The Atlantic - Latest Comments in On Playing Your Position.

Re: On Playing Your Position.

adamnvillani — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 16:01:30 -0000

My response is that the difference is between whether someone is naturally keeping another person alive vs. whether it would require artificial intervention to keep the other person alive. In the case of abortion, it is artificial intervention that causes death.

Re: On Playing Your Position.

BreakerBaker — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 14:50:46 -0000

Jen R,

You’re right, the real concession for pro-lifers is in accepting that the procedure should be allowed under any circumstances. My feeling is, that once that understanding is established, once the pro-lifers have made that significant (and rather reasonable) public concession, the next clear step in reaffirming their principled and reasonable opposition to the procedure in issues of nonessential choice, is in the acceptance that they must also adopt a perspective of reasonable, responsible sex ed. (to include contraception). Mind you, I think this is where they should be already, and, as you point out, many of them already are. But I do believe that by embracing health exceptions, sex ed., and contraception in an open way, the pro-life community would be making three significant good faith concessions to the choice community. What choice advocates would do in response, whether they would view these concessions with suspicion or as a genuine attempt to find a way forward, I don’t know.

Re: On Playing Your Position.

Jen R — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 11:25:50 -0000

This will mean granting more victories to choice advocates by way of accepting, even embracing the need for something like comprehensive sex education (availability of contraception goes along with that, I think)

This idea that accepting contraception would be giving in to pro-choicers is a common one, and it drives me nuts. It shouldn't be a compromise for pro-lifers to support contraception and sex ed. For one thing, it just seems like an obvious practical way to reduce the demand for abortion. (I'm aware of the argument that using contraception leads to abortion due to the "contraceptive mentality", but it's weak and strikes me as more of a rationalization for an existing anti-contraception stand rather than a position anyone would come to from an objective look at the evidence.) For another, most pro-lifers also are pro-contraception. The National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association found that 80% of self-identified pro-lifers say that women should have access to contraception, and 77% support government funding for it.

The anti-contraception forces just have a stranglehold on most of the organizations.

Not that you're wrong about the reality on the ground -- like I said, the anti-contraception forces have totally disproportionate control over one side of the debate. There really needs to be a coup.

Re: On Playing Your Position.

Jen R — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 11:14:37 -0000

I understand, and I appreciate it.

Re: On Playing Your Position.

BreakerBaker — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 11:12:11 -0000

I hope it's clear that the double use of "so-called" was an editorial mistake, and not some sort of slight, Freudian or otherwise.

Re: On Playing Your Position.

lebecka — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 09:59:06 -0000

obama is the only politician I have seen in my lifetime that I think has the remotest possibility of pulling off this miracle.

Re: On Playing Your Position.

BreakerBaker — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 08:27:53 -0000

Not to reject the idea that sexism is a component of a lot of these conversations, I think it’s probably important to acknowledge that so-called women who have so-called “serial abortions” do exist, and that their existence is actually counterproductive for the advocates of choice. An argument in favor of a person’s ability to make a choice is an implicit argument in favor of that person’s capacity to make that choice responsibly. While I do not favor imposing a numeric limit, I do acknowledge that a woman who accidentally gets pregnant multiple times through consensual sex and who ends each of those pregnancies in an abortion likely is not approaching the various choices that lead to the eventual choice to have an abortion in a reasonable, responsible manner. Whether or not I believe such things should be written into law, I do believe the availability of an abortion should not be viewed or treated as a sort of post factum form of contraception. And while I do not think it’s necessarily the moral obligation of choice advocates to condemn such behavior, it’s probably fair to say that it would behoove them to acknowledge that such things do happen and that they probably shouldn’t. That is to say, rather than coming to the defense of acting irresponsibly, as Andrew's reader did.

Re: On Playing Your Position.

BreakerBaker — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 07:49:04 -0000

And this is where common ground is going to come from, I think. And it’s why I think the president has been talking for so long about how everybody can agree on the need to reduce unwanted pregnancies. Sooner or later, the more vociferous members of the pro-life movement are going to begin to acknowledge that they’ve lost the argument with regard to whether or not abortions are ever made available to women, that they’ve indeed lost that argument even within the hearts and minds of most of the faithful. Once they accept that battle lost, they’re going to begin to understand (I imagine many of them have already begun to understand this privately) the need to reframe their argument in a reasonable way. This will mean granting more victories to choice advocates by way of accepting, even embracing the need for something like comprehensive sex education (availability of contraception goes along with that, I think), but for their compromises they will reasonably expect some kind of compromise from the choice community by way of imposing some form of restrictions to choice. I may be wrong, but I tend to think that’s the natural progression of where this dialogue goes if the more reasonable, moderates that make up the majority of the pro-life persuasion can begin to have their voices heard in any meaningful way. The question is what sorts of concessions the more reasonable, moderates who are the majority of the choice persuasion will be willing or able to grant when/if that time comes. With these sorts of debates, that seem too much like wars, it’s so difficult for hardliners on either side to be trusting enough to make the first move towards reconciliation. If Obama is able to move people on either side of this and empower the reasonable majority of both, I think it will be an amazing feat.

Re: On Playing Your Position.

Ta-Nehisi Coates — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 23:45:42 -0000

Right, though I very specifically declined to write "men should stay out of the abortion debate." There's a lot of "I" in this post, and very little "We" or "You." I did that on purpose.

Re: On Playing Your Position.

BreakerBaker — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 22:38:49 -0000

Deborah,

Yeah, I think people who deny the necessity of an abortion in examples of ectopic pregnancies do not qualify as “reasonable pro-lifers.” I tend to believe the opinion of the majority of pro-lifers is that a hopeless pregnancy that could very easily result in the death of the mother should be terminated. Obviously, there are unreasonable pro-lifers out there. My guess is that most abortion rights opponents (even many of those I would characterize as being generally unreasonable), if they were to be intellectually honest, would admit that they believe in a health exception (even if it’s a very strict one) that would include ectopic pregnancies as well as various severe genetic or developmental abnormalities. The challenge for them is accepting a health exception that will show compassion and consideration to the woman’s safety without being too open to interpretation. Most of them would likely object to a mental or emotional health exemption.

My personal feeling is that people are, on average far more receptive to accepting those abortions performed out of medical necessity than they are to those that would qualify more as, let’s say, circumstantial necessity (i.e. those performed when there’s no clear health risk to the woman, but are instead performed because for whatever reason, the woman does not wish to be pregnant). When I speak of the reasonable pro-lifer, this is the person I am talking about. Those who believe the procedure should be available to women with a verifiable medical need and no one else. I would hope they would also include a rape/incest provision, but I would understand (though disapprove of) the position of those who were against it.

Basically, I think most pro-lifers are pretty reasonable. You’re right to point out that many people are pro-life in concept, pro-choice in practice, but I don’t think that’s probably true of most. I think most of the people who identify as pro-life are people who genuinely believe that life begins in a meaningful way at conception. If one is to take that perspective, which I do not believe is an unreasonable one, it stands to reason that one would oppose terminating the pregnancy as matter of choice but would usually accept it as a matter of necessity. Those who are not concerned with matters of medical necessity are zealots, but (again, speaking only from my gut) I think they’re probably in the minority. Even if they talk the loudest.

Re: On Playing Your Position.

Deborah — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 21:50:38 -0000

(Replying to BreakerBaker)

I'd reference the woman with the ectopic pregnancy in Andrew's stories. As noted today, you don't survive an ectopic pregnancy. The fetus will absolutely die, because it can't grow in a fallopian tube. And the woman will die, too. Yet this woman's family condemns her. With no hope at all (short of divine intervention, which I haven't noted fix a single ectopic pregnancy, encephalitis, etc) of the child's survival, and her survival only if she has an abortion, they still condemn her as a murderer. She should apparently have gone with God's plan, as understood by them, where she dies.

On the other hand I've seen lots of reports along the lines of "Mr. and Mrs. Jones theoretically opposed abortion, but when their children learned they were carrying a child with encephalitis, they supported their choice of an abortion." As with gay marriage, it makes a difference when you know and care about the person considering an abortion.

(I'm frustrated by the rest of today's ectopic update, which opposes parents choosing late-term abortion when the child is certain to suffer and die shortly before or after birth. I absolutely support any parents who choose to come to term with the encephalitis, multiple certain-to-fail heart surgeries, etc. Maybe it would even be me--haven't faced it. One never knows until one is truly in those shoes. Yet I was very moved by Andrew's story of the couple who did that, but it was a nightmare and they never recovered--far from the happiest moment of their lives. At least give me the chance to choose if I'm the parent facing this--one thing that did NOT come across in Andrew's stories was a sense of "I wish someone had forced us to do something different." Even those who still wondered about their decision didn't wish someone had taken that power away from them.)

Re: On Playing Your Position.

BreakerBaker — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 17:56:21 -0000

"...the only question is at what point you say 'this is a person with rights equal to the mother's.'"

I don't know if that's accurate. Because for the most part you're talking about two distinctly different rights: the right to exist vs. the right to end a pregnancy.

I think most reasonable pro-lifers (although I have no statistics to back it up) would still consider the life of the woman/mother to be more important than that of the zygote/embryo/fetus/baby.

So really, what we're talking about is at what point during development do we determine the unborn's right to exist outweighs the woman's right to kill it. And I honestly don't know the answer to that question.

Re: On Playing Your Position.

BreakerBaker — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 17:45:44 -0000

Considering that you're asking for the perspective of somebody who is pro-life, I'm not sure I'd be the one to ask. I would speculate again, that their opinion would be that becoming pregnant is something similar signing a contract and with that contract comes certain responsibilities, the physical burdens of gestation being chief among them. That's clearly not the best way of putting it. And it's only speculation. But I think that's probably pretty close to how they feel in spirit.

The important point to them, I think, is that once a life is created, there's no turning back and no justifiable reason to make it go away. That a woman has every right not to become pregnant, but that there's no natural or fundamental right to make yourself unpregnant once that threshold has been passed. So the natural burdens endured by a woman while pregnant (or thereafter) are secondary to the issue of life. I think that makes sense. Which is not to say that I agree.

Re: On Playing Your Position.

Deborah — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 16:58:40 -0000

I found that part very frustrating. This guy had made a ton of bad choices, but rather than bemoan anyone's failure to stop him at a dozen points (e.g. the US conveniently outlawed drugs, which would have stopped his becoming a drug addict if making things illegal stopped people obtaining them), he focused on not having someone try to stop his girlfriend from going through with the abortion he wanted her to have. Not at all small-c conservative, in terms of not insisting the state keep stepping in and try to change your mind if you make a decision you might later regret.

Re: On Playing Your Position.

Deborah — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 16:54:00 -0000

Well, when talking about what should happen a number of them quickly switch to controlling women. But let's take your point as a given: the only question is at what point you say "this is a person with rights equal to the mother's."

Fascinating as a find prenatal development, I don't think the various stages--single cell, ball, flattened ball, tube, etc--are people, on any sort of legal equivalent to a newborn baby or five-yer old child. I also don't grasp why the moment of conception is a cutoff--shouldn't individual sperm and egg then be granted full protection, since all it takes is one more, rather simple, step to render them fertilized and thus "people"? If a single fertilized cell has full legal standing, why not a single unfertilized cell?

Plus, if you look at how conception and pregnancy work in real people--very often the fertilized egg does not implant, or implants but things don't go well and the woman gets her period a couple of days late, with worse cramps. (The latter is the "50% of all pregnancies end in miscarriage" statistic you may have heard.) And all the many things that can go wrong later, as detailed in Andrew's posts. Allowing early abortion doesn't seem that far off from what happens naturally all the time. And understanding development better changes your perspective--the nervous system is getting hooked up in the mid-second trimester, for example, so talking about what the baby thinks and feels before this is not grounded in much reality.

Everyone can pretty much agree that if a woman is late in the third trimester, and the baby could survive outside the womb with minimal medical intervention, it has some rights. Which is why the present law--the woman's business in the first trimester, limits in the second, extreme limits in the third such as are outlined so heartbreakingly in the pieces Andrew quoted. The myth of the careless woman who, at 8.5 months, announces she's changed her mind and BAM she gets an abortion is just that, a myth. It's legally not an option.

Finally, what about sk's point above? I have been pregnant three times, resulting in children. (Plus probably 5 of those "feel tired and nauseous, then normal, then period arrives late with bad cramps" that are likely very early miscarriages.) Pregnancy is very, very hard on the body, at least for many women. It's a lot to ask. It is a huge limitation on the rights of the mother. It's not some little "you can't wave your arms if you'll hit someone's nose" intervention.

Re: On Playing Your Position.

sk — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 15:51:40 -0000

Well, perhaps nobody else is paying attention to this thread anymore, but I still have a question. Yesterday, calexical made the following point (cut and pasted below), but nobody responded. I'm honestly interested in how someone who identifies as pro-life feels about calexical's argument. I think it's a valid point, and I've never heard the pro-life side address it. It relates to the issue of rights of pregnant women vs. rights of the unborn.

Calexical: [speaking about the fetus] "You're not just arguing for the right not to be killed. You're arguing for the right to be kept alive through the use of someone else's body. Leaving aside the complications of whether the woman consented, if you're making a pure rights argument, then you have to account for the fact that no one has a right to demand blood, organs, or even food off other people, even if they'll die for lack of them."

Re: On Playing Your Position.

Jen R — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 14:00:26 -0000

I'm saying that in my experience, "men should stay out of the abortion debate" usually indicates that the speaker doesn't want to hear *anyone*, male or female, speak against abortion. So, I think that getting into an argument with someone like that about whether or not men in particular have a right to an opinion on abortion is actually beside the point and not worth doing.

I understand that Ta-Nehisi's not saying that, since he's talking about his own position and not anyone else's. Just something that's been bugging me for a while in general.

Re: On Playing Your Position.

lebecka — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 13:46:36 -0000

Confused, Jen... Can you clarify what you mean here?

Re: On Playing Your Position.

lebecka — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 13:41:12 -0000

"I have said many times that abortion is a choice I would not make but after hearing from more and more of Dr. Tiller's patients, I wonder what I would do if faced with the same sad set of realities they were hit with."

this statement of yours really hit me in the gut-- I have the privilege of having three perfectly healthy, beautiful children with no problems of any kind. I too have made the above statement, but today I am also not sure what I would do in their shoes.

To try to legislate in this situation is very difficult. Of course we want the least loss of life possible, Of course we want to avoid eugenics, of course we want to respect the mother and her wishes. I think what has come out of the stories at Andrew's most clearly is that we can not pretend to foresee all situations; some form of legalized abortion _must_remain available. What can we agree to as a country? That remains to be seen.

But these domestic terrorists have to be stopped. They are unacceptable.

Re: On Playing Your Position.

lebecka — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 13:30:21 -0000

I agree with you. The stories at Andrew's show why we can't absolutely restrict abortion, although we may choose as a society to narrow the boundaries of legally acceptable abortions, which I would open to discussing in conjunction with a discussion of making different forms of birth control and sex education more widely available.

Re: On Playing Your Position.

Jen R — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 13:07:32 -0000

"... *and* I've never seen one..."

Re: On Playing Your Position.

Jen R — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 13:06:17 -0000

Ta-Nehisi, I respect what you've posted here. At the same time, I note that I've seen lots of people say that men should stay out of the abortion debate, I've never seen one of them react any better to pro-life views expressed by women.

Re: On Playing Your Position.

BreakerBaker — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 12:55:20 -0000

Wendy,

I'm generally onboard if you put abusive in front of ex, and if by trouble all you mean legal trouble.

I'm not against a man, even if he's no longer in a relationship with a woman having his opinion known with regard to whether or not she should have an abortion. I'm simply not in favor of having his override hers. In the end, I think we all agree that the choice falls to the woman. Frankly, speaking for myself, while there are a number of aspects about pregnancy and motherhood that I envy my wife for, having that choice at my disposal ain't one of them.

Re: On Playing Your Position.

BreakerBaker — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 12:47:12 -0000

I'm generally against hexing too, but coercing a woman into having an abortion she may not want to have because you're afraid to be a father is something a man deserves to regret for the rest of his life.

Re: On Playing Your Position.

wendy — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 12:46:57 -0000

You know what's worse than a woman having trouble getting an abortion because her husband/boyfriend wants her to?

A woman who has trouble getting an abortion because her ex wants her not to.

A solid majority of abusers don't show that side of themselves right away; telling him she's pregnant is very often the first time he hits her. And now he's demanding to control her not only for the duration of the pregnancy, but 18 years of a legally enforceable right to be able to find her at any time, to be able to drag her into court and complain about how she lives, to allow the child to come to term only to be pawn and hostage in his ongoing efforts to assert authority over a woman who had the temerity to not want him.

To call a pregnancy life-threatening doesn't always mean medical conditions.