disparities in income; in 2002 Black women had 32 percent of all abortions in spite of making up 12 percent of women.)
The ongoing impasse in the abortion debate, and the possibility that the new Supreme Court could radically upset current law and policy, call for fresh attempts to resolve the conundrums of abortion. Maybe a compromise between conservative pro-life women and liberal pro-choice women is possible. For the pro-choice, the right to abortion must be guaranteed before they are willing to bother promoting the idea that abortion is wrong, because their instinct rightly reminds them that heretofore any equivocation on their part will be used to limit this right. For, pro-lifers a recognition from their opposition that abortion should truly be rare is a prerequisite to serious engagement.
One package of policies that both sides might be able to find in common could include: 1) an open admission that abortion is ethically unsound as regards the interests of the fetus and a related campaign to reduce the number of abortions, 2) a nationally-guaranteed and subsidized right to a safe and dignified abortion in every community, and 3) subsidies for women who want to give birth and adopt out and for those who want to raise a child (obviously welfare re-reform will be a hard sell). Liberals would be much more willing to discourage abortion if there was a guarantee that it would still be available everywhere, and any policy which could put a dent in the one million abortions motivated by financial factors would be attractive to right-to-lifers.
Paradoxically, and in what would have to be a deliberate suspension of supply and demand, a new policy framework 1) could make increased abortion availability go along with a reduction in the number of abortions, and 2) would require ensuring the supply of abortion services while at the same time working towards a reduction in the demand for abortion. The policies under consideration have the potential to build ties between feminist and socially conservative women: they are feminist because they would guarantee not just as an abstract right, but as a practical reality, access to abortion services, and they are conservative because by guaranteeing special rights to women they recognize that they, women, are, in fact, different from men.
Given that in most times and places men have owned women’s bodies, it is understandable that feminists feel particularly protective of their infant legal status as equal to men and of their concomitant jurisdiction over themselves. And the reality of legal and moral reasoning about abortion will always be different from the more immediate reality of being a woman in a body that is pregnant. But if women worked together, across political lines, a set of solutions that could both increase access to and reduce the numbers of abortions are possible.
On a sidenote, economists insist that we need the one million Mexicans who illegally enter the US each year in order to maintain our economy and our Social Security system, so maybe a policy that birthed a million new Americans could help resolve more than one of the conundrums of the moment.
posted by Steven O'Connor @ 10:27 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
There is something unrealistic in viewing abortion as "moral" or "immoral." Throughout history, women have routinely ended unwanted pregnancies, or perhaps more often, births of infants who were obviously sickly, and whose lives would deprive healthier siblings of thriving into adulthood, and giving birth to another generation.
In many hunter-gatherer societies, or in socieities living in cultures and conditions more simiiar to those in which we evolved, women have either had herbal means of ending pregnancies early, or they have had the means to kill their newborns, when they were unlikely to survive, or when they would be too costly given the available resources and/or the number of children already in a family. Infantacide is still alive and well in many cultures, and often it is the girl babies who are killed, leaving some contemporary cultures with a surplus of men --a rather odd "natural" experiment that is rarely discussed or even vaguely mentioned.
We can't forget that we are mammals, primates, and that infantacide is common in primate cultures, often at the hands of males who did not father the new born, and who want to impregnate the mother as soon as possible. And in many mammals, females neglect (thus killing) some of their offspring who show signs of physical weakness, and who, if the mother expended the energy to keep them alive, would risk depriving the other living offspring of the resources needed for normal development. Is it "moral" to maintain the life of a newborn, if it would lead to the death of other children in the family? It is known that raising human offspring require more resources for a longer persiod of time than in many other species. Having as many viable and healthy offspring, children and grandchildren, as possible is perhaps one of the more pressing drives of evolution. In human societies, If an infant was noted as sickly, it has often been a grandmother who quietly murdered the weaker newborn. This is how it is done in China and India today, where newborn females are killed in their earliest moments of life. Is infanticide "moral" if it promotes the overall health of the whole family? Perhaps thinking in terms of morality is neither wise nor realistic, and a discourse with morality as the basic topic is unlikely to benefit anyone. Is it moral to put all the avialable resources into raising a sickly infant, when siblings will likely go hungry as the result? Why are they killing their newborn daughters in some castes in India, and all over China, where the mother is only permitted to have one child per family, and prefers to have the "one" be a male, the result of male supremacy. One of the only species of primate where there is no male-derived infantacide is in the Bonobos, where women are dominant by virtue of their sticking tightly together. The roaming male who wants to impregnate a new mother, is unable to kill the newborn, thus making her fertile immediately, because she will no longer be nursing. Should a male bonobo attempt infantacide, he will be attacked and driven off by a large group of well-organized females. Chimpmanzee females are not so fortunate, and infantacide in chimps in not uncommmon.
Why is abortion or infantacide thought of in terms of morality and the "rights of women" when it is so often the failure of males to take responsibility to protect and provide resources, for the raising of the children? A woman deprived of the support required to raise an infant may have little choice but to sacrifice the life of a newborn, in order to ensure adequate provisions for the rest of her children. Our no-fault divorce laws, while presumably helpful to women, have led to that absurd half/half resolution to divorces --which in the end make newly divorced males the economic victors, while the newly divorced females are suddenly living and raising their children in relative poverty. The stress of feeling unsure of the availability of resources, creates highly anxious mothers, and highly anxious mothers are unable to well-regulate the emotional system of their offspring. Is the "moral dilemma" a female problem, or is it simply the result of providing yet more freedom for males in a culture. When the males are themselves of lower socioeconomic status, and also unsure of how and when they will be able to provision for their women and children, the obvious strategy has been to have as many children as possible, and hope that some will survive the most difficult conditions. Women however are limited by nature as to the number of offspring they are capable of producing and raising into adulthood. The issue is not one of female morality, or right and wrong, but is in the end, a practical problem, that can only be considered in terms of pragmatic solutions. You mention the rate of abortion in African Americans being relatively high, and this serves as a perfect example. The African American male has far fewer opportunities to ensure access to resources, and to feel secure in his ability to support his offspring. He may often be highly anxious, or riddled with fear as not only is he potentially unable to provision his family, but he is also the frequent victim of other male's aggression, who are in essense acting as predators. A male who is sytematically deprived of access to resources, and who is a regular victim of predators, is less likely to be able to regulate the emotions of the mother of a newborn. And a poorly regulated mother, has a far more dififcult time in regulating the emotions of her infant. The same situation is present for the white male who is living with inadequate access to resources. Is this his "fault" or a moral problem for whilch he is responsible - or is this simply the result of a poorly organized economic system?
Infanticide is a common practice in cultures around the world. Abortion is another type of infantacide, nothing more and nothing less. Why should this be considered a matter of morals, instead of a basic economic process common in nature, in many if not most mammalian species. And why should it be considered a problem for women, when, at least among the higher apes including our species, it may be far more related to the economic condition of males, than to the moral behavior of the females. It is interesting to note that often in cultures where infantacide is a common practice, it is the paternal grandmother who does the killing of the newborn. It is said that she is less sure that her son was father of the infant, and therefore she may feel less attachment to the baby, whereas the matenal grandmother is very sure of who is mother to the newborn and killing her daughter's offspring is much harder. The sooner we get the idea of morality out of the picture, the better. We are dealing with an economic problem, that is scarcity of resources for many members of our species, and the ongoing system of male supremacy, which continues to leave women as the property of men, and many men the property of other men, resulting in an inequity in the distribution of resources, in a species that is hard-wired for sharing and equity.
Under this reasoning it is never wrong to kill anybody: all killing (and all human behavior) is natural in that that is what we are doing.
By this theory, genocide should not be judged as immoral because people do it. And I'm sure that genocide is often tied to economics too...
Genocide and infantacide to not seem to me to be necessarily logically connnected. I have always had a problem understanding why it made sense --to anyone-- that the "Americans bought Alaska from the Russians." What is the logic of people living in an entirely different part of the world, "buying" the property, living space, of people living elsewhere? And from yet another group, living also, in an entierly different place. Did America really buy Alaska from the Russians? Did my great grandparents or whoever, really "buy" Alaska? Where did they get the money to pay fo rthis, and where did the resources from this purchase go, into my families' bank account? Genocide and infantacide seem to be very different activities, on the other hand, in between group competition, killing a whole group is perhaps the net effect; this is after all "group selection," a powerful force in evolution. And group selection has made us be cooperative and compliant animals, as groups with a higher number of cooperators seem to always win in a copmetition with groups with fewere cooperators and more defectors.
Infantacide, however, seems to be a product of natural selection, not group selection. Even genocide is probably best discussed in pragmatic terms, rather than in terms evoking morality. When a brother kills someone who killed his brother or another member of his family, in retaliation, out of loyalty, he is surely not an immoral person. The intense loyalities we see in American street gangs, as they move to protect one another from real or imagined insults, suggest a highly developed sense of morality --defending one's familiy and friends, defending one's ingroup, can hardly be seen as an "immoral" form of behavior. If you are acting to defend me, out of loyalty and empathy, out of love for me, I wil not see your actions as immoral, but as the highest form of morality. Failure to defend one's group members because you have no empathy for your group, your family members, your loved ones, now that feels to the group members as rather immoral.
Why is it helpful to think in terms of morality? We act on our moral convictions quite nonconsciously, we act on the basis of implicit knowledge and implicit reasoning, and we never know why or how we made our most difficult decisions, because the "reasons" will always be outside of our conscious awareness. For the most part we cherish life, and we cherish our loved ones, and will fight for them, and isn't that a high level of morality? We identify with the stupidity of our parents, and imitate them blindly, not out of immorality but out of loyalty and love. Lets leave morality out of the picture. There are few people who have the kind of brain damage that leaves them with no empathy, a lack of fear reactions when faced with fear inducing stimuli, a cruel psychopathy. lets assume that most are acting out of love and loyalty, and let morality be what it is, discourse of some sort with little pragmatic meaning. We may talk morals, we may blither away pro morality anti-morality, but in the end, most of wil act time and again, with little or no awareness, out of our nonconscious loyalty, our passionate committment to those we see as our ingroup. The kindness to strangers and to others closer up, to our families, both in human and non-human animals alike, that we seem to be so prone to, is part of our primate inheritance, or should I say our mammalian inheritance.
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