1) My friend Damon Linker writes a column (with an unfortunately provocative headline) that, while sketching out his own moderate moral discomfort with abortion, takes to task strong abortion opponents as actually not caring so much about the fetal life which abortion extinguishes as about pushing an anti-contraception sexual traditionalism--the evidence being the success which various birth control initiatives have apparently had in lowering the abortion rate, initiatives which social conservative pro-lifers have decided refused to support.
2) Ross Douthat writes an uncharacteristically angry column in response to Damon and others, disputing--I think somewhat persuasively--the evidence which is presented in support of the thesis that more contraception services (such as provided by Planned Parenthood) always correlates with fewer abortions, asking hypothetically why such initiatives and institutions, if they really are "pro-life," always seem to tightly associate the providing of contraception services with the whole bloody economy of abortion, and ending with a strong challenge to moderates like Damon: please just unapologetically defend abortion rights, and stop making like you're troubled by abortion when you aren't actually interesting in limiting its practice.
3) Damon hits back, wondering how it is that the usually milquetoast Douthat has turned into an absolutist on this issue, rehearsing all the well-understood biological details about fertilization, implantation, and development which cut (again, to my mind persuasively) against any kind of simplistic, non-philosophical claims about "life beginning at conception," and strongly defending a series of laws and norms which puts its trust in intuitions--"An abortion at six weeks is worse than one at four weeks. Eight weeks is worse than six. Twelve is worse than 10. And so forth, as we approach fetal viability"--rather than any kind of "rational systematization."
4) Fellow Potterholic and Rod-Dreher-fan Alan Jacobs gives Damon's protestations no credit whatsoever, pointing out that Damon is fundamentally unwilling to dispute the "package deal" (contraception services and abortion) which Planned Parenthood depends upon, and concluding that "if in the face of the horrors revealed by these recent videos of Planned Parenthood’s callous and mercenary attitude towards the organs of killed fetal humans your response is to attack Ross Douthat, then maybe, just maybe, you’re not as 'deeply troubled by abortion' as you’d like to think you are."
5) In a series of Tweets, Damon defends himself to Alan, enough to lead Alan to restate his thoughts about Damon's substantive claims, in which he makes a couple of observations that I can't resist commenting on. First:
While Linker’s view is often described as a “gradualist” one, and while morally that may be true, in legal terms it’s not gradualist at all: it’s totally binary, all or nothing. In this account, before viability the taking of a fetal life is legally nugatory; after viability it’s murder. This is a big jump in any circumstances, but especially worrisome given the success of prenatal medicine in pushing viability earlier and earlier.
And second:
I appreciate, and even value, the general point that underlies Linker’s argument: that sometimes our laws have to be based on fallible and not especially consistent moral intuitions; that ad hoc reasoning is sometimes the best that we have; that the attempt to impose absolute consistency on our laws and jurisprudence is almost necessarily quixotic and prone to the generation of unintended consequences, because, as the adage rightly goes, hard cases make bad law. But I think our track record as a species--and more particularly as Americans--suggests that rough-and-ready moral intuitions do very little to protect the weak, the powerless, the despised. We need stronger and (yes) more consistent legal and moral stuff to protect those who cannot protect themselves.
Now unless I am reading this wrong--and Alan, please correct me if I am not--it seems to me that he is pretty plainly endorsing Douthat's implicit claim that abortion must necessarily oblige one to take a "binary" approach: legally nugatory, or murder. It's a position which it seems to me many strong defenders of abortion rights already, in structure if not in substance, agree with. The upshot is that talking about the supposedly "pro-life" upsides of contraception or the value of Western European-style compromises (something like universally accessible and free abortion services through the second trimester, and very strict restrictions thereafter) all comes off as weak: it doesn't give you the "stronger and (yes) more consistent legal and moral stuff" which a topic as serious as abortion requires. Mere intuitions ain't enough.
Well, maybe they're not--as anyone who as ever read my blog (or hell, this blog post!) can tell, I'm an intellectual who wants to get all the arguments in proper order so as to figure out what I think. But for Alan (and implicitly Douthat too) to apparently presume that we just can't trust moral intuitions about abortion to properly parse out the circumstances--that we need to develop moral arguments that are clearly all or nothing--strikes me as a rather surprising rejection of the long-standing conservative principle of "the wisdom of repugnance." I'm not sure how anyone could pretend that the whole reason the Planned Parenthood videos are generating so many accusations and so much discussion (and changing some minds) is exactly because, while none of the biological realities of abortion were unknown to anyone who took the time to think about it, those realities are now being displayed (however strategically) in a clinical, economic, utilitarian way which quite a few people--myself included--find kind of revolting. Is that disgust--which obviously will activated, as Damon suggested, less at conception than at four weeks, less at four weeks than at eight, less at eight than at twelve, etc.--really not something opponents of abortion should make use of? Are Alan and Ross, when it comes to what they plainly understand to be the enormity of abortion, really a variety of Nussbaumian liberal, who want our discourse on this matter to be clear and absolute, on one side or the other, without any ambiguous or ambivalent feelings of shame? I suppose that if you believe, to use the old pro-life stand-by, that the argument over abortion is a straight-up discussion about the teleological moral status of an unborn baby and nothing else--that this, in other words, can only be a replay of the argument over slavery--then I'd agree: it's all or nothing, folks. But until and unless medical technology enables us to vouchsafe complete independent personhood to the fetal embryo as soon as, say, its heart starts beating, then I'm going to continue to believe--to have the intuition!--that the woman in whom that baby is developing isn't the same as a slave-owner, and her preferences and needs have a balancing moral worth as well.
I'm a believer in repugnance. Not all of it, not all the time--anyone who lives in a pluralistic society, as opposed to a completely sexually traditional Christian one, if they are honest, can't deny that it isn't just sin, but also differing perceptions and differing experiences, which can lead some people to find certain things gross and while others don't. Which means you can argue about such feelings--argue that they're wrong-headed, or that they are insufficiently complete. But I don't see why the fact that feelings of repugnance get attached to various actions or conditions non-systematically, giving rise to differences and arguments, is an argument against their legitimacy as a tool of social discourse. (Jason Brennan and Peter Jaworski have recently written a thoughtful--though I also think somewhat repetitive--article challenging the notion that anyone ought to ever give any ethical place to what they call "symbolic" or "semiotic" limits, which in their view are always mere social interpretations, and therefore ought to fall before real practical consequences. The first and most obvious problem with that claim, of course, is that economic and utilitarian "consequences" themselves are cultural and social constructions as well.) Damon's position regarding abortion is pretty much my own--in part exactly because it is neither a philosophical prioritization of bodily autonomy in all cases, nor a theological mandate about the moral inviolability of the natural processes of biological reproduction either. It's squishy. Let's hear it for squishy, at least sometimes, okay? I thought that was one of the better conservative principles, after all.