Wednesday, February 11, 2004
(9:09 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Intellectual Dishonesty
This is a meta-question about the political debate surrounding abortion. In the varieties of opinion on this issue, there seem to be many who sincerely question when a fetus constitutes an actual, full-blown person entitled to the same legal rights as the people who are out walking around. Some seem to think that if a pregnancy is aborted early enough, then it is morally acceptable. Others take more extreme views, saying that it's morally acceptable at any time during the pregnancy or that it's completely unacceptable at any time.
The tendency of pro-life advocates is to act as though this debate is not actually happening. They use highly morally loaded language and speak as though everyone knows that the pro-life position is correct but that some people are simply morally blind or depraved. It's "begging the question" on a grand scale. My first question is: Is begging the question in this way acceptable? The pro-life activists believe that they're saving lives, and when we look at it that way (which is already begging the question), then using intellectually dishonest arguments seems like a relatively small problem.
Second question: Are there pro-life advocates who do not oppose themselves simultaneously to abortion and to "sexual sin"? Often times there seems to be a feeling that pregnancy is the logical consequence of sexual activity and that people need to live with the consequences of their actions (thus pregnancy is a punishment, which ironically makes it easier to sympathize with the person who wants to end the pregnancy). Taken to its extreme, this would lead to the papal position on contraceptives, etc., which very few people would support. Although this lends some incoherence to their arguments, many pro-life, anti-sex advocates say that people who get unexpectedly pregnant are stupid for not using birth control and thus "deserve" to get pregnant for being so reckless. Would the pro-life movement inspire such bitter partisanship if it weren't simultaneously tied up with this idea of "sexual sin"? Do we want to live in a country where people are forced to have a child as punishment for their actions?
Just to be clear: I think abortion is bad and I wish it didn't happen. I just tend to think that the consequences of making it illegal are worse than the status quo. I think that the work done by people like Tara Smith at the Pregnancy Center is the best way to go about preventing abortion, and I also think that such organizations are bound to be unsuccessful as long as they're run by people with the same attitudes as the "mainstream" pro-life movement.
That's what I think.
