In his celebrated poem Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman considers a potential accusation against himself and shrugs it off with a quip:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then, I contradict myself;
(I am large—I contain multitudes.)
Whitman was a poet rather than a logician so we find it charming when he claims that reality doesn’t apply to him. Other people, however, are not let off the hook so easily. Too many people subscribe to what I would call the Whitman Inconsistency Fallacy: the view that since a person believes both proposition A and proposition B, that A and B must therefore be compatible even if they are contradictory.
If writers of textbooks on logic ever include the Whitman Inconsistency Fallacy they’ll be able to use the arguments made by Mara Hvistendahl as prime examples. Hvistendahl is a science journalist who recently published a book arguing that the unnatural sex ratios throughout the world are the result of, among other factors, the prevalence of abortion and ultrasound technology. Since I’ve made the same claims myself, I find there is much to agree with in Hvistendahl reporting and critique.
But Hvistendahl believes it is possible to be a pro-woman feminist and an abortion rights supporter, which leads her to make a plethora of contradictory claims. To her credit, Hvistendahl is not an abortion absolutist. She believes there are certain legitimate reasons for denying a woman’s right to an abortion. Unfortunately, this praiseworthy move toward moderation only highlights the incoherence in her thinking.
Listed below are ten statements taken directly from her recent article in Salon.com. Although they are arranged in a different order, each quote is taken verbatim. In reading these claims, keep in mind that Hvistendahl accepts the truth of every one of them:
1. Women make the decision to abort because women know best how difficult it is to be female.
2. Increased autonomy does not . . . make a woman more likely to have a daughter.
3. [W]omen — and not their husbands — often make the decision to abort a female fetus . . .
4. [T]he practice of sex selection [is] a fundamentally sexist act . . .
5. Just as a woman should not be forced to abort a wanted pregnancy, she should not be forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term.
6. Further reducing a woman’s rights would only make her more wary of having a daughter.
7. No one combating sex selection in China or India now argues that the appropriate reaction to decades of violating women’s rights is to swing in the other direction and violate them further.
8. Abortion is part of the story of how sex selection became rampant in Asia.
9. Activists and government leaders in Asia, in fact, distinguish between the right to terminate a pregnancy and the right to choose the sex of one’s baby.
10. “You can choose whether to be a parent,” explains Puneet Bedi, a gynecologist in Delhi who performs abortions — and campaigns against the sex-selective sort. “But once you choose to be a parent you cannot choose whether it’s a boy or girl, black or white, tall or short.”
As a summary of the article, we can combine these ten statements into a two-part narrative:
Woman know best how difficult it is to be female, so as their autonomy increases they—not their husbands—make the fundamentally sexist decision to abort a female fetus. Just as a woman should not be forced to abort a wanted pregnancy, she should not be forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term. Further reducing a woman’s rights to have an abortion would only make her more wary of having a daughter. No one combating sex selection in China or India now argues that the appropriate reaction to decades of violating women’s rights is to swing in the other direction and violate them further. (Statements 1-7)
Abortion is part of the story of how sex selection became rampant in Asia. However, activists and government leaders in Asia distinguish between the right to terminate a pregnancy and the right to choose the sex of one’s baby. You can choose to be a parent but once you choose to be a parent you cannot choose whether it’s a boy or girl, black or white, tall or short. (Statements 8-10)
Even a casual reader (which apparently excludes the editors at Salon.com) can see the obvious inconsistency in these statements. Hvistendahl is making two simultaneous claims:
(A) Those who are combating sex selection in Asia believe that woman should not be forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term and so oppose restrictions on the right to an abortion since it will make her more wary of having a daughter.
(B) Activists and government leaders in Asia believe that if a pregnancy is unwanted because the fetus is female, the woman’s right to an abortion should be restricted, even if it makes her more wary of having a daughter.
Since Hvistendahl believes both proposition A and proposition B, she thinks that A and B must therefore be compatible. Perhaps, like Whitman, she contains multitudes.
However, there is an even more fundamental flaw in her argument. One of her core assumptions is that an abortion is not the taking of a human life:
Bans on sex-selective abortion have passed in four states — Illinois, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma and Arizona — and been proposed in five others this year — Massachusetts, Rhode Island, West Virginia, New York and New Jersey. These bills are filled with language intended to set a precedent for declaring a fetus equivalent to a life.
She is correct that the legislation in each of these states assumes that the fetus is a living human being (none of them are predicated on the fetus being a “person.”) Despite the fact that this science journalist makes an assertion that reveals a hopeless ignorance of basic biology, I think we should treat her statement as a belief genuinely held by an otherwise intelligent interlocutor. So she doesn’t believe a fetus is equivalent to a life. If we proceed charitably and assume she really believes what she says—a fetus is not a living human being—what consequence does this claim have on her view that sex-selective abortion is immoral?
Consider these two statements:
1. It is morally wrong to end the life of a non-living being.
2. It is morally wrong to end the life of a non-living being that has properties associated with being a female (e.g., an XX chromosome).
Since you cannot end the life of a being that is non-living, the first statement is internally incoherent. The addition of the qualifier in statement #2 neither makes it more coherent nor changes the veracity of the moral claim.
This is similar to the move made by Hvistendahl. Consider her statement:
1. A fetus [is not] equivalent to a life.
Now let’s add a qualifier that Hvistendahl believes is morally relevant:
2. A female fetus [is not] equivalent to a life.
Hvistendahl would be forced to agree that the addition of the qualifier doesn’t change her first claim. If a fetus is not “equivalent to a life,” then it doesn’t matter whether the fetus is male or female.
Yet her entire argument hinges on there being a moral distinction between a “fetus” and a “female fetus.” She believes a woman should have the right to kill a “fetus” but not a “female fetus.” Does the fact that the fetus is female make it equivalent to a life? Hvistendahl would say it does not. Then why is sex-selection abortion wrong?
Here is how Hvistendahl summarizes her argument:
Sex-selective abortion is wrong because women should account for half of the human population, and in parts of the world they now account for far less. That alone justifies moral outrage.
Laid out in syllogistic form, her argument can be outlined as follows:
Premise A: If woman should account for half of the human population, then sex-selective abortion is wrong. (If P, then Q.)
Premise B: Woman should account for half of the human population (P.)
Conclusion: Sex-selective abortion is wrong. (Therefore, Q.)
The form of her argument (modus ponens) is valid, but is it true? Does the fact that woman should account for half of the population automatically mean that sex-selective abortion is wrong? What happens if we remove the qualifier “sex-selective?”
Premise A: If woman should account for half of the human population, then abortion is wrong. (If P, then Q.)
Premise B: Woman should account for half of the human population (P.)
Conclusion: Abortion is wrong. (Therefore, Q.)
Hvistendahl would reject this form of the argument. But as we’ve previously proven, the fact that a fetus is female cannot change—according to Hvistendahl’s reasoning—the morality of the act of abortion. So why does she accept the first form of the argument but not this one? Because that is the outcome she wants. She believes that (A) a woman should have the right to an abort a fetus and that (B) a woman should not have the right to abort a fetus if she knows it is a female. Logic and consistency be damned, the two beliefs must be compatible because she wants them both to be true at the same time
Sadly, Hvistendahl has the gall to criticize others for not sharing her inconsistent and illogical reasoning:
Antiabortion advocates like Mr. [Ross] Douthat, in fact, are among the only ones who can’t seem to make the intellectual distinction between choosing to terminate a pregnancy and selecting for sex. They will soon have to catch up.
Antiabortion advocates don’t make the intellectual distinction between choosing to terminate a pregnancy and selecting for sex because there is no moral or logical reason for accepting the former and rejecting the latter. They are, in other words, intellectually consistent. Perhaps it’s Ms. Hvistendahl who has some catching up to do. I recommend she start by taking basic courses in biology and logic.
July 1st, 2011 | 5:15 am
I feel the need to point out that the content and tone of this article makes for a case study in Ms. Hvistendahl’s claim that conservative concerns about sex-selective abortions are simply a smoke screen for their attempts to ban abortion on a general basis. That’s obviously not a bad thing if you believe abortion needs to be banned, but it would be nice if conservatives were a little more frank about it.
As for the meat of the argument, Carter’s main problem here is that he attempts to take a pro-choice argument, analyze it for conformity to pro-life beliefs, and then expects people to be surprised when logical contradictions emerge.
This shows up most prominently towards the end of the article, when Carter expressed confusion as to how someone can be morally opposed to an end (sex-selection), while being supportive of a mean (abortion). Carter may want to consider if he sees a contradiction between a second amendment right to fire guns, and a moral imperative not to fire guns at people. I’d be surprised if he could bring himself to find a contradiction between the two.
Incidentally, we can also see this in his almost deliberate confusion of “human life” (that is, something biologically alive and genetically human, like blood cells) and “a human life” (in other words, a person).
July 1st, 2011 | 5:59 am
Fitzgerald . . . that conservative concerns about sex-selective abortions are simply a smoke screen for their attempts to ban abortion on a general basis. That’s obviously not a bad thing if you believe abortion needs to be banned, but it would be nice if conservatives were a little more frank about it.
Indeed, I think conservatives should be frank about it. If a person is truly concerned about the fate of girls and women then they can’t support abortion—period. It makes no sense to support the killing of girl children in the womb except in cases when they are directly targeted. In both cases the result is the same—the female children are dead. If you are against female children being dead then you should be against abortion
As for the meat of the argument, Carter’s main problem here is that he attempts to take a pro-choice argument, analyze it for conformity to pro-life beliefs, and then expects people to be surprised when logical contradictions emerge.
You should read the piece again. I’m not analyzing her argument to see how they conform with pro-life beliefs but rather with pro-choice beliefs (i.e., if its okay to kill a fetus (the pro-choice position) then it shouldn’t matter if the fetus is female). You can be against sex-selection or your can be for abortion but you can’t consistently support both.
This shows up most prominently towards the end of the article, when Carter expressed confusion as to how someone can be morally opposed to an end (sex-selection), while being supportive of a mean (abortion).
Sex-selection is not the end, but the means. The end, in Hvistendahl’s argument, is that woman should account for half of the human population. If that is the end goal, then why is abortion okay but sex-selective abortion illicit? It makes no sense to support one and oppose the other when the outcome is the same.
Carter may want to consider if he sees a contradiction between a second amendment right to fire guns, and a moral imperative not to fire guns at people. I’d be surprised if he could bring himself to find a contradiction between the two.
First, I don’t see a contradiction between (a) the right to fire guns and (b) the moral imperative not to fire guns at people because there is no contradiction. A person can act on his right (e.g., fire a gun at a range) without violating the moral imperative (firing at a person).
Second, I don’t see how your analogy is fitting in the case abortion. Are you saying women have a right to abortion and a moral imperative not to have that right affect other humans?
Incidentally, we can also see this in his almost deliberate confusion of “human life” (that is, something biologically alive and genetically human, like blood cells) and “a human life” (in other words, a person).
There is no confusion, except on Hvistendahl’s part. Perhaps she is, as you imply, sloppy in her writing since none of the legislation she referred to made mention of personhood as a factor.
However, whether a “human life” is a person is irrelevant in regards to her claim. Whether we are talking about a human life (something biologically alive and genetically human) or a human life (something biologically alive and genetically human that has personhood) makes no difference. Her argument would still be incoherent. Adding “female” to either type of human life doesn’t change the moral calculus. If it’s acceptable to kill a fetus because it is not a “human life” then nothing changes by saying that it is a “female fetus.”
July 1st, 2011 | 7:01 am
I agree with your basic premise that the author’s arguments are inconsistent, although I am 100% pro-choice. I am opposed to banning sex-selection abortions, just as I am opposed to banning any other abortions.
My thought is, you can’t clean up an oil slick by pouring more oil on it…in the same way, you cannot cure entrenched misogyny by further restriction of female autonomy and rights.
Sex-selection abortion is a SYMPTOM of a society that values females less and males more. It is not the cause. Abortion on demand in the West has not created the skewed sex ratios that it has in India and China for the simple reason that our society is not as punitively anti-woman as those cultures.
Eliminate the patriarchy, erase the misogyny, and sex-selection abortions in China and India will become essentially non-existent–as they are in Europe and the States.
Liberte…fraternite…egalite…
July 1st, 2011 | 7:30 am
Fitzgerald,
I think your response does a nice job of illustrating Joe’s point about the internal contradiction of wanting to have it both ways on this issue.
Your “means” and “ends” argument in itself contradicts basic premises of the pro-choice philosophy. If we take the Roe v. Wade trimester system as being representative of “mainstream” pro-choice thinking, then, at the very least during the first trimester, a woman can obtain an abortion for any reason she wants. Under this logic, who is the state or “society” to impose on her an obligation to consider larger demographic or sex ratio consequences in making her decision? It’s her choice and her body isn’t it? Are you saying that the state should have the ability and authority to examine the ultrasounds of her fetus and question her motives for her decision? That’s very intrusive, isn’t it?
Sex selection is already an accepted part of “reproductive decision making”. I recall reading an article in People magazine several years ago which profiled various couples who had taken steps to select the sex of at least one of their children. In most cases their motivation was to create gender balance among their children or to have the experience of raising a child of one gender or another. In more than one case, the woman had aborted a child of one gender in order to try to have a child of the other gender.
Under the logic of Choice, how do the decisions of these women, and their husbands, not fall under the rubric of “personal” and “private”? Would you pass a law that would limit the “reproductive options” of these nice, smiling middle class American families? Or would you only be willing to pass such a law so long as it only applied to anonymous peasants in India? They, after all, are no doubt giving in to the patriarchal and misogynistic imperatives of their third world culture and so must not really be exercising a self-actualizing, autonomous choice. Of course the fact, that in India, sex selection abortions are, apparently, more prevalent among upper class families rather muddies the whole ignorant peasant scenario.
Why should these women not have the right to hold rallies against any laws that would restrict sex selection abortions complete with rousing cheers such as:
“Keep your demographers out of my uterus!” (granted, it doesn’t have the same ring as “rosaries/ovaries”).
or,
“XX, XY, it’s my choice and right to try!”
I remember reading in Ms. magazine another article by a woman who decried sex selection abortions and who distinguished them from “normal” abortions. I wanted to ask her all the same questions I’ve asked you.
On a related matter, your attempt to distinguish “human life” from “a human life” is not only semantically and biologically suspect (what a difference a definite article makes!) – I’ve never before heard of blood cells by themselves referred to as “human life”, it also deliberately ignores what Mara Hvistendahl said and the basis for Joe’s critique of that statement. Ms. Hvistendahl, in the quote cited above, criticized the state bills as equating a fetus with a “life”. She used no qualifiers, such as say, “human”. Joe simply pointed out that a fetus is in fact, alive (i.e., it meets the biological criteria for life) and that “it” is genetically human.
Finally, and I almost hesitate to say this for fear that someone will take it seriously, would not the logically consistent and politically aware pro-choice response to sex selection abortions of girls be to issue a call to the women of the world to abort their male babies (sorry, fetuses) in response as an act of gender and demographic solidarity and justice? If the ultimate objective is gender equity and if fetuses are just lumps of genetically human material, then sex selection per se should not be of any concern to those with a pro-choice philosophy. Isn’t the real problem rather discrimination in the exercise of choice on the basis of xx chromosomal composition, and would not a voluntary mass movement of autonomous, self- and politically- aware women to abort their lumps of xy fetal matter be more in keeping with the goals and philosophy of the pro-choice movement?
Just wondering.
July 1st, 2011 | 8:03 am
Perhaps feminists would be more receptive to claims by antiabortion advocates regarding sex-selection if said antiabortion advocates cared about women’s autonomy in any other area of life. Do you know how wretched the lives of women born into these cultures are? How much ink has been spilled at “First Things” and other conservative journals about the “boy crisis,” in which girls’ success in school is proof that boys are miserable? How many conservatives favor, say, state-funded day care or public schools? I cannot think of a single conservative who has ever argued for any policy advancing women’s economic autonomy, but many who think that men should be the unquestioned tyrants of their households. Since all conservative opinions favor women as helpless doormats, why should any woman believe you care about this issue? Your arguments are the best illustration ever of the position that conservatives believe life begins at conception and ends at birth.
July 1st, 2011 | 10:35 am
It is not difficult to understand why a pro-choice feminist would be suspicious of those pro-lifers who want her to join forces with them in making “reasonable” restrictions on abortions when she knows that those same pro-lifers would deny her an abortion even to save her life.
July 1st, 2011 | 10:41 am
David Nickol It is not difficult to understand why a pro-choice feminist would be suspicious of those pro-lifers who want her to join forces with them in making “reasonable” restrictions on abortions when she knows that those same pro-lifers would deny her an abortion even to save her life.
First, a “pro-choice feminist” is an oxymoron. You can’t be in favor of females and in favor of a procedure that kills more females than all other acts of violence against women in America combined.
Second, by “reasonable” restrictions do you mean restrictions that make no logical or moral distinctions between the act of abortion but are still preferred because they work to advance a liberal agenda?
July 1st, 2011 | 11:07 am
I don’t see the contradiction between opposition to sex-selection and refusal to acknowledge the personhood of a fetus. What if there was a pill you could take that killed off your girly sperm so that you would be guaranteed to sire a boy. No fetus dies, but one might still consider it ethically problematic to use such a pill because of the resultant gender imbalance. One might say that the right to a vasectomy is absolute, but the right to selecting which sperm can survive is not.
Similarly, a nation may not want to allow people from foreign countries to adopt baby girls because of the resultant gender imbalance – not because adoption is akin to murder.
What pro-choicers may be recognizing is that even if one does not believe that a fetus is a person, the right to an abortion is not absolute. While the decision to abort may be private, the consequences are not. I suppose the question is whether one can effectively ban sex-selection as long as abortion is unrestricted and seen as a right. I suspect that the answer is no.
July 1st, 2011 | 11:14 am
Joe,
“Pro-choice feminist” is an oxymoron only in the eyes of those who are anti-choice.
By “reasonable” restrictions I mean restricting late-term abortions, narrowing the definition of “mental health,” and prohibiting abortions at any stage of pregnancy for non-serious reasons, among which I would include sex selection.
July 1st, 2011 | 11:17 am
Anon Prof I don’t see the contradiction between opposition to sex-selection and refusal to acknowledge the personhood of a fetus.
I didn’t present that as a contradiction. The contradiction is thinking that its okay to kill a fetus until you know that the fetus is female. That makes no sense.
No fetus dies, but one might still consider it ethically problematic to use such a pill because of the resultant gender imbalance.
Why it is ethically problematic? I’m not saying it is not, but it’s not as easy of an argument to make as you might assume. If the right to a vasectomy is absolute, then what would happen if everyone took advantage of that right and had a vasectomy. Would the result be ethically problematic?
The problem with many of these individualistic rights is that we don’t want everyone to actually act on them.
Similarly, a nation may not want to allow people from foreign countries to adopt baby girls because of the resultant gender imbalance – not because adoption is akin to murder.
That would be a genuinely legitimate way to address gender imbalance. But then again, there is not absolute right to an adoption so it’s not really similar to the point under discussion.
I suppose the question is whether one can effectively ban sex-selection as long as abortion is unrestricted and seen as a right. I suspect that the answer is no.
I completely agree with you on that point.
July 1st, 2011 | 11:35 am
Karen and David,
You each employ a variant of a straw man argument to justify your unwillingness to consider a “pro-life” or “conservative” argument, namely, you turn the “other” into an exaggerated caricature with no redeeming features or valid positions, usually while glorifying your own position as that of the beneficent, the good, the right and the true. It is the functional equivalent of holding your hands over your ears and yelling out “I’m not listening”. I hasten to add that this approach to avoiding any consideration of another’s arguments is not at all unique to “the left”. It’s a common tactic in public debates by people on all points of the political spectrum. It’s why I don’t watch either MSNBC or Fox.
July 1st, 2011 | 11:42 am
It’s hard to write more after what Peter S. has. That was an excellent response.
Karen, the problem is it’s often the wealthy in the societies that first choose sex selection, and it’s a top-down phenomena that trickles to the middle classes. It’s not the economically disempowered who choose this, and ironically we see sex-selection biases even in wealthy cultures.
The problem is essentially you gave women the right of self-determination, but don’t like what happens when they use it en-masse. A lot of women would like to have a boy, and not a girl for many reasons. You don’t like those reasons, but they are essentially doing what any pro-choice women would assent to; choosing not to have a child when it doesn’t accord with their own wishes.
Adam Last in a devastating response addressed Andrea’s argument, as quoted by Ross in his follow up:
“Let’s pretend for a moment that the only source of the problem really is patriarchy. Well, then, you have two choices: Do you confront the slaughter of millions of girls by “fighting” patriarchical culture in some nebulous way that may, or may not, after several decades, pay off? Or do you outlaw abortion, enforce the ban pretty rigorously (by sending doctors who perform them to jail) and understand that while there will still be illegal abortions which slip through the cracks, girl babies won’t be targeted as widely and that the vast majority of those who would have been killed in the gendercide will be allowed life?”
From http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/30/patriarchy-liberty-and-the-160-million/
July 1st, 2011 | 11:56 am
David Nickol “Pro-choice feminist” is an oxymoron only in the eyes of those who are anti-choice.“Pro-choice feminist” is an oxymoron only in the eyes of those who are anti-choice.
Well, yes, if by “anti-choice” you mean people who are against people having the choice to kill female humans in the womb.
By “reasonable” restrictions I mean restricting late-term abortions, narrowing the definition of “mental health,” and prohibiting abortions at any stage of pregnancy for non-serious reasons, among which I would include sex selection.
I guess if you consider any allowance for killing babies to be “reasonable” then those certainly would be reasonable. I think they would all be a step in the right direction, but you aren’t likely to find many pro-choicers who will agree.
July 1st, 2011 | 12:17 pm
You each employ a variant of a straw man argument to justify your unwillingness to consider a “pro-life” or “conservative” argument . . . .
Peter S,
You yourself are an excellent example of what you are criticizing.
My message was as follows:
I did not say, “Those who are pro-choice should not listen to pro-lifers who want to prohibit abortion for sex selection.” I stated a fairly simple truth, which I think is not difficult to acknowledge no matter what side of the abortion debate you are on. I am unequivocally opposed to abortion for sex-selection, and yet you seem to consider me a pro-abortion extremist of some kind who will not listen to pro-life arguments.
It is just a fact that pro-lifers (except most “pro-life” politicians) are opposed to all abortions. I like to point out that for Jews, while most abortions are prohibited, abortions to save the life of the mother are not merely permitted, they are close to being mandatory. I once was told by a fairly prominent pro-life activist that he would join forces with an Orthodox Jew to ban the 99% of abortions they both agree should not be performed, and then he would join with other forces to ban the 1% of abortions the Orthodox Jew would permit. If you were an Orthodox Jew, would you cooperate with (or trust) someone like that?
July 1st, 2011 | 12:32 pm
Joe’s argument is precisely the one I tried to make in the last thread on this topic in response to the woman from India. I wish I had made it half as articulately and detailed. The same argument applies to gays who fear abortion of fetuses with any “gay gene” that might be discovered.
Andrea is very naive. How does one go about changing a “patriarchal” culture as entrenched as China’s or India’s before the damage of sex selection has been done?
One thing that hasn’t been addressed: Bracketing all logic and ideology, as a practical matter, how does one distinguish between sex selective abortion and any other kind? If a woman has a female fetus and says “I don’t care if it’s female, I just don’t want it,” how is anyone supposed to know if she’s lying? If she later gets pregnant with a boy and carries it to term and says “I just wanted this one,” what test could possibly prove her false? As a practical matter, you simply can’t stop sex-selective abortion without stopping abortion. Andrea’s position is at least consistent on that point.
Fitzgerald’s analogy is extremely flawed. A better analogy would be arguing that shooting people randomly is ok, but aiming the gun specifically at women is wrong.
July 1st, 2011 | 12:43 pm
David Nickol:
The piece illustrates a difficulty with not being opposed to all abortions due to the “autonomy” argument. You can’t solve sex-selection without banning all abortions, period. Making it illegal to sex-select is incoherent due to Joe’s logical argument.
If I have the autonomy to determine my own reproductive future, I can choose to abort a fetus for whatever reason I like. It could be a boy, a girl, predisposed to down’s sydrome or homosexuality. The moment you say it’s wrong to select for a factor you are destroying the autonomy idea.
You are saying ironically a pro-life idea: that it’s wrong to abort because of potential. It’s a much weaker potential: the argument of societal harm over the argument of killing a person. But its just as much opposed to pro-choice beliefs as any argument a pro-lifer could make.
July 1st, 2011 | 1:02 pm
[...] Joe Carter points out Mara Hvistendahl’s obviously inconsistent beliefs about abortion and sex-selection abortion: [...]
July 1st, 2011 | 1:50 pm
here’s joe carter’s main point:
“She believes that (A) a woman should have the right to an abort a fetus and that (B) a woman should not have the right to abort a fetus if she knows it is a female. Logic and consistency be damned, the two beliefs must be compatible because she wants them both to be true at the same time.”
what’s wrong with joe carter’s argument? how are these two beliefs compatible? how would one distinguish legal from illegal reasons for aborting female fetuses?
July 1st, 2011 | 1:54 pm
David,
One of the logistical problems of this type of blog in which comments are held for moderation (a policy with which I agree) is that it creates lags in the posting of comments such that it may be unclear which post or posts the writer is responding to. Also, the time markers on the posts can be deceptive in terms of serving as an indicator of which posts the writer was able to read at the time of writing a response and sending it. It seems pretty clear that Joe and other moderators do not, nor should they be expected to, moderate each post as it comes in, rather they check periodically to read through all of the posts that have come since the last time they checked. They read through those and post all of those that meet the criteria for comments at the same time. That’s why, if you check a blog post periodically, you will notice that the number of comments posted increases by irregular amounts at irregular intervals.
In the case of my comment of 11:35 in regards to the arguments which you and Karen made, I was responding to what Karen wrote at 8:03 a.m. and what you wrote at 10:35 a.m. At the time I wrote the comment, your later post of 11:14 a.m. had not yet been posted here. I believe that our respective comments of 11:14 and 11:35 were both posted here by Joe at the same time, along with several other comments
I disagree with your contention that I am “an excellent example” of the type of argumentation that I criticize. I believe I made it quite clear in my criticism of straw man argumentation that I was focusing not on your respective stands on abortion itself but rather on the comments which each of you made characterizing “pro-lifers”.
In your statement of 10:35, you state ” . . . those pro-lifers would deny her an abortion even to save her life . . .” With this statement, you characterize everyone who is or who identifies him or herself as pro-life on abortion as opposed to any exceptions to a prohibition on abortion. Based on this characterization you in effect say that no “pro-choice feminist” could or should ever be willing to speak with such people.
Furthermore, even though this was not the particular focus of my critique, you gave no indication in the post of 10:35 that you would support any restrictions to abortion. Putting ” ‘reasonable’ ” in quotations, as you did in that comment, could lead a reader to reasonably, as it were, conclude that you do not in fact support any such restrictions.
In your post of 11:14 you do state your support for various restrictions on abortion. Had I read that comment at the time I wrote my comment, I might have modified my response to you by distinguishing you more from Karen, but my main point about the characterization of the other side of the argument would still have been valid.
The real problem with trying to have discussions about terms such as “the life of the mother” or “mental health”, or any proposed restrictions is that the reasoning and rhetoric of both Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton have made it all but impossible to discuss any of these issues in any detailed fashion in public. A real discussion would examine closely both the meaning and procedures of “abortion” itself as well as the possible scenarios in which an “abortion” would in fact be “necessary” to save a woman’s life or perhaps prevent serious harm.
I could write on about this at more length, and wish I could, but my time is up. If you really are open to discussion, you will not leap to any assumptions about what I mean in the previous paragraph or about my specific position on these issues.
July 1st, 2011 | 2:01 pm
I would far prefer to see sex-selection abortion than infanticide, which was the common practice before legal abortion. Read Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s “Mother Nature” for a discussion of “the daughter destroyers,” the high caste groups in the most misogynist provinces. All women born into that caste were killed at birth so that all wives were purchased from lower-caste families, and treated like dirt. I cannot understand the mindset that would ban abortions and then allow the girls then born and then to live in cultures where they are valued solely as a means to extort money out of their parents and then burned alive when the parents don’t have any more cash? You all think this is good? It’s better that they never live at all.
July 1st, 2011 | 3:36 pm
Karen,
Why do you think it is better for people to be eliminated before they are abused and then burned? Trying to end both sounds like a pretty good idea to me.
July 1st, 2011 | 3:44 pm
So Karen, you’d rather see it killed a minute before it’s born than a minute after it’s born? Two minutes? Ten hours? Where’s the line? If you believe that a fetus is not a person, exactly when does it become a person? What miraculous occurrance happens at exactly that moment that turns the fetus into a person? And you pro-life folks accuse _us_ of irrational beliefs. The only way to make sense of my questions is to assume that the fetus never _becomes_ a person because it always already _is_ a person. Abortion and infanticide are six of one, half a dozen of the other.
July 1st, 2011 | 3:50 pm
I meant of course, you pro-choice folks accuse us of irrational beliefs. Proofreading is our friend.
July 1st, 2011 | 4:26 pm
Imagine you were a female. Would you want to be born into a world where forced gestation by the state brought you to term, and you would be forced to be pregnant for 9 months if you found yourself pregnant?
July 1st, 2011 | 4:48 pm
Karen…I cannot understand the mindset that would ban abortions and then allow the girls then born and then to live in cultures where they are valued solely as a means…You all think this is good? It’s better that they never live at all.
This is a common argument that appears on First Things and elsewhere. It’s in line with Margaret Sanger’s beliefs (eugenicist and founder of Planned Parenthood), that criminals, delinquents, and those pre-disposed to genetic deformities should never be born.
Using your logic, let’s gather all the mentally retarded, the homeless, the elderly, and the low-income black people living in the projects and put them in the gas chamber.
If you start deciding which life to take, why not broaden your beautiful vision?
July 1st, 2011 | 5:07 pm
Jeremy:
“…if you found yourself pregnant.” Quite a nice, impersonal way of referencing the natural course of the sexual act.
July 1st, 2011 | 5:48 pm
@Karen 8:03 am
“Since all conservative opinions favor women as helpless doormats, why should any woman believe you care about this issue?”
I would agree that women pay a disproportionate (perhaps inordinate) cost of being a mother, Crittenden put the “mommy tax” at over a million dollars for a college educated woman in “The Price of Motherhood” back in 2001. But is the solution to redress this levy by saying no to the only way in which humans come to be, gestating in women’s bodies?
I’m not a woman, but there are women who can articulate arguments against abortion without simultaneously being committed to “… favor women as helpless doormats…”. I would turn your attention to Erika Bachiochi, a legal scholar who has recently published a paper entitled “Embodied Equality: Debunking Equal Protection Arguments for Abortion Rights”. It can be found here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1873485
I found the link to the paper here: http://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2011/06/powerful-new-contribution-to-pro-life-feminism.html
Compare Crittenden’s words with Bachiochi’s:
“Upon closer examination, it turned out that the women who earn almost as much as men are a rather narrow group: those who are between the ages of twenty-seven and thirty-three and who have never had children.1 The Independent Women’s Forum was comparing young childless women to men and declaring victory for all women, glossing over the real news: that mothers are the most disadvantaged people in the workplace. One could even say that motherhood is now the single greatest obstacle left in the path to economic equality for women.”
-Crittenden, Price of Motherhood, Ch.5 The Mommy Tax
“In a legitimate attempt to get beyond the essentialist idea that women’s reproductive capacities should be determinative of women’s lives, pro-choice feminist legal scholars have jettisoned the significance of the body. In rightfully arguing that pregnancy is more than just a biological reality, they discount the fact that pregnancy is a fundamental biological reality. I will show that acknowledging this biological reality—that the human species gestates in the wombs of women—need not necessitate the current social reality that women are the primary (and, too often, sole) caretakers of their children or the social arrangements in which professional and public occupations are so hostile to parenting duties.”
-Bachiochi, Embodied Equality: Debunking Equal Protection Arguments for Abortion Rights, Abstract
If nothing else, I think Bachiochi has something interesting to say “… that abortion rights actually hinder the equality of women by taking the wombless male body as normative, thereby promoting cultural hostility toward pregnancy and motherhood.” -Ibid.
Please forgive my citations, I don’t have my copy of the “MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers 7th Edition” on hand.
July 1st, 2011 | 6:06 pm
“it’s better that they never live at all” is consequentialism at its most chilling, the stuff of moral monsters.
July 1st, 2011 | 6:24 pm
Karen’s post reveals the nihilism and love of death at the heart of the “pro-choice” position. She has in fact unwittingly demonstrated how there can be no hope of positive change, especially for women, in a society that does not welcome new life but systematically snuffs it out, because it is “better for women never to have been born”! Only when ALL new life, male and female, is welcomed into the world can there be any hope for fundamental change.
July 1st, 2011 | 8:27 pm
@Andres
Fascinating comments, Andres. I think if the anti-abortion movement is going to have a chance at convincing the public at large that abortion must be banned, it is going to have to convince them that restricting abortion isn’t going to hurt women’s rights and equality. I attended a fairly liberal university that did not admit women until the 1960s, and did you know that there were faculty members who believed that women could handle the workload because menstruation would get in the way? Anyway, I think too much has been discovered about women’s equality to discount this in the debate over abortion. I tried to respond to some of the other anti-abortion posts, but my responses were not approved.
July 1st, 2011 | 8:55 pm
“confusion as to how someone can be morally opposed to an end (sex-selection), while being supportive of a mean (abortion).”
This is at least the second comment I’ve seen on this board over the past few days trying to pass abortion off as a means to some other end (e.g. sex selection).
Let us be perfectly clear: the end of every abortion is a dead human being. That is what we (euphemistically) call “abortion”. Thus the term “abortion” is loaded not only with its means (e.g. various techniques), but also – and primarily – with its end: the death of a particular innocent.
Every single abortion is a moral act precipitated by a small conspiracy of people with a crystal clear aim: to kill a living human being in utero (or thereabouts). “Because I don’t want a girl”, or “because it’s deformed”, or “because I feel like it” are not ends; they are excuses. The purpose of the act is to kill; the intention is to achieve the result of a dead baby; and the result is precisely that: a dead baby. Identifying the end of a moral act does not entail an infinite regress of volitions, as others would have it – knowingly or not.
Furthermore, the very idea that “sex-selection” can be an end is an absurdity, seemingly made possible only by the inanity of modernist obfuscation. Note: It is absolutely impossible to select the sex of your child – or, by extrapolation, of your children. Now, you can choose any of several methods to kill your child on account of that child’s gender, but killing him will not change his gender – nor anyone else’s. One cannot select the gender; one can only “select” (or deselect) the child. The intellectual notion of “sex-selection” turns out to be just another modernist conceit of the will-to-power that reduces the human being to an object for use – or for disposal, whichever I feel like. It is an absurdity.
July 1st, 2011 | 10:10 pm
Jeremy: I am a woman. While I would not want to be forced by the state to have a child, I DO think all pregnant women should have to give birth. I don’t have to imagine anything. Nobody “finds herself pregnant.” We all know how we get that way.
Karen: The situation you describe is horrible. But no, I don’t think it’s better to kill people so “save” them from a life whose horrors you only imagine. You’re not saving them, you’re killing them. Most people, you should note, fight to stay alive no matter how horrible their lives are. Who are you to decide who should die? It is true that many people in the West don’t care or do enough for women in the developing world who live hard, poor, desperate lives. We who are pro-life don’t say that nothing should be done for them. We say that abortion is not one of the things that should be done to them. You don’t help people by killing them, or making them kill their children.
David Nickol: You keep arguing that pro-life people want women to die rather than abort their children. I am not following where you get this idea.
July 1st, 2011 | 11:47 pm
“I DO think all pregnant women should have to give birth.”
Then our beliefs can never be reconciled.
July 2nd, 2011 | 1:18 am
Since Hvistendahl believes both proposition A and proposition B, she thinks that A and B must therefore be compatible.
“A and B, therefore A and B are compatible” is a valid argument. “S believes that A and S believes that B, therefore S believes that A and B are compatible” is not.
The contradiction is thinking that its okay to kill a fetus until you know that the fetus is female. That makes no sense.
A more charitable interpretation of Hvistendahl’s position is to say that she believes it’s okay to kill a fetus because you don’t want a child, but it’s not okay to kill a fetus because you don’t want a girl. In other words, it’s more charitable to say that she’s making a distinction between different types of acts, rather than between different states of knowledge. Since acts, in part, are distinguished by their intentions, “Aborting to avoid having a child” is a different act from “aborting to avoid having a girl”, even if the consequences are the same. Under that interpretation, her position is perfectly consistent (even though it’s wrong).
July 2nd, 2011 | 3:11 am
I would like the opportunity to change the state, but that’s challenging from the womb. So odd people think they have a right to decide if another’s life is worth living and so end it, instead of trying to make life better.
July 2nd, 2011 | 7:42 am
@Jeremy 8:27 PM
Hi Jeremy,
First, I’ve got to do some intellectual cleanup. It’s unfair to consider Crittenden an anti-abortionist or a conservative. What I intended to convey with my Crittenden citations is establish that there are concerned individuals (liberal, conservative, whatever) who have something meaningful to say about the situation women find themselves in when they become mothers. Specifically, Crittenden addresses Karen’s concerns about “… any policy advancing women’s economic autonomy, but many who think that men should be the unquestioned tyrants of their households.” in Ch. 6 and 8, “The Dark Little Secret of Family Life” and “Who Really Owns the Family Wage”, respectively, in the “Price of Motherhood”. Having established that there is literature out there which addresses the issue of women’s economic autonomy, I then turn to Bachiochi and compare her words with Chrittenden’s because both are concerned about “… cultural hostility toward pregnancy and motherhood”. On Bachiochi’s website, http://erika.bachiochi.com/, she describes herself as “A lawyer, Catholic theologian and mother of five young children …” (I think she’s about to have her sixth soon.). By her own admission, I guess you could say Bachiochi is a conservative. At this point, I think I’ve established the existence of at least one conservative who addresses Karen’s concern “… said antiabortion advocates cared about women’s autonomy in any other area of life.”
At this point though I’m not sure where to go. I think I’m with Dblade 11:42 am when he quotes Adam Last (specifically the second disjunct) “Do you confront the slaughter of millions of girls by “fighting” patriarchical culture in some nebulous way that may, or may not, after several decades, pay off? Or do you outlaw abortion, enforce the ban pretty rigorously (by sending doctors who perform them to jail) and understand that while there will still be illegal abortions which slip through the cracks, girl babies won’t be targeted as widely and that the vast majority of those who would have been killed in the gendercide will be allowed life?” I’m willing to fight “cultural hostility toward pregnancy and motherhood”, but I’m unclear how to do it. While I figure that one out, humans will continue to be destroyed in utero and in vitro. This being the case, I think trying to oppose the gendercide while fighting “cultural hostility toward pregnancy and motherhood” is not all that bad of a strategy.
July 2nd, 2011 | 10:00 am
“The contradiction is thinking that its okay to kill a fetus until you know that the fetus is female. That makes no sense.”
Suppose I were to concede that this is what Hvistendahl is arguing. Don’t most pro-lifers do the exact same thing? Many pro-lifers say an abortion is permissible if the life of the mother is at risk. Is it a contradiction in thinking that it is not okay to kill a fetus until you know the fetus carries a given amount of health risk to the mother?
July 2nd, 2011 | 12:43 pm
Jeremy, no, because that’s a very specific case where clear and present danger happens to a specific person.
It’s more like amputating a leg. There are cases when it makes moral sense to do so, but they are extremely rare. Abortion to save a life is probably even rarer-how many are performed to do so per year? Also the person actually doesn’t want the abortion; it only is done because of a tremendous risk to their life.
It’s different from saying “I support a women’s right to choose, but not when their right to choose causes something I personally don’t like.”
July 2nd, 2011 | 2:29 pm
“[Abortion is] more like amputating a leg. There are cases when it makes moral sense to do so”
This is exactly my point, and not a half-bad analogy. Both sides believe that certain circumstances may make an abortion morally right or wrong.
“Or do you outlaw abortion, enforce the ban pretty rigorously (by sending doctors who perform them to jail) ”
First, don’t you find it odd that you think a woman is “murdering” her baby, and yet don’t mention any kind of jail penalty for her. I would think that the murder of a child might at least carry, say a 30-day jail sentence for the perpetrator? Second, abortions can be performed without abortion clinics and doctors (and most are, via methods like the plan-b,the pill, etc). If a family wants rid of a fetus badly enough, they’ll find a way, even if it isn’t safe. And I think any woman who is willing to get a 3rd trimester abortion must really want to be rid of the pregnancy.
July 2nd, 2011 | 5:24 pm
Gail F.
You say: “David Nickol: You keep arguing that pro-life people want women to die rather than abort their children. I am not following where you get this idea.”
I am speaking of the Catholic position that abortion is never permissible, even to save the life of the mother. It seems to me that anybody who claims abortion is murder is taking the same position as the Catholic Church (and of course Catholics are a big part of the pro-life movement). If abortion is murder, then an abortion to save the life of a woman whose life is endangered by her pregnancy is murdering the unborn baby to save the life of the mother. You may be familiar with the “Phoenix abortion case,” in which a pregnant woman in a Catholic hospital was on the verge of death as the result of pulmonary hypertension. An abortion was necessary to save her life. The hospital ethics committee reasoned that it was not a “direct abortion,” because the intention was not to kill the baby, and in fact the target of the surgery was the placenta, not the baby. Certain ethicists say (to vastly oversimplify) that if the death of the unborn child is not intended (and in this case, the mother definitely did not want to lose the baby), then medical intervention to save the life of the mother is not a direct abortion and is permissible. The Bishop of Phoenix, however, condemned the surgery and excommunicated the nun who was the head of the ethics committee, Sr. Margaret Mary McBride. The position of those who believe what the bishop believes is that there may not be an abortion to save the life of the mother. In this case, the pregnancy was at the 11-week mark, and there was of course no way to save the baby. So it cases like this, the position of the Church is that it is better to let the mother and the baby die than to save the mother. The abortion is forbidden even though if there is no abortion, the baby will die anyway, because it can’t survive without the mother surviving.
I think this is pretty much the inevitable conclusion for those who claim that a person is present from the moment of conception, which it seems to me is what the majority of pro-lifers claim to believe. Pro-life politicians are generally willing to make exceptions in cases of rape, incest, the life of the mother, and severely disabled fetuses, but they are compromising on an issue that there can be no logical compromise on. If a baby conceived as a result of rape is a person from the moment of conception, then allowing the rape victim to have an abortion is murdering the baby. If a mother is too ill to continue a pregnancy without dying, and the unborn baby is a person from the moment of conception, then abortion is the killing of an innocent person to save the life of another person, and deliberate killing of an innocent person is never permitted. (You may never do evil so that good may come of it.)
July 2nd, 2011 | 5:29 pm
Jeremy, it never makes it morally right. It’s still morally wrong to kill someone, even to stop a robbery; its just the lesser of two evils. The “in case of the mother’s life” is a case that’s removed from general pro-choice ideas. You don’t amputate a leg willingly, or without dire cause.
As for the outlawing, you stop the doctor and make the pills illegal to distribute. The quote there was in reference to measures to stop a gendercide, and its not as productive to jail the users. Yes, you’d get people still doing it, but hopefully not enough to throw the sex ratio into an insane unbalance.
Problem though is if its legal, as someone said above, you can’t prove intent. Did she abort because it was a girl, or because she didn’t want a child right now? Short of forcing women to sign statements of intent at the doctor, I don’t see how this can be done.
July 2nd, 2011 | 8:04 pm
David Nickol:
I’m not a Catholic, so no idea on their teachings. But I don’t think that position is even tenable on any merit, restricting it to that case.
That’s essentially saying it’s better for two people to die than one, and any way you look at it isn’t sustainable. It’s also not a pro-life position, as the goal is to preserve life as opposed to terminate it.
The thing about personhood doesn’t mean paralysis. If you can only rescue one of two people, you have to choose, regardless if both are persons. The pro-life argument that fetuses are people is designed to prevent death when it’s not a hobson’s choice. I think you can be pro-life and oppose the details of that case.
The problem of rape is difficult. I’m going to be blunt here: the argument is that the child shouldn’t live because he is a painful reminder that the women was raped, and he might also be a eventual rapist himself (depending on how much you believe in nature.) I don’t think that’s worth killing him over.
Generally I think a pro-lifer can only accept abortion when the only option is clear, permanent harm to the point of death or close to it. You are arguing from the extremes, but can’t we all agree that the majority of abortions are nowhere near as thorny an ethical problem as these?
July 2nd, 2011 | 10:56 pm
You are arguing from the extremes, but can’t we all agree that the majority of abortions are nowhere near as thorny an ethical problem as these?
Dblade,
Certainly for those who call themselves “pro-life,” the majority of abortions aren’t difficult cases. But I given how big a player the Catholic Church is in the pro-life movement, I would not say I was “arguing from the extremes.” In Catholic Countries where the Church has involved itself deeply in abortion politics, such as Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and the Philippines, all abortions are illegal, including those to save the life of the mother. Many people (including Catholics) find it hard to accept that both mother and child must be allowed to die if an abortion is needed to save the mother’s life, but that is the authentic teaching of the Catholic Church. Yes, it is a rare occurrence, but it does happen.
July 3rd, 2011 | 11:08 am
You are though. You are holding up a case which is a vast minority of abortions, and bewailing it while something worse happens under your face.
I mean heck, how many women need lifesaving abortions overall? 1%? Wouldn’t it be easy to regulate based on it, since it would involve medical diagnoses? Would every western democracy that enacts pro-life laws choose to implement this model?
It’s also missing the point. The problem is that legal abortion for social reasons will lead to this kind of trickle-down eugenics. We’ve been lucky so far; if anything like criminality or other higher-order behaviors can be show to have a strong biological basis, even if flawed, we could see this kind of problem in the west.
July 3rd, 2011 | 12:08 pm
“Jeremy, it never makes it morally right. It’s still morally wrong to kill someone, even to stop a robbery;”
I disagree. If someone invades my home tonight and threatens my wife or my children, and the only way I can stop the intruder is to kill him, then I am doing a moral good by killing the intruder. I’m not being immoral by defending myself or my family, nor am I being evil in any way.
“The quote there was in reference to measures to stop a gendercide, and its not as productive to jail the users. ”
I disagree here also. If the state enacted a law to give a long-term jail sentence to any woman who gets an abortion, you are saying that wouldn’t lower the abortion rate? Furthermore, why shouldn’t murder get a jail sentence, if abortion is in fact really murder?
July 3rd, 2011 | 2:47 pm
Joe
There’s really no logical problem or contradiction in the positions you’re attacking. Consider:
1. You have a right to buy a scratch off lottery ticket.
2. You do not have a right to know if the ticket is a winner or loser before you buy it. Hence you may not be wearing special x-ray/infrared goggles that let you see beneath the ‘scratch material’ as you’re making your selection.
This would seem no different than asserting one has a right to choose to be a parent or not but once you make that choice you have to live with whatever the baby happens to turn out being.
Your propositions A and B aren’t technically true. Hvistendahl notes that abortion was not introduced in Asia as part of women’s rights but as a part of state management of women. A state that can force women to have abortions because its ‘managing population’ can just was logically deny some woman abortions because its decided to ‘manage gender ratios’. In both cases the view of abortion is very different than that in the west where the view is that the state is keeping out of abortion in favor of autonomy.
Technically I think Hvistendahl does not advocate outlawing abortion for sex selection which technically would run afoul of personal autonomy. But that wouldn’t apply to supporting regulations that frustrate sex selection as a motivation (i.e. making it harder to access ultrasound machines, pre-genetic testing etc.).
I think the gender ratio issue is a bit overblown and actually self correcting myself. First I suspect that ‘sex selection’ has been practiced by many human cultures. It’s called infanticide and it can be done in both hard and soft ways (hard meaning literally killing infants who are girls more often than killing boy infants, soft meaning that girl infants aren’t given the care and attention that boy infants are resulting in more ‘natural’ girl deaths than boys).
Second, this leads to the question of how come we have many examples of culture sthat had few qualms about infanticide AND a preference for male children yet did not end up in some absurd situation where a generation ends up killing like 99% of their girl children resulting in demographic extinction? Certainly I’m not going to put much stock in a thesis that depends on humans being such ‘naturally good’ creatures that they would always keep their bad impluses in at least a little check. I think what must happen is a sociological process that checks variations in the gender ratio.
Here I think Hvistendahl is incorrect. On balance women probably benefit from the ‘war on girls’. Yes some women unfortunately end up in human traficking to men seeking wives or mates in societies with a ‘shortgage’ of females but I suspect many other women see their status rise. With more men than women a woman can afford to be much more selective in a husband. Even in societies where families decide for women, a shortage of women means higher standards can be afforded women. I agree its not quite a pretty way to do it, but ironically I suspect ‘sex selection’ will do more for women’s rights in Asia than a lot of self-righteous heckling by western elites. Note that in societies that have artificial ‘girl shortgages’ such as fundamentalist Mormons who practice polygamy, baby boys often end up with a worse lot in life than baby girls. A family that has 3 baby girls has 3 potential wives for the society’s elites. A family that has 3 baby boys must confront the prospect of them seeking not 3 but multiple times 3 girls for wives in less than two decades! Not surprisingly, such sects often spin off lots of ‘runaway’ teen and young teen boys who are actually driven out of the community.
I do think that Hvistendahl is right to raise the issue of non-abortion sex selection as more dangerous. The generation of ’99% boys’ has probably never happened in human history because even with social norms permitting infanticide and a strong preference for boys, a born baby represents a lot of ‘sunk costs’ in terms of time and wear and tear on the mother. Even with abortion there’s a degree of investment with a family seeking a baby by the time an ultrasound gives them an answer. With ‘sperm sorting’ and other possible things in the future the cost could drop to zero making the demographic doomsday scenario more likely.
July 3rd, 2011 | 2:58 pm
Dblade
If I have the autonomy to determine my own reproductive future, I can choose to abort a fetus for whatever reason I like. It could be a boy, a girl, predisposed to down’s sydrome or homosexuality. The moment you say it’s wrong to select for a factor you are destroying the autonomy idea.
By this reasoning ‘autonomy’ would extend not only to abortion but long afterwards. If I want to choose to have a famous singer for a child, I can ‘post-birth abort’ when the kid is 9 years old and vocal coaches confirm that she just doesn’t have the vocal chords to be a professional singer!
But you accomplish this distortion by looking at only one idea of ‘autonomy’….the autonomy that’s usually at issue is the autonomy one has over their own body. In other words your body is yours and you have a right to say ‘no’ with it. That would mean you may say no to having sex with someone, no to having their baby, and no to a baby that’s already inside of you.
The right then isn’t to ‘kill’, the killing is incidental or a side effect. Like saying people who opt not to be organ donars are ‘killing’ people who need transplants because each year so many die waiting for a transplant while so many perfectly acceptable organs are buried because those who died either didn’t sign an organ donar card or opted to reject donating. If it became possible to transplant a fetus to another womb or an artifical one nothing in Roe.v.Wade would forbid a state to outlaw abortion provided it respected the autonomy of the individual’s body.
This being the case, the right you’re talking about is one that doesn’t exist and isn’t advocated by most pro-choicers that I’m aware of. A state can under the principle of individual autonomy of their own bodies still outlaw a host of options for people to ‘determine their reproductive future’. For example, nothing in Roe.v.Wade would stop a state from banning genetic engineering on fetuses to produce ‘designer babies’.
July 3rd, 2011 | 3:12 pm
Also the ‘victims’ here get kind of confusing….there’s an estimate that without sex selective abortion there’d be 900M more girls in Asia. But that seems to beg a lot of questions:
1. If sex selection was not available, would all 900 families have gotten pregnant knowing there’s a 50-50 chance they might end up with an unwanted girl? To use my first analogy, if I had ‘xray goggles’ that could let me see what was under scratch off lottery tickets, I’d end up buying lots of scratch off lottery tickets. But if I lost those googles, I wouldn’t keep buying tickets, I wouldn’t buy any. How many of those 900M girls would have ended up not even existing in Joe’s world?
2. Speaking of non-existence, you’d have 900M boy victims if sex selection didn’t happen. If 900M times, families aborted girl fetuses until they got to a boy fetus, then if sex selection was available you’d have 900M boys who exist today but would case to exist in that ‘alternative universe’. If pro-lifers think its fair to ask people who exist today “what if your mother had an abortion” then its also fair to ask “would your mother have had you if she didn’t have an abortion a few years before you?”
From a Hindu and Buddhist perspective, (at least by some sects), this ‘potential problem’ may not be an issue because matters of existence can be thought of as a ride at an amusement park. A woman having an abortion or opting not to get pregnant may simply mean you have to ‘wait in line’ a bit longer to score a human rebirth. From a Christian perspective, there’s no ‘waiting line’. People come into existence at conception and existence is good. Better to exist in a womb for 2 months than never to have existed at all. So pro-lifers here would seem to be wishing away the existence of 900M Asian boys!
Don’t take this as an argument for either abortion or sex selection….just some of the paradoxes that seem to arise when people start spinning off ‘potentials’ as ethical arguments.
July 3rd, 2011 | 3:41 pm
You are holding up a case which is a vast minority of abortions, and bewailing it while something worse happens under your face.
Dblade,
You might be right if I argued that because there are a tiny number of “hard cases” in which most people would find it difficult to deny a woman an abortion, then all abortions should be permitted. That is not the argument that I am making.
Would every western democracy that enacts pro-life laws choose to implement this model?
I think it is very unlikely that any state (or more than a few states) in the United States would enact a law banning abortion to save the life of the mother. However, I think that is inconsistent with saying abortion is murder or claiming a “right to life” exists from the moment of conception.
I stick by my original statement, which was, in my opinion, noncontroversial. It is not difficult to understand why a pro-choice feminist would be suspicious of those pro-lifers who want her to join forces with them in making “reasonable” restrictions on abortions when she knows that those same pro-lifers would deny her an abortion even to save her life. If you like, I can restate it as follows: It is not difficult to understand why a pro-choice feminist would be suspicious of those pro-lifers who want her to join forces with them in making “reasonable” restrictions on abortions when she knows that those same pro-lifers want to prohibit 99% of abortions that currently take place.
Do you see the National Rifle Association volunteering to get together with gun-control organizations for the purpose of coming up with “reasonable” restrictions on gun ownership?
July 3rd, 2011 | 4:00 pm
Jeremy, you are not though. It’s a choice between two moral evils: killing a man or allowing him to kill you.
For example, lets say your car’s brakes fail while driving, and you are closing on an intersection. Ahead of you is a schoolbus, and you know if you don’t do something, your SUV will collide with it. So you sharply turn the wheel, and flip the SUV into a parked, but empty car.
In both cases, you did something that could cause harm. You chose the path that caused the least. In no sense is the act itself of totalling an empty car a moral good, it’s just less harmful than the alternative. It’s not fair, but it’s not a case where say you buy one kid a car and the other you don’t.
As for murder, we have to go with what stops it immediately and what is feasible. When a problem is wide-scale, it breaks the criminal system down. When marijuana use became popular, it strained the system to its limits. Or Rwanda.
July 4th, 2011 | 12:26 pm
Boonton:
You’re extending the argument too much. Autonomy is defined fairly specifically in this, as the ability to abort a fetus within a certain timeframe from conception, by the mother for any reason. That’s autonomy in regards to this.
In other reasons, yes autonomy isn’t the greatest good. But during that time of legal abortion, due to the lack of personhood of the fetus, it is. I’m saying if you want to make certain abortions illegal then, you are being pro-life: the life of the fetus is suddenly important.
Yet then it isn’t otherwise. It becomes a “some animals are more equal than others” condition. Bad to select for gender, okay (at 90%+ rates in the UK) to select for down syndrome.
As for victims and potentials, you have to argue from the visible changes. I think we can all say cultures with a high gender imbalance aren’t healthy: I’m reminded of the perils of black women trying to find a suitable black man to marry. The problems you list are with any birth, really.
You can only argue from potential when an effect is clear. In this case, serious imbalances.
July 4th, 2011 | 11:14 pm
Dblade
In other reasons, yes autonomy isn’t the greatest good. But during that time of legal abortion, due to the lack of personhood of the fetus, it is. I’m saying if you want to make certain abortions illegal then, you are being pro-life: the life of the fetus is suddenly important.
Not ‘due to lack of personhood’ but ‘irregardless of the personhood’. The individual has autonomy over their body, even if denying the use of their body to another results in another person’s death. To use an oft quoted hypothetical, you are not under any obligation to donate your kidney to another person, even if your refusal means the other person will die. That’s not changed by ‘proving’ the person in need has full personhood.
You’re correct that the autonomy argument hasn’t carried the day fully in the US (as it would if we took, say, an Ayn Rand view of it). You can’t decide to legally abort, say 8 months and 25 days into a pregnancy, for example. But the trimester scheme of Roe is not all that bad here IMO. You can argue that after a certain period of time ‘constructive consent’ has to some degree been granted thereby justifying making it hard to ‘change your mind’…a bit like how if you allow someone to squat on your property for a long period of time, kicking them off requires you jumping thru some legal hoops.
As for victims and potentials, you have to argue from the visible changes. I think we can all say cultures with a high gender imbalance aren’t healthy:
I don’t think we know anything of the sort and more importantly I don’t think we know anything about ‘managing gender ratios’ in ways that don’t do more harm than good. For most of human history, though, we know that humans have lived under states that are weak (meaning gov’ts that had limited ability or interest in regulating personal life) and ‘gender selection’ was within the ability of most parents to one degree or another. During that long history not a single example comes to mind of a society that got in trouble because ‘gender selection’ caused such imbalances that problems arose. This implies:
1. Humans are less prone to gender selection than we might think (less likely IMO)
2. There are self correcting mechanisms that cause gender imbalances to adjust the ‘cost/benefit’ analysis. For example, in some cultures the girl’s family must pay a dowery to secure a husband. In others the male must pay to secure a bride. In a culture that where you get ‘too few girls’, doweries must logically fall and even turn into payments that the grooms family must make.
Yet then it isn’t otherwise. It becomes a “some animals are more equal than others” condition. Bad to select for gender, okay (at 90%+ rates in the UK) to select for down syndrome.
I’m not clear who is actually saying ‘gender selection’ abortions are to be outlawed. The reforms praised in the Salon article had to do with putting limits on the use of ultrasound machines, which don’t make abortions illegal but would frustrate an attempt to use abortion as a gender selection tool as well as educational campaigns. An actual law prohibiting ‘gender selection’ abortions would seem nearly impossible to enforce unless you had a very overbearing state.
The autonomy argument, IMO, doesn’t really impact efforts to frustrate high tech gender selection (i.e. ‘sperm sorting’) because the actual autonomy argument is that individuals have sovereignity over their own bodies, but not over other people’s bodies or actions. A law that outlawed a doctor selling a ‘sperm sorting’ device for a non-abortive gender selection technique wouldn’t interfere in autonomy the way I read it. The way you read it, though, (as a right to ‘decide’ your ‘reproductive future’) it might.
July 5th, 2011 | 10:44 am
[...] consequences of sex-selective abortion around the world (we’ve talked about her here and here), but all the while assuring readers that the catastrophic problems she’s describing have [...]
July 7th, 2011 | 7:34 am
[...] consequences of sex-selective abortion around the world (we’ve talked about her here and here), but all the while assuring readers that the catastrophic problems she’s describing have nothing [...]
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