Miles suggests that an aversion to killing the innocent is not at the root of the objection to abortion. I think that is right, but I am not sure it is for the reason that he suggests. He wants to assimilate the problem to cases where we accept the deaths of innocents to gain other social benefits, such as permitting the private use of automobiles. That will lead, statistically and predictably, to the deaths of many innocent people, and yet no one would say that automobile accident deaths are a reason to ban private motorcars. I think Miles' idea is that the anti-abortion people are like folks who oppose private use of cars because of highway fatalities: they don't see, or don't agree with, the benefits that assenting to the deaths of fetuses offer to women. Thisa nalogy strikes me as defective. In a way one can see why it is faulty by seeing why the death penalty analogy Miles also draws is not like the car case,a nmd why it i is also not like the abortion case. It is true that if we have the death penalty then we will kill innocents, but some might think that the risk, indeed the certainty, was acceptable, as long as we took a lot of precautions to avoid killing the innocent, because the capital punishment advocare thought that for whatever reason it was very important to exercute the guilty. (Incidentally I am not a principled abolitionist; I thinj _we_ shouldn't have the death penalty, but that's because it is a racist tool of class oppression. If the Henry Kissingers ended up on the end of a rope after a fair trial, I could live with that.) But notice that with the death penalty, like the abortion case and unlike the car case, it's the point of the operation, its intention, to kill: no one wants uighway fatalities. They just happen. So those cases are not alike.So I don't think the car case is helpful with the abortion case, where deliberate killing is also the point. I also don't think that the death penalty case is that helpful with the abortion case, or if it is it doesn't make point that Miles wants to make. With the death penalty, we all think that it is very important not to kill innocent people. That is why we want procedural safeguartds, and why even death advocates regard the cases that slip through as terrible misscarriages of justice. With abortion, however, the point of the exercise is to kill fetuses that have done, and could do, no wrong that would deserve death. So that contrast suggests that revulsion at intentionally killing the innocent is what bothers the antichoice/prolife folks. But I think that is not the whole of it, although it may be part of it. Bill B and others who have suggested that what bothers that crowd is _women's_ choice seem to me to be on to something important. It's no accident that for the most part, people like Dennis P and Christopher Hitchens (who was prolife even when he was a red) excepted, antichoice/prolife positions are part of the whole range of retrograde, rightwing, antifeminist positions. Hostility to women's control of their own sexuality and lives seems to be in general (not in every case) a big motivating factor for antichoice activism, and may not just activist but support of antichoice positions. One can see this by thinking about the logic of the majority position that Judith Thompson tries to explain with her violinsit theory. If my analysis of that is right, its precisely when pregnancy is the result of voluntary sex or carelessness taht aborion is unacceptable. That is, women shouldn't fuck around. If they're raped, that's another story. But mandatory motherhood is indicated if they let themselves get knocked up. I don't agree, but polls show that a lot more folks believe thsi than believe either extreme position. ANd it is a deeply antifeminist view. All that said, there is still the logical point that Dennis P will insist on, that if abortion is deliberate killing of innocent people, it is at the best very problematic. Miles' idea that we can secure other benefits, like women's emancipation, by doing taht will strike many people as unpersuasive. Deliberately killing innocent pepple is arguably much worse than subordinating others. One can think that without buying into the Christian Coalition's overall perspective. So there is still an intellectual problem for hardline pro-choice folks like Miles (I think) and me. It doesn't answer the problem to note that abortion on demand (or request) is necesasry for women's emancipation. jks
Miles Jackson <cqmv at pdx.edu> wrote:
On Sat, 1 Feb 2003, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> The problem for us pro-choice types is to explain why birth is the
> significant line. jks
>
I hesitate to jump into this with a person with far more philosophical acumen than myself, but try this out: people in our society make conscious decisions that result in the death of innocents all the time. If we say 99.9% of death penalty cases result in the death of people who are really guilty, and there are 1000 executions, we're advocating the death of an innocent person if we support the death penalty. These types of situations are commonplace in our society: support for lax environmental laws, draconian social aid for working poor pregnant women, 70 mph+ speed limits on the interstates. Many, many political and social decisions that people make clearly and directly lead to the death of innocent people in our society and throughout the world (coughiraqcough).
So we need to come clean: even the anti-abortion crowd doesn't think "life is sacred". Not really. They are willing to sacrifice innocent people if it makes their lives more efficient or pleasant. It isn't a question of living up to the impossible ethical principle of not taking innocent life; rather, it is a question of deciding under what conditions taking innocent life is justifiable. So agonizing about when a fetus becomes a person is irrelevant. Insofar as you believe that women should be autonomous individuals rather than reproductive vessels at all costs, abortion is justifiable, as are other social practices that lead to innocent death.
Miles
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