I found this Caitlin Flanagan essay to be one of the most moving defenses of the "safe, legal, and rare" compromise I've ever read. I feel alienated sometimes from both sides of the debate, and she speaks to the fuzzy middle ground that I want to try to defend even if it lacks a philosophical rigor or consistency: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/12/the-things-we-cant-face/600769/
I am pro-life, but am often frustrated at the polarized discussion on both sides of this difficult and deeply personal issue. In this vein, I want to share two articles that show the complexity of the situation. Once conception has occurred, there is no way to roll back the clock. All politicized rhetoric aside, neither abortion nor giving up the child for adoption are "quick fixes," as can be seen in these excellent articles which I have found challenging and helpful.
This is such a great question and such a complex one too! I feel like it’s hard to pick a single thing I’d ask people to read, because the debate is so much more complex than a binary pro-life vs pro-choice — there’s a vast chasm between the positions of “shout your abortion” and “safe, legal, and rare”, even though they are currently political allies.
If I had to pick one piece, I think it might be the book Defenders of the Unborn: the Pro-Life Movement Before Roe vs Wade by Daniel K Williams, which I found really excellent and thought-provoking for demonstrating how the current political landscape of abortion was not inevitable. Also Perfectly Human: Nine Minths with Cerian by Sarah C Williams was a really moving testimony to the meaning of a “non-viable” life.
This article about a woman who chose to have an abortion after she learned in the third trimester that her baby had a genetic disorder that would leave him incompatible with life shifted my perspective on the question of late term abortion’s legality. Whether you agree with her choice or not, the terrible decisions she was forced to make illustrate that this is an immensely complex moral question.
On my mind has been the book Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Choose Motherhood Before Marriage by Katherine Edin. Mostly I'm considering if the argument that abortion protects poor women is a straw man. I think it might contribute to child spacing, but I'm sceptical that it prevents or alleviates poverty, which is the strongest argument for legal abortion outside of maternal health, in my opinion. If poor women want children, and choose them with no partner or financial plan, perhaps a better conversation is how to improve life for women so they can parent, not how to prevent parenting
I think it's generally both unhelpful and uninteresting to discuss abortion as a 'this is how I feel about it, as an act' issue rather than as a policy question. The issue at hand isn't 'is abortion right or wrong', but whether laws on the books are good or bad.
I am unequivocal on the point that the abortion bans in place (most of which will take effect after the court overturns Roe) are bad policy. Safe and legal abortions will decrease, and illegal abortions will increase. Women who miscarriage (which can look like a drug induced abortion) can be and are treated as criminals.
I also view the overturn of Roe and the banning of abortion as a giant leap toward the end of our democracy. Disregarding precedent and politicizing the judiciary throws the supreme court's legitimacy into question. SB8 in Texas explicitly turns neighbor against neighbor, and Idaho and South Dakota are following that example. We're rapidly heading toward a country where basic notions of freedom and equality and citizenship vary greatly between states. That's not sustainable.
It's also not a coincidence that the states that will eliminate abortion lack much of a safety net. Unfortunately, nothing tears a country apart faster than economic precarity joined to moral righteousness.
I really appreciated Jen Fulwiler's "How I Became Pro-Life." It helped me see the other side in a real way, and it isn't polemical (or patronizing). I think this may be the first time I began to understand how reasonable people could disagree with something I thought was obvious.
Alan Jacobs shared this in his newsletter yesterday, I assume in light of recent events, and it made me desperately wish this book had been published. Here's a snippet that is relevant to the abortion conversation specifically, but read the whole thing for the way he weaves the Cappadocians in.
"I have at times been in groups of people who know and respect the work of Care Net, but if in those contexts I mention my admiration for the work of Paul Farmer and Partners in Health, I am liable to get some suspicious looks. Paul Farmer’s theology is on the liberal end of the spectrum, as are his politics: for instance, he is a vocal admirer of the Cuban government’s health care system....
"In other groups, people join enthusiastically in my praise for Paul Farmer — but become nervous when I mention my admiration for Care Net. They hear of an organization trying to provide women with alternatives to abortion and they think of large photographs of bloody fetuses held aloft by abortion-clinic protestors; they think of reactionaries who want to control women’s bodies and keep them barefoot and pregnant; they think of a conservative evangelical church in thrall to the Republican Party....
"And yet both Partners in Health and Care Net are pursuing the Biblical mandate to care for the weakest and most helpless among us. In so many ways they are doing the same work, and even are dedicated to the same goal — the preservation and healing of the lives of people made in the image of God. Why must we see them in opposition to each other? (And for all I know they may even see themselves in opposition to each other.) Such an attitude is simply tragic."
"And the cause of the tragedy is this: that the categories of American politics determine the way that many American Christians think about ministry, mission, and service."
I don't have a good reference to give, but I find a good way to begin a discussion is through a solid scientific groundwork on the biology of pregnancy. Most people*** tend to be rather ignorant of key questions such as the dates and length of the different milestones of the fœtus development, and the complex works of the female body from conception to birth.
To give a few examples :
Typical Schelling point milestones for "abortion should definitely not happen after this point" are conception (the maximalist pro-life position), nidification (couple of days), first heartbeat (3 weeks), start of the development of the nervous system (6 weeks), first movements (16-25 weeks), viability (24 weeks), and birth (the maximalist pro-choice position, which nobody really holds as far as I am aware).
Now the USA have generally incredibly lax limits for abortion, but in my country - France - the limit is 14 weeks after conception for voluntary abortion (medical abortion is another discussion entirely). And in France, most pro-choice people are, in my experience, surprised and a bit disturbed to learn that the first heartbeat and the development of the nervous system both start well before this limit.
On the other hand, I was really shaken in my maximalist pro-life position when I learned how many pregnancy end in a natural early miscarriage without the woman even knowing she was pregnant. I've read that more than half pregnancies end this way.
To be clear, none of the scientific facts I listed above (and which may themselves be up to debate) does in any way give a clear answer to the issue of abortion. But any discussion which is unaware of the scientific facts is built on sand.
*** Most people in my social network, myself included. As a young male mathematician, most of the people I discuss with are young and male and as such not directly concerned by issues of pregnancy. The optimist in me wants to believe that women, especially of an age where they have been or plan to become pregnant, are better informed as are men whose wife are pregnant. My hopes, however, are not very high.
I am a real fence-sitter on abortion; when I was a bit younger I was strongly in favor of legal abortion. Now I would probably still say I hold something like that view, but hesitantly, with reservations, wanting to restrict abortions to 12 weeks or perhaps even 9 or 6 weeks. My eyes have been opened to all the ways that conditioning personhood on "consciousness" or "independence" leaves out the most vulnerable in our society, but I still think that there is a line that can be drawn that allows abortion without devaluing vulnerable adults: the difference between a being with 64 cells and even the most profoundly disabled person is still vast.
I found Ross Douthat's piece "The Case Against Abortion" (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/30/opinion/abortion-dobbs-supreme-court.html) to be pretty thought-provoking, although perhaps it was because of my own readiness to hear his arguments rather than their airtightness. I'd be interested in talking/reading with anyone who would like to talk specifically about when a fetus becomes a human being.
"Loved and Wanted: A Memoir of Choice, Children, and Womanhood" by Christa Parravani comes to mind. She personally has as an unwanted pregnancy and delivers her son, but throughout the book she examines a lot political failings where she was in WV and nationally (poverty, health care, environmental justice). It was very thought-provoking and harrowing, IMO.
I love this question and the way you practice hospitality in making room for it, Leah. I think I'd pick Eva Feder Kittay's paper called "The Personal is Philosophical is Political: A Philosopher and Mother of a Cognitively Disabled Person Sends Notes from the Battlefield." As of the last time I heard her speak, Kittay remains pro-choice. But this paper grapples with the moral personhood of a person with complex disabilities, which is a useful way of thinking through what counts as personhood altogether. I had my (almost certainly uniformly pro-choice) grad students read it this spring; each struggled beautifully to grasp an idea of human worth outside of utilitarianism. For me, that struggle leads inevitably to asking the hardest question of moral recognition—not just about a person with complex disabilities, but by extension, about any individual human as such.
For many of us, the debates about abortion cases before the Supreme Court have persisted over the course of all our lives.
Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973. I remember the major cases from when I was a young woman in the 1980s and 1990s.
The best book I can think of that someone should read would be an edited collection by Jack Balkin, a well known constitutional law scholar.
He brought together a group of legal scholars to write their own opinions explaining how the Court should have decided Roe v. Wade, and from across the political spectrum: those in support, as well as those in opposition.
Here's the result: Jack Balkin, ed., What Roe v. Wade Should Have Said (NYU Press, 2005).
I found this Caitlin Flanagan essay to be one of the most moving defenses of the "safe, legal, and rare" compromise I've ever read. I feel alienated sometimes from both sides of the debate, and she speaks to the fuzzy middle ground that I want to try to defend even if it lacks a philosophical rigor or consistency: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/12/the-things-we-cant-face/600769/
At the risk of self-promotion, Dorothy Day’s approach remains challenging for me, in that it rejects the entire legal approach to the question.
Hope it’s helpful: https://comment.org/making-little-of-the-law-and-everything-of-love/
I am pro-life, but am often frustrated at the polarized discussion on both sides of this difficult and deeply personal issue. In this vein, I want to share two articles that show the complexity of the situation. Once conception has occurred, there is no way to roll back the clock. All politicized rhetoric aside, neither abortion nor giving up the child for adoption are "quick fixes," as can be seen in these excellent articles which I have found challenging and helpful.
https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-42055511
https://www.plough.com/en/topics/justice/culture-of-life/in-the-shoes-of-the-woman-considering-abortion
And here's one more that turns the question on its head in a different way: https://www.plough.com/en/topics/justice/culture-of-life/a-world-where-abortion-is-unthinkable
This is such a great question and such a complex one too! I feel like it’s hard to pick a single thing I’d ask people to read, because the debate is so much more complex than a binary pro-life vs pro-choice — there’s a vast chasm between the positions of “shout your abortion” and “safe, legal, and rare”, even though they are currently political allies.
If I had to pick one piece, I think it might be the book Defenders of the Unborn: the Pro-Life Movement Before Roe vs Wade by Daniel K Williams, which I found really excellent and thought-provoking for demonstrating how the current political landscape of abortion was not inevitable. Also Perfectly Human: Nine Minths with Cerian by Sarah C Williams was a really moving testimony to the meaning of a “non-viable” life.
This article about a woman who chose to have an abortion after she learned in the third trimester that her baby had a genetic disorder that would leave him incompatible with life shifted my perspective on the question of late term abortion’s legality. Whether you agree with her choice or not, the terrible decisions she was forced to make illustrate that this is an immensely complex moral question.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/jezebel.com/interview-with-a-woman-who-recently-had-an-abortion-at-1781972395/amp
On my mind has been the book Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Choose Motherhood Before Marriage by Katherine Edin. Mostly I'm considering if the argument that abortion protects poor women is a straw man. I think it might contribute to child spacing, but I'm sceptical that it prevents or alleviates poverty, which is the strongest argument for legal abortion outside of maternal health, in my opinion. If poor women want children, and choose them with no partner or financial plan, perhaps a better conversation is how to improve life for women so they can parent, not how to prevent parenting
I think it's generally both unhelpful and uninteresting to discuss abortion as a 'this is how I feel about it, as an act' issue rather than as a policy question. The issue at hand isn't 'is abortion right or wrong', but whether laws on the books are good or bad.
My recommendation for a reading: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59214544
I am unequivocal on the point that the abortion bans in place (most of which will take effect after the court overturns Roe) are bad policy. Safe and legal abortions will decrease, and illegal abortions will increase. Women who miscarriage (which can look like a drug induced abortion) can be and are treated as criminals.
I also view the overturn of Roe and the banning of abortion as a giant leap toward the end of our democracy. Disregarding precedent and politicizing the judiciary throws the supreme court's legitimacy into question. SB8 in Texas explicitly turns neighbor against neighbor, and Idaho and South Dakota are following that example. We're rapidly heading toward a country where basic notions of freedom and equality and citizenship vary greatly between states. That's not sustainable.
It's also not a coincidence that the states that will eliminate abortion lack much of a safety net. Unfortunately, nothing tears a country apart faster than economic precarity joined to moral righteousness.
I really appreciated Jen Fulwiler's "How I Became Pro-Life." It helped me see the other side in a real way, and it isn't polemical (or patronizing). I think this may be the first time I began to understand how reasonable people could disagree with something I thought was obvious.
https://jenniferfulwiler.com/2008/01/how-i-became-pro-life/
"What would you ask someone to read, if you were seeking a better conversation about abortion with someone who disagrees with you?"
I appreciate everyone's links, but feel overwhelmed with the list!
Anyone, have anything I could give a listen? Podcast? videos?
Alan Jacobs shared this in his newsletter yesterday, I assume in light of recent events, and it made me desperately wish this book had been published. Here's a snippet that is relevant to the abortion conversation specifically, but read the whole thing for the way he weaves the Cappadocians in.
"I have at times been in groups of people who know and respect the work of Care Net, but if in those contexts I mention my admiration for the work of Paul Farmer and Partners in Health, I am liable to get some suspicious looks. Paul Farmer’s theology is on the liberal end of the spectrum, as are his politics: for instance, he is a vocal admirer of the Cuban government’s health care system....
"In other groups, people join enthusiastically in my praise for Paul Farmer — but become nervous when I mention my admiration for Care Net. They hear of an organization trying to provide women with alternatives to abortion and they think of large photographs of bloody fetuses held aloft by abortion-clinic protestors; they think of reactionaries who want to control women’s bodies and keep them barefoot and pregnant; they think of a conservative evangelical church in thrall to the Republican Party....
"And yet both Partners in Health and Care Net are pursuing the Biblical mandate to care for the weakest and most helpless among us. In so many ways they are doing the same work, and even are dedicated to the same goal — the preservation and healing of the lives of people made in the image of God. Why must we see them in opposition to each other? (And for all I know they may even see themselves in opposition to each other.) Such an attitude is simply tragic."
"And the cause of the tragedy is this: that the categories of American politics determine the way that many American Christians think about ministry, mission, and service."
https://blog.ayjay.org/the-gospel-of-life/
I don't have a good reference to give, but I find a good way to begin a discussion is through a solid scientific groundwork on the biology of pregnancy. Most people*** tend to be rather ignorant of key questions such as the dates and length of the different milestones of the fœtus development, and the complex works of the female body from conception to birth.
To give a few examples :
Typical Schelling point milestones for "abortion should definitely not happen after this point" are conception (the maximalist pro-life position), nidification (couple of days), first heartbeat (3 weeks), start of the development of the nervous system (6 weeks), first movements (16-25 weeks), viability (24 weeks), and birth (the maximalist pro-choice position, which nobody really holds as far as I am aware).
Now the USA have generally incredibly lax limits for abortion, but in my country - France - the limit is 14 weeks after conception for voluntary abortion (medical abortion is another discussion entirely). And in France, most pro-choice people are, in my experience, surprised and a bit disturbed to learn that the first heartbeat and the development of the nervous system both start well before this limit.
On the other hand, I was really shaken in my maximalist pro-life position when I learned how many pregnancy end in a natural early miscarriage without the woman even knowing she was pregnant. I've read that more than half pregnancies end this way.
To be clear, none of the scientific facts I listed above (and which may themselves be up to debate) does in any way give a clear answer to the issue of abortion. But any discussion which is unaware of the scientific facts is built on sand.
*** Most people in my social network, myself included. As a young male mathematician, most of the people I discuss with are young and male and as such not directly concerned by issues of pregnancy. The optimist in me wants to believe that women, especially of an age where they have been or plan to become pregnant, are better informed as are men whose wife are pregnant. My hopes, however, are not very high.
I am a real fence-sitter on abortion; when I was a bit younger I was strongly in favor of legal abortion. Now I would probably still say I hold something like that view, but hesitantly, with reservations, wanting to restrict abortions to 12 weeks or perhaps even 9 or 6 weeks. My eyes have been opened to all the ways that conditioning personhood on "consciousness" or "independence" leaves out the most vulnerable in our society, but I still think that there is a line that can be drawn that allows abortion without devaluing vulnerable adults: the difference between a being with 64 cells and even the most profoundly disabled person is still vast.
I found Ross Douthat's piece "The Case Against Abortion" (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/30/opinion/abortion-dobbs-supreme-court.html) to be pretty thought-provoking, although perhaps it was because of my own readiness to hear his arguments rather than their airtightness. I'd be interested in talking/reading with anyone who would like to talk specifically about when a fetus becomes a human being.
"Loved and Wanted: A Memoir of Choice, Children, and Womanhood" by Christa Parravani comes to mind. She personally has as an unwanted pregnancy and delivers her son, but throughout the book she examines a lot political failings where she was in WV and nationally (poverty, health care, environmental justice). It was very thought-provoking and harrowing, IMO.
https://www.amazon.com/Loved-Wanted-Memoir-Children-Womanhood/dp/1250756847/ref=asc_df_1250756847/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=509360428472&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=6452090747458629930&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9007577&hvtargid=pla-1036982410010&psc=1
I love this question and the way you practice hospitality in making room for it, Leah. I think I'd pick Eva Feder Kittay's paper called "The Personal is Philosophical is Political: A Philosopher and Mother of a Cognitively Disabled Person Sends Notes from the Battlefield." As of the last time I heard her speak, Kittay remains pro-choice. But this paper grapples with the moral personhood of a person with complex disabilities, which is a useful way of thinking through what counts as personhood altogether. I had my (almost certainly uniformly pro-choice) grad students read it this spring; each struggled beautifully to grasp an idea of human worth outside of utilitarianism. For me, that struggle leads inevitably to asking the hardest question of moral recognition—not just about a person with complex disabilities, but by extension, about any individual human as such.
For many of us, the debates about abortion cases before the Supreme Court have persisted over the course of all our lives.
Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973. I remember the major cases from when I was a young woman in the 1980s and 1990s.
The best book I can think of that someone should read would be an edited collection by Jack Balkin, a well known constitutional law scholar.
He brought together a group of legal scholars to write their own opinions explaining how the Court should have decided Roe v. Wade, and from across the political spectrum: those in support, as well as those in opposition.
Here's the result: Jack Balkin, ed., What Roe v. Wade Should Have Said (NYU Press, 2005).
https://nyupress.org/9780814799864/what-roe-v-wade-should-have-said/
O Cárter Snead: What It Means to Be Human: The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics