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livSo a brave and much-admired gynaecologist was murdered in America, and lots of people are upset and frightened by this attack. May Dr Tiller rest in peace, and may all of you who are grieving or in shock find the best comfort you can.
The internet being what it is, several people are responding to Dr Tiller's death by rehashing the abortion debate. Some of it is the absolute usual stuff, with people parotting the same old talking points from the two camps (though the "pro-life" side are perhaps slightly more embarrassed and subdued than usual after the atrocity perpetrated in their name). And feminists getting into long, passionate arguments with people basically on their side about whether any desire to reduce unwanted pregnancy is an attack on women's autonomy and right to choose.
But because the late Dr Tiller specialized in "late-term" abortions, the pro-choice voices are focusing more than usual on the reasons why abortions of fully developed foetuses are sometimes necessary. There's a desire to put a human face on the debate by retelling stories of women who had to have late-term abortions. And, well, these stories follow a certain format or even style, which is not surprising due to the way that the internet magnifies and reflects things back. The model is that we have a couple who are joyfully waiting for the birth of a beloved and wanted child, and go for a scan at the six month point and suddenly find out that something has gone horribly wrong, so the only possible option is to have an abortion, and everybody is devastated, but deeply grateful for the existence of doctors like Tiller for averting an even greater tragedy.
I can see that the point is to present cases where the mother who chooses abortion is as sympathetic as she could possibly be, and counteract the pro-life propaganda against selfish, promiscuous, careless women who kill their babies on a whim. Fair enough as a rhetorical tactic, but I'm a little worried about what traits are needed to make a woman sympathetic. She has to be married, she has to be a potentially ideal mother, and it helps a lot if she's middle class and respectable. I'd like to hear some stories about women who are in unconventional relationships or none, or who have perhaps at some stage expressed the slightest possible doubt about whether they really truly want a baby, or who maybe do have some worries about whether they can afford to raise a child. After all, if the point of the rhetoric is that these late term abortions are necessary to save women's lives, then surely it shouldn't matter how saintly the women in question are. Medical necessity is necessity, emergency treatment in a life-threatening situation shouldn't be a reward for living up to the romanticized ideal of Motherhood.
The other thing that's really, really bugging me is the "something has gone horribly wrong" part of this style of story. The much loved and wanted baby turns out to have a congenital defect, so all of a sudden it's no longer a loved and wanted baby, it's a terrible tragedy. The only possibly humane thing to do is to kill it as quickly as possible so that it doesn't have to suffer. In some of the stories, the baby is already dead or obviously non-viable. In others, the baby has spina bifida or a hole in the heart or bone problems or an unspecified "genetic condition". There are heart-string tugging descriptions of how the baby if brought to term would need massive surgery, or be in terrible pain, or be born with cancer, or have a learning disability, or would never learn to walk, or would be... (and this is an actual example from one of the "my heartbreaking late term abortion" stories I've read) incontinent. And all these things are considered to be equivalent to the baby developing without lungs or a brain.
The thing is, there are people I love who are in a lot of pain, or needed significant surgery at some point in their life, or have cancer, or need expensive medical treatment or long-term care. And I'm basically too upset to even talk about how a baby which is predicted to be unable to walk or toilet herself absolutely must be killed right now, otherwise the parents and doctors are evil cruel monsters for bringing such a tragedy into the world. And yes, I understand that the pro-choice movement puts a lot of weight on arguing that a foetus is not a person. But this kind of rhetoric about the kind of babies that absolutely must be aborted no matter what hurts real people who are currently alive.
Note I'm not proposing that anyone should be forced to carry to term a baby she doesn't want. Please don't accuse me of taking that position! I'm saying that the people who are arguing so passionately in favour of abortion rights should select their arguments with care. Sometimes the pro-life side are accused of only caring about the life of pure innocent little unborn babies, but not actual living humans (and that accusation is certainly true in the case of the evil man who murdered Dr Tiller, and those extremists who encouraged him and are celebrating his action.) But at this stage in the debate, it's coming across as if some of the pro-choice side only care about the rights and autonomy of women who are young and healthy and able-bodied and neurotypical and preferably pretty and socially valued (and I have this sinking feeling that pretty is really a figleaf for "white, middle-class and sexually conservative").
Pretty much the only people I've seen addressing this issue are the wonderful Kay Olson and Wheelchair dancer. And that only in comments buried deep in a blog discussion. I want to add my voice to theirs, with a top level post, not that I have all that much traffic or prominence.
PS: I'm going to be pretty harsh about deleting comments that don't acknowledge people with disabilities as people. If you can't talk about people, not "tragedies" or "burdens" or "medical costs", please don't talk to me about this topic at all. And I don't particularly want to hear your personal views on the abortion debate in general either, because that's strongly missing the point of what I'm trying to say.
The internet being what it is, several people are responding to Dr Tiller's death by rehashing the abortion debate. Some of it is the absolute usual stuff, with people parotting the same old talking points from the two camps (though the "pro-life" side are perhaps slightly more embarrassed and subdued than usual after the atrocity perpetrated in their name). And feminists getting into long, passionate arguments with people basically on their side about whether any desire to reduce unwanted pregnancy is an attack on women's autonomy and right to choose.
But because the late Dr Tiller specialized in "late-term" abortions, the pro-choice voices are focusing more than usual on the reasons why abortions of fully developed foetuses are sometimes necessary. There's a desire to put a human face on the debate by retelling stories of women who had to have late-term abortions. And, well, these stories follow a certain format or even style, which is not surprising due to the way that the internet magnifies and reflects things back. The model is that we have a couple who are joyfully waiting for the birth of a beloved and wanted child, and go for a scan at the six month point and suddenly find out that something has gone horribly wrong, so the only possible option is to have an abortion, and everybody is devastated, but deeply grateful for the existence of doctors like Tiller for averting an even greater tragedy.
I can see that the point is to present cases where the mother who chooses abortion is as sympathetic as she could possibly be, and counteract the pro-life propaganda against selfish, promiscuous, careless women who kill their babies on a whim. Fair enough as a rhetorical tactic, but I'm a little worried about what traits are needed to make a woman sympathetic. She has to be married, she has to be a potentially ideal mother, and it helps a lot if she's middle class and respectable. I'd like to hear some stories about women who are in unconventional relationships or none, or who have perhaps at some stage expressed the slightest possible doubt about whether they really truly want a baby, or who maybe do have some worries about whether they can afford to raise a child. After all, if the point of the rhetoric is that these late term abortions are necessary to save women's lives, then surely it shouldn't matter how saintly the women in question are. Medical necessity is necessity, emergency treatment in a life-threatening situation shouldn't be a reward for living up to the romanticized ideal of Motherhood.
The other thing that's really, really bugging me is the "something has gone horribly wrong" part of this style of story. The much loved and wanted baby turns out to have a congenital defect, so all of a sudden it's no longer a loved and wanted baby, it's a terrible tragedy. The only possibly humane thing to do is to kill it as quickly as possible so that it doesn't have to suffer. In some of the stories, the baby is already dead or obviously non-viable. In others, the baby has spina bifida or a hole in the heart or bone problems or an unspecified "genetic condition". There are heart-string tugging descriptions of how the baby if brought to term would need massive surgery, or be in terrible pain, or be born with cancer, or have a learning disability, or would never learn to walk, or would be... (and this is an actual example from one of the "my heartbreaking late term abortion" stories I've read) incontinent. And all these things are considered to be equivalent to the baby developing without lungs or a brain.
The thing is, there are people I love who are in a lot of pain, or needed significant surgery at some point in their life, or have cancer, or need expensive medical treatment or long-term care. And I'm basically too upset to even talk about how a baby which is predicted to be unable to walk or toilet herself absolutely must be killed right now, otherwise the parents and doctors are evil cruel monsters for bringing such a tragedy into the world. And yes, I understand that the pro-choice movement puts a lot of weight on arguing that a foetus is not a person. But this kind of rhetoric about the kind of babies that absolutely must be aborted no matter what hurts real people who are currently alive.
Note I'm not proposing that anyone should be forced to carry to term a baby she doesn't want. Please don't accuse me of taking that position! I'm saying that the people who are arguing so passionately in favour of abortion rights should select their arguments with care. Sometimes the pro-life side are accused of only caring about the life of pure innocent little unborn babies, but not actual living humans (and that accusation is certainly true in the case of the evil man who murdered Dr Tiller, and those extremists who encouraged him and are celebrating his action.) But at this stage in the debate, it's coming across as if some of the pro-choice side only care about the rights and autonomy of women who are young and healthy and able-bodied and neurotypical and preferably pretty and socially valued (and I have this sinking feeling that pretty is really a figleaf for "white, middle-class and sexually conservative").
Pretty much the only people I've seen addressing this issue are the wonderful Kay Olson and Wheelchair dancer. And that only in comments buried deep in a blog discussion. I want to add my voice to theirs, with a top level post, not that I have all that much traffic or prominence.
PS: I'm going to be pretty harsh about deleting comments that don't acknowledge people with disabilities as people. If you can't talk about people, not "tragedies" or "burdens" or "medical costs", please don't talk to me about this topic at all. And I don't particularly want to hear your personal views on the abortion debate in general either, because that's strongly missing the point of what I'm trying to say.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-08 08:43 pm (UTC)Well, the problem with "beyond reason" is that they're not going to give up on their own; defeat happens in somebody's brain, and they're using a cultural template that treats any result as a reason to try harder. One of the things I very much hope is not the case is that the US is headed at an equivalent of the 30 Year's War, but I wouldn't take any bets on this at all.
The "condemn them to a life of suffering" argument, well, I think that has three addressable parts.
One is the usual thinking-by-types failure; to be disabled (which is being used as a type label) is to suffer, and if you don't believe that suffering is virtuous (which fewer and fewer people have since effective analgesics became available...), you get a pattern where adding disabled people to the world is an undiluted cruelty, and to commit an undiluted cruelty would obviously make you a bad person, and avoiding being a bad person is good, so it's OK to abort a disabled/damaged fetus because that partakes of the good of not being a bad person. I think the fix for this one as a failure of understanding is to pound on the type-based thinking as an error; "disabled" is a label for being unusually dependent on others in some respect, and there's a lot of room for finding examples of "unusually dependent on others" that are not described as disabilities as well as all the standard examples of how people are a population, not instances of a type.
Two is that "evil to bring a disabled child into the world" conflates potential with actual; potential is a bet with the future, which is both unknowable and where all harm lies. There's some rhetorical room for pushing on "this is a person" versus "this might be a person, but the risk is great and the odds are bad", since if you take this argument out of a human reproductive context it's familiar to everybody, since it's the standard set of questions about evaluating future risk. That approach also allows for treating existing disabled people as successes, because they got a better result out of their future than they might have.
Three is the cystic fibrosis thought experiment. An otherwise completely normal and healthy fetus is identified by pre-natal diagnosis (presumably amniocentesis) to have cystic fibrosis.
Now, if you get treatment, your current life expectancy with cystic fibrosis is somewhere in the vicinity of 40, so about half the population life expectancy for Anglo NorAm. That's increased; in the 1970s, the life expectancy for a cystic fibrosis sufferer was 14. The treatment options may or may not continue to get better. (It might take adult somatic cell gene therapy to get much better, for instance, and that might turn out to be really hard to do in a non-lethal way. Or it might not; there is no knowing which right now.)
Having the disease doesn't affect your brain or your ability to function socially or otherwise be a person; it'll present you with a lot of health challenges, some of which are activity constraints, and the very high probability of a protracted and painful death.
The thought experiment comes in by postulating "ok, you decided to have the baby and rear the child; at the age of 15, they (having really hit the age of reason and figured out that the future is real) ask you why, when you knew they would be such a long time dying, you elected to bring them into the world?"
There are an awful lot of possible answers to that; there are people who can honestly reply "but I wouldn't have", people who can honestly reply "you are as God made you, and His reasons are good reasons, even if we do not understand them", and a whole lot of other people who have different answers.
From a rhetorical standpoint, though, having the hypothetical kid ask the question might make it easier to stay out of axiomatic abstractions that there is a single correct response to the category of question. (Especially if someone points out that everybody dies, and not necessarily well. How is this different from having a normal child?) Getting off the axioms and getting some combination of thought and empathy in play is pretty much required to get to a place where the answers aren't derived from identity issues.
One of the worst parts of all this as an identity is the specific type of "good person", and identifying with that type; it makes it very difficult to suggest that someone might not have chosen to do the best thing, or that there isn't one best thing that every good person would choose to do.
The flipped version, the "total depravity" theology that says everyone is a bad person and is incapable of being good on their own, is not of the character of an improvement. And it's generally speaking one of those two you're dealing with as the default anywhere the public morality is strongly informed by Protestant Christianity. It makes it very tough to get people to hear things in terms of choice and risk and the decision being a function of judgment about realizable possibility rather a function of the amount of goodness. (And the start of this, the late term abortion stories you were criticizing on grounds of framing, are *certainly* in the frame of amount of goodness.)