Today Dana posted a response to Julian Sanchez's CP article. I agree with her when she says that it would be politically disastrous for progressives to adopt the argument Julian is advocating. Her arguments for how we should talk about abortion fill in many of the flaws I see in Julian's argument:

From what I gather, the crux of his argument rests on the belief that a fetus does not have moral personhood, therefore abortion isn't immoral and we should preserve it. This argument (though it is nothing new) is valid and I think that most of my pro-choice peers would agree. And then the argument goes…if a fetus isn't a person, we shouldn't pander to the middle ground - that makes sense.

But he doesn't move the argument along any further - thereby missing a major part of the abortion discussion. Somehow in an article about reproduction, he manages to only use the word "women" three times and never the word "woman."



Julian is perpetuating a trend in the American media sphere, relegating women to the sidebar and simply talking about the validity of the fetus or "baby" that lives inside them. This article is supposed to be about how to frame the abortion debate, not policies surrounding it, but he is playing directly into the hand of the anti-choice movement; engaging in fetus-centered dialogue. This is an issue of women's health and women's rights; he has taken on their re-framed dialogue and is engaging with them on their terms.

He writes, "The only reason for regarding an abortion as more regrettable than a root canal, then, is the belief that moral personhood is not fundamentally about having a certain kind of mind." That's just not true - for some women abortion is an emotional experience, while for others not as much so. Even if you don't believe that a fetus has 'moral personhood' - some women feel the potentiality of a child, and therefore mourn an abortion. I doubt that Julian was somehow intending to diminish women's personal experiences, but in the same way that outlawing abortion does not take into consideration the lives of women -this moral statement has implicit value judgments on women's decisions.

Julian dismisses the need to talk about "women's bodies" by saying: "Treating fetuses as persons has harmful consequences, even if we simultaneously insist that their interests are trumped by women's right to control their bodies." Going on to say….by treating abortion as immoral we would be denigrating a huge amount of our population to the status of baby killer! YES - I agree! But I am supremely confused about how you would discuss a woman's right to control her own body if you are concurrently treating fetuses as a person - this seems inherently contradictory. Implicit in the "women's rights" dialogue is the belief that this *is* a fetus, and therefore a part of the woman's body and a personal health issue.

He tries to back up the previous point by saying that there is a direct correlation between politicians wanting to increase abstinence only policies and preventing abortion. Though surely, preventing unintended pregnancy is part of the abstinence only sex-ed agenda, it is not the whole idea! If these people really thought abortion was immoral, providing comprehensive sex-ed would work better! Abstinence only education is entrenched in promoting gender-norms, in promoting the belief that sex before marriage is bad and vilifying women who chose to "loose their flower" before marriage.

At the end of the article, Julian says: "Many genuine abortion moderates probably reason that since large numbers of people seem equally powerfully convinced that abortion is either morally unobjectionable, on the one hand, or tantamount to murder, on the other, it's best to leave such a fraught decision in the hands of individual women." So he's saying that people who are abortion moderates think that women should be allowed to make their own decisions (choice!) because they know people who are both 'pro and anti' - abortion. That doesn't make sense - if you think abortion should be left up to individual women to decide, you aren't a moderate, you're full on pro-choice.

Back to the main point of the article - Julian writes that framing the abortion debate using "safe, legal, and rare" language would be a "moral and strategic mistake." He writes, "Solomonic attempts to split the difference will collide unpleasantly with the reality that Schrödinger's Fetus, like its feline predecessor, is always either alive or dead under scrutiny." (Lots of big words and complicated metaphors make arguments better!) I also had problems when Hillary Clinton described abortion as "a tragic choice," but that was because she is making moral judgments on women's health decisions. In the end though -guess what? I believe we should work to make abortion rare! Like any health issue, prevention is always the best medicine. While concurrently working to protect abortion rights and ensure equal access, it is critical that we work to provide women with tools to prevent unintended pregnancies. To "win" the abortion debate in the public sphere - more than simply re-framing the debate about moral personhood is necessary. What must be done is work to take back the language of the debate to one that reflects the nuanced nature of women's personal decisions.

p.s. the ending ode to Yeats "The Second Coming" is an interesting choice -there being a variety of ways in which to interpret the connections between the poem and the issue of abortion in today's world. Alas - that is for another day.