A Longer Version
Trippy said:
Out of curisoity, what's your opinion on my Jurisdictions abortion laws?
It's sort of a mixed bag insofar as I find the criteria—“
cases where the pregnant woman faces a danger to her life, physical or mental health, or if there is a risk of the fetus being handicapped, in the event of the continuation of her pregnancy”—restrictive. While the term brings many a shiver, yes, I do believe
abortion on demand is a woman's right. It is a logical consequence of the “her body, her choice” outlook. But, to the other, I might be failing to understand something about your description.
I think part of what makes the American debate seem so strange to our international neighbors is that it seems many places are getting over the kind of religious fervor that my domestic neighbors seem to revel in. There is a book by Martin Riesebrodt, and perhaps the title will ping your curiosity:
Pious Passion—The Emergence of Modern Fundamentalism in the United States and Iran. And, yes, it is a compare/contrast inquiry into the development of fundamentalist Christianity and Islam in those nations.
The American side of the equation is worth considering here. Fundamentalism as we recognize in the modern American evangelical originated in the twentieth century. It is largely reactionary, an attempt to hold back the hands of time. Among the various factors leading to its development, the most recognizable is, of course, Darwinian evolution. This fundamentalism, while diverse in its criteria according to various factions—there are between five and twenty required fundamental articles of faith, depending on who you ask—is exceptionally vulnerable to exploitation: evolution, prohibition, communism, war and peace, medical research, and even cosmology are on the list of things that set these people off.
At its heart is a simple American principle,
freedom, that is utterly botched. If you look closely, you'll find a tacit argument reiterating itself over and over when fundamentalist Christianity has a problem with American society:
My freedom is violated as long as someone else's freedom is intact.
• Abortion: Don't agree with the principle? Don't have one.
• Gay rights: Don't like homosexuality? Don't have a gay relationship.
• Library books: Don't like a certain book? Don't read it.
This might seem obvious to some, or obviously cavalier to others, but it's a fairly simple notion that results in everyone getting to exercise their rights. But it is also unsatisfactory to the religious side of the arguments.
• Abortion: My right to free Christian conscience is violated if anyone can have an abortion.
• Gay rights: My right to free Christian conscience is violated if people can be gay.
• Library books: My right to free Christian conscience is violated if that author is not censored.
There are some considerations within that; should public funds, including taxes paid by Christians, be used for abortions, or to buy books for libraries? Well, okay, I can see that argument clearly enough, but, to the one, what about non-Christians? It took decades to make the point about obligatory prayer in public schools—i.e,
Should Christian children be obliged to recite another faith's prayer? In order to enforce this assertion of freedom, well, it's hard to describe. What would be the point of having a public library? I mean, if I can object to keeping the
Catholic Encyclopedia in a public library?
Or, to put it functionally: Okay, so no Darwin in the library (evolution). No
Heather Has Two Mommies (homosexuality). No
Boy's Life by Robert McCammon° (a character named “Demon”). No Starhawk (witchcraft). So, right. I can certainly imagine an atheist petitioning against all sorts of religiously-associated titles. At some point, this outlook on rights runs into a functional problem.
The underlying motif is one in which “equality” is defined as “supremacy”. And here, I might invoke the question of what equality equals for people. For the deprived classes, it is a step up. For the privileged classes, it is a step down. And that step down is what drives this sort of religious politic. Many evangelical fundamentalists consider equality a deprivation because they consider privilege a right.
We might consider the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, which held what should be its last opening ceremony this week. The construction site was vandalized, even torched at one point. A local judge tried to stall the opening with some procedural tactic to the point that the federal court had to tell him to knock it off. The whole point of the resistance was that Muslims had no right to build a mosque in town. For the record, though, local officials did stand up for the Center, and a neighboring church, after the arson at the construction site, opened its doors to the Muslim community and offered them a place to gather on Fridays. That is, the pushback was somewhat limited, and the public trust generally stood up for the First Amendment rights of Muslims in Murfreesboro.
Or we can look to what would be a funny situation in Louisiana, except that it's kind of depressing at the same time. The legislature passed, and Governor Jindal signed, a charter schools measure that would allow public funds to go to religious schools. And some of these schools are clearly political to the point of being insane. Dinosaurs and humans, liberalism as a tool of Satan, young-Earth creationism, and all that sort of thing. But the problem for folks in Louisiana arose when a Muslim school applied for and received charter authorization. One legislator who voted for the charter schools bill actually said that if she had known it would include Islam, she would have voted against it. No, really. It comes down to free religion, but only for Christans.
To bring this back to abortion and LACP: In deciding
Roe v. Wade, the Court refused to establish life at conception, noting that the history of philosophy and medicine had failed to answer the question:
Texas urges that, apart from the Fourteenth Amendment, life begins at conception and is present throughout pregnancy, and that, therefore, the State has a compelling interest in protecting that life from and after conception. We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man's knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer.
And this is the battleground. LACP is the insistence of one group that everyone else be obliged to its philosophical outlook, and the assertion is tied to religion in much the same manner as censorship, evolution, gay rights, and other issues:
The freedom of the Christian conscience is violated if it is not given privilege over others.
When it comes to tangible things, middle ground is available. But redemptive religion is a peculiar case in which everything else stacks up against the most valuable thing in existence, the eternal soul. One can construe, from the Christian Scriptures, that to leave one's neighbor in sin is to be complicit in sin. Thus, for the Christian, it can be argued—and many do—that to normalize homosexuality is to be complicit in the gay offense against God, or to accept abortion in society is to be complicit in the murder of an innocent “person”. Any potential offense against God's authority, dignity, or Will, can be argued in this form. And for this reason, there are some with whom no middle ground can be agreed upon.
Our Puritan heritage is persistent, but inconsistent. These days, we're arguing about “forcible”, “legitimate”, and “honest” rape when it comes to the abortion question, including the now infamous HR 3, which would have excluded statutory rape from abortions funded by Medicaid. Yet in 1875,
Lysander Spooner, in a rant apparently about alcohol prohibitions, noted:
The statute book of Massachusetts makes ten years the age at which a female child is supposed to have discretion enough to part with virtue. But the same statute book holds that no person, man or woman, of any age, or any degree of wisdom or experience, has discretion to be trusted to buy and drink a glass of spirits, on his or her own Judgement! What an illustration of the legislative wisdom of Massachusetts!
Ten years old?° At least we know what was important to our Puritan heritage in the nineteenth century.
More to the point, though, there is a reason abortion access advocates stand such a firm line. Legalized abortion on demand is not without societal benefits. Women's physical health has improved, as has their educational and economic standing in society, and as a result their mental health as well. Some might find the access advocates' arguments about putting women back in their places somewhat hyperbolic, but it is also a logical outcome of granting our Puritan streak free rein.
No standardized sex ed? No birth control for minors? And then there is this whole “personhood” thing that includes hormonal birth control and even intra-uterine devices as abortifacients. To the one, the most apparent solution is for women to just stop having sex with men, but this is impractical and would, over the long run, be unhealthy for women's mental health. The reason American advocates for abortion access fret about conservatives putting women back in their places—i.e., barefoot and pregnant—is that we keep seeing markers of it in society. In 2010, for instance,
Michael Reagan, a prominent conservative advocate and, yes, son of the former president, unloaded on Michelle Obama:
If mothers would once again start teaching their daughters the time-honored role of family chef, and fathers would make sure that their wives are honored and cherished for making the kitchen one of their principal domains, we’d be a lot better off.
Instead we have a First Lady who sees her role as First Mother not only to instruct us on what we victuals we should eat, but warns us that the menu at the local fast food emporium is the diet from Hell.
She goes so far as to dig up patches of the White House lawn, formerly the site of the so-called Easter egg hunts, and plant the seeds of what she tells us are the staples of a healthy diet — a diet regimen in the White House kitchens one doubts includes whatever puny edibles grown on the lawn of the Executive mansion.
If she and her fellow radical feminists would devote more time to praising and defending the produce farmers and retailers bring us, and less time playing the role as diet dictators, meals would be family celebrations instead of burdensome chores for the moms who cook them.
Moreover, giving Mom a day off from cooking dinner by a making a family trip to the nearest hamburger joint would be seen as a gift to her rather than one of the mortal sins in an imaginary list of dietary commandments.
Their menu may be fattening, and viewed as one of the Lord’s practical jokes on his children by making such fare lip-smacking good, but enjoying it is not a flagrant violation of the dietary Ten Commandments. Slathered with mustard and ketchup it’s just plain tasty — fattening but tasty.
A happy home is one in which moms teach their daughters how to cook tasty meals for their future families and dads teach their sons that one of their roles in family life is drying the dishes and otherwise doing chores around the house to lighten Mom’s burdens.
Finally, women should understand and act on the time-honored truth that the fastest route to a man’s heart is through his stomach, and not always through the drive-in window at the nearest fast-food restaurant. That’s one way we can begin to put the family — and America — back together.
One might be given to think Mr. Reagan was writing satire, but no, he wasn't.
Or Christine O'Donnell, the Tea Party darling who failed to win her 2010 senate bid; she has before expressed that a woman's role is to serve her husband.
Or our neighbor
Madanthonywayne, who thinks liberal criticism of such outlooks “is a perfect example of liberal arrogance”. This isn't a lunatic fringe in any statistical sense.
Todd Akin's remark about how a woman's body can actively prevent pregnancy resulting from a “legitimate” rape? That is a theory espoused by a doctor who headed the National Right to Life Committee, the oldest anti-abortion organization in the U.S.
The American debate about abortion might well seem bizarre to our international neighbors; I assure you it seems bizarre to many Americans. We're a country less than twenty years removed from the last abolition of sexual intercourse as a spousal privilege; it was 1993 when North Carolina became the last state to strike spousal exemption from its rape statutes. We are, as a society, severely neurotic about sex, sexuality, and sexual intercourse.
Of course, many Americans reject psychology and the idea of neuroses. That is to say, without such ideas, one has no reason to consider the composite sum of their outlook. One can oppose various advancements of women's rights and, as individual issues, assert some notion of logic; at no point, though, are they obliged to stop and look at the whole of what they are doing.
But for those who accept that there is a valid notion of psychology, and that human behavior can be viewed in thematic contexts, it's horrifying to consider what will happen to women if these issues come to fruition.
In the end, I think what makes the American abortion debate seem so strange is its peculiar boundaries and definition. It is difficult for many people on my side of the argument to
not tie the question to a raft of other issues of consequence pertaining to sex and sexuality. For the other side, there is the strong persuasion of the eternal soul, and even those few non-religious folks who stand with the anti-abortion crowd cling to the LACP assertion like an article of faith. If it seems there is no middle ground, it is because that is how the issue is defined, and redefining it is not a task easily undertaken, to speak nothing of achieved.
In that sense of redefinition, though, remember that the reason abortion access advocates don't like the term, “pro-abortion”, is that few, if any, actually like the idea of abortion. But the better way to reduce the number of abortions is to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies. Redefining the abortion debate in this context would also require major concessions from conservatives on other issues of consequence pertaining to sex and sexuality—namely sex education and birth control access. Otherwise, we're arguing over legislative goals that, taken in sum, degrade women's status in society.
Thus, I do think the abortion policy you describe is somewhat restrictive, unless of course I'm simply missing some aspect of it. But it is also possible that the policy is sufficient if the culture is not so stunted in its address of these issues. After all, I'm looking at it from a context eyeball-deep in the neurotic spasm otherwise known as the American political debate.
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Notes:
° Boy's Life by Robert McCammon — An excellent novel circa 1991 that, for me, marks the end of the latter Golden Age of Horror that began with Stephen King's Carrie in 1974 and reached its height in the middle of the 1980s. In truth, the proper McCammon title to use for this example is Demon Walk, which also includes a character named “Demon”. In the 1990s, before I moved back to Seattle, a parent in Salem, Oregon, objected to Demon Walk in the school libraries because the title and the presence of a character named “Demon” violated her rights as a Christian parent. It wasn't enough that she simply tell her kids to not check the book out; she wanted it banned from the shelves. In other words, her First Amendment rights as a Christian were violated as long as Robert McCammon's First Amendment rights as an author remained intact.
° Ten years old? — One counterpoint I have encountered before is that this somehow makes sense compared to lifespan and childbearing, though I consider that argument downright silly; menarche has been moving younger as time passes in the U.S.
Works Cited:
Blackmun, J. Harry. “Opinion of the Court”. Roe v. Wade. January 22,
1973. Law.Cornell.edu. November 21, 2012. http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0410_0113_ZO.html
Spooner, Lysander. Vices Are Not Crimes: A Moral Vindication of Liberty. 1875. LysanderSpooner.org. November 21, 2012. http://lysanderspooner.org/node/46
Reagan, Michael. “Kitchen is not a Dirty Word”. The Cagle Post. December 17, 2010. Cagle.com. November 21, 2012. http://www.cagle.com/2010/12/kitchen-is-not-a-dirty-word/
