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War on Morality: Abortion

Can you legislate your morality? Certainly you can work to make something illegal if you think it is immoral. If you have enough political power, or get enough people to agree, you can make anything illegal.

But does making something illegal stop people from doing it? if you believe that people base their beliefs largely on the law, or they fear being caught doing something, then you might think that you can change people’s behavior for the better just by outlawing something.

But fear of the law is not always the biggest motivator, and time and time again we’ve learned that changing the law only changes people’s behavior to the point where they are now jumping through hoops, or doing dangerous things to accomplish what they could have accomplished more safely otherwise. See prohibition, and the war on drugs.

Strict father model conservatives¹ act as though the state can act as a force to change people’s minds. You can naively argue that you’re simply making something immoral illegal because it ought to be illegal — and that’s good enough. Unfortunately, it’s not good enough if the net effect is a less stable society when people do not tend to take their moral cues from the government².

Even people who support choice in the abortion issue can often be heard to say that their goal is not more abortions, but rather safer abortions. This is an acknowledgement of the reality of what happens when abortions are illegal. Forced-birth³ supporters want to ignore that reality; in the case of “radio conservatives” they are even heard to mock the argument⁴.

Not that this will change anything about conservative radio, but now there is hard data to back up two important opinions.

1. Outlawing abortions does not reduce the number of abortions, it merely makes them less safe.
2. The only way to reduce abortions is to increase access to contraception.

These findings were published in the Lancet (referenced in New Scientist this week) and they lend force to arguments pro-choicers have made for a long time.

This study also appears in the article “With Facts on Our Side” in The Nation (November 2007 issue).

“The legal status of abortion doesn’t predict whether abortions occur,” study co-author Gilda Sedgh told me by phone. “It predicts whether they are safe. South Africa liberalized its abortion laws in l997, and maternal deaths from unsafe abortion have plummeted by 90 percent.”

This fact alone means that forced-birth supporters must attack this study. The forced-birth opinion, if enacted, is measurably deadly to women because of the truism that legislating morality doesn’t make it the people’s morality. No doubt conservatives will use the same argument they’ve used against undocumented immigrants — if they’re getting an illegal abortion, they’re lawbreakers and perhaps they’re getting what they deserve. But this toll would quickly be felt well into the middle class⁵, and I don’t think the majority would stand for it. Calling pregnant woman “illegals” probably won’t wash.

But I find the following even more important.

The countries with the lowest abortion rates, like the Netherlands, have few abortion restrictions and lots of birth control. Consider Eastern Europe. Under communism, abortion was virtually the only family planning method. As contraception has become more available, the abortion rate has plummeted—from 90 in 1995 to 44 in 2003.

I am anti-abortion. I’m not for making it illegal, I’m for making it not happen.

To be truly anti-abortion is about giving women the widest possible latitude in controlling their biological processes. We have evolved a certain method of reproduction as a species. And our morality has evolved to give each of us a sense of individual autonomy. Our rights have developed to respect that individuality. Do we usurp a woman’s individual biology for the purpose of imposing our view of society on her? If a woman’s reproductive function a tool of society, or part of her self?

This study shows that we have the tool to reduce the incidence of an objectionable procedure. But religious absolutists have adopted an all-or-nothing argument. In their view, contraception and abortion would be illegal. Contraception, to them, is often equal to abortion. In a world where that becomes the law, disastrous consequences from botched abortions would be commonplace as unwanted pregnancies skyrocket and desperate women seek dangerous alternatives.

Opponents of legal abortion ask women to be strong and make tough choices to prevent the pregnancy from happening in the first place. However, when reality does not agree with your opinion, now you are faced with what may be a tough, but practical, choice. If you want fewer abortions, you should compromise on the contraception. Society asks you to make this choice for yourself. Will men and women meet the challenge and make this compromise? Or will religion assert an unworkable solution, an ultimate authoritarian cop out?

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¹ People who believe the government should act like a strict parent. See brief Wikipedia entry or George Lakoff’s books.

² I have always found it ironic that conservatives argue against making people dependent on the state for their survival, and then advocate authoritarian social measures which try to make people dependent on the state for their morality. It’s been tried many times in the past with a state religion, but in a country where you’re not allowed to force a religion down the throats of your population, people start working to turn government into a surrogate religion. Religion already has a lousy track record on morality, and government as church does an even worse job. Government ought to stay out of the morality business altogether, look to the people for what laws to enforce and retreat altogether on morally contentious issues.

³ The term “pro-life” is misleading and inaccurate. People who oppose abortion are not pro-life, they are against legal abortion. If I wanted to be equally inaccurate, I could say they are pro-dangerous-abortions, since that is the result of restrictive abortion policy. But keeping it simple and accurate, they are about forcing pregnant women to carry through the pregnancy and go through the birth process. They are pro-forced-birth. Some people refer the term “anti-choice.” That always struck me as too tit-for-tat, and sounds confusingly unspecific to me. It’s simpler than that. Forcing women to give birth is forced-birth. The term is focused on the immediate consequence, and the fact that it is not just removing choice, but forcing a woman into something. It highlights the victimization that is taking place.

⁴ I know not all conservatives agree with talk radio. However, I have not often heard conservative media criticised by conservatives for belittling the issue of the specter of an increase in dangerous abortions. I perceive a lot of silent agreement, and that’s my charitable assessment. The less charitable assumption would be that these people don’t disbelieve a spike in dangerous abortions, but rather don’t care about dangerous abortions. The “sinners deserve to die” thing that worked so well with AIDS during the Reagan administration.

⁵ Super-rich folks need not worry. With enough money there is always a way to get your safe abortion. And the self-righteous religious rich know that if you have an abortion quietly enough, even God doesn’t hear about it.

Posted by James at October 21, 2007 8:52 AM
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