Two years ago, when North Carolina governor Pat McCrory
broke his campaign promises and signed new abortion restrictions into law, I
wrote about the spectacular lack of trust this showed for women and the
health care decisions they make. I did
so as a soon-to-be dad, awaiting the birth of my baby girl. I did so because I thought the implicit
message of distrust was poisonous and would undermine everything my wife and I
would teach her about her value and potential as a human being, and everything
society would tell her about those same things.
I was angry then. I still am.
Now McCrory has done it again, signing
into law a 72-hour waiting period for women seeking abortions. He does this in full knowledge of the
hardships it will present to lower-income women and women who have to travel
far to receive abortion services. That
he announced the decision via email rather than on his website or in some other
public manner shows, perhaps, some sense of shame at yet another betrayal of
the public trust.
My argument remains the same now as it did two years ago
concerning the lack of trust he and the radical Republicans in the state
legislature have for women. It is not my
intent to re-litigate that point.
Nor is it my intent to make a general pro-choice
argument. My stand for choice is based
in pragmatism and a deep respect for the bodily autonomy of women. Arguments that “life” begins at conception
are, at base, philosophical rather than scientific. We use the law as a blunt instrument to
answer the fine questions of when a fetus stops being a fetus and starts being
a person. Allowing abortion preserves a
woman’s autonomy; preventing it after “viability” acknowledges that at a
certain point the fetus can live without its mother and society can rightly
take an interest in it. The entire
argument is a balancing act of interests.
But this balancing act is illustrative of a larger issue,
and one that shapes our politics in ways that we need to understand. On the one hand, we have conservatives who
say that a person due all the
protections of law is the product of the union of sperm and egg. On the other we have progressives (I prefer
“liberal” but there is still a negative valence to the word in our discourse)
who claim that the fetus is a person when it can live, albeit with
technological assistance, outside of the womb.
Conservatives say the separate life has an equal status to the mother, reducing her to an incubator;
liberals that until viability the mother’s rights predominate.
What is interesting about this is the value that
conservatives place on the pre-viable fetus. They give it the attribute of
“life” and furthermore of “personhood.”
Both of these are not scientific facts; they are philosophical
opinions. For conservatives, the zygote and fetus that form have a right to live, and a mother may not abrogate
that right except, perhaps, in cases of rape, incest, or danger to life. In reality, then, the rights assigned to the
fetus supersede those of the mother. The
fetus, remember, whose personhood is entirely a matter of philosophical opinion.*
The abstract
person is equal to or more important than the concrete flesh-and-blood mother.
I think this is a key to understanding the way some
conservatives think.
In the Citizens United
case, the Supreme Court ruled that non-profit corporations could not be
limited in their political spending, a decision which has seen these rights
extended to other entities as well. In Hobby Lobby, closely-held corporations
were held to have free exercise rights under the Constitution. In case after case rights that have been
traditionally applied to people have been extended to artificial “persons,”
corporations created by law. That the
actions of these persons have negatively impacted the lives of real people does not seem to bother
supporters. Again, we have a prejudice
against the concrete.
Support for the death penalty is high among conservatives,
who see it as enacting an ultimate form of justice, even in the face of the
real harm done innocents convicted to death row erroneously, and the
possibility of people being executed for crimes they didn’t commit; in a 1993 case the
Supreme Court essentially ruled that as long as procedures were followed,
states could execute an innocent man. Like fetal personhood and like corporate
personhood, there is a preference in these matters for the abstract over the
concrete—process over people; the law over life.
We might also consider the following:
- A preference for as…liberal…an interpretation of the Second Amendment over common-sense gun regulations;
- Favoring religious interpretations of marriage over the due process rights of gay men and women who wish to marry;
- Allowing religious exemptions from serving people when doing so would violate “closely-held” religious beliefs under the guise of “restoring” religious freedom;
- Willingness to effectively disenfranchise thousands to remedy the almost non-existent scourge of vote fraud with the claim of seeking “clean elections;”
- Using the existence of a minuscule number of cheaters to make access to public assistance programs harder.
The list surely goes on.
In each case a principle, an abstraction, is used as a justification to
ignore the suffering of real people and, in some cases, as an excuse for “accidental”
suffering inflicted. Time after time we
see certain conservatives siding with impersonal forces rather than with real
people. Yes, principles are important to
have, and liberals have them, too. But if
your principles require you to inflict harm on fellow human beings, then I
suggest your principles are faulty. They
are a good starting point, but must bend to reality.
Indeed, blind obedience to abstract principles has led to the worst atrocities we have visited on one another. We cannot allow them to let us lose sight of
the humanity of those around us, to deny our fellow citizens the equal standing they are due, a result that leaves us all impoverished.
*So is anyone’s personhood when you get down to it. But it’s hard to deny personhood to people
right in front of you. It can be
done. Sadly, it has been all too often.
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