If there is any point I'd hope to emphasise, it is that despite the history of sexism and subjugation of women, there is also a respectable pro-life position, that comes down to a different reading of relevant ethical concerns.
I suspect, once again, that part of our differing emphases has to do with context and experience. I grew up in a strictly pro-life household, all of my relatives are pro-life, and most of the college students I teach today are pro-life. I had never heard a single pro-choice argument, presented sympathetically, until I was 17 years old, at a summer camp, when rooming with a young woman who was pro-choice. I became pro-choice almost overnight. Not without giving years of thought to the pro-life position, however--both before and after my "conversion," so to speak.
So, for me, it is a given that I have to treat those who hold a "pro-life" view with respect, in my daily life. I therefore, in my daily life, have to treat this argument with care and respect, even as I experience it as an attack on my physical and moral integrity. I know that many "pro-life" are working from a sincere belief in the sanctity of life. Some, but very few, hold this view pretty consistently: no death penalty, no participation in war for any reason, no euthanasia.
In the US, however, the "pro-life" view typicaly asserts a "bright line" between "innocent" life and life that is not innocent, and can be taken. They in fact most often believe that there can be no, absolutely no grounds for abortion: even to save the mother's life, rape, incest. God creates the life; we have no business in ending it, no matter what (until that life becomes "not innocent"--a label that is determined by ... well, them). This view is so strong in the US right now that abortion and even contraception are getting more and more difficult to acquire. I grew up in a small rural town. There are huge swaths of the country where there are no physicians willing or trained to perform abortions. There are pharmacists who are refusing to fill prescriptions for contraception, especially in the midwestern and so called "red-states," where it's not uncommon to live 25 miles from the nearest town. (Even if this is technically illegal at this point, I grew up praying in a public school, with teachers leading the prayers, on a daily basis in the 1970s and 1980s).
I understand the viewpoint. I just find it mildly terrifying. It bothers me that you don't have to find it so terrifying. I know that's not your "fault," obviously. And I don't wish that you had to be terrified--I don't actually think it is good for people. But I wish you could understand what it is like to experience your body as violable, and what it is like to feel intense pressure, from everyone you love, to submit to that view of your body as just, as, in fact, not just as the moral high ground, but as the only moral ground. And then to experience, not here--not from you L'Anima, as I appreciate the carefulness you always take in your argument--but in most other places, a perception that you are inherently too "biased" by virtue of experiencing your integrity as under attack to rationally discuss that law.
This logical distrust of the experiences of those who are most affected by a moral question as being incapable of "objectively" evaluating the question is ... I hardly know how to finish that statement. But it is relevant to the argument above that abolitionists, who often didn't believe (themselves, let alone their audiences) 100% in the humanity of black people, could then argue on other grounds against slavery, i.e., it's bad for white people and society as a whole.
There's nothing obviously "wrong" with that approach, except, well, everything.
So, agree to disagree, but with some recognition that the stakes of this debate are asymmetrical for the participants, and that that makes a difference. |
