Pro-Choice Arguments, Part 1

Recently, I have been exposed to some "new" arguments in favor of abortion.

The first is the "whole life" view. You will sometimes hear it under the banner of "underlying causes." It usually goes something like this: Liberals are interested in fairness and equality. They fight for social programs that will distribute capital to those in need. Abortion occurs mostly among the poor. Statistics show that when poverty decreases, so do abortions. Therefore, if you want to decrease the number of abortions, then you should favor politicians who will work on the problem of abortion by working on the problem of poverty.

What is noteworthy here is that the people who advocate this are often Christians. Their position is framed as a "real world" solution, because Christians, it is thought, have already lost on the political question of banning abortion. So we need to think creatively of proximate success on the question.

I want to respond to this by looking at a series of problems with the argument:

1. It forgets that abortion is itself presented as a "whole life" solution to poverty.

Going all the way back to Sanger, it is not as though we must tolerate abortion while we work on poverty. Abortion is itself the solution to poverty, or at the very least it is a solution to poverty. If a disadvantaged young woman gets pregnant, she can always turn to abortion to keep her "whole life" situation from being worse.

Now if this is true, then we must consider the contributions of Peter Singer to this discussion. He favors the possibility of infanticide, because why would we expect a couple to raise a severely disabled child? It is going to impact the "whole life" happiness of that couple to spend their days caring for a totally dependent child. The same can be said of others in society that are a drain on resources and therefore affect the happiness of the greatest number.

In effect, the Christian who advocates this nonsense has become a utilitarian, at least when it comes to public policy. He thinks that the world cannot ingest Christian principles, and so the best we can do is remove Christian principles from public life and function with a next best option, which is the rationalist utilitarian option.

A friend of mine suggested that they are also functional Gnostics in an important way. They have initiated a spiritual separation of Christianity from public life. In fact, they are suspicious of anyone who would try to bring Christianity into public policy at all. The upside here is that they certainly will never face persecution for their Christian beliefs. Why would anyone persecute someone who has partitioned his Christian faith into the realm of his own subjective spiritual experience, but will never let it break out into the messy physical realm? That is the way they are Gnostics. Christianity is the domain of the spirit cut off from the world. The rest is the realm of the body and politics and the dirt and grit of daily life, where spiritual things have no influence.

2. The problem of causation and correlation. Is poverty the cause of abortion?

To illustrate this point, imagine for a moment that we could render all poverty gone from the world. Would that eliminate abortion? Even without looking at studies of the current situation, we know that abortion would remain, as a last protection for the rich against having an unwanted child. Consider the many middle, upper-middle and upper class people who procure abortions today. Are they doing it because their "whole life" experience is compromised? It is specious to connect abortion to poverty. Poverty may complicate things, but it complicates a lot of social problems without being their cause.

3. The "whole life" argument is a red herring fallacy for any liberal Christian who wants to argue it.

To illustrate this point, I will take you through an imaginary Socratic dialogue:

Socrates: So, Liberal Christian, I have a question for you: Why do you favor policies that will reduce the number of abortions?

LC: I don't encourage abortion. I still see it as a bad thing.

Socrates: Okay, but please indulge me as to why it is a bad thing?

LC: As a Christian, I believe abortion takes the life of an unborn baby, but I also know that I should be a realist and advocate policies that others will accept and which will not merely impose Christian ethical views publicly.

Socrates: Let me see if I can understand your position. You think abortion is so bad that it should be reduced in society through policies that will help to that end. And you think it is so bad because it takes the life of an innocent unborn human being. But you also think that taking the lives of these innocent unborn human beings should be legal. Have I understood you correctly?

LC: Socrates, you are a gadfly!

In effect, the advocate of this view is saying only this: We should have a more just society, because in doing so we will reduce the number of abortions that occur. But while we are working for that just society, we can commit the additional injustice of slaughtering the most helpless among us. I struggle to understand how any Christian can find such an argument in the slightest bit persuasive. It is yet another of these pseudo-intellectual rationalizations that is embraced because of its complexity, and because of "the studies." Opacity and obscurity of argumentation are sometimes signs of genius finding it difficult to explain things. The "whole life" view is opacity and obscurity as a cloak for nothing.

4. The "whole life" view is a false dichotomy.

What is puzzling to me about this is that any Christian could seriously affirm it. Why not work towards helping the poor and work towards banning abortion? The idea that we have lost on the question is only true if we accept the authority of the person proclaiming defeat. In a democracy, Christians are given every right to work towards banning abortion. And in the meantime, we can also do what we feel is best to help the poor. I happen to think that conservative values and market solutions are a better answer for poverty than liberal ones. See Dalrymple's fine work on this, titled Life at The Bottom.

5. Analogy between abortion and poverty and crime and poverty.

Let us change the terminology. There is a causal connection between crime and poverty. Anytime you reduce poverty, you reduce crime. We should focus our energies of social justice for the disenfranchised in the inner cities and not on prosecuting crime. Therefore, we need not address crime at all in the meantime because we are going to (see if this sounds familiar) address its "underlying causes."

6. The argument assumes that liberal social policy is superior to conservative social policy in helping the poor.

On this point, both sides offer impressive "studies" and "statistics," etc. Suffice it to say for this piece that it is far from obvious that liberal policy is superior to conservative policy in addressing the problem of poverty. And, at any rate, to me this point is wholly secondary to the prior points, which are more than adequate to destroy the "whole life" view on the question of Christian support for abortion.