By Kevin D.
Williamson
Tuesday,
December 07, 2021
To believe the story the abortion-rights
advocates tell you, you have to believe in magic.
There’s no magic required on the pro-life
side.
That’s the real source of our long
disagreement.
In its most basic version, the pro-life
position is easy to understand, requiring no special intellectual training, no
religious commitment, no mysticism, and nothing you’d really even call a
philosophy. What we believe is that you don’t kill children who haven’t been
born for the same reason you don’t kill children who have been born. That’s it.
There isn’t some magical event that happens at some point during the pregnancy
that transforms the unborn child from a meaningless lump of cells to a
meaningful lump of cells. Modern, literate people don’t need the medieval
doctrines of “quickening” or “ensoulment” (or some half-assed, modern, secular
repackaging of those ancient superstitions) to know that the unborn child is an
unborn child — we have biology, genetics, and, for those who need to see with
their own eyes, imaging technology for that. The human organism that you hold
in your arms six months after birth is the same organism it was six months
before birth. It isn’t a different organism — it is only a little older. It is
true that the child six months after conception isn’t fully developed — and
neither is a 19-year-old. We have a natural, predictable, reasonably
well-understood process of individual development. There is no magic moment, no
mystical transformation, and the people who tell you that there is are peddling
superstition and pseudoscience.
But, of course, the one-armed
paper-hangers must be heard from. (A one-armed
paper hanger, if you don’t know, is someone who makes an argument that goes,
basically: “I have a personal experience relating to x, so,
therefore, my opinion about x is dispositive.” It is a dumb
form of argument made by people who are themselves dumb or who believe that you
are.) This week’s one-armed paper-hanger is Elizabeth Spiers, a Democratic hack
(“digital strategist”) who argues in the New York Times that
we should not consider adoption a viable (if you will) alternative to abortion
because . . . well, because, damn it: “I Was Adopted.
I Know the Trauma It Can Inflict,” reads the classic one-armed-paper-hanger headline. Of course, she
doesn’t really know — she describes her own upbringing as
“idyllic,” in “a home where I knew every day that I was loved” — but she
has heard about the trauma, from her biological mother, among
others. Spiers writes:
Both Maria
and my mom, Alice, oppose abortion on religious grounds. My mom is white and
Southern Baptist; Maria is Hispanic and Pentecostal. Both like to point to me
to justify their beliefs, saying that had Maria gotten an abortion, I would not
exist. It’s a familiar argument: The anti-abortion movement likes to invoke
Nobel Prize winners who might never have materialized, or potential adoptees
who might have cured cancer, if they hadn’t been aborted at eight weeks.
This is, of course, pure moral illiteracy,
but Democratic hacks writing in the New York Times do not find
themselves challenged very often or very energetically (when I wrote about
abortion for the Washington Post, my editor was Ruth Marcus; that was fine, but the reverse situation is impossible to imagine at
any major American newspaper), so they persist in their ignorance. So the
Southern Baptist and the Pentecostal (what ethnicity has to do
with it, Spiers never even tries to explain; she just assumes that the
signifiers will push the right buttons) agree about abortion — what might we
deduce from that? What might we deduce if we add in Catholics, a
not-insignificant number of Jews, Muslims, millions of agnostics and atheists,
etc.? The obvious takeaway, for anybody who is paying attention, is that
opposition to abortion is not reliant upon some particular religious creed. As
for those Nobel prize–winners and such — Spiers must understand, at some level,
that pro-lifers do not actually endorse the abortion of mediocrities, either.
Like most abortion-rights advocates, she is either unwilling or unable to
engage with actual pro-life views.
There are millions of adopted Americans.
I’m one of them, and we did not get together and elect Elizabeth Spiers to
speak on our behalf. If we were looking for a representative, I am sure that we
could do better. I am confident that we at least would not find somebody who
would write:
The right
likes to suggest that abortion is a traumatic experience for women — a
last resort, a painful memory. But adoption is often just as traumatic as the
right thinks abortion is, if not more so, as a woman has to relinquish not a
lump of cells but a fully formed baby she has lived with for nine months. . . .
Some on the right believe that the trauma adoption inflicts is a consequence of
irresponsibility. But unexpected pregnancy is not a de facto function of bad
decision making. It can be a failure of contraception, the product of a rape, a
mistaken belief that a woman is infertile. There is no justifiable reason to
inflict harm on women and the babies they might produce in any of these
situations, regardless of judgment.
This could be the textbook example of
“begging the question.” Spiers writes as though there were only one set of
interests to take into consideration, only one party who might suffer trauma.
The contention of the pro-life side is that there are two. Spiers is free to
disagree with that contention — she is free to believe that the moon is made of
green cheese — but it is an act of intellectual dishonesty to pretend that this
is not the very question under consideration. But once you admit what the
argument actually is, this kind of arrogant, ignorant argument-by-assertion is
very difficult to defend or to take seriously as an argument. But that is the
point of the one-armed-paper-hanger mode of argument to begin with: It is a
ploy that relies on the assertion of special standing, generally using personal
trauma or suffering as a kind of rhetorical shield. You can usually play the
question either way — “I lost both my legs in Afghanistan, and I think it is
time to pull out” vs. “I lost both my legs in Afghanistan, and I think we
should stay the course” — but partisan editors can always elevate the version
they prefer and exclude the inconvenient one. Spiers writes that she resents
“being used as a political football,” but that is exactly what she is doing —
cynically, and, indeed, cruelly — with her biological mother: exploiting her
suffering as a way of foreclosing real discussion of the issues at hand.
It is interesting that it never seems to
occur to sophists such as Spiers that the suffering of women who relinquish
their children for adoption is evidence for the pro-life position. Why do they
suffer? Because they are not ignorant. Mothers understand motherhood. No one
has to explain to these mothers (the “biological” is an unnecessary decoration)
that they owe some moral obligation to their children. They know. Spiers calls
this “biological brainwashing.” In fact, she uses the phrase twice in
a brief column. (Never mind, for now, that there is no such thing as
brainwashing, that this is another example of the metaphor displacing the thing
it is meant to describe.) Brainwashing refers to persuasion and indoctrination,
but there is nothing of the sort at work here. The connection mothers feel to
their children isn’t an opinion that is imposed on them by some third party —
that connection is a fact, part of the real world, not a subjective
preference. As Spiers writes, some adoptions work out very well, and some work
our badly. (In that, adoptive families are a lot like non-adoptive families.)
But the act of adoption is never morally neutral, neither for the parents who
are relinquishing their child nor for the adoptive parents. The reason this
transaction is morally significant is that the child is morally significant per
se. That significance is the significance attached to every human individual —
it is not the mother’s gift to give or to withhold.
Pregnancy is, without question, traumatic
for women who wish that they were not pregnant. But they are pregnant,
and wishing it were not so does not change the facts of the case. Abortion does
not existentially erase motherhood any more than infanticide does. The question
of maternal responsibility or irresponsibility is not irrelevant,
but it is secondary to the superseding interest of the child.
The three most important words in any real
policy debate are: “Compared to what?” In this case, the point of comparison is
the ultimate one: death. What we ask of women who become pregnant
because of a rape or sexual abuse is horrifying. But sometimes we have to ask
horrifying things of people who don’t deserve to be in the situation they are
in: The young men who fought and died at Gettysburg and Normandy were not, for
the most part, lifelong soldiers who had spent their boyhoods training for war
and dreaming of it. The women who take a heroic attitude toward their undesired
pregnancies in these situations deserve the deepest kind of admiration. But, in
any case, we do not put children to death because their fathers were criminals.
Spiers’s argument is that we should permit
putting children to death in order to spare their mothers from any moral or
emotional discomfort associated with relinquishing those children for adoption.
This is stupendously childish (if you will forgive the word)
way of looking at the world. Killing people in order to prevent their suffering
and to relieve ourselves of any lingering feeling of discomfort regarding our
moral duty toward them puts human beings on the moral level of ailing pets. You
could make precisely the same argument for euthanizing the poor or the disabled
(as some share of abortion advocates have done since the beginning of the
euthanasia movement), which is why the superstition of the “magic moment” is so
rhetorically and politically important for the pro-abortion set.
Without the magic thinking, we would have
to think about the thing straight on. Stripped of the superstition and the
rhetorical human shields, Spiers’s argument is that we should allow children to
be put to death because, if they are born and adopted, then their mothers will
experience regret, whereas if they are exterminated, we can all pretend that
nothing ever really happened. There is no abortion-rights regime without that
kind of brutality.
Yesterday was December 6, the anniversary
of the ratification of the 13th Amendment. The parallels between slavery and
abortion have been explored (not always with great sensitivity) at length by
other writers, but there is one aspect of the case against slavery that
remains, to my mind, relevant. One of the arguments abolitionists made against
slavery was that, irrespective of the interests of black slaves (about whom even
many goodhearted 18th- and 19th-century reformers had primitive and backward
views), slavery was bad for white people, that the social
toleration of so great an evil led to decadence of other kinds by causing the
moral muscles to atrophy. (For a certain kind of New England Puritan, slavery
was causally linked to Southern vice, from sexual profligacy to drunkenness;
the temperance crusaders were in many ways the spiritual heirs of the
abolitionists.) There is something similar at work with abortion, I think. By
this, I do not mean that abortion has reshaped our pattern of life (it’s the
other way around, there: The American commitment to sexual license long
predates Roe v. Wade) but that it has diminished our
intellectual and moral capacity. We have had to twist ourselves around so
grotesquely, to anesthetize ourselves so thoroughly, to spend so much time
learning not to see what is in front of our eyes, that we are finding it difficult
to untwist ourselves, to come awake, and to learn to see again. The Elizabeth
Spiers essay is an example of what I am talking about. Programmatic barbarism
is no less barbaric for being programmatic.
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