UNDERSTANDING PRO-LIFE - A LOGITICIAN'S APPROACH

The right of a fetus to live is more important the the right of a woman to choose.


I have always been more sympathetic to the pro-choice perspective than many of my peers. I have always felt that, beneath the controversy, invective, hypocrisy and outright mendacity that inevitably accompanies every occasion for an honest, America, conversation--beneath all of it, the argument is possessed of a sound operating logic, beautiful like a purring Detroit engine.

To illustrate what I mean, I spent a couple of hours once working through the formal logic of the pro-life argument with the most rigorous epistemic practices I picked up in college. generations of thought were given to modu ponens, if-and-only-ifs and what is "necessary and sufficient." A few possible constructions came out of it. My proofs were lean, clean and watertight. Then I realized I had written something nobody would ever read.

In every construction, it all winds up not mattering much how you feel about public health or women's rights, the bread-and-butter pro-choice argument follows logically from a set of true premises and a normative value.

A normative value differs from other premises because it is not conventionally "true" or "untrue." Instead, they describe what ought to be and how to assign value. It is an epistemic ground-floor. Any two people presented with the same facts who hold different normative values can reasonably arrive at opposite conclusions. For example, the premise "life begins at conception," may sound like a statement of fact (something that could be empirically disproven). However, upon closer examination, it becomes clear that such a claim is purely philosophical; it does not require evidential support (i.e. "your baby has fingertips at 8 weeks"), nor does it appeal to an absolute Truth (i.e. "your baby has a soul"). At what point you consider "life" to begin depends entirely on which definition or parameters of life ought to be.

It should be altogether clear (even without reviewing my extensive legwork) that if you believe that life begins at conception, you must believe that abortion is a form of murder. What I urge my friends to consider is that if you believe murder is greatly immoral, you must have a moral responsibility to object to it. It is no big leap to sugegst that you even have a moral responsibility to prevent it, just as you would prevent a neighbor from being slain by a burglar if you had a safe opportunity.

It is unreasonable to expect pro-lifers to stand by and do nothing.


So, there. There is an elegance to the basic pro-life argument that I admire. And yet, conservatives are determined to capitulate to the middle and make things more complicated than they need to be, beyond all reach or reason. Consider that anti-abortion legislation (surprisingly the most consistent legislative goal of a Republican party overwhelmingly elected in 2010 on the promise that they would focus on "jobs, jobs, jobs,") traditionally carries language for exemptions in the cases of rape, incest and when the pregnancy threatens the life of the mother. Moreover, far from being simple capitulations to liberals, these exemptions are actually popular among conservatives. How does this fit into the watertight pro-life argument?


In simple terms, it doesn't. 


What does the consent of the mother, her relationship to the father, or her chances of survival have to do with the premise, "life begins at conception?" Does being raped somewhat change the beginning of the life of a fetus? If you saw a raped woman who chose to bear and raise her progeny, would you tell her that her "rape baby" is not as alive as the other children? Do you tell her that, since it wasn't her fault, your "compassionate" laws allows her to kill the kid if she wants? Why not? I thought abortion was murder!

The only opening availible is that, hey, sometimes murder is okay.

To get to the bottom of this puzzle, I had to radically extend the scope of the pro-choice arguments I drafted so neatly before. Risk to the life of the mother was easy enough to explain. Incorporating premises linking moral responsibility, moral authority and consent was a real challenge. After you define and defend limiting principles for "consent" and grapple with the fact that moral responsibility has just becomes a matter of degree, not a matter of definition, you still have to explain that making a woman carry her rapist's child is a worse crime than murder in order to justify an exemption. The project became technically fussy and vulnerable to counter-arguments in ways it originally was not. It becomes pretty clear, also, that pro-life has a lot more to do with slut-shamming than it likes to admit.

Facts had to be faced: the argument against abortion is much stronger without the rape exemption. It isn't that surprising: nothing makes an prohibition harder to justify than adding the word "unless."

Of course, the rape exception was a piece of cake compared to the incest one. Despite how obvious it seems to Americans today—all of us products of contemporary Western society—it is nearly impossible to explain why we should all care if family members get it on. “It just seems icky,” is somewhat lacking in intellectual seriousness.

The point of all this is that when I read the latest news story about some ignorant mutant from Missouri or some bill written by Republican VP candidate Paul Ryan, I need to remind myself that my ideological opponents are not evil. Even when they are trying to overturn Roe v. Wade, a decision I completely agree with, they are no doing an evil deed. Even when they are trying to abolish rape exemptions, they are not doing an evil deed. Even when they are being stupid, narrow-minded, cynical or cowardly, they are not evil. Voter suppression is evil. Cutting social programs while building more nukes is evil. Whether or not to save hypothetical lives is just a difference of opinion.

Let's keep things in perspective.