Roe v. Wade

[ Roe's 35th anniversary was this week. So...]

This is why I'm pro-choice:

One of the biologically defining features of the human species is neoteny - the fact that our rate of development has been slowed relative to that of our closest kin. Long childhood, long babyhood, and long fetushood. Some events of late gestation that for other primates occur inside the uterus, take place for humans in the first year of independent life. That is, human embryonic development has stretched out so long that bits of it now actually occur after birth. Dramatic changes have been selected for in our recent evolution to accommodate this slowed development. For example, female hips have widened in the effort to keep up with ever-larger babies (particularly their heads) - and sadly without complete success, as the phenomenon of death during childbirth attests. Moreover, humans are born with unfused skull plates so the brain can continue its explosive rate of growth after birth.

That's on the hardware side of things. Growing to be a fully socialized and participatory human can be viewed as its own evolutionary process, and absorbs years of training. Consciousness is no lightswitch flipped on at conception, or at the second trimester, or at birth, or on the first birthday. There's no moment. It is a gradual process of coming into an intentional and reciprocative relationship with one's environment (particularly the social environment) as based on an ever-refined mental model which a child builds of world-and-self.

It's my belief that consciousness lay in the process of building and maintaining a model of the world - and then of course pursuing one's intentions within it. As social primates, the models we build intimately involve our interactions and transactions with other social primates (which, tangentially, is why most of us are so religious: we find it natural to extrapolate the idea of a social hierarchy all the way on up). And I believe it is no terrible oversimplification to say that this process of becoming conscious, indeed of becoming fully human, maps closely onto the process of acquiring language. They're not one and the same, but they're powerfully correlative.

So if you catch the implications of this - of my emphasis on the great duration involved in the development of consciousness - you can see how my personal pro-choice view may even be considered extreme. People want to find a pat answer in this debate and stick with it: life starts here, or life starts there. I say that life - conscious life - comes gradually, meaning that it comes late. And so I strongly believe abortion is not and cannot be murder. Which doesn't make it particularly laudable, nor goes to deny the difficult feelings it entails for any woman choosing it. But for all that, it is morally unobjectionable.


Now, that was a tough argument to make. Not because the argument is baseless, shabby, or uncompelling - I obviously happen to think it's none of those things - but because nobody wants to find themselves in a political debate saying, "I shall now explain why my position is not pro-murder." Because that's a tough rhetorical spot to be in, the pro-choice movement as a whole has gravitated toward other framings. Understandably, they'd like to spend their time talking about something else. Heck, look at that name: pro-choice. What does that mean? Of what sort of choice are we pro-, here? Pro-choice-of-bunnies? Pro-choice-of-peaches? The movement can't even address its own position in its own moniker.

And watch out, because if the pro-choice movement won't argue that abortion is not murder, they've abandoned the field for the pro-life movement to hold that debate all by themselves. Which is why rhetorically I think the pro-choice side has slowly been losing this fight over the past couple of decades.

Consider:

Pro-Life Person: "Help! There is a murder taking place!"

Pro-Choice Person: "Butt out! Everyone has a right to privacy!"

And that's why the pro-choice argument must strongly articulate that there is no murder taking place. The pro-lifers are simply pressing a prior claim.

[Here's a stoned-in-the-dorm-room thought experiment: suppose a woman and a man are into extreme infantilistic fetishism. And suppose the woman is morbidly obese. Okay, the woman has her abdomen surgically opened, is liposuctioned to clear space - the grown man is thoroughly disinfected, fitted with a snorkel, and insinuated in her belly where he is sewn cozily into place. I guess the snorkel is left poking out of the woman's navel. Now, does the woman have the right to block the man's snorkel - or by another means kill him - because he happens to be inside her body, and she has a right to privacy?]

The awkward terms of this national debate - "murder" versus "privacy" - were in no small measure set by Roe v. Wade. Unlike many other western democracies (Britain, France, Italy) America did not establish a right to abortion through a publicly-debated legislative process. The right to abortion was given by judicial decree, and it happened to be handed down on this specious basis of privacy rights. To that extent, perhaps the pro-choice movement hasn't found itself in its awkward debating posture out of the rhetorical cowardice we're so accustomed to from the Democratic Party. Perhaps it's more because they've been making the case they need to make in consonance with the legal defenses of Roe they've been pressing for 3.5 decades now.

But rather than defend Roe - that is, rather than make the privacy argument - a better idea may be to take the offensive - and also abandon a double-negative for a positive - in fighting for a legislative guarantee of reproductive rights: something which would be independently assured in the case Roe were ever to go away as a piece of legal reasoning protecting abortion. The Republicans have had an anti-abortion amendment in their plank since 1980: why not pre-emptively push for a reproductive-rights amendment from the other side?