Abortion: Hamlet, Machiavelli, Obama

Do read Alan Jacobs on Obama at Notre Dame. Because the clump-of-cells argument is so crude and ‘final’, Obama, putting himself at the front of a long train, seeks refuge in bad postmodernity. Rather than overdetermining the abortion question as a question of science — and this, given his blanket concessions to the prerogatives of scientific progress on related fronts, is revealing — Obama underdetermines it as a question of interpretation. A woman’s right to choose opens upon the necessity of choosing one of competing interpretations of the meaning or sanctity of life — thence, actually, to become dependent upon it. Life-at-conception and clump-of-cells alike are left behind; the woman ‘gets to’, because she has to, decide ‘for herself’ whether or not the embryo she has conceived is a living person , based on a data set officially deemed indeterminate.

Let me pause to underscore that, for somebody who rejects both life-at-conception and clump-of-cells, this kind of difficult reckoning is inescapable and, therefore, appropriate. (And even the most commanding interdict has its excusing permissions, however rare.) Whether our laws and our politics ought to be founded on that difficulty, or grounded in it, is another matter entirely. Alan is simply right, I think, that solemnly pronouncing this difficulty an officially accredited Mystery ends the conversation Obama would wish to start — and, in doing so, starts one that perhaps he’d rather not start. A courageous libertarianism, our touchstone here, doesn’t hold that any choice anyone makes is right if they experience a cosmic sense of rightness about it. A courageous libertarianism holds that citizens must be free to make right choices and wrong ones too — so long, of course, as they don’t harm other persons officially accredited as such. So the courageous pro-choice position must be that whether a fetus is a legal person must not depend on the mystical, idiosyncratic determination of the mother that her embryo is or isn’t a person to her .

The rule of law, I think, does not admit very well of the irony of doubt, or any therapeutic gnosticism. This dubious joke really is on the pregnant woman; her embryo is neither fish nor fowl, neither an animal she is entitled to kill nor a person she is forbidden to murder. She must decide not only whether this thing inside her must live or die but what — or who — that thing is. That a person in this position might wind up, sooner or later, crying “Who am I to decide?” is no surprise. The cry, a “To be or not to be?” for our time, raises (up) what Philip Rieff refers to (in contrast to the question of one’s parents) as the ‘parent question’, the question of the moral stakes involved in human creaturehood. Hamlet’s paralyzing ironic doubt about the parent question led unironically to death unbound. When doubt in the personhood of one’s fetus becomes paralyzing, one turns either to the law — which defers silently to Mystery — or to public opinion, fractured irreconcilably in two. At such a crisis moment, in which Hamlet so spectacularly and prolongedly choked, Machiavelli found a way to survive, if not thrive: seek the effectual truth. Seeking the effectual truth is a better political doctrine than a personal one. The effectual truth of our abortion law is that having an abortion proves that the embryo was not a person. The only escape from mystical indeterminacy is into a determinacy brutally disenchanted. The right to choose for oneself is exercised with all the finality of retrospect.