Why I think it's so hard to convince people on abortion

 

Centering When Life Begins

I’ve seen a few posts/videos on social media warning people not to let arguments about reproductive rights be centered around when life begins. The argument made by these posts is very good, and it goes approximately like this: 

“The question of when life begins is totally irrelevant. No one is entitled to your body, even if access to your body is necessary for their sustained life. For example, imagine a person needed an organ transplant, and your organ was the only available match. While it might be a good moral choice to donate the organ, you cannot morally be forced to give up your organ for the other person’s wellbeing.”

Like I said, I personally think this is a very good argument, but I don’t think it’s as powerful a tool for convincing the other side as some people make it out to be. 

For one, the organ donation analogy is not a perfect analog with pregnancy and abortion. To illustrate, notice the similarities in a second, parallel analogy: 

“No one is entitled to your home, even if access to your home is necessary for their sustained life. For example, imagine a person needed a place to warm up on a cold Wisconsin night, and your home was the only available space with a heater. While it might be a good moral choice to let them in, you cannot morally be forced to give up space in your home for the other person’s wellbeing.” 

But, it is totally moral to legally require that parents allow their children to live in their homes–at least until they reach a certain age. A similar argument can be applied to the organ donation scenario to distinguish it from the case of pregnancy. And that argument ultimately centers when personhood begins. Of course, this isn’t a one-two punch knock-out against the organ donor / bodily autonomy argument, which like I said is a very good argument, but it makes it more debatable than many pro-choice people want it to be. 

More importantly, though, I just don’t think de-centering the question of when life begins in this way is likely to be persuasive to those who identify as pro-life. 

I actually think centering different questions is actually what causes the kind of discourse we have now, where both sides talk past each other without much dialog that doesn’t just end in “I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree.” Someone who feels strongly that a certain question is the fundamental question of the issue is not easily going to agree that the fundamental question is something different entirely–especially when what they consider to be the fundamental question raises the stakes of the outcome so dramatically. 

Different Moral Frameworks

I think another thing that makes convincing pro-life conservatives so difficult is that many of the arguments pro-choice people make that on-paper seem like the most likely to appeal to conservative sensibilities rely on utilitarian ethics. The basis of (in my opinion) very good arguments like the following is that U.S. Policy should be designed to result in the greatest good for the greatest number of people: 

• Abortion bans don’t stop abortions. They only stop safe abortions. 

• If you want to reduce abortions, you should really support more compassionate social policy. 

• Abortion bans criminalize abortion-related healthcare like abortions after ectopic pregnancy and care for people who have miscarriages. 

• State abortion bans actually result in more abortions as women seek abortion care out of state more readily because they fear the option will soon be eliminated. 

But I think most people who are pro-life are not utilitarians. They are deontologists, which means they evaluate moral choices not based on consequence calculations, but by set rules or maxims. Specifically, many are christian deontologists who evaluate moral choice based on the set rules of their christian faith. (It’s important to note that these rules don’t always derive directly from the bible. They are established through tradition as well)

To a pro-life Christian, abortion is wrong because human life is sacred and abortion is murder. Abortion should be illegal not because abortion bans are effective or don’t have unintended negative consequences, but because the law should reflect a moral value against murdering the innocent. They trust that flawed details or unintended consequences can be worked out later, but that it is essential that we criminalize what is unquestionably wrong first and foremost. 

Certainly not all pro-life advocates think this way, but I think a lot of them think this way even if they don’t recognize it or articulate it like this. Even when pro-life advocates respond with utilitarian claims (like that the cases where abortion is necessary are outweighed by the weight of the death of theunborn), I think the premise is still deontological: the maxim (for them) “abortion is murder” is an unquestionable truth. 

And there are pro-choice deontologists who see protecting a woman’s right to choose as ethically fundamental. Will these kinds of ethicists have an easier time convincing the other side? I’m not sure, but often I think approaches that adopt the same source of moral rules and values that pro-life advocates turn to have more persuasive power. 

I used to be pro-life from a Latter-day Saint perspective. I’ve moved to other fundamental ways of understanding the argument as well, but the arguments that I think had the most impact on me initially were ones that analyzed the doctrine underpinning my church’s anti-abortion stances and found room there for more diversity of opinion. One of the first ways I framed my own pro-choice opinion is that if God knows everything and assigns spirits to bodies, he would certainly just put the spirit previously assigned to a now-aborted fetus into another body. I think that’s why it seems from the church’s materials that abortion isn’t “Murder,” it’s just “like unto it.” And in my view of Latter-day Saint doctrine, I see elective abortion as more an issue of chastity than murder. 

Convincing others on controversial topics is hard. Efforts to do so often feel fruitless. And it’s true that it’s not your job to educate the ignorant. But somebody has to if we want things to change. It’s the unfortunate reality that change will require listening intently to those whose opinions you find repugnant and who will likely not be convinced except by the long passage of time and experience. 

But that long, hard fight is one we have to engage in in a post-Roe world.