Abortion and Such Yet Again 

 (January 2016, re-posted 5 September 2021)

 

​Once or twice a year I write on the abortion controversy, usually in a small-city newspaper or a blog post. Sometimes, I'm just pedantically correcting the question, "When does life begin?" That formulation is forgivable since common, but pretty useless: one thing the Bible and biology since the late 19th century agree on is that life doesn't begin, but began and has been transmitted ever since. So eggs and sperm are alive, as are zygotes, embryos, and fetuses. "There is always a death in an abortion" — and death with each menstruation and miscarriage and millions of deaths (over 100 million in humans) with each ejaculation. The relevant and crucial question is "What dies?" and following from that, "Is that what to be a human person under the law?" 

​My most serious agenda (which I'll follow here in a short form) is to demonstrate that the set of issues surrounding abortion is unresolvable in any philosophically respectable way and recommend a messy, intellectually incoherent, vulgarly pragmatic political compromise. E.g., we may be able to get what looked like might follow from Roe v. Wade. Building upon the feeling of many ordinary Americans that early abortions are okay while late ones are not, and that contraception is a good idea, what we could get are strict restrictions on late-term abortions while contraceptive use by women — and fertile girls and men and boys — is encouraged, along with "Plan B's" of various sorts, plus readily available, safe and legal early abortion as needed, with the goal of making the need for any abortions increasingly rare. 

​Meanwhile we'll engage in cycles of unresolvable arguments stemming from radically different premises and competing but complexly-related histories. On the one side, are the history of patriarchal oppression and the control of women's bodies, and the resistance to patriarchy and control. On the other side, this:

 

​If "People are the riches of a nation" and a large and growing population the source of a nation's strength and prosperity, then policies of "pronatalism" (also just called "natalism") are essential,and society and State must act aggressively to encourage live births, with the kids raised to where they can be militarily and economically useful, and ready to produce another generation. One obvious wayto this goal: harness sex to reproduction by striving to prevent all sex outside of the reproductive and reproductive in a stable social unit (long-term families) in which the kids can get raised. Under this approach, the sexual "abominations in Leviticus" etc. make sense as do secular-based prohibitions on contraception.

​​(Whether pronatalism is a good idea in a world of over 7 billion people facing another and particularly serious period of climate change and resource depletion — that's something we need to discuss.) 

 

​If the goal (finis, telos) of sex is reproduction, it is unnatural to engage in sex that is nonreproductive. If Nature is part of God's plan, such unnaturalness is sinful. If the State should get involved in prohibiting unnatural acts and/or various kinds of sin, then laws against contraception make sense (and condoms when and where I was a kid were quite properly legally "SOLD FOR THE PREVENTION OF DISEASE ONLY").

 

​If a human being is essentially a soul, and if that soul is of infinite value; if that soul enters a zygote at the moment of conception, then anything that destroys a zygote or embryo or fetus is a variety of murder. Worse — maybe infinitely worse — if/since the victims are unbaptized they will join the other unbaptized infants and miscarriages in damnation: perhaps in a Limbo, if that theology comes back into fashion, or in "the easiest room in hell," as in Michael Wigglesworth's teaching-poem, "The Day of Doom" (the Year of the Lord 1662 [the date for the poem, not the Apocalypse]).

 

​Given the US First Amendment and at least a fair amount of de facto separation of Church and State, we're not going to have much honest debate on the theology of contraception and abortion and the politics that debate implies. Nor are we going to have an open and vigorous debate on population policy and its implications for and involvement in climate change, resource allocation, immigration, who pays for old people, and tax breaks for families. (Some Americans who are all for population control in theory still want tax deductions for their children, even third and fourth and fifth kids.)

 

​There has been some social progress on these issues, certainly with gay rights and, maybe more relevantly here, condoms: which are now advertised, required in LA-produced up-scale professional pornography, and apparently encouraged in some areas of amateur porn upload sites — uh, or so I have heard. On the other hand, there is the logic of abortion = murder, hence large-scale abortion = mass murder, hence … well, hence bombing an abortion clinic or shooting abortion providers can be admitted as an act of terrorism but then defended as a "lesser evil." On the other side, if one just rejects the whole idea of souls and ensoulment and follows a rigorous materialism, then it becomes fairly easy to justify even a late-term abortion but more difficult to condemn killing older human organisms, especially before or after they can talk rationally or after you've been forced to admit that there may be little justification in nature to put so much value on speech or reason or consciousness that "mind" become a kind of stand-in for "soul."

 

​I hope Americans will say on the abortion debate and other sex issues, "Screw ideology and intellectual rigor folks! Let's cut a political deal on abortion and sex stuff and move on." As much as Americans are generally anti-intellectual, though, I expect the opposing logics of the abortion debate to continue robust and dangerous — and we'll be cycling back to the topic for the rest of my life.

Trump and the Transgendered, 21 October 2018

‘Transgender’ Could Be Defined Out of Existence Under Trump Administration — New York Times

* I doubt there are that many transgender people under the authority of the US that this is a big practical issue for the American State or People. The meanness and pettiness of the Trump administration here — marketed as conservative toughness — is probably the point. 

* Usage has usefully evolved to where "sex" can refer to biological sex, starting with XX people and XY people. That can get complicated on just the level of chromosomes and intrauterine environment, but, roughly, H. sap. is a "sexually dimorphic" species with "the modal phenotype" bimodal: most of us are born and live sexually male or female. "Gender," in the useful evolving usage, has been sex as socially and culturally manifested — and that can get very complicated and go way beyond XX people and XY people and "innies" and "outies." 

So far as they're thinking at all (as opposed to scheming and calculating), the Trump administration is making the same sort of mistake as the Roman Catholic. Church on contraception. They're not thinking "nature" and "natural law" in a modern scientific sense buy "Natural Law" in the sense of Aristotle and a simplistic idea of a purpose for "sex" in at least two senses: sex in the sense of the sex of an individual, sex in the sense of the activity. 

Very generally, this is the same sort of problem ethologists — behavioral biologists — could see with Trump's loose use of "instinct." There's no "hunting instinct" in, say, cats, and the purpose of feline hunting isn't eating. There's a hierarchy of "species-specific, genetically-encoded behaviors" — spotting, tracking, stalking, pouncing, biting, shaking, eating — that in nature have cats hunting, and usually eating, very well, thank you. Similarly with most human sex: Coupling for the purpose of reproduction is relatively rare. Many people copulate and there are enough births that we have (re)filled the Earth and kind of subdued it and can slow down already with the reproduction and "dominion" stuff. For political arguments for such subjects START HERE, and then sex and gender issues become intellectually wonderfully complicated — and the political issues get down to courtesy and accommodation to reasonable requests/demands and just telling small sexual/gender minorities making unreasonable demands — as with any interest group — to f*ck-off. The Trumpian attempt to define away the gender issues and the transgendered and avoid useful political conflict, is not only mean and petty, but also cowardly. 

Red-Teaming & Rhetoric (and Arguments Like that on Abortion)

Apropos of little — for a long time it was and apparently remains conventional for US forces in war-games, at least of the table-top varieties, to be the Blue Team and the opponents the Red Team. So there's the handy expression and concept, "red-teaming it": for working out strategies from the point of view of one's opponent(s). Sort of "walk a mile in his shoes," but maybe while heavily armed. 

We asked students to do something similar when writing argument papers in Rhet 101, when they got to the "Refutation" part of the argument and needed to respond to "obvious objections." Well, "obvious to whom?" and "how obvious?" (you don't want to raise objections that are just silly — or are pretty powerful, but easily overlooked).

More Americans need more experience "red-teaming" (also reading more literature and "mindful" game-playing) and working through the logic of situations, including logic using premises we don't share, even premises we abhor.

For one thing, we'd get fewer references to "senseless violence" when the mayhem is probably evil but is, if anything, too logical. The leadership of your rebel army wants peace talks with the Imperial government, and your subgroup doesn't? Some "naked infants spitted upon pikes" from a nursery for the kids of government officials will stop those talks. Fast. And invite reprisals that will keep the war going strong for months to come. You believe that human beings are essentially a human soul, that each soul is of infinite value, and that your job as an agent of the Inquisition of Holy Mother Church is to save souls by any means necessary? Then effective means up to an including the destruction of the world — mere  finite matter — can be justified, and the torture of a heretic arguably an act of love. 

We'd also get "logical" being used less as a kind of Vulcan compliment word and get it back to a neutral meaning. «All men are green; Socrates was a man; therefore Socrates was green» — is logical but you can safely bet untrue. 

Being able to "red-team" an argument is even more important when we're not talking about enemies but just opponents on some political issues who might be our allies on others. It's a way to learn (to use another old expression) "where they're coming from" and understand the logic of their arguments — even when they might not understand the logic because, like most of us, most of the time, they haven't worked through "where they're coming from" and how the hell they got to where they are, taking positions that look obvious to them and — in bad cases — just "senseless" to you.

So let's get to an argument where we need such thinking 'cause currently it keeps going around in circles, when it doesn't "spiral out of control." Abortion.

Consider some descendants of an Inquisitor and of a rebel willing to make good on a government terror threat — the line on spitted infants is from that " mirror of all Christian kings" (II.Cho.6), Shakespeare's Henry V — and how they might be arguing.

One, and it might be either, sees humans as essentially a soul, with a human soul entering matter at the moment a human child is conceived. So a human zygote — a fertilized human egg — is essentially a soul to be saved or damned, a soul of infinite value, and as yet unbaptized and unborn the first time, let alone "born again." (I'm conflating some belief systems here, but "'good enough' is good enough.") To kill intentionally that zygote, embryo, fetus, and, eventually, soon-to-be-born child is murder to start with plus, far worse, damning an innocent soul perhaps to limbo or, perhaps, "the easiest room in hell," as the estimable Rev. Mr. Michael Wigglesworth puts it in his "Day of Doom" (see lines 345-60, or don't; even if you agree with the theology, it's a really, really, really awful poem). 

The other can cite the doctrine of the sovereignty of free people over their bodies and the right of women not to have to go through a pregnancy they don't want. And go on to cite how enforced pregnancy has fit into the history of men keeping women unfree. 

Now the pro-choice person here can say s/he doesn't believe in souls, and the anti-abortion person can argue s/he accepts the history but that the emphatically finite Earthly rights of pregnant women are outweighed by the right to life — not just physical life, but a chance at "life eternal." 

And the figurative "game" — the argument — doesn't really even get started. In a minimum of two games, there are two winners in their own terms, and nothing has gotten settled.

"Red-teaming" the abortion argument is important to show both logical, hence "extreme," sides how serious and seriously dangerous the abortion argument is. 

Many pro-choice people might just say, and will say if pressed, "Well, we don't believe in souls and ensoulment and all that." Now red-team it. If humans are just meat, what then? If there's no problem killing a zygote or embryo or even a fetus, when does the problem enter in? It's a leap into the absurd to believe in a God and a God moreover who cares — in the midst of a massive universe — cares about human beings, period; but in that objective view of things it's just an assertion contrary to fact (as in, probably, "a lie") that the human species, as meat, has any significant value, let alone any individual human being. 

To which the pro-choice person can say, "Well, I believe in human value; I feel the value of the child in my arms; I sense it when I talk to people" and, with that confession of faith — that absurd leap of faith if you know humans and our history — there may be a reduction of contempt for one's opponent who starts with another leap of faith; and reductions of contempt are frequently useful.

And for the anti-abortion person to be "pro human life," with human value and dignity — that person must think through the situations of individual women forced to have babies they don't want, and the history of women kept in subjugation. 

And where do we go from there?

And then, I suggest, from there we think through what happens if that damn Red Team and our fine and pure Blue Team press our points to a philosophically pure, radically, essentially, totally-pure pure conclusion. What should be done with people who'd continue the millennia-long persecution of women — who'd enslave women to the making of babies? What should be done with murderers of infants and souls? 

Shall we, say, fight to the death? Or exhaustion of resources? 

There is precedent.

Let he who is without sin, she who is most rigorous, cast the first molotov cocktail.

There are lots of precedents.

My own suggestion is for backing off: agree that maybe literal fighting has never been such a great idea, and a really bad one given the current range and availability of weapons. My own suggestion is for pragmatic, messy, political thinking: sometimes in the manner of Machiavelli, sometimes in the manner of the compassionate, practical saint or holy fool. 

Eventually, we can get a "technological quick fix" for the abortion issue. Our fairly near descendants can declare a human embryo a person under the law from implantation on — and remove the embryo to storage and, in another "eventually," the womb of a woman who wants a baby. Or, eventually, an artificial womb. Such actions would be too expensive to be done frequently, so we should do what we should be doing anyway — the Church gets the nature part of "Natural Law" wrong here — and coming up with really effective contraception: i.e., implants or whatever so that women and girls, men and boys are sterile until they desire children. Until then: working full-tilt on a male contraceptive, on making contraception readily available, and, starting, say, ten years ago, inventive and shameless "Wrap that Willy!" campaigns to encourage condom use.

The logically and morally rigorous probably can't go along, but the rest of us can do fairly well seeing things from the points of view of others. And since we probably can't exterminate our opponents and damn well shouldn't try; since even as we wouldn't like to be silenced, we shouldn't even try to silence others ... Well, we can muddle through on our disagreements, and agree and cooperate where we can. 

As I said, it's messy, but necessary for that social life, civilization experiment thing.  

Re-run from "Boxing Day" 2009: Abortion (and Combatting VD)

            If you've ever argued with a significant other over whether toilet seat lids belong up or down, or whether toilet paper should be mounted to deliver the sheets "over" or "under" — if you've ever gotten into a nasty little spat over bathroom trivia, then you have the concept, "What you're arguing about? That's not what you're arguing about." More exactly, what you're arguing about is only one of the things you're arguing about.

            When Americans argue about abortion, we're also arguing about, among other issues, the oppression of women and young people, the difficulty of seeing special value in human life absent a God to assign that value, the place of religion in politics, the meaningless futility of life in a universe purged of the Sacred, the value of play and pleasure, and population issues centering on the policy of "pronatalism": encouraging the birth and rearing of children.

            But if the crucial point is to reduce the number of abortions in the US to as close to zero as possible, then we need to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies, which means, as a practical matter, that we in America have to get serious about birth control.

            If we are to reduce unwanted pregnancies, fertile girls and women must have easy access to birth control — and ditto for boys and men. Fertile humans must be encouraged to use birth control and insist that their partners use birth control and, while both are at it, take reasonable precautions to reduce the risk of venereal disease (VD, a k a STDs [Sexually Transmitted Diseases]).

            Reduce the risk to zero? That's impossible. But anything worth doing is worth taking a risk to do, and most post-pubescent people find sex eminently worth doing. Sex is less risky than SCUBA diving and requires less training. But even as one needs to trust a dive partner, one needs to trust — and protect — a sexual partner; and even as only the profoundly stupid dive drunk or take other dumb risks, even so Americans need to be indoctrinated that only the profoundly stupid take unnecessary risks with sex.

            When I reached puberty back in the 1950s, my father gave me a box of condoms and the fatherly advice, "Until you know what to do with it, keep it in your pants." The advice was good since my parents and their friends had made sure my friends and I would "know what to do with it": no sex education in school, but we got a short-course at home and from medical folks the parents pooled their money to bring in for a lecture and discussion.

            Sex education in schools can spend a day or two making sure boys and girls know that conception is probable when sperm meets egg, and learn the various ways to prevent that meeting. And they can take a couple weeks on STDs and preventing catching VD or spreading it.

            More important, though, is getting people to actually use birth control and "safe-enough" sex. We're getting down to the nitty-gritty here: making contraception and disease prevention materials readily available, and indoctrinating Americans — starting with adolescents — to use them.

            Feminist women should continue pressing the argument for contraception (and "contragestion") for girls. I'm male, so I'll argue for indoctrinating American males to use condoms any time we engage in copulation and aren't actively trying to make a baby. (Gays included: unprotected anal intercourse can spread HIV and syphilis.)

            Part of the indoctrination can be religious, and I have no objection to condom packages coming with large cautionary labels such as "WARNING: SEX OUTSIDE OF MARRIAGE MAY LEAD TO DAMNATION." Other parts of the indoctrination, though, must include the macho and arguably sexist appeal that real men don't allow women to control men's reproduction and, until they want children, real men "Wrap that Willy!" The indoctrination should include the definitely "age-ist" idea that virile young men — as opposed to weakening old men — can use condoms without losing their erections.

            If the overriding issue is minimizing abortion, and reducing VD an important goal for public health, then — given that couples will couple — then development of a "male pill" would be good, and there's much to be said for encouraging vasectomies, but, for the foreseeable future, condom-use will be crucial. So, for the foreseeable future, condoms should be as available for purchase as candy bars, and maybe more so: fornication may damn you to hell, but it doesn't encourage obesity or tooth decay. If reducing unwanted pregnancies is crucial, and reducing VD very important, we should use advertising, marketing, and carefully-crafted propaganda to push contraception.

            Let's get serious: a large-scale public campaign encouraging guys to "Wrap That Willy!" would violate taboos, but it would be deeply moral.

"It Could Have Something to Do With Cancer …": Commercialism, Identity Politics, and Disease

            My one experience with actual science was working summer of 1964 in the gut lab (officially "Gastro-Intestinal Research," later "Gastroenterology") at Michael Reese Hospital and Research Center in Chicago. One of the projects I was tangentially involved with — possibly washing the equipment — was up for renewal of funding, and as part of my education, and maybe to get some work out of me as an English major, I was given a draft of the grant proposal to read. My only comment on content was on the paragraph listing all the wonderful potential of the project: a raised eyebrow and the sort-of question, "Cancer?" We were doing pretty pure basic research, which likely would have some use in dealing with ulcers, but cancer …? The response I got was my cryptic main title: well, "It could have something to do with cancer"; down the line, what we found out about gut motility — or whatever the project was — could throw some light on cancer. I muttered something about "Why not ulcers (maybe)?" and was told something like, "Americans aren't scared silly about ulcer."

            Now people in our lab were doing research into early detection of cancers — we made Time magazine with that project — so our claim of a cancer connection was credible, and our work was solid basic physiology, however labeled. Still, I was struck by the idea of fads and fashions in diseases and that the biggest gun fashion in mid- and late-20^th-century diseases was cancer.

            I've been thinking about that cancer quote since I got an ad with my newspaper on pink paper stock, with print and shading in a variety of blue few men have a word for — "dark lavender"? — and featuring a photo of a woman. At the top left of one side, balanced down the page by a black-and-white photo of a mature woman, was the sentence, "Let Us Help You Detect Your Risk Early".

            The ad was for "Life Line Screening" not for breast cancer, as I initially thought, but for cardiovascular disease.

            Which is as things should be.

            "According to the American Heart Association," citing statistics in line with those I've seen from more disinterested sources, "cardiovascular disease — including heart disease, high blood pressure, and stroke — kills nearly a half-million women in the U.S. each year. That figure exceeds the next seven causes of death combined. More women die from [CVD, cardiovascular diseases] than of all cancers (including breast cancer, which kills about 40,000 women annually), respiratory conditions, Alzheimer's disease, and accidents combined." Into the 1990s, the American Heart Association was estimating that "1 in 2 women will eventually die of heart disease or stroke, compared with 1 in 25 who will eventually die of breast cancer" — and even allowing for Heart Association bias and hype and capacity for error, the point is still that coronary heart disease and stroke are far more dangerous to women than breast cancer.

            Now the flip side of the Lifeline Screening ad was specific: "We Can Help You Avoid Cardiovascular Disease," but the color stock remained (of course), and I suspect I was not the only person to first think, "Breast cancer."

            I had an aunt who had breast cancer, and a friend, and the daughters of two friends, but that probably wasn't why I thought "Breast cancer"; breast cancer has VIP friends and gets a lot of publicity, much of it using pink. As an embedded quotation in Sandy M. Fernandez's "Pretty in Pink " article has it, in her brief "History of the Pink Ribbon" (1998):

“Pink is the quintessential female color […]. The profile on pink is playful, life-affirming. We have studies as to its calming effect, its quieting effect, its lessening of stress. [Pastel pink] is a shade known to be health-giving; that’s why we have expressions like ‘in the pink.’ You can’t say a bad thing about it.” Pink is, in other words, everything cancer notably is not.

And pink was picked up by powerful commercial allies in the war on breast cancer, as Fernandez very usefully documents, and as a feminist cause, picking up the ribbon from the red ribbon of (gay-inflected) AIDS activism, and — in a move Fernandez doesn't discuss — inspiring later emphasis on prostate cancer (totally for men, usually straight and older).

            These, too, are important disease threats, and I'm sympathetic, with an uncle who had prostate cancer and a good friend who died young from it; and I still contribute to AIDS research (I'll send my check to GMHC this week, guys, honest!).

            Still ….

            Still, working backward: The 20^th-c. emphasis on finding a cure for AIDS as what in the United States was initially a syndrome among young, gay men, drew attention away from AIDS prevention as part of wider programs against the spread of sexually-transmitted diseases and the occurrence of unwanted pregnancies. Gay activists did yeoman's work in encouraging use of condoms in the gay community; the attention paid to a high-voltage disease like AIDS, however, distracted from the necessity to reduce the spread of increasingly endemic diseases like gonorrhea and syphilis — and distracted in sex-talk from discussions of male responsibility in contraception. Finding a pharmaceutical/medical cure for AIDS was an easy cause to push as opposed to a wide-scale, loudly public WRAP THAT WILLY! campaign encouraging use of condoms, and spelling out in a full-monty propaganda effort when condoms were most important. As I challenged a group of newspaper editors in south-west Ohio, "If it would save ten lives a year to do so — and it would save at least ten in our area — would you run large public service ads proclaiming in large font. 'Butt-Fucking Is Risky. WRAP THAT WILLY!'"? Promoting medicines to control AIDS bears far fewer costs than breaking linguistic taboos and taking on, among others, the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church.

            The emphasis on breast cancer and then prostate cancer drew too much attention from non-sexy (pun intended) but deadly menaces such as heart disease. Equally bad, the emphasis on early detection of breast and prostate cancer led to overtesting and overdiagnosis, and in some cases overtreatment with serious harm. Additionally, there were the monetary costs of testing, plus the figurative but important costs of anxiety from false positives from screenings and the human-hours appropriated and rendered unpleasant by the unpaid tasks of going for mammographies, PSA (prostate-specific antigen) tests, biopsies, and digital rectal exams (DREs). Added to that, and getting back to my initial topic, there is the warping of research when funding is too much for the "popular" diseases: a particularly perverse application of middle-school ethos obsession with popularity.

            In some ways, it is amusing that there are fads and fashions in disease. Mostly, though, attention to high-profile diseases because they have been rendered high profile — is a bad thing. Yes, ladies, get mammograms made if, but only if, you're in one or more categories at risk for breast cancer; and, gentlemen, get your PSAs and DREs — if, but only if, prostate cancer is a significant risk for you, personally, at your age. (Face up to it guys: live a long life, and you will get prostate cancer.) And contribute to worthy causes fighting cancer.

            But —

            But recall that other important initialism and contribute a bit more generously for research into CVD, cardio-vascular disease, which is more likely to kill you than cancer. And quit smoking and keep your weight down and get exercise and get your blood pressure checked and do those other unexciting things related to low-profile diseases that don't get ribbons and their own color and fail to attract friends in high places.

            You want to save women's lives? Spread the word about heart diseases — and try to see it as a mild advantage that you might save a few guys' lives as well.