My views on abortion changed radically 11 years ago, the moment I looked at the first sonogram of the fetus who is now our son Matt.
Part of the change was that when I looked at the fetus I did not see a fetus who would become our child. I saw our child.
I don't remember how early in my wife's pregnancy she had the sonogram, but I know she wasn't far along. I know it was before the point where the Supreme Court said that abortion should no longer be permitted except to protect the health of the mother.
I know it was at a point when, if my wife had decided, Oh heck, I don't really want to have a kid right now, she could have gone and had an abortion.
I did not become at that moment anti-abortion. I was always anti-abortion. But I was pro-choice. I still am. What changed for me was my smug certainty in my own political opinions.
When I looked at the sonogram I suddenly realized that I could no longer be sure when the fetus became a child. Was it a child the day before the sonogram? Two days? Two weeks? Or would it not become one, despite the evidence of my own lying eyes, for another month? Or week? Or hour?
The old reliable positon, a fetus becomes a person when it is viable outside of the womb, used to put the beginning of an individual life at about six months. But that has turned out to be really an admission of the limitations of the available medical technology. It is now possible to save premies at a much earlier point.
And what about fetuses conceived in petri dishes and implanted in the mother? Weren't they viable outside the womb already?
It suddenly seemed to me that the scientific and medical position on abortion should be far more conservative than the religious one. A religious view allows that there is a specific point when the fetus becomes a baby, when God implants it with a soul. Some people think that happens at the moment of conception. But the Catholic Church used to teach it happened at the moment of "quickening," that is somewhere in the second trimester. The religious position is therefore flexible, being based on a faith in things unseen.
It reminds me of that old Jewish joke. When does a fetus become a person in its own right? When it graduates from law school.
The scientific position, because it is based only on what can be seen and measured and tested for, ought to be, then, a shrug.
We don't know. We can't know right now, with the technology we have. A good point might be---might be---when the fetus develops a functioning brain. But at exactly what moment does that occur? Is there a switch that flips to on all at once and can we locate it and monitor it so we know? So we can say, Hey, you're in luck, no power to the brain yet, go ahead with the abortion, or Sorry, it's a baby now, you have to go through with the pregnancy!
The fact is that everything the baby will be is there inside the fertilized egg. But to call that a person is a bit like saying that because I have the blueprints in hand and all the materials for a house on the site where I plan to build a house I already have a house.
A bit.
A potential baby in the form of a collection of living cells is quite different than a potential house.
How much different doesn't seem to have a scientific answer.
The logical and humane attitude then should be to err on the side of caution.
But the other way my faith in my own political thinking was shaken was that I suddenly realized that my old position on abortion was the position of a single young man who'd had a lot of girlfriends and no intention of marrying any of them---until I met the future Mrs Mannion, who scared the devil out of me because the only reason I even thought of dating her was that one day in class I looked over at her and said to myself, I'm going to marry that girl. Before that ephiphanic and terrifying moment, I was on my way to becoming Sam Malone.
I should note that very few of those girlfriends had any intention of marrying me either. We were all too young and too focused on our individual ambitions. Marriage and babies were out of the question, at the moment.
Safe, legal, cheap, and morally neutral abortions were a very helpful and reassuring option.
For one thing it cut down on the likelihood of any unexpected Father's Day cards.
In short, my old pro-choice opinion was entirely selfish and self-interested.
To add to my self-doubt, I noticed that a lot of my friends' positions on abortion were changing as they got married and had children.
I have two prejudices now.
One is that an awful lot of people who are militantly anti-abortion are sentimentalists. They aren't thinking about abortion. They are picturing babies. That old Angel Soft toilet paper ad is playing in their heads. They are imagining lots of happy, rosy-cheeked babies with wings bouncing around heaven.
And I'll believe the Catholic Church really believes that a fetus is a baby when it starts holding funeral masses for miscarriages.
The other is that when a lot of people who are pro-choice talk about back alley abortions and a woman's right to choose and how the anti-abortion crowd are misogynists, it's a dodge. They are really defending their own choice to have lots of sex without having to worry about anybody being inconvenienced by a surprise pregnancy.
This, by the way, is a choice I defend. It happens though to be a choice that can be made without there being an unlimited and unregulated resort to abortions.
The biological reason for sex isn't procreation. Lots of life procreates without sex. The reason for sex is genetic variation.
A "natural" argument against birth control ought to be an argument for promiscuity.
At any rate, human beings are not constrained by what's "natural." Nor are they licensed by it.
And a what God intended argument has the same problem as all what God intended arguments---it depends on the ability to read God's mind.
God made people and people invented knives and forks, indoor plumbing, airplanes, and contraceptives.
But all absolutist pro-choice arguments depend on the assumption that the fetus is a lump of superfluous tissue, until the woman carrying decides it isn't.
Besides being ugly, facile, and convenient, this argument is not something liberals should be comfortable with. Liberals, with their faith in science and their conviction that left to their own devices individuals will behave badly, that is selfishly, ought not to have an easy time with an argument about biology that is not scientific and an argument about rights that assumes that an individual, particularly one under stress, will make a disinterested and correct decision.
No liberal who believes that the woman making the choice is the only one competent to make the choice----and that men, especially, are excluded from the debate---would accept the argument that the only people who get to make decisions about taxing the rich are the rich.
It was noted at the time that the only liberal principle Bill Clinton wouldn't trim on was the right to choice. This is another way of saying that the only liberal position Liberals themselves really cared enough to cut up rough over was choice.
Since the election, liberals and Democrats have been arguing over values. How much should we start emphasizing values in our speeches and debates? Which values should we emphasize? What language should we use? How much should we allow or at least acknowledge religious arguments in debates?
Just considering the question has raised the hackles of a lot liberal bloggers and commentators, most of them seeming to take the position that any acknowledgement of religious belief amounts to surrendering to the religious right.
As if there are no religious Democrats or liberals.
But many of them also assumed that any admission of values into the debate was the same as rejecting gay marriage and abortion rights.
As if the only values we have are gay marriage and abortion rights.
And when you read their "never give an inch" rhetoric and see how quickly their arguments collapse into sputtering fuck yous and the hell with your religion to anyone who questions their positions on gay marriage and abortion rights, it's hard not to conclude that gay marriage and abortion rights are their only values.
Values much of America interprets as being two sides of the same coin: a defense of the right to screw around without worry, consequence, or bother.
"Yeah, well, fuck them! Puritan assholes!"
Yeah, well, fuck the People isn't a particularly Democratic value.
This has been a long lead in to some interesting links.
First is a post from Amy Sullivan at Washington Monthly. Sullivan is a religious person whose faith informs her politics. As such she was a strong defender of John Kerry when the media, the dreadful bishops, and the Bush Leaguers stirred up their hypocritical communion flap. And as such she was glad to learn that John Kerry has recently come out and said that the Democrats need to find ways to express the idea that abortion is wrong while protecting the availabilty of safe and legal abortions.
This is a position Mario Cuomo laid out 20 years ago, to much cheering by Democrats. So you'd think it would be uncontroversial, especially as a position held by a Catholic politician.
So I was shocked and dismayed to read Atrios and Steve Gilliard, bloggers I greatly admire, responding to Sullivan's post in ways that were ugly, pig-headed, and full of self-righteous bullying and barely contained anti-religious bigotry.
Atrios has the sense and the gallantry not to attack Sullivan personally. Gilliard's post begins "Fuck Amy Sullivan," and doesn't improve much. He even finishes with the hypocritical liberal male's cop-out "it's not my argument to make" because he's, just, you know, a man. Of course he is making the argument, he's just also arguing that no men have a right to hold an opposite opinion.
But then he's also posted a letter from a pro-life liberal without comment, which is good of him.
The comments on their posts are appalling, by the way, not just because of the stupidity of the supposed liberals joining in to beat up on Sullivan but also because of course the right wing trolls have had to have their say as well.
You get to read the rantings of two sets of jerks shouting at each other over the heads of everybody else.
What else is new?
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