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I finished Kristin Luker's 1984 book, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood.
In
my latest reading, Luker discussed a variety of issues. She detailed
her methodology, as she specified what criteria she used in selecting
the pro-life and pro-choice activists to interview. Pro-choicers
were required to spend less time on their cause than pro-lifers to
qualify for participation in her interviews because many pro-choice
women did not have as much time to devote to their cause as pro-lifers,
since pro-choice women were busy at their professions. Moreover,
pro-lifers were more passionate about their cause because they were
seeking to change the status quo, whereas pro-choicers felt that they
had already attained a significant victory in Roe vs. Wade.
Luker said, however, that pro-choicers were becoming a little more
passionate, on account of the United States having an anti-abortion
President at the time, namely, Ronald Reagan. I'd say that pro-choicers were also passionate in 2012, on account of Republican politicians' comments and proposed legislation about abortion.
I
was disappointed that Luker did not talk much about the role of
evangelicals in the pro-life movement, and how abortion became an issue
of the religious right. But, the way Luker told it, Catholicism has
played a significant role in the pro-life movement. In its early days,
it was largely Catholic. And even later, there were a number of people
in the pro-life movement who were converts to Catholicism. Catholicism
should not be downplayed when it comes to the pro-life movement, but I
think that the evangelical presence in it should also be extensively
discussed.
Another point that Luker made was that many
women who choose abortion do not make their decision lightly. I think
that even pro-lifers should recognize this, because that would sensitize
them more to the need to help the women who are considering abortion,
so that the women could have their babies without great cost to
themselves. I applaud pro-lifers who actually do reach out to the women
who are struggling with the implications of having the baby.
I
thought that Luker's comments on pages 242-243 were especially
noteworthy. She's discussing what would happen if pro-lifers succeeded
in banning most abortions, which she thinks could very well happen on
account of pro-lifers' passionate commitment to their cause:
"In a
Prohibition-type situation, abortions would be nominally illegal, but
those with the right combination of money and information would be able
to get them. (And the combination would be important: a rich person in
the heartland of Iowa would probably have a harder time than a
middle-income person in New York with feminist connections.) Well-to-do
people in general would get better abortions, and the poor would get
worse ones. Every physician would have to interpret the law
individually, and great variation would result. States like California
would almost surely be liberal in interpreting the new law, and states
like Mississippi almost surely would not. Occasionally, some hapless
woman and her partner at the wrong place and the wrong time would be
caught, tried, and given the maximum allowable sentence as a way of
maintaining boundaries. Such cases would make the national headlines.
After several years of this, public opposition to the law would increase
to massive proportions, and the law would be repealed."
I've
heard or had conversations with pro-choicers who believe that a law
against abortion would be unfeasible. They don't think that such a law
would stop abortion because unexpected pregnancies and the cost of
bringing new children into the world would continue to exist. Plus,
they ask what the penalty for abortion would be. If the embryo is a
person, should there be a death penalty for those who take its life? My
impression is that many pro-lifers don't go that far.
I can sympathize with pro-lifers who want the government to make a
statement that life is sacred, for, if one human life is not considered
sacred, what assurance do we have that another human life would be
valued? But, even if abortion were outlawed, problems would still
exist.
Showing posts with label Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood. Show all posts
Saturday, November 24, 2012
Friday, November 23, 2012
Kristin Luker's Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood 8: Slippery Slopes
My latest reading of Kristin Luker's Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood
(copyright 1984) was interesting because it brought to my mind
discussions that I have had with people about abortion, as well as
pro-life Republican Todd Akin's controversial comments during the 2012 elections.
Luker was talking about what the pro-life and the pro-choice movements may have to do to be successful in a country (namely, the United States) in which most people have middle-of-the-road views on abortion. On the pro-life side, Luker believes that pro-lifers in some sense undermine their own position when they support exceptions for rape and the life of the mother, for that compromises their stance that the right to life is absolute and places them on a slippery slope. Why, she asks, should we prioritize the mother over the embryo in these cases, but not in other cases? And, if a woman who was raped should not have to bear her rapist's baby because the pregnancy was unexpected, why shouldn't women with other unexpected pregnancies be allowed to have an abortion? Moreover, Luker notes that anti-abortion laws in the past had an exception for the life of the mother, with the result that some doctors interpreted that exception strictly, whereas others interpreted it broadly (since one could arguably be saving a mother's life through abortion if the pregnancy would harm her mental health or lead her to suicide).
Luker refers to pro-life attempts to justify abortion to save the life of the mother. One way is to say that this occurs rarely, but Luker responds that its lack of frequency has nothing to do with whether it's ethical or not. Another way is to say that directly killing the embryo through abortion is wrong, but performing a procedure that has the consequence of taking the embryo's life (even though that is not the procedure's main purpose) is acceptable. For example, on page 231, Luker refers to the view of Thomas Bouscaren: "In the case of ectopic pregnancies, where an embryo begins growing in the Fallopian tube rather than in the uterus, Bouscaren argued that although it would be wrong to surgically remove the embryo, thus causing its death, it would be acceptable to remove the diseased tube, thus causing the death of the embryo indirectly." Luker's problem with this argument is that it emphasizes the subjective intent of the physician. A third way is to treat the embryo as an "unjust aggressor" when it threatens the life of the mother, and thus it can be aborted, the same way that killing an aggressor is justified for the sake of self-defense. But Luker does not think that portraying the embryo as an "unjust aggressor" will help the pro-life cause.
Regarding pro-life treatment of the rape exception to an abortion ban, Luker says on page 235: "Most of the pro-life people we interviewed said that women who are raped simply don't become pregnant very often, and many of them said they thought this was because something biological happens to rape victims that precludes the possibility of pregnancy." This sounds like what Todd Akin said, which means that Akin was probably drawing from a belief that exists within the pro-life movement, at least as early as the 1980's. Luker does not agree with this view, for she said that women "who promptly report the rape" don't become pregnant very often because they undergo procedures that eliminate pregnancy "in its earliest stage" (page 235).
On the pro-choice side, Luker says that its emphasis on women being able to do what they want with their own bodies can strike people as rather selfish. But it was mainly Luker's treatment of the pro-life side that brought to my mind discussions that I have had and things that I have read about abortion. In college, a pro-choice friend of mine once asked me why we should have an exception for the life of the mother, when that exception assumes that the mother is more valuable than the embryo. He was probably wondering why, if I were to regard the mother as more important in that case, I couldn't regard her as more important in other cases, as well. My friend did not buy into the "unjust aggressor" argument, which he read in one of Ronald Reagan's anti-abortion writings, for my friend said that the embryo was not intentionally causing the mother's death. I also heard the argument that it's acceptable to indirectly cause the death of an embryo when I was talking on the phone with a pro-life, pro-family activist, looking for an internship in a Christian conservative organization, and I've come across it when reading the views of Republicans who don't believe in an exception for the life of the mother. Usually, they say that a procedure to save the mother's life whose intent was not to kill the embryo, but which ends up killing the embryo, is acceptable.
When it came to exceptions, they did not particularly disturb me when I was more of a pro-lifer. Granted, I could not answer my pro-choice friend's question of why we should regard the mother's life as more important when an embryo was threatening it, but I didn't think that this one ambiguous case was enough to overthrow the entire notion that, in most cases, a woman should not be able to kill her unborn baby. After all, there are exceptions to all sorts of ethical rules (i.e., don't kill), but that does not invalidate the rules. And yet, there are usually sophisticated philosophical justifications for those exceptions. Luker does not think that there is a sufficient justification, however, for pro-lifers to allow abortion to save the life of the mother.
There's something that I wonder, though: Couldn't arguments that pro-choicers use to justify abortion also be used to justify infanticide? If a mother can justifiably have an abortion because she can't afford to raise kids or feels that she wouldn't make a good mother, why couldn't she justifiably kill her children for those reasons after they come out of the womb? On some level, Luker interacts with this question on pages 229-230, as she points out what she feels are weaknesses in pro-lifers' exception for the life of the mother:
"Thus the dilemma: if all embryos really are 'babies' and by definition 'innocent' and physically dependent, on what moral grounds can the lives of some of them be ended? For example, it is not hard to imagine that the activities of a healthy, active three-year-old could threaten the life of an overburdened, anemic mother with active cardiac disease. But even the most active abortion supporter would recoil from the suggestion that this three-year-old should have its life ended in order to save the life of its mother. In part this is common sense: three-year-olds can be cared for by others, but embryos, at least for now, cannot. But if pro-life groups concede that the physical dependence of embryos makes them different in this critical way from already-born children, then they have seriously called into question their own argument that there is no moral difference between an embryo of three days and a child of three years."
Luker is pointing out what she believes is a weakness in a pro-life position that has an exception for the life of the mother: if an embryo's life can be taken because it threatens a mother's life, why couldn't the life of an already born child be taken when it threatens a mother's life----if the mother has heart problems, for example? But I think that the same sort of question can be asked regarding the pro-choice position, and so pro-choicers need to address more fully why abortion is acceptable, but taking the life of an already-born child is not. A pro-choicer can say that an already-born child is part of a social network, but I think that we're on slippery ground if we assume that this is what gives someone value as a living human being. After all, some people after their birth aren't social or particularly cared for by their family or others, and yet I doubt that pro-choicers would deny their right to live. Perhaps a pro-choicer could say that a mother could give her child to someone else after the child is born, whereas she can't while she is still pregnant, but why couldn't a pregnant woman make plans to do that after the child's birth?
In any case, I think that both pro-life and also pro-choice positions are rather slippery.
Luker was talking about what the pro-life and the pro-choice movements may have to do to be successful in a country (namely, the United States) in which most people have middle-of-the-road views on abortion. On the pro-life side, Luker believes that pro-lifers in some sense undermine their own position when they support exceptions for rape and the life of the mother, for that compromises their stance that the right to life is absolute and places them on a slippery slope. Why, she asks, should we prioritize the mother over the embryo in these cases, but not in other cases? And, if a woman who was raped should not have to bear her rapist's baby because the pregnancy was unexpected, why shouldn't women with other unexpected pregnancies be allowed to have an abortion? Moreover, Luker notes that anti-abortion laws in the past had an exception for the life of the mother, with the result that some doctors interpreted that exception strictly, whereas others interpreted it broadly (since one could arguably be saving a mother's life through abortion if the pregnancy would harm her mental health or lead her to suicide).
Luker refers to pro-life attempts to justify abortion to save the life of the mother. One way is to say that this occurs rarely, but Luker responds that its lack of frequency has nothing to do with whether it's ethical or not. Another way is to say that directly killing the embryo through abortion is wrong, but performing a procedure that has the consequence of taking the embryo's life (even though that is not the procedure's main purpose) is acceptable. For example, on page 231, Luker refers to the view of Thomas Bouscaren: "In the case of ectopic pregnancies, where an embryo begins growing in the Fallopian tube rather than in the uterus, Bouscaren argued that although it would be wrong to surgically remove the embryo, thus causing its death, it would be acceptable to remove the diseased tube, thus causing the death of the embryo indirectly." Luker's problem with this argument is that it emphasizes the subjective intent of the physician. A third way is to treat the embryo as an "unjust aggressor" when it threatens the life of the mother, and thus it can be aborted, the same way that killing an aggressor is justified for the sake of self-defense. But Luker does not think that portraying the embryo as an "unjust aggressor" will help the pro-life cause.
Regarding pro-life treatment of the rape exception to an abortion ban, Luker says on page 235: "Most of the pro-life people we interviewed said that women who are raped simply don't become pregnant very often, and many of them said they thought this was because something biological happens to rape victims that precludes the possibility of pregnancy." This sounds like what Todd Akin said, which means that Akin was probably drawing from a belief that exists within the pro-life movement, at least as early as the 1980's. Luker does not agree with this view, for she said that women "who promptly report the rape" don't become pregnant very often because they undergo procedures that eliminate pregnancy "in its earliest stage" (page 235).
On the pro-choice side, Luker says that its emphasis on women being able to do what they want with their own bodies can strike people as rather selfish. But it was mainly Luker's treatment of the pro-life side that brought to my mind discussions that I have had and things that I have read about abortion. In college, a pro-choice friend of mine once asked me why we should have an exception for the life of the mother, when that exception assumes that the mother is more valuable than the embryo. He was probably wondering why, if I were to regard the mother as more important in that case, I couldn't regard her as more important in other cases, as well. My friend did not buy into the "unjust aggressor" argument, which he read in one of Ronald Reagan's anti-abortion writings, for my friend said that the embryo was not intentionally causing the mother's death. I also heard the argument that it's acceptable to indirectly cause the death of an embryo when I was talking on the phone with a pro-life, pro-family activist, looking for an internship in a Christian conservative organization, and I've come across it when reading the views of Republicans who don't believe in an exception for the life of the mother. Usually, they say that a procedure to save the mother's life whose intent was not to kill the embryo, but which ends up killing the embryo, is acceptable.
When it came to exceptions, they did not particularly disturb me when I was more of a pro-lifer. Granted, I could not answer my pro-choice friend's question of why we should regard the mother's life as more important when an embryo was threatening it, but I didn't think that this one ambiguous case was enough to overthrow the entire notion that, in most cases, a woman should not be able to kill her unborn baby. After all, there are exceptions to all sorts of ethical rules (i.e., don't kill), but that does not invalidate the rules. And yet, there are usually sophisticated philosophical justifications for those exceptions. Luker does not think that there is a sufficient justification, however, for pro-lifers to allow abortion to save the life of the mother.
There's something that I wonder, though: Couldn't arguments that pro-choicers use to justify abortion also be used to justify infanticide? If a mother can justifiably have an abortion because she can't afford to raise kids or feels that she wouldn't make a good mother, why couldn't she justifiably kill her children for those reasons after they come out of the womb? On some level, Luker interacts with this question on pages 229-230, as she points out what she feels are weaknesses in pro-lifers' exception for the life of the mother:
"Thus the dilemma: if all embryos really are 'babies' and by definition 'innocent' and physically dependent, on what moral grounds can the lives of some of them be ended? For example, it is not hard to imagine that the activities of a healthy, active three-year-old could threaten the life of an overburdened, anemic mother with active cardiac disease. But even the most active abortion supporter would recoil from the suggestion that this three-year-old should have its life ended in order to save the life of its mother. In part this is common sense: three-year-olds can be cared for by others, but embryos, at least for now, cannot. But if pro-life groups concede that the physical dependence of embryos makes them different in this critical way from already-born children, then they have seriously called into question their own argument that there is no moral difference between an embryo of three days and a child of three years."
Luker is pointing out what she believes is a weakness in a pro-life position that has an exception for the life of the mother: if an embryo's life can be taken because it threatens a mother's life, why couldn't the life of an already born child be taken when it threatens a mother's life----if the mother has heart problems, for example? But I think that the same sort of question can be asked regarding the pro-choice position, and so pro-choicers need to address more fully why abortion is acceptable, but taking the life of an already-born child is not. A pro-choicer can say that an already-born child is part of a social network, but I think that we're on slippery ground if we assume that this is what gives someone value as a living human being. After all, some people after their birth aren't social or particularly cared for by their family or others, and yet I doubt that pro-choicers would deny their right to live. Perhaps a pro-choicer could say that a mother could give her child to someone else after the child is born, whereas she can't while she is still pregnant, but why couldn't a pregnant woman make plans to do that after the child's birth?
In any case, I think that both pro-life and also pro-choice positions are rather slippery.
Thursday, November 22, 2012
Kristin Luker's Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood 7
In my latest reading of Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (copyright
1984), Kristin Luker explores the role of motherhood in women's stances
on abortion. (And, by the way, Luker presents a statistic that women
comprise the majority of the pro-life and the pro-choice movements.)
Her argument, based on interviews, is that pro-life women activists largely focus
their energies on the domestic sphere. Pro-choice women activists, by contrast,
tend to be higher-income and more committed to professions outside of
the home. Again, this is not an absolute, but Luker is speaking about
trends that she observed.
What's this mean, in terms of abortion? If a pro-life woman homemaker has an unexpected pregnancy, she already has a structure in place to care for that child, since she is already caring for children. A professional woman with an unexpected pregnancy, by contrast, would see the unexpected pregnancy as an interference to her career and her aspirations, and she would probably doubt her ability to raise another child. That's what I got out of Luker's discussion.
Another interesting point that Luker made was that many pro-life women prefer the domestic sphere to the paying workforce because their options are limited in terms of jobs. Whereas many pro-choice women have the education to pursue more fulfilling vocations, pro-life women are limited to lower-paying jobs, such as those in the service sector. Consequently, pro-life women think that the domestic sphere is better than the paying workforce.
Would Luker's analysis be accurate about thirty years later, in 2012? I'm not entirely sure. I do know women who are homemakers, but there are also a lot of women who work because they want to or they have to, and this includes pro-life women. And I wouldn't be surprised if there are a number of pro-life women who have received college and graduate educations. I've met or heard of a number of them! But there may be something to Luker's view that pro-life women tend to be women who root their identities in being wives and mothers, rather than a professional career.
What's this mean, in terms of abortion? If a pro-life woman homemaker has an unexpected pregnancy, she already has a structure in place to care for that child, since she is already caring for children. A professional woman with an unexpected pregnancy, by contrast, would see the unexpected pregnancy as an interference to her career and her aspirations, and she would probably doubt her ability to raise another child. That's what I got out of Luker's discussion.
Another interesting point that Luker made was that many pro-life women prefer the domestic sphere to the paying workforce because their options are limited in terms of jobs. Whereas many pro-choice women have the education to pursue more fulfilling vocations, pro-life women are limited to lower-paying jobs, such as those in the service sector. Consequently, pro-life women think that the domestic sphere is better than the paying workforce.
Would Luker's analysis be accurate about thirty years later, in 2012? I'm not entirely sure. I do know women who are homemakers, but there are also a lot of women who work because they want to or they have to, and this includes pro-life women. And I wouldn't be surprised if there are a number of pro-life women who have received college and graduate educations. I've met or heard of a number of them! But there may be something to Luker's view that pro-life women tend to be women who root their identities in being wives and mothers, rather than a professional career.
Wednesday, November 21, 2012
Kristin Luker's Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood 6: Worldviews
In my latest reading of Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood, Kristin Luker discussed the difference of worldview between pro-lifers and pro-choicers. She
doesn't mean that all pro-lifers or all pro-choicers adopt the
worldview that she ascribes to them, but rather she notes trends that
she observed in her interviews with activists. So please keep in mind that what
follows is not absolute, but it may describe general trends, at least
during the 1980's, when Luker wrote this book.
According to Luker, pro-lifers believe in moral rules, even though they don't perfectly live up to them, since there are pro-life women who have had abortions. Pro-choicers, by contrast, don't have as rigid a view regarding morality, and they make moral decisions by looking at competing claims and what's good for people involved. Luker states that pro-choicers have a New Testament approach to ethics, one that subordinates rules to love. For example, pro-choicers don't think that putting a child up for adoption is preferable to abortion, for the former would put the child into a world where he or she might not be loved or receive adequate care.
On a related note, pro-choicers regard personhood as social, and so they maintain that one becomes a person at birth, when one first socially interacts with people. Pro-lifers, by contrast, are frightened by this suggestion, for they regard personhood as innate rather than socially-conditioned, and they fear that valuing people based upon their contribution to society is similar to Nazism.
At the same time, according to Luker, pro-choicers are not for women carelessly getting pregnant and having multiple abortions. Luker states that they dislike this because the women had other alternatives----such as birth control----and multiple abortions usurp "the potential rights of the embryo by trivializing them" (page 180). I can't say that I entirely understand the pro-choice position here, for, if abortion is acceptable, what would be wrong with having more than one abortion? Something tells me that even pro-choicers are seeing the embryo as something other than a blob of tissue. But this position calls to my mind a conversation that I was having with pro-choicers back in my conservative college days. A pro-choicer said that she was against abortion personally but did not think that the law should ban abortion, and so I asked her why she was against abortion personally. Her response was that abortion was too easy of a solution----that sex and pregnancy should be considered as more weighty than an attitude of "Oh, I'm pregnant again----time to have another abortion!" would suggest.
Pro-lifers regard sex as sacred because it produces children, whereas pro-choicers regard sex as sacred in terms of intimacy. Pro-choicers also think that sex should not only be for procreative purposes, as Luker says on pages 176-177: "From their point of view, if the purpose of sex were limited to reproduction, no rational Creator would have arranged things so that an individual can have hundreds or even thousands of acts of intercourse in a lifetime, with millions of sex cells----egg and sperm----always at the ready." Regarding the sanctity of sex, this, too, reminds me of a discussion that I had with a pro-choicer in my college days. I was saying that people should wait until they are married to have sex because anything else would cheapen sex and its sanctity, and one lady wondered what exactly was so sacred about sex: she saw it primarily as a physical act! She converted to Islam sometime after that discussion, so I'm curious as to whether her view is different, now.
Pro-lifers think that God has a plan, and so they believe that an unexpected pregnancy is part of that plan. Pro-choicers, by contrast, are less religious (or are spiritual but not religious), and they don't believe that any ills of society are God's will, which is why they believe that it's important for human beings to stop them. This, presumably, would include preventing a child from growing up unwanted. This debate recalled to my mind Richard Mourdock's comments during the 2012 elections.
On whether or not Luker's characterizations gel with my experience, I'd say not entirely. On the issue of abortion, yes, pro-lifers probably have a rigid sense of rules whereas pro-choicers are more open to situational ethics, but what about other issues? On a number of issues, it seems as if the Left is absolutist whereas the Right conditions ethics on the situation. I think of the use of torture in interrogation techniques, or funding violent groups to fight Communism, ideas that the Right has championed. And, regarding sex, I think that conservatives, too, value sex as a means of intimacy.
According to Luker, pro-lifers believe in moral rules, even though they don't perfectly live up to them, since there are pro-life women who have had abortions. Pro-choicers, by contrast, don't have as rigid a view regarding morality, and they make moral decisions by looking at competing claims and what's good for people involved. Luker states that pro-choicers have a New Testament approach to ethics, one that subordinates rules to love. For example, pro-choicers don't think that putting a child up for adoption is preferable to abortion, for the former would put the child into a world where he or she might not be loved or receive adequate care.
On a related note, pro-choicers regard personhood as social, and so they maintain that one becomes a person at birth, when one first socially interacts with people. Pro-lifers, by contrast, are frightened by this suggestion, for they regard personhood as innate rather than socially-conditioned, and they fear that valuing people based upon their contribution to society is similar to Nazism.
At the same time, according to Luker, pro-choicers are not for women carelessly getting pregnant and having multiple abortions. Luker states that they dislike this because the women had other alternatives----such as birth control----and multiple abortions usurp "the potential rights of the embryo by trivializing them" (page 180). I can't say that I entirely understand the pro-choice position here, for, if abortion is acceptable, what would be wrong with having more than one abortion? Something tells me that even pro-choicers are seeing the embryo as something other than a blob of tissue. But this position calls to my mind a conversation that I was having with pro-choicers back in my conservative college days. A pro-choicer said that she was against abortion personally but did not think that the law should ban abortion, and so I asked her why she was against abortion personally. Her response was that abortion was too easy of a solution----that sex and pregnancy should be considered as more weighty than an attitude of "Oh, I'm pregnant again----time to have another abortion!" would suggest.
Pro-lifers regard sex as sacred because it produces children, whereas pro-choicers regard sex as sacred in terms of intimacy. Pro-choicers also think that sex should not only be for procreative purposes, as Luker says on pages 176-177: "From their point of view, if the purpose of sex were limited to reproduction, no rational Creator would have arranged things so that an individual can have hundreds or even thousands of acts of intercourse in a lifetime, with millions of sex cells----egg and sperm----always at the ready." Regarding the sanctity of sex, this, too, reminds me of a discussion that I had with a pro-choicer in my college days. I was saying that people should wait until they are married to have sex because anything else would cheapen sex and its sanctity, and one lady wondered what exactly was so sacred about sex: she saw it primarily as a physical act! She converted to Islam sometime after that discussion, so I'm curious as to whether her view is different, now.
Pro-lifers think that God has a plan, and so they believe that an unexpected pregnancy is part of that plan. Pro-choicers, by contrast, are less religious (or are spiritual but not religious), and they don't believe that any ills of society are God's will, which is why they believe that it's important for human beings to stop them. This, presumably, would include preventing a child from growing up unwanted. This debate recalled to my mind Richard Mourdock's comments during the 2012 elections.
On whether or not Luker's characterizations gel with my experience, I'd say not entirely. On the issue of abortion, yes, pro-lifers probably have a rigid sense of rules whereas pro-choicers are more open to situational ethics, but what about other issues? On a number of issues, it seems as if the Left is absolutist whereas the Right conditions ethics on the situation. I think of the use of torture in interrogation techniques, or funding violent groups to fight Communism, ideas that the Right has championed. And, regarding sex, I think that conservatives, too, value sex as a means of intimacy.
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
Kristin Luker's Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood 5: The Pro-Life Movement and Ideology
In my latest reading of Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood,
Kristin Luker discussed the development of the pro-life movement. At
first, during the 1960's (prior to 1967), the pro-life movement
consisted largely of Catholic male professionals, who believed that
there was more of a national consensus that abortion was murder than
there actually was, and thus they were shocked by the lack of outrage at
such things as California's liberalized abortion law. After 1973's Roe
vs. Wade decision, however, women who highly valued their identity as
wives and mothers regarded Roe as an attack on their values, and so they
joined the pro-life movement. There were others who were joining the
pro-life movement out of a variety of motives: minorities were joining
because they were against devaluing the lives of the vulnerable, people who lost a child were joining because they had issues with people
voluntarily giving up their unborn children through abortion, and there were others who realized that they themselves could have been aborted.
One question that I had during my latest reading concerned whether the pro-life movement was right-wing or left-wing. Luker says that there were Republicans (even a Republican organization) who supported California's liberalized abortion law. My impression, from what Luker and others (such as Lou Cannon) have said, is that the 1960's was not a time when the Republicans were pro-life while the Democrats were pro-choice, for things were much more complex than that. There were pro-choice Republicans, and there were Catholic pro-life Democrats.
But, according to Luker, there was some conflict between many of the women who joined the pro-life movement after 1973, and the older generation of pro-lifers. According to Luker, many of the post-1973 pro-life women lacked the level of education of many of the pre-1973 pro-lifers, and so many of the pre-1973 pro-lifers regarded themselves as genteel while seeing the post-1973 pro-lifer women as strident and unsophisticated. Was there a liberal-conservative divide between the pre-1973 and the post-1973 pro-lifers? I'm not entirely sure, but there may be a grain of truth to that (and here I'm diverging from what Luker explicitly argues and doing my own speculation). Many of the post-1973 pro-life women were arguably conservative in that they championed a traditional role for women. Meanwhile, Luker quotes a pre-1973 pro-lifer who said that she did not like being told to vote for a pro-life candidate if he was not a good candidate, and she noted that she was also pro-life in her opposition to world hunger, capital punishment, and war. This reminds me of liberals today who chastise right-wing Republicans for being pro-life on abortion but not on other issues, such as poverty, the death penalty, and war. Was this pre-1973 pro-lifer expressing concern that the pro-life cause was being hijacked by the Republican Party?
At the same time, I gather from Luker's narrative that there were people who were joining the pro-life movement who were not particularly right-wing. Many minorities who were concerned that abortion was devaluing life were probably not right-wing Republicans. At least I doubt that they were, and I'm open to correction on this.
One thing that I was thinking about as I read Luker was the White House Conference on Families during the Carter Administration. I have watched scenes from this conference on the PBS documentary, With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America, Episode 3: We Are Family (1974-1980). What I noticed was that there were obviously a number of pro-lifers at the conference who were conservative, but there was one pro-lifer who said that he was also against war and capital punishment. Was this a time somewhere in between the pro-life cause being open to a variety of perspectives, and the pro-life cause becoming more firmly associated with the Republican Party and right-wing conservatism? Do we see an intermediary stage here?
(UPDATE: On page 216, Luker states that 1976 marked an anti-abortion plank in the Republican platform as well as the Hyde Amendment banning government funding of poor women's abortions.)
I'd like to close this post with two items. First, please read Mehdi Hasan's excellent article for the Huffington Post, Being Pro-Life Doesn't Make Me Any Less Of A Lefty. Second, I'd like to quote what Luker says on page 157: "To argue that embryos are entitled to all the rights of personhood, despite their 'condition of dependency,' because they possess the entry-card of forty-six human chromosomes is to emphatically assert that personhood is a 'natural,' inborn, and inherited right, rather than a social, contingent, and assigned right." That's a rich statement. Do I regard personhood as a natural right, or as a social, contingent, and assigned right? The latter position somewhat scares me, for I am leery to give society the latitude to decide who is worthy of being considered a human being, and I think that such a power could be abused. And yet, would adopting the former position make life an absolute right, even in cases of war and capital punishment?
One question that I had during my latest reading concerned whether the pro-life movement was right-wing or left-wing. Luker says that there were Republicans (even a Republican organization) who supported California's liberalized abortion law. My impression, from what Luker and others (such as Lou Cannon) have said, is that the 1960's was not a time when the Republicans were pro-life while the Democrats were pro-choice, for things were much more complex than that. There were pro-choice Republicans, and there were Catholic pro-life Democrats.
But, according to Luker, there was some conflict between many of the women who joined the pro-life movement after 1973, and the older generation of pro-lifers. According to Luker, many of the post-1973 pro-life women lacked the level of education of many of the pre-1973 pro-lifers, and so many of the pre-1973 pro-lifers regarded themselves as genteel while seeing the post-1973 pro-lifer women as strident and unsophisticated. Was there a liberal-conservative divide between the pre-1973 and the post-1973 pro-lifers? I'm not entirely sure, but there may be a grain of truth to that (and here I'm diverging from what Luker explicitly argues and doing my own speculation). Many of the post-1973 pro-life women were arguably conservative in that they championed a traditional role for women. Meanwhile, Luker quotes a pre-1973 pro-lifer who said that she did not like being told to vote for a pro-life candidate if he was not a good candidate, and she noted that she was also pro-life in her opposition to world hunger, capital punishment, and war. This reminds me of liberals today who chastise right-wing Republicans for being pro-life on abortion but not on other issues, such as poverty, the death penalty, and war. Was this pre-1973 pro-lifer expressing concern that the pro-life cause was being hijacked by the Republican Party?
At the same time, I gather from Luker's narrative that there were people who were joining the pro-life movement who were not particularly right-wing. Many minorities who were concerned that abortion was devaluing life were probably not right-wing Republicans. At least I doubt that they were, and I'm open to correction on this.
One thing that I was thinking about as I read Luker was the White House Conference on Families during the Carter Administration. I have watched scenes from this conference on the PBS documentary, With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America, Episode 3: We Are Family (1974-1980). What I noticed was that there were obviously a number of pro-lifers at the conference who were conservative, but there was one pro-lifer who said that he was also against war and capital punishment. Was this a time somewhere in between the pro-life cause being open to a variety of perspectives, and the pro-life cause becoming more firmly associated with the Republican Party and right-wing conservatism? Do we see an intermediary stage here?
(UPDATE: On page 216, Luker states that 1976 marked an anti-abortion plank in the Republican platform as well as the Hyde Amendment banning government funding of poor women's abortions.)
I'd like to close this post with two items. First, please read Mehdi Hasan's excellent article for the Huffington Post, Being Pro-Life Doesn't Make Me Any Less Of A Lefty. Second, I'd like to quote what Luker says on page 157: "To argue that embryos are entitled to all the rights of personhood, despite their 'condition of dependency,' because they possess the entry-card of forty-six human chromosomes is to emphatically assert that personhood is a 'natural,' inborn, and inherited right, rather than a social, contingent, and assigned right." That's a rich statement. Do I regard personhood as a natural right, or as a social, contingent, and assigned right? The latter position somewhat scares me, for I am leery to give society the latitude to decide who is worthy of being considered a human being, and I think that such a power could be abused. And yet, would adopting the former position make life an absolute right, even in cases of war and capital punishment?
Monday, November 19, 2012
Kristin Luker's Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood 4
I have two items for my write-up today on Kristin Luker's Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood.
1. I found Luker's discussion of women's jobs to be interesting----and I should note that she doesn't believe that women should be limited to those jobs, but rather she is acknowledging that, at the time that she was writing this book (the 1980's), there were certain professions that were "largely female" (page 114).
According to Luker, these jobs don't require a lot of education, making them fairly easy to enter. Luker says that a lady can become a "diploma" nurse a few years after high school, whereas becoming a doctor entails 8-10 years of education after high school. Luker also states that the jobs that women largely have are easy to re-enter after a period of absence, and so the jobs allow them to work, take time off to raise their kids, and then re-enter the work force. Luker states to illustrate this point that "The skills needed to be a nuclear physicist deteriorate dramatically over time, but the skills needed to be an elementary school teacher do not" (page 114). At the same time, according to Luker, there are downsides to the jobs that women tend to do: there is often little room for advancement or significant increase in pay.
This is part of Luker's larger argument that, for pro-choicers, equality in the work-force entails reproductive freedom, for an unexpected pregnancy can disrupt women's lives, monetary situation, and careers. But I found the discussion interesting because it was about different kinds of jobs. Are thing different now, almost thirty years after Luker's book was published? I think that jobs that used to be occupied by men are being opened up to women. But I also notice that women are in certain professions, such as secretaries, elementary school teachers, etc.
2. Luker has a chapter on the rise of the pro-life movement. I have not finished this chapter yet, but what I read so far said that, during the 1960's (until 1967), the right-to-life movement consisted of a number of male Catholic professionals, and they assumed that most people agreed with them that abortion was murder because people did not talk about abortion that much in public----as if people regarded it as shameful. But Luker states that the reticence about abortion was not so much due to a common belief that abortion was murder, but rather a general public reticence about sex, period. As a result of a number of pro-lifers' misunderstanding of many people's sentiments, Luker narrates, they (the pro-lifers) were shocked that there was not mass outrage at the liberalized abortion law in California.
1. I found Luker's discussion of women's jobs to be interesting----and I should note that she doesn't believe that women should be limited to those jobs, but rather she is acknowledging that, at the time that she was writing this book (the 1980's), there were certain professions that were "largely female" (page 114).
According to Luker, these jobs don't require a lot of education, making them fairly easy to enter. Luker says that a lady can become a "diploma" nurse a few years after high school, whereas becoming a doctor entails 8-10 years of education after high school. Luker also states that the jobs that women largely have are easy to re-enter after a period of absence, and so the jobs allow them to work, take time off to raise their kids, and then re-enter the work force. Luker states to illustrate this point that "The skills needed to be a nuclear physicist deteriorate dramatically over time, but the skills needed to be an elementary school teacher do not" (page 114). At the same time, according to Luker, there are downsides to the jobs that women tend to do: there is often little room for advancement or significant increase in pay.
This is part of Luker's larger argument that, for pro-choicers, equality in the work-force entails reproductive freedom, for an unexpected pregnancy can disrupt women's lives, monetary situation, and careers. But I found the discussion interesting because it was about different kinds of jobs. Are thing different now, almost thirty years after Luker's book was published? I think that jobs that used to be occupied by men are being opened up to women. But I also notice that women are in certain professions, such as secretaries, elementary school teachers, etc.
2. Luker has a chapter on the rise of the pro-life movement. I have not finished this chapter yet, but what I read so far said that, during the 1960's (until 1967), the right-to-life movement consisted of a number of male Catholic professionals, and they assumed that most people agreed with them that abortion was murder because people did not talk about abortion that much in public----as if people regarded it as shameful. But Luker states that the reticence about abortion was not so much due to a common belief that abortion was murder, but rather a general public reticence about sex, period. As a result of a number of pro-lifers' misunderstanding of many people's sentiments, Luker narrates, they (the pro-lifers) were shocked that there was not mass outrage at the liberalized abortion law in California.
Sunday, November 18, 2012
Kristin Luker's Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood 3: the Law Reagan Signed, and the Pro-Choice Movement
In my latest reading of Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood, Kristin Luker discusses California's Therapeutic Abortion law during the 1960's and the pro-choice movement's reactions to it.
As I said yesterday in my post about Luker's book, the nineteenth century had laws against abortion that still permitted abortion to save the life of the mother, but medical doctors were given the latitude to perform an abortion when they deemed it to be necessary. When medical advancement dramatically reduced the number of instances in which abortion would need to be performed to save the mother's life, people turned a critical eye towards practicing abortion for the sake of the mother's mental health, and there was a push to interpret anti-abortion laws more strictly.
California's Therapeutic Abortion law in the 1960's was a reaction to this, and it sought to preserve medical doctors' latitude in performing abortions. Not only was this a move to protect doctors, but it also addressed another relevant concern at the time: the rubella epidemic, which was causing severe birth defects (blindness, deafness, heart problems, mental disability, etc.), and some believed that abortion should be an option in this case because of the taxing responsibility of raising a child with such defects, and perhaps also because of the potential that the child could not have much quality of life (I may have read the latter reason in this book, but I can't find where, so it may not be there). Governor Ronald Reagan signed the bill into law, after successfully pushing for a symbolic concession to the anti-abortion movement (and I don't exactly understand what that concession was). (UPDATE: From what I read in Luker, it seems that Reagan was against allowing abortion on the ground that it was for the embryo's own good, on account of the embryo's defects.) The law itself was not for abortion on demand, but, overall, in the law's aftermath, doctors agreed to perform far more abortions than they refused.
But there were women who did not think that California's Therapeutic Abortion law went far enough. They favored the repeal of all anti-abortion laws, not merely reforming them, and some women thought that California's law treated them as chattel. And they did not believe that a medical doctor should have the final say about whether or not they'd have an abortion, but that they themselves should have the final say, for pregnancy and having children affected their lives. On page 97, Luker quotes a pro-choice woman who said: "When we talk about women's rights, we can get all the rights in the world----the right to vote, the right to go to school----and none of them means a doggone thing if we don't own the flesh we stand in, if we can't control what happens to us, if the whole course of our lives can be changed by somebody else that can get us pregnant by accident, or by deceit, or by force."
On page 100, Luker states that the organization of the pro-choice group, Society for Human Abortions, was when a number of women became unwilling to regard abortion as something that should be weighed in light of interests outside of the woman herself: "Until SHA was organized, women seemed willing to live with a situation in which their rights to control their own bodies was defined as only one of several competing rights, such as the rights of the husband (or whoever was the father of the embryo), the right of the state to regulate sexual morality by regulating the consequences of sexual intercourse, and the right of the state to control the production of potential citizens. It may very well be true that women were not happy about sharing their right to control their own bodies with various competing claims; but the interesting fact remains that until SHA was formed, they did not choose to exert organized political pressure on their own behalf."
As I said yesterday in my post about Luker's book, the nineteenth century had laws against abortion that still permitted abortion to save the life of the mother, but medical doctors were given the latitude to perform an abortion when they deemed it to be necessary. When medical advancement dramatically reduced the number of instances in which abortion would need to be performed to save the mother's life, people turned a critical eye towards practicing abortion for the sake of the mother's mental health, and there was a push to interpret anti-abortion laws more strictly.
California's Therapeutic Abortion law in the 1960's was a reaction to this, and it sought to preserve medical doctors' latitude in performing abortions. Not only was this a move to protect doctors, but it also addressed another relevant concern at the time: the rubella epidemic, which was causing severe birth defects (blindness, deafness, heart problems, mental disability, etc.), and some believed that abortion should be an option in this case because of the taxing responsibility of raising a child with such defects, and perhaps also because of the potential that the child could not have much quality of life (I may have read the latter reason in this book, but I can't find where, so it may not be there). Governor Ronald Reagan signed the bill into law, after successfully pushing for a symbolic concession to the anti-abortion movement (and I don't exactly understand what that concession was). (UPDATE: From what I read in Luker, it seems that Reagan was against allowing abortion on the ground that it was for the embryo's own good, on account of the embryo's defects.) The law itself was not for abortion on demand, but, overall, in the law's aftermath, doctors agreed to perform far more abortions than they refused.
But there were women who did not think that California's Therapeutic Abortion law went far enough. They favored the repeal of all anti-abortion laws, not merely reforming them, and some women thought that California's law treated them as chattel. And they did not believe that a medical doctor should have the final say about whether or not they'd have an abortion, but that they themselves should have the final say, for pregnancy and having children affected their lives. On page 97, Luker quotes a pro-choice woman who said: "When we talk about women's rights, we can get all the rights in the world----the right to vote, the right to go to school----and none of them means a doggone thing if we don't own the flesh we stand in, if we can't control what happens to us, if the whole course of our lives can be changed by somebody else that can get us pregnant by accident, or by deceit, or by force."
On page 100, Luker states that the organization of the pro-choice group, Society for Human Abortions, was when a number of women became unwilling to regard abortion as something that should be weighed in light of interests outside of the woman herself: "Until SHA was organized, women seemed willing to live with a situation in which their rights to control their own bodies was defined as only one of several competing rights, such as the rights of the husband (or whoever was the father of the embryo), the right of the state to regulate sexual morality by regulating the consequences of sexual intercourse, and the right of the state to control the production of potential citizens. It may very well be true that women were not happy about sharing their right to control their own bodies with various competing claims; but the interesting fact remains that until SHA was formed, they did not choose to exert organized political pressure on their own behalf."
Saturday, November 17, 2012
Kristin Luker's Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood 2
In this post, I'll talk some about Kristin Luker's narrative about historical perceptions of abortion in her 1984 book, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood.
Luker goes back to the difference of opinion between the Pythagoreans of ancient Greece and the Stoics. According to Luker, the Pythagoreans held that "abortion is wrong because the embryo is the moral equivalent of the child it will become" (page 11). The Stoics, however, did not think that abortion was "tantamount to murder", although they acknowledged that embryos had "some of the rights of already-born children (and these rights may increase over the course of the pregnancy)" (page 11). So, even in ancient times, there was reflection about the extent to which an embryo was a full human being, with human rights.
Luker also looks at ancient and medieval Christianity. While she acknowledges that early Christianity opposed abortion and other "barriers to procreation" (i.e., contraception, homosexuality), she states that "the church's sanctions against abortion were almost never as severe as the penalties for the murder of an adult person" (page 3). For years, a prominent idea was that abortion was wrong after quickening, "the point at which the woman can feel the embryo move within her, an event that occurs during the fifth or sixth month of pregnancy" (page 4).
In the nineteenth century, however, doctors in the United States were attempting to establish their medical authority, for there were long-standing factors that challenged it: the lack of a medical guild, the absence of licensing laws, competition in the field of medicine from the domestic sphere (i.e., home remedies, midwives), and the fact that medical schools could not restrict their admissions to the cream of the crop because they needed enough students who could pay tuition. According to Luker, to establish their medical authority, a number of physicians claimed that they knew something that many did not know: that life began at conception, and so both early and also late abortions were problematic.
Luker narrates that physicians favored anti-abortion laws, but these laws did not ban abortion. Rather, they allowed abortion when physicians deemed it to be necessary to save the life and health of the mother. Some physicians were strict in their application of this principle, and some were more liberal. Essentially, the authority of the medical profession was established and upheld, and, during this time, lawyers, philosophers, and religious bodies usually did not weigh in on the abortion issue, for they regarded it as the territory of the medical profession.
Over time, however, that changed. With medical advancement, there came to be very few cases in which childbirth would threaten the physical health of the mother. And yet, there were physicians who allowed abortion when (according to them) it would help the mother's mental health, and one rationale was that this would save the mother's life by preventing her from committing suicide. When mental health became more accepted as a justification for abortion, others felt free to weigh in on the abortion issue----churches, for example----perhaps because abortion appeared to be no longer solely a medical issue.
Luker goes back to the difference of opinion between the Pythagoreans of ancient Greece and the Stoics. According to Luker, the Pythagoreans held that "abortion is wrong because the embryo is the moral equivalent of the child it will become" (page 11). The Stoics, however, did not think that abortion was "tantamount to murder", although they acknowledged that embryos had "some of the rights of already-born children (and these rights may increase over the course of the pregnancy)" (page 11). So, even in ancient times, there was reflection about the extent to which an embryo was a full human being, with human rights.
Luker also looks at ancient and medieval Christianity. While she acknowledges that early Christianity opposed abortion and other "barriers to procreation" (i.e., contraception, homosexuality), she states that "the church's sanctions against abortion were almost never as severe as the penalties for the murder of an adult person" (page 3). For years, a prominent idea was that abortion was wrong after quickening, "the point at which the woman can feel the embryo move within her, an event that occurs during the fifth or sixth month of pregnancy" (page 4).
In the nineteenth century, however, doctors in the United States were attempting to establish their medical authority, for there were long-standing factors that challenged it: the lack of a medical guild, the absence of licensing laws, competition in the field of medicine from the domestic sphere (i.e., home remedies, midwives), and the fact that medical schools could not restrict their admissions to the cream of the crop because they needed enough students who could pay tuition. According to Luker, to establish their medical authority, a number of physicians claimed that they knew something that many did not know: that life began at conception, and so both early and also late abortions were problematic.
Luker narrates that physicians favored anti-abortion laws, but these laws did not ban abortion. Rather, they allowed abortion when physicians deemed it to be necessary to save the life and health of the mother. Some physicians were strict in their application of this principle, and some were more liberal. Essentially, the authority of the medical profession was established and upheld, and, during this time, lawyers, philosophers, and religious bodies usually did not weigh in on the abortion issue, for they regarded it as the territory of the medical profession.
Over time, however, that changed. With medical advancement, there came to be very few cases in which childbirth would threaten the physical health of the mother. And yet, there were physicians who allowed abortion when (according to them) it would help the mother's mental health, and one rationale was that this would save the mother's life by preventing her from committing suicide. When mental health became more accepted as a justification for abortion, others felt free to weigh in on the abortion issue----churches, for example----perhaps because abortion appeared to be no longer solely a medical issue.
Friday, November 16, 2012
Kristin Luker's Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood 1: What Is the Embryo?
I started Kristin Luker's 1984 book, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood. One reason that I decided to read this book was out of interest in the history of the pro-life movement.
Specifically, I've wondered when or how a pro-life stance on abortion
became a part of the ideology of the religious right and much of the
Republican Party, for it has been disputed that political conservatism
as a movement was always pro-life. Maybe Luker
addresses this question, and maybe not. We'll see! Another reason that
I'm reading this book is to get an academic, scholarly perspective on
the abortion issue.
In my latest reading, Luker went into the perceptions towards abortion throughout history and through the nineteenth century, but I'll talk more about Luker's narrative on that in my post tomorrow. Today, I will use as my starting-point something that Luker says on page 2:
"Early in the process of becoming involved in the abortion issue, people on each side (pro-life and pro-choice) often feel compelled to 'share the faith' or to 'enlighten' their opposition. In most cases, they rehearse those details about embryonic life that have led them to believe that the embryo is self-evidently either a 'baby' or a 'fetus'...A pro-life person can confound a pro-choice attacker by simply stating that it is obvious that the embryo is a baby, pointing out its very evident similarities to a newborn child and brushing aside its dissimilarities. Conversely, a pro-choice person can enrage a pro-life person by admitting that although the embryo is human (it is not, after all, some other species) and alive (it is not, after all, dead), this nevertheless does not prove that the embryo is 'a human life'----in any case, not a 'meaningful' human life."
I should note that Luker uses the term "embryo" as a neutral term, although she recognizes that it is inaccurate as a general term for the unborn. The thing is, calling the unborn human being a "baby" or a "fetus" carries a lot of ideological baggage, and so Luker opts for "embryo". I'll do the same in my write-ups on Luker's book.
I appreciate that Luker in the passage that I just quoted focuses on the embryo. In the past, when I (as someone with pro-life convictions) talked about abortion with some pro-choicers I knew, I often felt that I was beating my head against the wall. Pro-choice women told me that they had the right to do what they want with their own bodies, but I was arguing that, technically-speaking, the embryo was not their own body but was a separate human being, and they had no right to take the life of a separate human being. And then there were pro-choicers, both men and women, who said that they personally were opposed to abortion, but they didn't want to force their morality on others. That made no sense to me. Why were they personally opposed to abortion? Because they considered it to be murder? If that is the case, then why would they oppose a law that would ban this act of murder? In these debates, I often wished that pro-choicers would give me an idea as to what exactly they thought that the embryo was, rather than repeating the usual platitudes about "choice". Luker, however, highlights where pro-lifers and pro-choicers disagree in terms of what the embryo is.
But how can we tell what the embryo is? In some of my debates about abortion with pro-choicers, they pressed me on the basis for my belief that life begins at conception. They weren't satisfied with Bible passages about God shaping people in their mother's wombs or knowing people before their birth, and so I had to find another foundation for my belief, at least for the debates. I could say that we know that the embryo is a person because----although it seems to have gills at some point in the womb----it becomes a human being. But then certain pro-choicers responded that this makes the embryo a potential human being, not an actual human being. Their question about the basis for regarding life as beginning at conception is difficult, in my opinion, for it requires one to define what exactly makes somebody a human being, and then to justify that criteria. But then I wonder if that can also pose a problem for pro-choicers who do not regard the embryo as a human being, for I could ask them why they consider the already born to be human. What is it exactly about humans that makes them human? Is it intelligence? Then what about newborns, who lack the intelligence of adults?
Granted, the way that Luker presents the debate, even pro-choicers acknowledge that the embryo is human, but I've met some pro-choicers who equivocate on that point. Moreover, in the passage that I quoted, Luker says that pro-lifers are trying to convince others that the embryo is human by basically pointing to a picture of the embryo and saying, "See! That looks like a baby!" (my loose paraphrase). And yet, as Luker notes, the embryo differs from a newborn baby, in areas. But does the embryo differ from a newborn baby enough that the embryo can be characterized as something other than human?
More tomorrow.
In my latest reading, Luker went into the perceptions towards abortion throughout history and through the nineteenth century, but I'll talk more about Luker's narrative on that in my post tomorrow. Today, I will use as my starting-point something that Luker says on page 2:
"Early in the process of becoming involved in the abortion issue, people on each side (pro-life and pro-choice) often feel compelled to 'share the faith' or to 'enlighten' their opposition. In most cases, they rehearse those details about embryonic life that have led them to believe that the embryo is self-evidently either a 'baby' or a 'fetus'...A pro-life person can confound a pro-choice attacker by simply stating that it is obvious that the embryo is a baby, pointing out its very evident similarities to a newborn child and brushing aside its dissimilarities. Conversely, a pro-choice person can enrage a pro-life person by admitting that although the embryo is human (it is not, after all, some other species) and alive (it is not, after all, dead), this nevertheless does not prove that the embryo is 'a human life'----in any case, not a 'meaningful' human life."
I should note that Luker uses the term "embryo" as a neutral term, although she recognizes that it is inaccurate as a general term for the unborn. The thing is, calling the unborn human being a "baby" or a "fetus" carries a lot of ideological baggage, and so Luker opts for "embryo". I'll do the same in my write-ups on Luker's book.
I appreciate that Luker in the passage that I just quoted focuses on the embryo. In the past, when I (as someone with pro-life convictions) talked about abortion with some pro-choicers I knew, I often felt that I was beating my head against the wall. Pro-choice women told me that they had the right to do what they want with their own bodies, but I was arguing that, technically-speaking, the embryo was not their own body but was a separate human being, and they had no right to take the life of a separate human being. And then there were pro-choicers, both men and women, who said that they personally were opposed to abortion, but they didn't want to force their morality on others. That made no sense to me. Why were they personally opposed to abortion? Because they considered it to be murder? If that is the case, then why would they oppose a law that would ban this act of murder? In these debates, I often wished that pro-choicers would give me an idea as to what exactly they thought that the embryo was, rather than repeating the usual platitudes about "choice". Luker, however, highlights where pro-lifers and pro-choicers disagree in terms of what the embryo is.
But how can we tell what the embryo is? In some of my debates about abortion with pro-choicers, they pressed me on the basis for my belief that life begins at conception. They weren't satisfied with Bible passages about God shaping people in their mother's wombs or knowing people before their birth, and so I had to find another foundation for my belief, at least for the debates. I could say that we know that the embryo is a person because----although it seems to have gills at some point in the womb----it becomes a human being. But then certain pro-choicers responded that this makes the embryo a potential human being, not an actual human being. Their question about the basis for regarding life as beginning at conception is difficult, in my opinion, for it requires one to define what exactly makes somebody a human being, and then to justify that criteria. But then I wonder if that can also pose a problem for pro-choicers who do not regard the embryo as a human being, for I could ask them why they consider the already born to be human. What is it exactly about humans that makes them human? Is it intelligence? Then what about newborns, who lack the intelligence of adults?
Granted, the way that Luker presents the debate, even pro-choicers acknowledge that the embryo is human, but I've met some pro-choicers who equivocate on that point. Moreover, in the passage that I quoted, Luker says that pro-lifers are trying to convince others that the embryo is human by basically pointing to a picture of the embryo and saying, "See! That looks like a baby!" (my loose paraphrase). And yet, as Luker notes, the embryo differs from a newborn baby, in areas. But does the embryo differ from a newborn baby enough that the embryo can be characterized as something other than human?
More tomorrow.
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