Progressives don't understand the pro-life crowd
Progressives' reliance on hypocrisy-baiting weakens the possibility of a robust pro-choice position.
Have you seen posts that go like this?:
“Oh, so [politician] is against abortion but is okay with the death penalty.”
“These ‘pro-life’ people don’t care about kids in cages!”
“If you’re pro-life, why don’t you want social safety nets for families after birth?”
I’m sure you have. And they’re well meaning a good chunk of the time, but it shows a fundamental ignorance about the pro-life movement.
You might be wondering: why does that matter? If you think pro-lifers are incorrect (which, on some things, I do), who cares how they think?
I do! Why? Because this debate obviously isn’t going away, and nothing bothers me more in political debate than when people talk past each other.
Luckily, I have spent a decent amount of time learning about the movement. I spent elementary school and high school receiving Catholic education. In my last 3 years of high school, I was moderately involved in a pro-life movement. I know the logic, I know the arguments, and they do go beyond the superficial explanation of “these are just woman hating bible-thumpers that want to control peoples’ bodies”.
The arguments I listed above, and the continued attempts at hypocrisy baiting against the pro-life crowd are bad. They are not bad logically, and are not always bad when it comes to political expediency, but they fundamentally misunderstand the rationale behind pro-life ideology and make it so that conversation is impossible. Why? Because they falsely assume the premises of the pro-life movement and also take the name of the movement (“pro-life”) far too literally (as the left sometimes tends to do).
So I’m going to put my pro-life hat on and spell out these arguments with the hopes they’ll be listened to and understood because I’m not some weirdo yelling at you outside of a clinic or making a cringe, “own-the-libs” video about it. I’m just here to lay it out.
The fundamental premise of the pro-life ideology is that life begins at conception. That means that once the sperm and the egg successfully do their thing, that’s a real human. It doesn’t matter what it looks like, it doesn’t matter when it’s heart begins. Pro-life people tend to believe that you have to draw a line somewhere and that conception is the neatest and most accurate line possible.
This means that they believe that abortion is literally murder. It is the same thing as murdering a live baby, because the fetus has the same level of personhood. This is also why it renders plenty of pro-choice slogans, such as “my body, my choice” somewhat incoherent to pro-lifers, because it is not a matter of removing something from your body but taking an actual life - which you would not have the right to do unless your life was literally on the line and you were acting in self-defense.
Which brings the next matter to the table: what if abortion is required to save a mother’s life?
I haven’t found a consensus for this among pro-lifers. In Catholic school, I was taught that this was a permissible exception due to Aquinas’ doctrine of Double Effect. This means the following: say I require medical procedure x to save my own life, but as a result, the fetus will die. This action is permissible because my aim is to save my life through an operation where the fetus is essentially unintended collateral. However, Double Effect makes the problem murkier if a medical procedure I require involves directing my intent at killing the fetus. That is, if I need to kill the fetus to perform this procedure that will save my life, rather than if the fetus will simply die as collateral, then some may argue that the action is not permissible. This is still debated among pro-lifers.
As such, attempts to “gotcha” pro-lifers by saying “you’re pro-life, but you won’t let the mother get an abortion to save her life?” doesn’t work very well as an argument, because a significant amount of pro-lifers permit life-saving abortions, and the debate that should be taking place instead is the coherence of Double Effect and its application in these scenarios (hypocrisy baiting is useless here).
The coat hanger argument is another big one that essentially argues that abortions ought to be legal because otherwise they will be done dangerously. This is a harm reduction argument, which consequentialists or some moral pluralists may sympathize with. Strict deontological Christians? Not so much. Particularly when they believe that you are literally committing murder, which is different than what is perceived to be a victimless crime such as drug abuse. It may make sense to some pro-lifers to support harm reduction in the latter case, but not the former. As one pro-lifer once put it to me: “robbing a bank would be less dangerous if it were legal, but that doesn’t mean it should be legal.”
Similarly, the pro-life to death penalty argument doesn’t work on pro-lifers either (although Catholics as a subset of Christians reject death penalty as per the pope’s dictates). Christians that are pro-death penalty support it because they believe those on death row are not innocent and deserve punishment. A fetus - which they believe to be a human baby - is thought to be innocent, namely because they have not committed any wrongdoing. Thus, abortion is seen as murdering the innocent whereas death penalty is seen as punishing the guilty.
This should also get us to think about other hypocrisy baiting arguments, such as “oh, but you believe in war/austerity/etc?” And I am more sympathetic here, particularly because I think the Catholic “just-war” argument could also justify abortion. But let’s not digress too hard. The belief in war, again, comes from roughly two angles:
You genuinely believe going to war will save more people than it will damage. This is part of just-war theory, but also just a general thought much of the population has. Thus, war has the aim of saving lives as does abortion, which makes supporting war and opposing abortion cohere in this person’s mind. This is a view I find to be naïve but not necessarily malicious.
You’re an imperialist, Harry. A third-world government nationalized their resources or elected a socialist and you are unhappy about it and want to be able to engineer an economic order more favourable to your country. In this case, it doesn’t really matter what the person’s opinion on abortion is. They’re in it for power, and hypocrisy baiting doesn’t really do anything. Are they hypocritical? Yeah. But they might not even have the internal belief that killing is bad to begin with.
The austerity angles, on the other hand, are as follows:
A belief that the welfare state does not help relieve poverty. Some pro-lifers don’t actually think the welfare state helps and thinks prosperity is more likely under laissez-faire capitalism. As such, they’re not “anti-life” on this belief front. They just have different views about which opinions constitute austerity.
A belief that the welfare state can relieve poverty, but is not obligated to without the consent of the taxed. Where you as an individual must refrain from killing an innocent via abortion, you are not obligated to use your money to pay for other suffering beings nor is the government warranted in taxing you for it. The pro-lifer in this scenario typically sees ethics through deontological side constraints. That is, actions are permissible so long as they do not violate said constraints (e.g., murder).
These angles both fail because the internal logic of the pro-lifer is not actually inconsistent when broken down.
The last argument that’s common is the violinist one. This is the one I found most compelling, but it does have holes. The argument states that if you woke up attached to a professional, talented violinist and were required to be attached to them for 9 months or else they would die, you would obviously not be morally obligated to do so. This argument states that the autonomy of the pregnant woman trumps the right of the fetus to live.
The issue here is that the violinist, in this scenario, is inexplicably tied to you in a way that would actually have an explanation for pregnant women. Whereas pregnancy is thought to be a choice or consequence for sex, the violinist case doesn’t grapple with the causal factors before the fact, which pro-lifers find to be quite relevant. The glaring problem here, though, is obviously the case of rape. Because one doesn’t choose to be raped, the analogy with the violinist is actually quite aligned even in the pro-lifer’s logic. But they will likely point out to you that most abortions that occur are not in cases of rape.
As you’ll notice, all of these depend on internal moral consistency. These people - actually, all people - follow internal sets of beliefs that are consistent and rational to the believer.
That doesn’t make them correct - in fact, this is the fatal flaw of the pro-life movement (they assume Christian deontology as default) - but it does make hypocrisy-baiting on the part of pro-choicers ineffective. I have tried to lay out pro-life arguments charitably, based on how I had learned them, but there are reasons why I do not think the pro-life view is correct. Ironically, it is for some of the same reasons why I think the pro-choice approach to pro-lifers is bad, and that is this:
Both proponents rely on the consistency of their internal logics; both of which are often valid but not sound.
The reason why I don’t ascribe to the pro-life view, in other words, is not because I think pro-lifers are hypocritical. Nor do I think they all have bad intentions or misogynist perspectives. It’s because I am an Augustinian realist that believes that laws should be aimed at helping diverse and conflicting people live among one another, which involves making concessions that may be tragic or troublesome for the sake of social harmony.
Assuming Christian metaphysics as a given makes the pro-life argument seems far more sound, but conceding this ground is profoundly unnecessary. Because this article does not have the purpose of arguing for pro-choice policy, I won’t go into it, but I think questioning the fundamental premises behind the pro-life movement is far superior to the hypocrisy baiting in mainstream discourse.
To me, it is important that we understand the mindset and reasoning of people we are debating. Some prefer the tactic of strawmanning into oblivion, which is sometimes effective at achieving short-term political goals. However, because this debate has now been hot for decades, I think a much more level-headed approach in which we attempt to see where others are coming from is a superior one. I’m very happy and lucky to be in a country that affords me with reproductive freedoms, but I won’t be taking them for granted and value formulating a nuanced position for a discussion that’s very clearly not going away.
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Aquinas writes that the soul only enters the body at a stage much later than conception. So Catholics shouldn't be rushing to declare conception the starting point of life, if they are to follow the guidance of one of the doctors of the church. Also, there are no shortage of passages in the Bible where God not only tolerates but even supports instances of abortion. So overall, the opposition to choice on the grounds of Christian doctrine is in itself flawed.