Y Safle

When discussing issues around abortion, one often sees an argument such as this from the pro-choice side:

when all is said and done, the question most prevalent should be: “Do we want our orphanages and adoption agencies overflowing with uncared for children?”

The argument being made is that we should allow people to kill foetal life, because the consequence of not doing so would be children who are uncared for, and that this is such a miserable outcome that the alternative is somehow better than the consequence.

But our pity for uncared-for children is being hhijacked here. If we can convince ourselves that killing life before it reaches some point of development that we consider crucial is better than allowing children to live in misery then is it not better to kill them?

But in that case, if a child is born to a mother who we suspect will be abusive or will abandon the child, should we not then kill the new born child? Why would one course of action be better than the other?

If you ask a pro-choice advocate this question, they will give you answers based on issues such as the mother’s right to choose what she does with her body and so on.

And that is fine. We can then evaluate those arguments on their own merits, but note that these issues are the real nub of the argument. The issue is an issue of morality. People must weigh up the morality of killing human life with the morality of restraining a mother’s choice.

But an appeal to pity (argumentum ad misericordiam to give it its latin name), is fallacious. It is not the argument that needs to be answered, and it distracts us from the real issue at hand.

A methodist Christian minister (of a particularly liberal mindset) was talking to me about abortion, and he said, in relation to that debate:

But no male has the right to take that choice away from a woman.

Now I don’t spend all my time talking about the abortion debate, but on those occasions I have debated the issue, this line has almost always been thrown at me in one form or another. Time and again I am told that my views on the debate are of no value because I am the wrong sex. (That is not quite how this minister put it - but he did intend that the debate only be between women, and likened male interference to an assault).

The argument seeks to silence moral debate by saying that men are not fit to consider such moral issues.

That argument is spurious. We each have a right to consider the morality of these issues, and if our society so comes to a consensus that an abortion is morally unjustifiable on (say) the grounds that it is murder, then the choice of the woman will be restrained. But first we must seriously consider the issues in a careful and compassionate manner.

I see no desire in society to take such a choice away in such cases, nor any likelihood of a societal consensus to that effect. But that need not stop members of the society having forthright views on the issue though. It is our duty to encourage that such views be spoken and discussed freely.

I therefore submit that attempts to divide opinion based on the sex of the holder of the opinion are counter productive to the aims of equality and free speech in a liberal democracy.

This minister also said:

And please, I know this is an emotive issue, but can we stop making it even more so by using the term “killing” of abortion?

Absolutely not!

When I write contributions on this debate I am careful to avoid language that I know is perhaps ambigous, and likely to cause offense to those with whom I (mostly) disagree. Thus I try to avoid the term “preborn child” or “unborn child”, and I do not describe abortion as “murder”, nor the “pro choice” movement “anti life” or any such thing. Emotive terms do not help (thus my objection to incorrect terms such as “parasite” used by pro-choice proponents), and I agree that we should avoid terms that tend to frogmarch us to certain conclusions.

Having said this though, I think it is quite wrong to attempt to hide the truth of what is happening in abortion by refusing to use terms that are accurate.

The foetus is a living organism of species homo sapiens sapiens. It has a genetic identity of its own, and is certainly a form of life. Termination of that life is killing. When a woman has a termination, she kills the foetus. The term is quite simply accurate.

Some misunderstand the term “tissue” applied to a foetus so as to say that all that is occuring is a removal of tissue in a similar manner that an appendix may be removed. One can only suppose that these people are deliberately ignoring the fact that the tissue that constitutes a foetus is a genetically distinct but metabolically dependent living organism. The term does apply.

I have asked American friends why they support the Republican party in that country, when that party is so often seen to be anti-environment, implicated in support for despotic regimes, and prone to invade countries and the like.

The answer I am given is that one must vote for a party based on a whole raft of political and ethical issues. The one example they invariably give: is the candidate pro-life or pro-choice?

It seems to me that this raft of political and ethical issues is somewhat precarious.

Why?

Well in the UK and elsewhere we note that the abortion issue is not the big party political issue that it is in the US. The reason we suppose is that change in the law can only come with a cross party consensus, and indeed that is always the way that the UK abortion law has evolved.

But what of the US? We see this tremendous polarisation, whereby pro-life is largely associated with republicans, and pro-choice with democrats. Not universally of course, and there is a large pro-choice republican middle, and many pro-life democrats. But that is largely the way the issue has been divided for whatever reason.

So why after a score or more years of pro-life republican presidents, hasn’t the US reversed Roe vs Wade? Why hasn’t the legislature, with republican majorities, changed the law?

The answer is surely that it is very much against the political interests of the republican party to reverse Roe vs Wade. To do so will split the republican party, and strip away the prime reason Christians say they are voting for them. What is more, the party would have to choose whether to alienate the middle or the Christians when framing new abortion laws. So the republican party will have its cake and eat it. Republican presidents will say they are pro-life, but beyond tinkering at the edges, they will not act on their alleged principles. Just like the UK, the only way to reform the law will be to achieve a cross party consensus.

So why should a Christian vote for the Republican party?

Hey, how should I know? We don’t even have a republic here.

You would think that if the world was going to end then people would want to spread the world. Moreso if in so doing they might actually avert the impending catastrophe.

Not so, it seems, American “liberals”.

Okay - that is unfair. I am probably (hopefully) only talking about a small fraction of American “liberals”. No doubt my stereotype is wrong. But here is what I’m talking about.

There is a blog posting titled You just don’t want to die of starvation because you’re jealous I have a Hummer and you don’t, where the writer wishes to rail against the thesis of one Jonah Goldberg that people would question global warming science if it turned out that global warming was entirely natural (a strange counterfactual in any case).

The writer puts words into the mouths of conservatives thus:

[they want to continue] the conservative theme that people who like nature are so abhorrent that it’s worth it to fry the planet just to [tee] us off

And then goes on with an ad hominem line that suggests we can ignore the ramblings of conservatives because they are the same people that gave us the pro life movement.

You can check out the feedback on the site above. I pointed out that it is illegitimate to conflate these issues, whatever one thinks of them. I was immediately attacked on my views on what it means to understand humanity of a foetus, and at the same time for bringing abortion into a thread ostensibly about global warming! Worse, as I tried to give reasoned arguments, I was attacked by a string of ad hominem arguments of the form “you are too stupid to understand”, “All your country men are mad” and such like.

Now call me stupid (clearly many have taken me up on that already), but my point was that when an issue is as important as global warming - where the whole world is being affected, and where society consensus is required to effect a lasting and workable change, it seems to make no sense to me to snap and bite at someone who agrees with you, simply because they disagree on some other issue.

What seems to be happening is that American “liberals” are adopting a package of beliefs that define their community. If one is a “liberal” in America, one must be pro-choice, believe global warming is a problem, and who knows what else.

You may not pick one belief and be admitted. It is all or nothing. Accept the package or be mauled by the self professed sentry dogs to the ivory tower of “liberalism”.

But this is just nuts. If we really care about global warming, and we really care about our environment then it makes absolutely no difference what our other beliefs are. We can work together to effect a change. Indeed, one way that more advanced countries in this field are making progress is to use the market to control emissions. Right wingers have something to add to the resolution of this issue, and whatever our political stripe, we must accept that help gladly.

After the lack of engagement in the thread above, and the appalling string of ad hominem arguments, I find myself as just the kind of person who would like to go out and buy a Hummer just to annoy the woolly thinking self styled “liberals”.

Fortunately for the world, I won’t do this. Partly because I feel to strongly on global warming, partly because I probably can’t afford to do so, and partly because I have no idea what a Hummer is!

But what do I make of these “liberals”? Well I think they are downright dangerous. If a pro lifer, (or any other right winger) were wavering on the global warming issue, these people would push them right back into the comforting arms of the Jonah Goldbergs of this world.

Worse, they have misappropriated the term “liberal” here. That is why I have been applying it in quotation marks to them. An essential tenet of liberalism is respect for the freedoms of each other, including freedoms of belief and speech. These people have no respect for such freedoms. They demonstrate just the type of small minded human behaviour that makes global warming such a threat to us. They perpetuate the idea that communities of which one is a member are better than those of which one is not. They believe conservatives are all stupid and mad, and afford the same judgement to anyone who does not accept their designated package of “liberal” beliefs.

This is ghetto thinking.

If we want to save the world we need to step out of the ghettos and start shouting about what really concerns us.