“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m
looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” So said
Joan Didion. I recently had a conversation about abortion, and while I said I
was prochoice, I became conscious of a kind of paleness of conviction. Why was
I prochoice? Why did I feel a tinge of guilt about admitting to be so? I
realized that although I had stated an opinion, I couldn’t articulate satisfactory
reasons for that opinion. Reasons, that is, beyond the usual rhetorical go-to.
Feminism tells me that as a woman I have a right to the processes of my body,
but the argument somehow feels a bit thin. This logic actually heaves more
responsibility onto the mother of a child. Fatherhood begins to pale in
comparison to the importance of childbearing motherhood. Men are pushed to one
side, having little of importance to say unless they too act to shore up the battle
line of Woman’s Right to Choose: get in line! You’re with us or against us! And
yet, prolife feels immediately wrong to me. But I need reasons. I need a why. I need to be certain.
Prochoice most often rests its laurels on exactly what the moniker suggests—the right to choose. I am for choosing! This amusingly
right-wing maneuver, this upholding of FREEDOM TO X, grounds itself with the
breezily simple premise of “my body my choice.” Positive freedoms (freedom to rather than freedom from) are usually invoked by libertarians
and conservatives as constitutional rights of the individual. Prochoicers, avid
feminists or not, have good reason to ground the argument in My Body Land:
after all, the mother bears the child, not the father. Men may express
opinions, so this story goes, but the buck stops with the woman: her body her
choice. No Republican WASPs beyond this point! Get out of the bedroom etc.
I always loved this argument because through it I was
automatically a PIP (a Politically Important Person i.e. a woman). I was
automatically entitled, then, to an opinion as a person politically-important-in-itself.
As a woman, I’ve actually very little to do reading- and thinking-wise since
being a woman makes my body “always already political” as any good academic
person will offer. I quickly realized that anyone disagreeing with me on the
subject of abortion either: does not actually have a right to disagree with me
unless they have the physiological capacity to birth a child; secretly hates
women pathologically; is just not culturally up to snuff; hasn’t read as many
Slate articles as I have; is either religious or ignorant (the two are
certainly not mutually exclusive); is a tragically misinformed (probably
traumatized) exile of the sisterhood in dire need of a crash course on her
cultural subordination and marginalization of which she was somehow blissfully
ignorant; or is just an old person, and thus excused for their inevitable
bigotry and general irrelevance.
Now I would maintain that many of these hyperbolic cartoons do
proliferate (pun intended) in the prolife camp. In fact, given the choice (cf.
previous parenthetical) between spending time on either side of the abortion
fence just for drinks and mingling, I’m not sure I’d ever rub elbows with
prolifers—moralizing from the religious right would seem to be inevitable (It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia dramatized
the difference beautifully as between a raging feminist and a religious whacko (as
if one was stuck between a rock and a bat shit sandwich)).
All too often prolifers are as content with the gut reaction
answer as prochoicers. Reasoning for the former rests on an unambiguous
observation that we’re dealing with a life, and also that that life is sacred, vulnerable,
threatened, and thus deserves to be protected. Now prochoicers can cartoonize
prolifers until kingdom (doesn’t) come, but the my-body-prochoicers will always
have to grapple with the eventuality that the argument falls rather impotently
back in on itself. Tasty candy without calories, to scream Woman’s Right gets
one exactly nowhere because the whole impetus behind the abortion procedure is
that it isn’t your body. It’s another body, and one that for any
number of reasons just needs to not be in your body anymore. If it was just one
body, there would be no problem, thus why the my-body-my-choice argument is so
tempting for the political Left: it erases the painful difficulty of a very
uneasy responsibility for all thinking adults (not just women). As of 2015, 38
states have fetal homicide laws, 23 of which apply to the earliest stages of
pregnancy. Is this unreasonable? I’m not sure.
Thus many painful rhetorical and moral difficulties ensue. The
difficulty for any reasonably independent thinker is one of ideology: both
camps are soaked through. Enlightened persons valuing women as independent,
intelligent equals go prochoice. Persons with a steady moral compass valuing
human life from conception to fruition steer prolife. Moral condescension
infects both camps.
But it is a moral question, isn’t it. We need to decide if
morality should be foundational or fruitional. Should morality come from high
ideals for which we strive, or should we determine ethics as we go as a kind of
tool for adjusting to the everyday travails of living. Both of our camps depend
on vocabularies that are simply too difficult to remain coherent: where really
does one body end and another begin? Where does an individual life begin?
Words, vocabularies, rhetoric will never exhaust the “endless forms most
beautiful and most wonderful” that constitute the processes of life in all its
difficulty, wonder, and weirdness. But we need an answer for abortion, don’t
we? Moral idealism fails us because it can never address the gorgeously
inconvenient flux that is our ethical battleground of the everyday. Our
problems of today are just that: of today. They are not all of yesterday, nor
with they all be with us tomorrow.
Abortion now divides the American political landscape. It
seems to be an issue irreconcilable, making de facto enemies and allies; an
issue of freedom and of life, perhaps worthy of war (cultural or otherwise).
But imagine that the other side actually has a legitimate point. We have, then,
competing definitions of good. There’s a kind of tragedy here. Ethics is
supposed to resolve clashes among moral claims, not create them. William James
wrote that “there is no such thing possible as an ethical philosophy
dogmatically made up in advance.” People scream loudest when they are least
certain of being right (if certain, you only have to whisper). No one is
certain down to the very marrow with abortion. What if the mother is dying?
What if the father wants to keep the child, and the mother does not? What if
the child will be deformed, and can expect little beyond a life of alienation
and pain? What if the mother is herself a child, and will later regret an
abortion that seems convenient only for the present? Sidney Hook wrote about
the tragedy of uncertainty:
I mean by the tragic sense a very
simple thing which is rooted in the very nature of the moral experience and the
phenomenon of moral choice. Every genuine experience of moral doubt and
perplexity in which we ask: “What should I do?” takes place in a situation
where good conflicts with good....No matter how we resolve the opposition some
good will be sacrificed, some interest, whose immediate craving for
satisfaction may be every whit as intense and authentic as its fellows, will be
modified, frustrated or even suppressed.
The choice may be easy, or it may be difficult—but it cannot
be certain. Hook was writing about the philosophy of pragmatism, a philosophy
which dismisses platonic idealisms (the Good, Truth, Justice, Nature, etc.).
Philosophy as the search for truth becomes the search for adjustment, an
adjustment for living in a world of many values and many definitions of what
the business of living should be. “Truth is made,”
William James wrote, “just as health, wealth, and strength are made, in the
course of experience.”
Practically speaking, I see two possible worlds here: a nation
where abortion is condoned, and one where it is sanctioned. Putting aside
politics and high morality, we look at actual life of the everyday. To condemn
abortion may well reinforce our reverence for human life. We would be surer of
where we stand, and the responsibility for fetal life would be handled with a
degree of honesty and righteousness not found in legal or political systems
today. However, one reality will not change: women and girls will still seek
abortion. It will be unregulated and it will be dangerous, but abortion will
never be an option unsought. And where abortion may have saved a mother from a
difficult pregnancy, there will be no legal recourse for a responsible doctor.
Rape victims will either have unwanted children, or pursue more dangerous
recourse. Women neither psychologically, emotionally, financially, nor perhaps even physically equipped for motherhood will be unduly tested--perhaps beyond reasonable capacity. Foster care will be further burdened, and young people
beginning to climb out of poverty will simply sink back down. Parental planning
will become a moral pamphlet with little to offer someone who did not plan to
get raped, to have their life endangered by unforeseen complications, or who
otherwise simply cannot be a responsible parent.
Permitting abortion is not without risk. The creeping in of a
kind of casual regard to a very uncasual procedure is certainly possible. But I
do not think it probable. Anyone even vaguely familiar with abortion seldom
takes the procedure lightly. To create conditions where women who are either
unwilling or unable to become a parent, or else are endangered by a pregnancy—to
create conditions where these women are obligated to “go through with it” and
take those consequences—that is a far riskier, uglier reality. If women are given
the choice to abort difficult or unwanted pregnancies, perhaps every child born
would be wanted. But perhaps not.
This is a better not best philosophy. Anyone thinking the
issue simple has simplified it in order to feel certain about it. We lost
certainty long ago. I come reluctantly back to prochoice, with less certainty
but somehow also with more resolve. I know more now why I know not. Is this tragic
as Sidney Hook writes? Surely we’ll continue to adjust, hopefully not without
more thinking and even a little bit of play:
I have perhaps overstressed the
sense of the tragic in human life in an effort to compensate for the distortions
to which pragmatism has been subject. There is more in life than the sense of
the tragic. There is laughter and joy and the sustaining discipline of work.
There are other dimensions of experience besides the moral. There is art and
science and religion. There are other uses for intelligence besides the
resolution of human difficulties. There is intellectual play and adventure. But
until men become Gods—which they never will be—they will live with the sense of
the tragic in their hearts as they go in quest for wisdom. Pragmatism, as I
interpret it, is the theory and practice of enlarging human freedom in a
precarious and tragic world by the arts of intelligent social control. It may
be a lost cause. I do not know of a better one. And it may not be lost if we
can summon the courage and intelligence to support our faith in freedom—and
enjoy the blessings of a little luck.
