I had a thought recently about abortion ideology that I wanted to explore. I used to think the only prime driver of anti-abortionism is literally just Christian patriarchy (predominately in the West at least; elsewhere it might be Islamic patriarchy). In other words, this is really just a desire to enforce sexist gender norms, lest failing to do so continually remind you that even your government has declared your religion false. Abortion has to be illegal—or else women can have all the sex they want without subordinating themselves to a man or enslaving themselves in servitude to his children. That’s why anti-abortionists are also against anything that actually reduces abortion—like free IUDs; or any kind of birth control; or even mere training in how to use it. Condoms are evil not because they kill babies—to the contrary, prohibiting condoms has killed a huge number of people, including babies—but instead because they actually allow women to claim equality with men, sexual and otherwise. It fucks up patriarchy.
There is also, I suspect, a component of envy (like women who do not like other women claiming a hedonistic freedom they are themselves prohibited from enjoying; the “if I can’t have nice things, neither can anyone else” mentality; which may even reflect a sexual strategy) and a desire to control (like men who simply want to control women’s choices to keep them subordinated). But the prime mover, the thing without which there wouldn’t be a very strong movement to outlaw abortion, is this insistence on maintaining patriarchy and the subordinate status of women. It’s really about conservative Christian gender norms; the same thing that drives anti-trans activism: if we legalize that, just like if we legalize abortion, we are essentially declaring the Christian’s worldview false, because everything they believe about “man and woman” and their roles is inexorably linked to their entire Biblical worldview (Christ’s atonement, and thus mechanism of salvation, makes no sense without the story of Adam and Eve being taken in some sense literally).
Even worse: legalizing abortion means the government is thereby declaring their beliefs false. Right in their face. The cognitive dissonance is terrifyingly unbearable. It therefore must be crushed at all costs. The government must not repudiate their faith! The same motivation underlay the insistence on teaching creationism in schools: allowing the government to teach evolution is literally too emotionally painful to bear. It is a constant, official reminder that their worldview is bogus. It is an admission that they are losing the culture war. Their entire patriarchal culture—their entire religion—is just an archaic dying fad, factually unsustainable, and therefore unworthy of state endorsement. The horror!
This was clear enough in the long history of intense Christian opposition to gay rights. And there is a reason all these virulent beliefs are so comorbid: anti-evolution-in-school, anti-abortionism, anti-birth-control, anti-sex-education, anti-gay-sex, anti-gay-marriage, anti-trans-rights; these all orbit the exact same nexus of denying the conservative Christian’s sexist patriarchal gender norms. Yes, even evolution. Because, you know. Yeah, that. Which is why even when those few atheists side with Christians on these things, and oppose trans rights or abortion, just converse with them long enough and eventually they will reveal their own version of the same patriarchal delusion, maybe calling it Evolutionary Psychology, but ultimately just another bogus sexist belief in the same gender hierarchy that cannot abide challenges to its gender norms. Allowing the government to endorse factual reality against these deeply held beliefs is not just offensive, but literally, physically painful; and thus a cause of rage—and thence, action.
Consider a recent example. Atheists often scratched their head at why Christians were so enragedly obsessed with preventing the legalization of gay marriage. Why do they care what non-Christians do? It literally doesn’t affect them. Even when they insist it does (“I shouldn’t have to sell wedding cakes to homos!”), it really doesn’t (you literally are affected in no way whatever by who eats your cakes or where). Sure, maybe you can refuse to put words on your cake endorsing something you don’t believe in; that’s fine. But just cakes? Those aren’t words. And in any case, almost no one is a baker. So the once-nationally-pervasive anti-gay-marriage sentiment can’t be ascribed to angry bakers. This wasn’t a “won’t someone think of the bakers!” movement. Just as anti-trans activism isn’t really about bathrooms. So what was it really about?
As Amanda Marcotte brilliantly put it, after analyzing what anti-gay-marriage activists really said was their motivating reason, “To accept same-sex marriage is to accept this modern idea that marriage is about love and partnership, instead of about dutiful procreation and female submission.” In other words, merely allowing the government to recognize same-sex marriages means admitting that they have lost the culture war: marriage really is just about love and partnership, and now the government has outright said so. You should read her entire astute analysis in “The Real Reason Why Conservatives Like Ross Douthat Oppose The Gay Marriage Ruling” at Talking Points Memo. But in short, she’s right: while indeed Christians lost this culture war a century ago, they nevertheless complained about this constantly, still declaring their position “the silent majority” that an overpowered minority of decadent liberals were trying to undermine, rather than admitting their position was actually that of a declining minority who had already quite completely lost the argument—and hence, control of our national culture. What they still had, what could bolster their calm and assuage their cognitive dissonance, was that the government still endorsed their position (or appeared to at any rate). The prospect of losing even that was therefore nightmarish—terrifyingly unbearable, to be crushed at all costs. The government must not repudiate their faith! That is why Christians were so against allowing state-endorsed marriage contracts for gay people. It amounted to admitting even the government had declared their sexist, patriarchal understanding of the purpose of marriage bogus. So they fought it tooth and nail.
Our culture had long before already widely embraced a definition and understanding of marriage as something you do for love and not as a mere vehicle for gender-subordinating baby-production. It was only Christian conservative pockets who raged in terror at such a blasphemous shift in what marriage was even for. But that rage and fear sustained a massive political movement to oppose the government’s finally putting its official stamp of approval on what our culture had already broadly embraced. I think opposition to abortion is driven by exactly the same need, exactly the same impulse, exactly the same terror. All the “arguments against abortion” are just flailing around for some means to that end, rationalizations to get what they want, and not always the actual reasons they want it. The real driver is fear that their sexist patriarchy has not only lost and is in decline, but even the very government itself is saying so, the most intolerable of intolerables.
I am not here going to go into the arguments for and against legalized abortion, as that is not my subject today. You can check out my take on that elsewhere. Today I am only exploring a secondary question: why, when there are no even remotely credible arguments against legalizing abortion, people are still obsessively, even (literally) murderously against it? Why is this such an issue? And the patriarchy thing is definitely a major part of that answer. It unifies a lot of explanations, because it explains all the other crazy political fury coming from exactly the same people—against gay rights, trans rights, sex ed and evolutionary biology in schools. So it tracks well as a good explanation. And it predicts a lot of things.
But I’ve also come to suspect there is a second, reinforcing driver of anti-abortionism, one that might even be able to sustain its intensity without its abhorrently sexist patriarchal foundation: fear of death.
Atheists have long noted a major driver of religious belief itself is mortalism: people don’t want to cope with the fact that they are mortal—that inevitably, they’ll die, and thus not be around anymore—and their fear of this fate drives them by motivated reasoning to latch onto any “culturally normed” delusional belief-system that can let them go on thinking they will live forever. So, they can’t delusionally believe they are vampires (too easy to disprove; and there’s no widespread cultural support for it); but they can delusionally believe ancient blood magic will secure them eternal life. Because unlike vampirism, exposing yourself to daylight, or anything else, won’t immediately disprove that. Any disproof takes steps of reasoning; and steps of reasoning are easy to avoid if you are adequately motivated. And there is widespread cultural support to tap into—there are churches on practically every corner, literally hundreds of people who will eagerly validate your delusion, because doing so validates their own.
Hell, Christian evangelists literally use this as a persuader: atheism is bad because—shock!—those godless pinkos actually think we are mortal and Oh My God Isn’t That Terrible? Life would have no meaning! If it all just ends, that’s the worst thing ever! So surely we are immortal! We cannot abide thinking otherwise. “And hey, we have a special magic that makes you live forever; just some obedience to our social demands required. You know. Tiny little thing.” So there is no doubt fear of death is one of the prime factors driving religious belief; maybe not as potent a driver for every believer, but it drives a hell of a lot of them, particularly conservatives. If this is true of religion generally, then the same motivator could drive anti-abortionism specifically. All it would require is some inexorable cognitive link between “allowing abortion” and “admitting we’re all gonna die.” If that link exists, then abortion must be banned, because otherwise we are allowing the government itself to tell us we aren’t immortal. The cognitive dissonance would be terrifyingly unbearable. It therefore must be crushed at all costs. The government must not repudiate the faith!
So, is there such a link? I think there is. Atheists will often note that anti-abortionism makes no actual logical sense without a soul. “Anything with DNA is human, all humans are persons, therefore fetuses are persons” is illogical. Try it on a cadaver and you’ll see what I mean. Likewise anyone alive but braindead. “DNA” simply isn’t what “person” means. This is like trying to argue that because latches on ship’s doors are called dogs, that all ships must therefore be full of animals. Nonsense. Likewise “fetuses have heartbeats and fingernails, therefore they are persons” or any other likewise illogical rationalization. Other arguments are simply fabricated, like “abortion will kill you” (in fact maternal mortality is far higher; you are literally more likely to be killed by a pregnancy than an abortion). Clearly no one really believes that either. Except insofar as they need to believe it, to get the result they want, which is to get the government to stop declaring their most heartfelt religious beliefs false.
No. When you dig, push, get them to admit those arguments are all bogus, what you end up with underneath it all is this belief that fetuses have souls. One might question whether even having souls is sufficient to warrant outlawing abortion, but that doesn’t matter to the present point; by far most anti-abortionists are conservative theists (Christians, in the U.S.), and conservative theists are obsessed with the idea that people (and thus fetuses) have souls, and that it is this that makes killing immoral. After all, they can’t say murder is wrong because it ends life; they believe everyone is immortal. Right? And they can’t even say it’s wrong because it “might” send someone to hell, because it actually might not (Jesus saves!). You don’t see Christians saying it’s totally okay to kill Christians because doing so doesn’t really kill them—it simply relocates them, and to a far better place, in a far better body, where they can even reunite with lost loved ones and pets! No. They need this soul thing. Killing a body with a soul in it just has to be “wrong” somehow. They can’t actually articulate a logical reason for thinking that. But religion isn’t logical. What matters is that they believe it. Not whether they rationally should.
Once you recognize the absolute necessity of believing (1) fetuses have souls and (2) killing anything with a soul is wrong, in order to sustain any logical opposition to legalized abortion, it becomes obvious why allowing the government to legalize abortion threatens every delusional Christian’s belief in their own immortality. If it’s okay to kill a fetus, then the presence of a soul isn’t what makes a person; if the presence of a soul isn’t what makes a person, then only a particular physical structure and activity of the brain makes a person; and if only a particular physical structure and activity of the brain makes a person, then the dissolution of the brain is the dissolution of the person. The government is thus endorsing and admitting this when it legalizes abortion. It is outright telling Christians: there are no souls. Not in so many words, of course. All the government is doing is admitting there are no facts admissible in court that a person even exists in a fetus. But that is tantamount to admitting there is no soul in a fetus warranting outlawing the killing of one. And if fetuses don’t have souls, the same evidence entails neither do babies, children, or adults. The state is thus declaring personal life is a particular physical brain-state. Which entails death is death. No more immortality … unless you jump on the techno-immortalism bandwagon, which is itself a repudiation of Christianity. Jesus doesn’t save; hypothetical future nanobots do.
Legalizing abortion is thus intolerable to a conservative Christian for the same reason legalizing gay marriage is: it amounts to letting the government tell them their most cherished beliefs about how the world works are false. The resulting cognitive dissonance is terrifyingly unbearable. It therefore must be crushed at all costs. The government must not repudiate their faith! “How dare you have the law say people don’t have souls and thus are not immortal!” Fear of death thus, in part I suspect, drives anti-abortionism, because accepting abortion entails accepting its implicit mind-brain physicalism, which entails repudiating the Christian’s cherished delusion in their own immortality. Indeed, worst of all, it recruits their own precious government in effecting that repudiation. They would feel less threatened if the government endorsed their belief in souls, because that would validate their belief in their own immortality, and thus not trigger their fear of conclusive death.
Cognitive dissonance can only be resolved by abandoning the belief that is false (or unsustainable on any evidence), or denying the entire state of the evidence, which latter requires some mechanism of evasion or validation: avoiding (or making go away) people who don’t validate, and surrounding yourself with people who do validate, your delusion. But you can’t evade the government’s decisions. The law, the state’s decisions on what to manifest in society, is a constant and unavoidable reminder that your own cherished central authority (‘Merica!) won’t validate your delusion. And this is as true of their patriarchal delusion as their immortality delusion. The government is admitting fetuses don’t have souls and therefore neither do we. Which is effectively the same as admitting that the Christian isn’t immortal. Their deceased loved ones are gone forever. And soon they will be too. This cannot be abided. Whereas outlawing abortion creates the comforting impression that the government has endorsed everyone’s immortality, by recognizing the soul exists, and is the reason for outlawing any kind of killing at all. Their religion is thus validated.
This is true even for pseudo-Christians, those Christians who don’t really believe, or don’t much care whether what they believe “is true,” but who embrace the position of Plato and the modern neocon movement: if society will fall apart if people don’t believe they are immortal, then the government must endorse immortality by outlawing abortion. The neocon ideology is that most people (“the masses”) need to believe religion is true, even though it is false, because it is only this false belief in their immortality that motivates their being moral and obeying laws. Therefore, the neocon must themselves pretend to believe; otherwise they might contribute to the undermining of social order by inspiring the spread of unbelief, which if allowed will drown the nation in socialism, rape camps, fun-riots, and skeet-shooting kittens. The neocon belief is just as false and delusional as the sincere Christian’s. But it remains just as motivating. This is why those politicians who don’t seem likely to be real believers nevertheless think it remains important to outlaw abortion—so as to reassure the public they are immortal, and thus assuage them into conforming to the capitalist social structure. Opium of the masses.
Needless to say, there has to be some motive for being anti-abortion (as also anti-gay, anti-trans, anti-factual-education). Because it isn’t motivated by evidence. Indeed, even anti-abortionists recognize that it would be abhorrent of Jews to legislate a ban on pork and shrimp, or Hindus on beef, simply because of their personal religious beliefs. Everyone agrees they can simply freely not eat those things themselves; no one else, no one who lacks these beliefs, need heed such a directive. And so, if Christians believed in religious liberty, they’d agree they can refrain from abortions themselves if their religion declares them immoral; no one else, no one who lacks these beliefs, need heed such a directive. The government has no business outlawing abortion, then, than in outlawing pork, shrimp, or beef. But instead, when it’s abortion (or gay marriage, or switching gender, or teaching evolution or sex ed), they lash about for some rationalization to outlaw it, or at least impede it by law. Because admitting their real motives out loud would be damning, even to their own sense of identity. They can’t admit to being sexists defending patriarchy or that they are just afraid of death. They have to tell themselves a different story. But the stories they tell themselves are false. Their real motives, meanwhile, are real.
But the real motives exist as subtext everywhere. You can see this across the slew of “arguments” to outlaw abortion promulgated by the now-defrocked Frank Pavone, every one a specious rationalization, but underlying it is this latent fear that Christianity is false; we aren’t going to live forever. This is clearest in his argument that almost even mentions the fact:
I have talked with and listened to many providers of abortion and often they justify their actions by saying, “Well I don’t know when the child receives a soul.” My response to that is, “So what”? The law that protects you from someone else trying to take your life does not require that that person believe you have a soul. It doesn’t even require that they believe in souls at all. The pro-life effort is not about imposing religious beliefs upon anybody. We’re not asking that anyone belong to a particular religion by law. All we’re asking is that the same norms that protect born people be used to protect unborn people. Is that really too much to ask?
This argument is multiply specious. Just reword it as a Hindu justifying the outlawing of the entire beef industry and you’ll immediately see that his distinction between beliefs and behaviors is impertinent: outlawing beef is enforcing a belief on non-Hindus, a belief in the sacredness of cows. It enforces it through behavior: you can’t eat beef because I believe cows are sacred; thus disregarding the beliefs of everyone else, and simply forcing them to comply with the belief of the legislator. We all agree that’s wrong. And Pavone isn’t really responding to that here. He is just using verbal legerdemain to make it sound like he has. But notice what his statements further entail: he clearly believes the possessing of a soul is what makes killing wrong. He argues, “Well, just because you don’t believe there is a soul, still doesn’t make killing right,” because—your belief is false! There is a soul. So “disagreeing” over when a soul enters a body (he argues) doesn’t get you out of the fact that fetuses do have souls no matter what you believe; therefore you should comply with our belief that they do.
Notice he doesn’t argue that it doesn’t matter if souls exist, that murder is wrong for some other reason, that the unborn “are people” even if they don’t have a soul. No. He assumes the reverse. For him, this is merely a question of what one “believes.” Thus you can’t just “disbelieve” a soul exists and get away with murder—because, he is implying, belief is trumped by fact: fetuses have souls no matter whether you “believe” they do. He thus wants the state to validate not only his belief that people have souls, and that their having souls is the actual thing that makes murder wrong (neither of which is anything the state has ever or could ever actually declare), but that fetuses also have them—and so this excuse about “I don’t know when” souls go in simply has to be dismissed, because facts trump beliefs. Of course, there are no “facts” here. He is treating his belief as a fact, indeed the fact that gets to trump all other beliefs. Which is precisely what violates all principles of religious liberty.
This instance makes this obvious. But the same assumptions underlay all his arguments. “Abortion is the taking of a human life” is just code for “fetuses have souls; and killing things with souls should be illegal.” Likewise “abortion is an act of violence against a human being,” or abortion is “the destruction of children” or “child murder” or “baby killing” or “killing the child” or taking “innocent lives” or “the killing of babies,” or “the unborn [is] your brother” so we “cannot” claim we do not “know” when “life begins,” or “the child is already there, fully present,” or the unborn is a “human being” because he “bears the image of God,” or “the unborn child is a creature of God, loved and chosen by the Father” and therefore you cannot say “this child is not a person,” or we must respect “the need to protect our children,” or “if the destiny of the human person is to be on the very throne of Christ, how can followers of Christ tolerate human beings being thrown in the garbage?” Just as when he says we must “help those in need,” he is relying on the assumption that “those” are “people” who thus “have needs”; or when he says it’s “more tolerant and inclusive” to include fetuses as “persons” under the law.
At no point does he ever present any evidence for any of these assertions. Why are we to believe “the child” is “fully present” in a fetus? Not a clue. Yet Pavone bases nearly every single one of his arguments on this assertion; which is the same one, over and over again, only in different words. And it’s all just code for “fetuses have souls; souls are people; killing people is wrong.” Only six of his arguments (out of two dozen there) don’t employ this premise, but resort to the other tactic: false claims. Twice he declares abortion clinics aren’t physically safe for women; and once that they cause widespread psychological harm. Vast statistics refute him. He claims abortion clinics offer women “no other alternative” but abortion. Which is false. And he claims Sandra Bensing in Doe v. Bolton was forced to procure an abortion. Which is false. Likewise, he claims if we can outlaw killing the fertilized eggs of endangered sea turtles, then why can’t we outlaw killing human fertilized eggs? Apart from sea turtles being an endangered species (and humans anything but), there is no law against sea turtles killing their own eggs, so this analogy isn’t even logical. One does have to ask why he needs to make all these false claims to defend his position. Why is there no true statement he can make in defense of it? Well, we might have a clue in the remaining overwhelming number of times he repeats the same other argument instead: it’s “fetuses have souls,” all the way down.
Why is it so important for him to believe that? Why can’t he advance any intelligible reason killing is wrong but that? I suspect it’s because if he abandons either belief, he would be compelled to abandon belief in his own soul—and hence his own immortality. He might then have to admit he’s actually going to die. And he just can’t have that, can he?
I suspect that your explanation accurately accounts for a substantial majority of anti-abortion fanatics. I’d like to propose a third potential variable: the exploitation of a normal human instinct to create a political wedge to further the cultural tribe.
Even outside of the issue of souls, the idea that a pregnant women has a “baby” inside her is a strong one. It is likely very common, if not close to universal, to instinctively project personhood onto the life growing inside her, even at the stage when it is a mere clump of cells. It takes a certain amount of non-instinctive reasoning to accept that a potential person isn’t yet an actual person and thus murder is not committed prior to that transition (which is itself not easy to identify).
It is this common instinct, in combination with the fuzzy boundary for personhood, that makes it easy to develop political language that paints anti-abortionists as heroic protectors of babies and pro-choicers as baby killers—in service to keeping people within a political tribe.
I’m not saying that this can’t overlap both of the variables you outline. I’m simply suggesting that this is a possible third independent variable.
That can all contribute, as does envy and control as I mentioned, but I doubt it would drive any significant movement; just as the natural instinct to anthropomorphize animals drives a fringe movement to outlaw meat, not any significant movement that can actually pass laws. There has to be a more pervasive motive that emotionally drives vast numbers of people. Vague superstitions about babies wouldn’t cut it. There has to be some sort of perceived existential threat.
Richard: I think the difference here is that the intuition about anthropomorphism, etc. is running up against a culture that devalues non-humans to an irrational degree based on a hierarchical notion of nature, whereas the anthropomorphism of the fetus and the need to police human boundaries (which is a huge part of conservative thought) runs with that culture. I agree this is probably only an additional comorbidity and is just an additional contributing factor, but fundamentally people are going to be a lot more invested in simple ideologies that make them special over making cows special.
//There has to be some sort of perceived existential threat.//
Yes, but I’m suggesting that the threat isn’t always (or primarily) aimed at one’s own immortality, but at the life of an assumed pre-born person. After all, what kind of monster doesn’t want to save babies in danger? While it is often argued on the religious right that this instinct is due to the fact that a fetus has a soul, I would suggest that this religious claim is a hack written on top of the underlying instinct to protect offspring.
I think your argument is especially relevant to explicitly fundamentalist anti-choice advocates, which (I assume) makes up for the bulk of loud voices. I’m merely suggesting that there is an even deeper instinct at play which the religious right has weaponized in service to forwarding political aims (sometimes sincerely and sometimes cynically).
A focus on “the life of an assumed pre-born person” is refuted by the fact that they readily support death policies (they are not really that concerned to reduce the number of abortions so much as punish anyone who would seek one; and their policies, in regards abortion and outside matters, often lead to more deaths, e.g. they give barely a shit about the alarming rate of maternal mortality in this country). They are also lackluster in supporting the welfare of babies thus born. There is simply no passion for the actual interests of children here. It clearly isn’t concern for children that is driving their mad, raging activism. That would manifest in several other ways were that the case—many of them actually useful.
So there must be some other motivator. This “but they are babies!” rhetoric sounds good and activates emotions, but given this actual weak interest in doing anything for kids means it simply would have no major impact (people wouldn’t really care enough to drive policy) unless it was activating some other interest than an actual concern for children. This isn’t a mistake, as if they “mistakenly think” babies are being killed and are up in arms about it. They are up in arms about it for some deeper, existential reason, and then to get people to pay attention they frame it as “babies are being killed.” But, you know, babies in Ukraine, fuck them. And refugee babies? Put them in cages and toss them back to the dogs. There isn’t really mush actual interest in the babies here.
To put it another way:
If there was as much outraged passion for maintaining the Federal Child Tax Credit as for outlawing abortion, you might have a point. But there isn’t. So you don’t. That’s why I landed in a different place in my article. There has to be some other explanation.
Richard: That hypocrisy is just like the inconsistency and hypocrisy of simultaneously claiming that life is sacred because it has a soul so murder is wrong and that life is sinful but a future utopia would exist if we died. The methods of reducing abortions would all protect the unworthy, as would a sincere protection of life at all stages. But they will always happily get protections for their own communities: Countless studies have shown that conservative opposition to welfare, for example, hinges on carefully defining “welfare” as the thing that other people get (and abuse), and that when conservatives are forced to admit the scale of government assistance they have gotten in various forms, their opposition can decline.
The children of the Other are, at least sometimes, innocent. It’s only when they are born that the standard excuses can be trotted out.
Moreover, the method that they have for controlling abortion is brutal state oppression. The other things like federal tax credits and social work and welfare and protecting immigrant and foreign children are all helping. Government shouldn’t help. It should crush.
I think Ash is onto something here. You can see it in the way that black anti-abortion advocates like Kanye reframe the issue as basically trying to prevent an ongoing holocaust against their people. Our tribe needs to breed successfully, whatever that tribe is. That need is a big part of the inevitable coalescence of authoritarianism and sexism: They need a highly-policed, breeding-oriented population.
The Kanye argument is actually fringe. It was only recently that “white holocaust” (Great Replacement) became a concern more generally among conservatives. It never drove anti-abortionism before (this has never been a “we must save the white race from extinction” argument; much less a “we must save the black race from extinction” argument, which White Evangelicals would never get excited about anyway). If that were all that drove anti-abortionism, too few people would be strongly enough into it to ever affect policy. So this is not an adequate explanation of the scale and intensity of it.
So we are back to needing an explanation of why they drop interest in kids after being born, and aren’t interested in kids who die from maternal complications, and yet maintain an extremely intense emotional need to outlaw abortion, rather than reduce it. That intensity vanishes in all other contexts. If it were about a conservative desire to save public money, they’d be for abortion. So it’s not about welfare.
There is only one thing left: what beliefs the government is and is not endorsing by what it allows and doesn’t. And there are only two available motives intense enough, and actually in evidence, to drive such a vast scale of policy support for that: gender norms and mortalism. There is no “abortion is bad, because handouts” or “abortion is bad, because extinction is imminent” rhetoric anywhere in the abortion debate (beyond unrepresentative fringe outliers). But there is “abortion is bad, because souls” and “abortion is bad, because women should be raising kids” rhetoric all over the place. Those are therefore the best candidates for emotional drive. Everything else is just too weak a tea to really get that many people so excited and motivated.
Richard, you haven’t negated the observation I’ve made, you’ve simply illustrated the difference between tapping into instinctive concerns and making rational arguments. There is a primal urge to protect offspring, and in the anti-abortion movement, this is multiplied by the virtue signal of being a hero to all those poor unborn babies. It isn’t surprising that efforts to tap into this instinct don’t extend to logical policies that would reduce unwanted pregnancies or improve the life of children once born. Those policies do not exploit the protective instinct, but are rational solutions to the humanistic project to extend happiness and reduce misery.
This is where your observations come in—people who do not share that worldview, but instead value Christian patriarchy and enforcing sexist gender norms, have no interest in such policies, and indeed find them offensive. This is where the right wing project of Christian patriarchy exploits the natural desire to protect infants—and no more. All the arguments about souls is just a patch on top of the base instinct. And yes, for the evangelicals out there, I agree that existential concerns also play a vital role. But not every anti-choice advocate is a fundamentalist Christian, which is why I think the protective instinct is the fuel that powers their movement. Without that instinct, and left only with religious dogma, I believe the movement wouldn’t exist at all.
There can’t be an instinctive concern for kids that rarely even activates any such passion for the welfare of kids. So you simply aren’t providing an adequate explanation of the scale and intensity of the desire to use government force to block abortion. It can’t be that. Because if it were that, it would be having similar intensity effects around the entire halo of child welfare. It isn’t. So that’s not driving people.
There has to be a reason people care only about the unborn, and not the born. And that reason cannot be “an instinctive concern for how children are treated.” That would, again, have other observable effects that we aren’t observing. The cart goes after the horse, not the other way around: why are unborn fetuses the children who need protecting? People easily disregard mass death (guns and cars kill vastly more people than abortion; zero outrage from these same demographics). So why is this one specific instance of it so intensely motivating, and nothing else is?
Likewise, instinct is biologically universal. Yet this intense positioning is correlated with a specific ideology-sphere—only conservatives (and conservative-leaning) persons even have this specific sentiment (and not even all of them; it’s a minority within a minority, yet large enough in scale to effect policy). So instinct cannot explain this. Else the conservative arguments against abortion would activate liberals to agree with them. It doesn’t. There is something peculiar about the ideology, not the biology, of anti-abortionists.
So, we need to look at what anti-abortionists are actually saying: what comes up 95% of the time underlying every discourse of any sufficient length on this? Souls; and women being obedient and raising kids like they are supposed to. Odds are, what they are most often saying they are concerned about, is what they are actually concerned about. The superficial arguments (like “babies have fingernails”) of course don’t signify. But when nearly every single argument shares the same required premise (like “babies have souls”), that’s probably where the juice is.
I largely agree that Ash’s factor is a secondary one, but I don’t think the Kanye-type rhetoric is actually that fringe. It’s probably the next most common kind of rhetoric besides the two ones you’ve identified: Various groups basically calling this a mass murder campaign, an incarnation of eugenics, etc. They then trot out the association between early Planned Parenthood/Sanger and eugenics, etc. It’s hard to tell how deep this concern goes and how much it’s just doorstopping progressive rhetoric, but it really does keep cropping up. \
And we know that the White Replacement-type rhetoric isn’t actually that new. It’s only new in terms of volume and overtness, but it’s been a concern for a very long time. Really, since desegregation and the modern era of globalization (so post-1970s), various groups have been worried about demographic shifts, depopulation, etc. Depopulation is one of the biggest far right woobies even among people who are not as overtly neo-Nazi in their ideology: Vaccine and COVID conspiracies, etc.
So I don’t think this anxiety is actually that minor or fringe. I think it’s pretty deeply entrenched, even if it’s largely taboo and many people wouldn’t be willing to be animated by it directly without many layers of plausible deniability. On its own, maybe you’d only have a fringe but politically relevant movement like Q without the need to control women and the need to maintain their idea of a soul and thus a relief from mortality, but you add that on top of the first two elements which act as their mainstreaming appeal and it becomes a key radicalization pipeline. That’s very important to bear in mind right now about American politics: Fringes have disproportionate power because the mechanisms to mainstream and recruit are so profound. It took only a few years from Gamergate to neo-Nazis in the White House. And the loudest, ugliest, most violent voices even in movements that are otherwise mainstream like the anti-abortion movement tend to keep people around and act to move the Overton window.
Of course, even then, this would all be massively comorbid with underlying racism and sexism. Every time one discusses with a Nazi about the Great Replacement Theory, it becomes eminently clear that their modern version of the race war idea being about breeding means that they have to essentially blame white women . So even here, the need to control women and the need to maintain their religion and metaphysics would be involved.
Richard, I’m not arguing that the protective instinct is the direct motivator of the anti-abortion movement. I’m saying that it’s one of the core instincts that religious and right wing advocates exploit for political purposes.
I do listen to what rank and file anti-choice advocates say, and the single most common language I hear is the need to save the lives of innocent babies. I don’t think they are lying—I think many of them really believe that babies are genuinely being murdered and that they are motivated by a desire (and/or the appearance of a desire) to save them.
It doesn’t take an illogical religious argument to provoke or sustain this delusion, but those arguments are really good at doing so while also framing it all as tribal warfare, which itself is another instinct being exploited to drive the movement.
Yes, I think the ultimate goal for the central advocates of the anti-choice (and anti-trans, anti-marriage equality, etc) movement is Christian patriarchy, and I agree that concerns over souls and immortality also play a role. I think your reasoning would be on more solid ground by acknowledging that the instinct to protect offspring is one of the instincts exploited by the religious right wing. It is what many of them believe and it steelman’s your argument.
I agree persuaders use whatever levers they can. But the existence of a lever isn’t sufficient for it to motivate people to such an intense support for a cause. Lots of levers exist. They don’t rally large numbers of people to spend billions of dollars to change national policy (much less commit murder).
So I am not talking about all the levers that can be used (all the rationalizations that can be exploited). I am talking about why these levers can pull so much intense weight, and yet only do so with people who share certain ideological beliefs about gender and the afterlife.
In other words, I’m not talking about the lever, but its fulcrum. You are focusing on the lever, and not answering why its fulcrum is so far down the plank. Why is the lever strong with these people, yet so weak with everyone else? What is actually doing the heavy lifting? It’s not the superficial rationalizations. It’s the deep seated existential needs that juice them to such heights. That’s what’s missing in everyone else, and thus why these appeals do not gin up such passion in them (or in anti-abortionists for any other cause in the expected orbit: they pull the same lever, yet meet a weak fulcrum).
Ash: The problem with taking conservatives at their word is that people can sincerely hold convictions that are internally contradictory, but they can only do so in a fairly shallow manner. They can work themselves up into a lather, but it’s not really what’s guiding their behavior.
We know that conservatives typically don’t care about the unborn per se. There’s lots of ways to figure this out. For example, try arguing just in terms of reducing the net number of abortions with things like help with family planning, help with contraception, better economic policies, etc. Try pointing out to them that they could try to convince women rather than go running to Big Mommy State. This almost never works. Some will think about it, and those people are sincere. I have friends who are anti-abortion but progressive in terms of most economic and social positions even if they have anti-feminist biases, and their rhetoric is wholly about life, and they center their rhetoric in context of being in favor of welfare and assistance. (One such friend is disabled and has seen the problems with mental health and social work, and she is passionate on fixing those topics). But you don’t get many people with this argument. If they were reasoning straightforwardly from “I want to save every unborn baby I can”, they would care about these policies.
But anti-abortion advocates are only willing to use techniques that fit into conservative ideology to do it, which is not what they would do if protection of even this particular kind of life was their key motive. A conservative could be consistently anti-welfare and anti-“big government” and yet carve out an exception for this supposedly existential crisis. They don’t . They always, always pick ways of controlling abortion that place the onus on women. Which points to Richard’s point: Once you’ve satisfied the fear of death by having government effectively approve of (or at least not oppose) a soul on an ontological level with policy and satisfied the need to maintain a traditional hierarchical family and society, suddenly the remaining compassion they may have for the unborn doesn’t go far enough to do anything .
This is in sharp contrast to many liberals. See, I actually like the idea of safe, legal and rare for abortions. I think reducing the rate of abortions is a good thing. An abortion is, in my mind, an unfortunate outcome that just happens to be the best outcome. I know most women who have an abortion do not regret it and I know that an unborn fetus is not a person, but I also know that that does still mean that a form of violence was done to a potential person , and there is something tragic there. I’d rather us not even get there in the first place by having rational social policy. So if you suggest a way of reducing abortions to me , I will actually listen, even if I would be less concerned about it than protecting actually living children and families. I would be moved by that appeal. And so it tells me something that conservatives aren’t .
The only question with conservatives is figuring out if they really are just arriving at rationalizations they truly won’t believe when push comes to shove (as one can tell by the adoption of new rationalizations, which does come up in the debate), or if there’s a kernel of belief in there that is being filtered through their hierarchical worldview which inherently produces hypocrisy that they can’t admit because that would require admitting that they’re actually not up on this “human rights” and “equality under the law” thing.
Right.
Consider for example that Mormons preach against alcohol; it’s a sin to consume it. Yet there is no longer much passionate drive to universally outlaw it. They are mostly content to say “we know better; so we will refrain; everyone else, tsk tsk.”
So what would it take to get this to change? What would it take to get them so emotionally riled up that they would start treating alcohol consumption like abortion and seek to outlaw it? (As has happened in history; and still happens in a few locales.) It would have to be ginned up into some kind of existential threat to their entire worldview—exactly like they did with gay marriage. It has to be some form of “the government is telling us our religion is false.”
Hence my analysis of why Christians were motivated to oppose gay marriage that serves an important proof-by-example with respect to abortion. It clearly requires something beyond just “won’t someone think of the children” rhetoric. That can get you to “tsk, tsk,” but not to “we must employ government force.” And the evidence of this is that this rhetoric doesn’t work on anyone except those people whose worldview is under existential threat.
If “won’t someone think of the children” rhetoric could get people that riled up, it would work on most people, crossing all ideological lines. So observing that it is enough to get only some few people that riled up means it is not sufficient to produce the result we are talking about: a massive, passionate, at-scale impact that actually affects policy.
Like, for example, Christian opposition to porn: lots of people do want to outlaw it, but yet not enough to have any effect; most people by far who are “against” porn just can’t get excited enough to take real action to outlaw it. They just tsk, tsk it. What would it take to change that? To get this to be a real, impactful, litmus issue that begins to impact policy? Something more than presently exists, obviously. So we’d have to ask what more?
Hence to explain why gay marriage and abortion get the intense and scaled response they do, but porn and divorce and extramarital sex and guns and alcohol and so on don’t, there has to be some “extra other thing” that is ginning up the intensity to that level. And I only see two things in the evidence doing that: sexism and mortalism, which are both so fundamental to their worldview that allowing the state to endorse the contrary view becomes a threat to their entire sense of identity.
Everything else they can write off as the expected outcome of human sin, and thus tsk, tsk it but not freak out that the government endorses it—or at least not freak out enough to see the government as denouncing their core beliefs by this. After all, that there will be sinners, they accept; but that we are mortal and gender roles are a human construct, that literally denounces their entire worldview as false.
Fred, you make some good points. But I still think the both of you are missing the point of my argument. Consider Richard’s proposition that the anti-abortion movement is, in part, based on the “fear of death” (which I agree with). But certainly existential dread does not directly lead to anti-choice advocacy—it’s simply one of the core psychological traits that the anti-abortion movement (and religion in general) exploits.
And hypocrisy doesn’t make that observation any less true. For instance, members of that movement do not put any particular emphasis on investing in medical care and research to extend or improve the quality of life for seniors, which to me seems like an obvious priority for anyone who would like to live as long as possible. If anything, many of them probably oppose policies that could help make longer life possible. That’s because they are trying to navigate competing value sets.
Same goes for the instinct to protect babies. Just as with existential dread, by itself this instinct does not lead to anti-abortion efforts. But when we add social instinct to appear virtuous, then all three instincts together can provoke powerful motivations that certainly CAN lead to advocating for the outlawing of abortion. And yes, those leading the charge almost certainly have a Christian patriarchal agenda. But large numbers of rank-and-file voters who are persuaded by the anti-choice movement are inspired less by existential dread than by the fiction that they are trying to save the lives of infants.
This is no less true knowing that they do not support policies that would reduce unwanted pregnancies or help protect children after birth. Because THOSE policies are “liberal” and do not have the same emotional “juice” as the heroic crusade to save babies from the knives of butchers. I’m sure you can appreciate the emotional difference that would make to the minds of many.
In summary, there isn’t a direct line from the instinct to protect infants to being anti-choice. Just as with existential anxiety, it’s one of the core psychological mechanisms that are exploited by those who want to promote a dark social agenda. Don’t let their hypocrisy and logical incoherence fool you—that’s practically the conservative brand. If we want to keep pushing pro-choice momentum, we have to tap into the same instincts, but without the fantasies and nonsense. Recognizing it is both reality-based and important tactically for creating emotionally-salient messages.
What Ash just said is essentially my position.
The sine qua non remains the two existential drivers: mortalism and sexism. Remove those, and no sufficient strength exists from any other motives to generate any large-scale legal threat to abortion.
And this is proved by standard control analysis: it’s the only factor present in anti-abortionist groups and not present in neutral and pro-choice groups. When you remove one thing and the effect goes away, you’ve found the cause.
That there may need to be other activators is true. But they are clearly not the sine qua non of intense large-scale anti-abortionism.
Mostly agreed with both of you.
However, Ash, it’s important to note that we are talking not just about existential dread in the abstract but the specific Christian manifestation thereof. Those of us who accept that there probably is no afterlife of any kind may find death scary, but there’s no easy way to manipulate us based off that fact because we fully accept it’s inevitable. Christians, though, think they have an escape. But that escape requires a buy-in: It requires thinking that there’s a soul, this essential thing that is the true version of ourselves, this Platonic essence. And that belief, not just general existential dread but their specific cope, is (I agree) a major fulcrum.
Now, it is true there are many Christians and people who believe in afterlives who are not anti-abortion and many secular people who are, but the stats there are very clear.
In the same way, I think you’re right that this essential need to think of the reproduction of the tribe and the nation is more than just an individual lever, at least among the most reactionary/fascistic contingent. They are concerned about population in ways that go far beyond abortion, so we can tell that for them this issue is a fulcrum issue and not merely a lever one. Reactionaries are especially irrational and predisposed to mythology and so their behavior is even harder to justify even given their priorities, but I have no doubt that this fear of an extended death (the death of a nation or a people) is very, very real for this subset.
And, yes, I agree that a large part of the difference on policy is that conservatives like violent, authoritarian, seemingly-definitive solutions, no matter how pointless, ineffective, counterproductive, cruel or sadistic. But even that has to do with something about their true motives: the sadism is the point . Just like the sadism is the point in the Hell belief. So that too is a matter of fulcrum-versus-lever: arguments about saving the unborn are actually not that appealing to conservatives without the additional appeal of being able to control women and hurt people.
In other words, we’re having the classic problem of differentiating mere conservatives from rabid reactionaries and overt fascists.
A nice tight argument which makes a lot of sense.
“Killing anything with a soul is wrong.”
…well, except when their god does it.
Because their god has special rights and obligations. Because their worldview is fundamentally fascist and hierarchical.
Well said.
What substitute does the secular world offer? Sex-drugs-rocknroll? That isn’t going to make everyone happy. Utilitarianism over Thomism? That doesn’t give people meaning and purpose, just comfort. The best approach would be an atheism that is not trying to be happy-go-lucky. Let people despair and have their pity-party. Something like Sarte or Camus, not blind techoptimism.
You must be new to this rodeo.
To catch up to speed, read (for starters):
Justin Brierley and the Meaning of Life
The Objective Value Cascade
How Not to Live in Zardoz
At minimum, the secular world offers the vast majority of people on the planet the ability to control their own lives and bodies. We’re not talking about idealistic secularism here. We’re talking about a basic need for survival and essential dignity.
Hello Dr. Carrier,
Thank you for sharing your thoughtful and persuasive perspective. I suspect we would find we largely agree on many important things indeed, however in this instance I would like to propose two adfitional factors to add to the discussion.
The first is an insight into power and control previously explored by Steven Lukes in “Power: A Radical View”. Lukes argues that one way the the power elites control the general population is by controlling the leading topic of public debate. Typically this involves getting the public worked up over something of no concern to the Power elites so that their real concerns never get attention. For example, wealth inequality continues to worsen because changes in Tax policy continue to siphon wealth out of the middle class. Another relevant concern is that our healthcare system is abysmal. Replacing this system with medicare only for all would be a game changer. If it were spotlighted.
The second point is that our national divide is mischaracterized as right versus left wereas I argue its more usefully understood as sheep/shephards + wolves on oneside, and free agents on the other. The problem here is that the sheep are committed to following the shepard/wolves, resulting in a political force based upon a dangerous combination of arrogant ignorance. These people are unable to reason for themselves yet have power as a vast herd. In contrast, the others are not unified because we are not dumb sheep. Its like a battle between a bland green lawn versus a hill of wild flowers.
I mentioned control. And distraction is a form of it. But I also mentioned it can’t work by itself. There has to be an actual hook that emotionally drives the targets of control. Otherwise, you are just a fringe whacko with no ability to affect the law. There has to be an actual existential threat driving those appealed to. Otherwise, they’ll go worry about something else.
So the question isn’t “why would the power elite exploit this emotional driver” but “why this emotional driver?” In other words, why does this even exist as an exploit? As opposed to something else. There has to be a driver to exploit. Saying “the elite will exploit the drivers that exist” doesn’t answer that question.
Consider immigration: it’s a long-favorite fear-exploit, too, used to distract from the real issues (while every problem gets blamed on “immigrants” instead). But it can only be exploited if it already exists. There has to already be an existential fear of immigrants to gin up and exploit. This is why racism drives so much conservative politics: their target society already is racist; so it’s a ready exploit. Explaining why that is requires more than just saying “it’s being exploited.”
-:-
As to the sheep/agents dichotomy, I don’t think that captures the reality. Yes, Authoritarian Personality is herdist. But so can ostensibly anti-authoritarian personalities be. Liberals have their share of irrationally slavish tribalists and groupthinkers.
The real divide is no different than has always properly defined liberal vs. conservative: those who fear change (conservatives; which, when they are losing, become reactionaries) and those who think change will solve every problem (liberals; which, when they are losing, become radicals).
Political truth resides in between, albeit more toward the liberal side (not everything can be solved with change, and not every change is good; but most things can be, and can only be, solved with change, so one does need to be comfortable with, and rationally pursue, the right kinds of change to make anything in society better).
It just so happens that if you are an effective critical thinker, you are more likely to discover this fact, which has the selection-bias effect that liberals tend more often to be effective critical thinkers and thus more often in touch with the complexities of reality than conservatives. This is why personality traits like “openness to experience” and “ambiguity tolerance” correlate with liberal politics; while the converse, with conservative. Epistemology drives outcomes.
For a really good case study illustrating all the above, see the recent Washington Post article: “In Rural Georgia, an Unlikely Rebel against Trumpism” by Stephanie McCrummen (“Why didn’t the Republican red wave materialize in the midterms? The life of Cody Johnson offers one answer”).
To echo Richard: The control explanation is sort of like looking at a grifter and saying “He’s a con artist, of course he’s lying”. Yeah, agreed, of course he is. But why the particular lies he chooses ? That’s the interesting factor because it actually predicts the behavior beyond the trivial. The same applies to the conservative, both the ideologue and the opportunist. They need to control the world and people in it. Everything they do is about that, no matter how much they may disguise it with everything from faux libertarian rhetoric to rhetoric about the sanctity of life to demands on security. So the question is, Why this particular appeal ?
It’s telling that the abortion movement grew directly out of the political radicalization of fundies and evangelicals in the wake of desegregation. The fear that American society would become more egalitarian on one axis was hijacked on another.
There’s a great paper, https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=40027n , about how whites tend to view race as a zero-sum game. This applies to all ideologies of domination by identity. The power of the person who is asking for rights directly trades off with you , in this imagination. If gays get marriage, it won’t be long until they are treating straights as badly as straights treated them. The gain of the right to abortion meant that men were suddenly faced with a huge limitation on their ability to control women.
As for the sheep/wolves analysis: The problem with that thinking is that some of the sheep want to be wolves . This is just like how Folding Ideas responded to HBomberguy’s flat Earth video and pointed out that the desire to see an anti-authoritarian bent within flatties is entirely too humanizing for what are essentially fascists. The conservative wing in this country include very many powerless, marginalized people, but the problem they see in the world is that they don’t get to kick enough people in the teeth anymore. We’re all temporarily disgraced capitalists, to paraphrase Steinbeck. This is why it’s not really easily possible to do cross-class coalitions: As long as there are conservative ideas with any hold in the general body politic, some will see the problems with power and domination existing not as a problem with the idea of those things but with the fact that they’re not at a better place in the hierarchy.
I think this is all probably true. The anti-abortion belief, though, is one I’ve seen expressed in so many ways that I think there’s a lot of comorbidity going on with it.
When it comes to the connection of fetus and soul, it’s not just fear of death, I think. We have an anti-fatalist culture in some senses, but in a competitive culture heavily based on biotruths and a just world fallacy, we still have an idea that some people are just extraordinary and they are basically destined to succeed. (Without that belief, the kind that Jordan Peterson promotes with constant fraudulent use of the pareto principle, there can’t really be a belief in meritocracy). Once a fetus is growing, it’s a potential life. And so it must be a life that has the potential to be a President, to be incredible. This comes up when we point out the immense suffering that anti-abortion rules in practice cause by having so many children born and either put up for adoption which given the present infrastructure for adoption very often means not being adopted and instead suffering in foster care systems, or similar fates. But to point that out is to challenge the American delusion of infinite class mobility and infinite potential. You could just have killed the future President! If people instead thought honestly, recognizing that not everyone can be President or be a billionaire and a huge part of life is going to be luck, then no one would take this radically pro-natalist view. I think this kind of neo-fatalism is a big part of why people think of the fetus as being when the soul arrives rather than the much more logical idea that the ancients had that the spirit arrives in the breath.
Beyond that, the soul isn’t just a solution to the problem of death. It’s a solution to human meaning. It gives us human supremacy. If you think of humans on a spectrum with animals and think of our meaning as people as being an emergent consequence of a brain that can grant personhood, then you have to think of humans as fragile beings who can be lost even when the body still exists in some form. But the soul as an idea makes us essential beings, luminous beings in Yoda’s parlance. So we have consciousness not as a result of emergent biological phenomena but because of a fundamental aspect of the universe. Allowing abortion means that the government has rejected this mystical thinking. Christian apologists get a lot of hay out of the idea that “atheism” (read: naturalism) means that humans are no different from cockroaches.
There are some very rare people who actually do take a more defensible position on abortion, Quaker-types who derive an anti-abortion position from a belief in the absolute sanctity of life and the absolute demand to never use force against anyone. They are the only people who I would actually trust to follow the golden rule on this topic, because many really would support the violinist no matter what. But even this much better position still is based in magical thinking about what makes life important.
And then I think there’s just a huge amount of a culture that glorifies a very specific kind of femininity. A woman who is pregnant is “glowing”. On the one hand, applauding this and actually supporting pregnant women is great (if only our culture actually meant that in terms of, you know, paid paternity and maternity leave, funding social work, etc.) But all of this means that abortion as an option is a straightforward attack on this function for women. Even people whose root beliefs are not as deeply poisoned by misogyny still can see this idea at play. I pointed out to a friend of mine that to a woman who doesn’t want a child that that child is a parasite. She balked for purely emotional reasons and accused me of hating children and thinking of them as parasites. Because she ended up having good relations with her children and wanted to keep them even given the unfortunate circumstances of their births, everyone else should think the same way. It’s important for we feminists to remember that sexism isn’t just about control, it’s also about a (fraudulent and in practice non-existent) gilded cage.
There’s also a deeply statist, authoritarian bent to these beliefs. One thing I try to do to get forward progress in the abortion argument is to point out that it literally doesn’t matter what we think about biological autonomy or the personhood of the fetus: Abortion laws just don’t work. Governments should not take away our rights if the enforcement mechanism will cause more harm than good. But that notion implies limits to their utopian vision of a government that can create their ideal folk community, and that too is scary.
And, of course, there’s just good old-fashioned racism, classism, ageism, etc., all comorbid with the racism. A big part of the conversation is that in practice abortion is about family planning. It’s an option on the table. But to put it on there means trusting that most poor women can make their own adult decisions about their family. That’s why the regret argument comes up so often, that women may regret their decision. It’s why with some more reasonable people you can get them to admit that some people will make good abortion decisions but they’re concerned about the little teenage slut who will just have all the sex she wants and then keep getting abortions every two months. A big part of the problem with American culture is that all of these biases coalesce into a deeply anti-human culture where we all too often view the vast majority of people as disposable. Giving abortion to these underclass scum is bad for the same reason giving them welfare is bad. We’ve actually seen this play out really drastically after the overturning of Roe. Many conservatives and moderates started realizing that they had overplayed their hand and that now it wouldn’t just be some dumb black girl in the ghetto who would need an abortion but their own precious little princess after her boyfriend raped her. As always with conservatives, they construct social policy based around the idea that there will be an escape hatch for them and their family. But this is always at tension with their need for brutal, inescapable punishment. A huge part of the pro-abortion cause is a fantasy of being able to control one’s lessers. The fantasy gets a lot less fun when it’s in their own community.
So, yeah, the abortion debate is one of those issues where the entire discussion is really actually about a whole bunch of other ideas about what we think: What the role of women should be, what an ideal family looks like, how we should deal with people who want to live differently from us, etc.
Also, “Consider a recent example. Theists often scratched their head at why Christians were so enragedly obsessed with preventing the legalization of gay marriage” may be a typo. I assume you meant “Atheists” ?
Typo?
Did you mean atheists?
“Theists often scratched their head at why Christians were so enragedly obsessed with preventing the legalization of gay marriage”
I did, yes! Thanks for catching that. Fixed.
I think you’re on to something here based on my own experience speaking to anti-choice activists. I’ve noticed that they seem to think it’s an absolute gotcha to say something along the lines of “well, aren’t you fortunate you’re mom didn’t abort you.” My usual response of, it wouldn’t make any difference, I would never know or care, generally makes them apoplectic. I’ve also noticed that expressing that I don’t think death is the worst thing that could happen to someone freaks people out in general.
A key aspect to this is when you talked about them viewing their belief as if it is a fact. When I manage to get into a (rare) reasonable discussion on topics like this, I find people use terminology that is similar to my own, saying “they” (in this case it’s a conservative referring to liberals) don’t use scientific methods. Even if I walk through what science is, and find agreement, when we go to apply it, they dig their heals back into what I call their belief, but they say I’m the one listening to something false, that I’m the indoctrinated one.
What do you think about an approach here? Do you listen, use “I” statements, talk about values and work slowly through all the pseudo-science, or do you try out this idea about how their conclusion starts with their Christian value?
It depends. Not everyone is the same. Some people are so delusional they are impossible to reach with any approach. Those people you just have to stop talking to. Focus instead on inoculating future persons from becoming like them, and on people who can have rational conversations. Waste no time on the lost cause.
Once you’ve identified someone as rational enough to have a conversation, then it depends on how much time you want to spend. Street epistemology (the approach of getting someone to question their own epistemology until they lead themselves to your conclusion) requires very long stretches of one-on-one personal interaction. It’s a slog.
If you don’t have that kind of time (and indeed it is very low return; focusing a large amount of energy on one person is extremely inefficient), then the best you can do is find the best rational, evidence-based arguments and advertise them. Then you get hundreds of eyes on the same argument. If the return on investment is even just 5% that’s a dozen or more people’s minds changed. Yes, by far most make excuses to be unaffected. But that doesn’t matter when you have compound interest: you only need convert a few percent of every batch. And in my experience, this requires sustained exposure to the cure, i.e. a single article won’t have the effect, but it can start a journey of questioning and vetting that after a few years produces the desired result.
In middle cases (short-term one-on-one interactions), I would still attempt a street epistemology approach, but in just one-liners, in the hope that the method itself rubs off on them and they start using the technique on themselves. For example, call out every fallacy; identifying and explaining the fallacy in as few words as possible; and explaining why what you are doing is important, i.e. why they should start doing this to their own arguments to test and steel man them; and thereby at every opportunity encourage them to apply this same technique to themselves by always asking them, of every single premise-claim they make, “How would you know if you were wrong about that? What would you have to check to find out?”
Ultimately, you want them to start doing the critical thinking themselves. You can do that in many ways, e.g. even angering them so much that their anger drives them to go out and do some real research to try and prove you wrong (which will have the opposite result they intend). Most (say, 95%) will not do that; the anger (cognitive dissonance) will drive them to evasion behaviors instead (they will resort to various kinds of ad hominem as justification to ignore you; they will avoid you altogether; etc.). But the goal is the other 5%. Which you can’t gain if you haven’t also exposed the other 95% to the same cure. It is not possible to succeed without failure: without the 95 fails, you won’t have the 5 successes. So you have to think in these terms when interacting with the delusional, the irrational, and others trapped in labyrinths of motivated reasoning.
To reinforce Richard here: it all depends on the audience, context and interaction. You have to do things like figure out if the person has had a bad day, or if they just got burnt by an activist who sounds like you, or a lot of other things.
One thing you can try is just being really human. Do something like say, “Okay, that’s your opinion. You see the world that way. Have you considered that I don’t? I haven’t perceived things like you have. So why are you right and I’m wrong? Do you think you’re smarter than me? Less emotional?”
Unfortunately, if you’re interacting across a very serious political/ideological chasm or operating with someone for whom performance of meanness publicly or privately (“I just like owning the libs”), this just sets them up to do that. It may be bad optically for them (you will be surprised how quickly people will come to your defense if you’re, say, having this interaction on a private or small Facebook page, and how quickly the bully will lose backing even from their partisans), but the most common outcome here will be the person leaving, either out of shame or because they think they’ve won. But if you’re interacting with someone who is of good faith
In the same vein, it’s good to focus on things you share in common. This is particularly true with the atheism discussion. A huge part of apologetics-as-retention is to make people automatically associate atheism with negative stereotypes: Amorality, extremist politics, smugness, etc. “They don’t have a basis for morals”, “they don’t think there’s a truth”, etc. When you are an “atheist” to them, they have a nice box to put you into. But if you start with something like, “Okay, we both agree that there’s one truth, that reality is one way and not another” or “We both agree that there’s a difference between us finding something evil and us finding something merely unpalatable” or “We both agree that people make decisions and ponder their actions”, you can start breaking through that. They have a script they want you to play out, and the point of agreement and the concession of a point of theirs can break that script.
The other thing you can try, and I only recommend this if you have a really good read on the situation and are really comfortable with this, is to be really, really aggressive. Make it personal. Find something that shocks them and slam that button. When they get indignant, point out what the vile consequences of their belief were. Point out that it was always personal. For gay marriage, for example, point out that to them the issue is about some dictionary definition but to everyone else it was about whether someone could hold their loved one’s hands as they were dying.
This works astonishingly well for liberals and leftists because of a little secret I’ve learned: Conservatives, religious or not, know that we care to be nice . Liberals and leftists often worry that we’re not being accommodating enough, and sometimes we aren’t, but very often we actually are and the other side doesn’t care . They view it as smug, or fake, or virtue signaling. Because they would be angry in our shoes, they think that because we don’t seem to be, we are lying . Of course, they also think we’ll meltdown and get histrionic, but stereotypes don’t need to be internally consistent. If you remain consistent and erudite, not backing down, you can at least get them to stop viewing you as just a pushover or a simple roadblock. Most people are not so evil that they are willing to get extremely dirty and cruel with someone. They insulate themselves by pretending it wasn’t really personal. (This is why modern reactionary rhetoric has to be so irony-driven: They need a socially acceptable escape hatch if they end up seeming like a bully).
Many atheists, for example (and I’ve seen this myself), will note that the Hell question can really be a means to get a foot in the door. If they believe in Hell, they believe, fundamentally, that the overarching moral authority of the universe is a gleeful torturer and that they should smile as you burn. Slam on that button. Don’t let up. Point out how gross it is. Point out how, if you believed that there was an omnipotent torturer out there, you would be terrified and would want to protect them from that creature, as much as you might disagree and fight. Ask them how they can know that a God willing to torture you won’t torture them for some other perceived fault. Ask them what would happen if they died without faith in God and Jesus, if they for a brief moment as they were scared in their death throes and weren’t in their right mind renounced God even for an instant. Would they then deserve having their skin roasted off?
Yes, the hell issue may not be the one you’re talking about. But the issue you’re talking about is almost never the actual issue that is forming their beliefs. Many Christians sincerely believe, at some level, that if they think wrongly on a topic that they may be burnt, or at least are contradicting an entity that will happily judge them. How could they possibly think clearly about gay marriage or abortion with that in mind? They basically have an imaginary gun to their head.
And bear in mind that, with any interaction, there is a risk that you touching on their delusion can lead to splash damage. It was really shocking to me to consider what the Alt-Right Playbook pointed out after being informed by LGBTQ/female/minority activists: You can dunk on a CHUD, humiliate them, maybe even get them to admit they were wrong publicly… and then they’ll go off and blow off some steam by making a trans woman’s life miserable. With Christian people, if you hit them in the faith button, they may have a period where they become even more evangelical, especially if their reaction to questioning is to go talk to a pastor who pushes them further in order to resolve the cognitive dissonance.
Correction: if you’re interacting with someone of good faith, that humanization may help them realize that they do actually need to check their epistemology and it’s actually monumentally arrogant to think that their feelings on a topic they haven’t really examined should be taken seriously by anyone including them.
I think abortion and equality are two entirely different issues for people. About abortion: A new human life is still in some sense a marvel and a mystery and therefore under the domain of ‘gods’ and not under the domain of science. The gods last and only stronghold. Those who are ‘godly’ need to think of themselves as holding a more virtuous and superior position that cannot be challenged. God has to be victorious in the end otherwise god and religion is not ‘better’ for anything. Maybe it just a strategy to convince themselves and others that they are at least virtuously superior and stronger. On the other ‘anti-‘ positions: Hm. Could it be that it comes back to agency-detection? We sense an enemy. There IS an enemy. We NEED an enemy to be true. We just have to find it and point to it. It seems to me that people can let go the idea that there is a ‘good’ god but cannot as easily let go the idea that there is a bad god. An enemy. A danger. Maybe humans NEED an evil, identifiable enemy, (weirdly) for peace of mind. At least until we figure out we don’t. So we’ll find one or invent one. But there has to be one, and they have to be a weaker, vulnerable and an easy target.
It makes sense that agency overdetection would tend to lead to assuming supernatural evil more than good given that the hypothesis is that it developed because the danger of underidentifying is high rather than the benefit of overidentifying being high.
They might think so, but I don’t think these are separable in their worldview, such that if we removed the sexism (and the mortalism), the passion for outlawing abortion would wane. It would become just moral scolding at best. Or would shift concern to the welfare of mothers and prevention rather than criminalization.
Someone who wants to feel morally superior can do that by attaching to anything, it need not be any specific thing like abortion. It could have been intense opposition to war or police violence. It could have been intense opposition to dishonesty in politicians. It could have been intense opposition to legalizing alcohol. There are any number of “holier than thou” positions they could take. So why only take the ones they do, and not others? There is something yet to explain here.
Likewise the intensity can be selective. So we have to explain the strange selectivity of not just which virtues and behaviors they focus on, but of their intensity as well: why do only certain things in their moral sphere get this intensity of attention, to even get the government to endorse their position.
For example, they go on morally scolding women who have sex out of wedlock, without storming the gates to outlaw that behavior. So why do they go off the hinges with abortion, but not sex? Well, the fact that abortion allows, in their mind, women to “escape the consequences” of loose sexuality, so the government should not be helping them—it should be leaving them to the consequences of their bad decisions. Hence why this same fervor surrounds birth control and STD-prevention and opposing government education and subsidies for both.
Merely legalizing sex is okay because that just looks like leaving people to suffer the consequences of their sinful choices; it doesn’t look like (and thus doesn’t feel like) a denunciation of their belief system. Hence it’s the government helping women escape those consequences that is offensive: that attacks these people’s belief-system; it’s their own government telling them their religion is false. That is what is intolerable. (Likewise in respect to mortalism; so I think anti-abortionism would remain without the sexism, as long as the mortalism remains to drive it.)
Note a recent article just appeared explaining the psychology behind how anti-abortionism links to sexism that I will add to my article as well, and it shows how subconscious needs can guide conscious rationalizations: “What Really Drives Anti-Abortion Beliefs? Research Suggests It’s a Matter of Sexual Strategies.”
Yeah, I neglected to address this, but this is really critical.
You can’t trust what people say, not perfectly. Not ordinary people and especially not politicians.
Most people haven’t thought out their political position down to the last detail. They haven’t checked for internal contradictions. So a huge amount of their reasoning will come from things like their perception of their folk communities.
I really recommend reading Special Providence by Mead which breaks down Jacksonian, Jeffersonian, Hamiltonian and Wilsonian thinking. Conservative thought in this country is overwhelmingly a wedding of Jacksonian folk politics and Hamiltonian class politics. Reading that book helped me have a lightbulb moment when it comes to internal contradictions you see in conservative thought. They really don’t actually want to treat people within their community the same way they want to treat others. (Presumably, the writers of the Gospels saw this too, hence the admonitions against hypocrisy. Counter-cultural movements constantly have to point out the hypocrisy of dominant cultures).
The woman who gets an abortion is fundamentally, to them, someone who is acting outside their accepted window of behavior. They are violating their role as mother, as caregiver, as domestic agent. And so they are worth it to police.
A huge part of conservative politics centers on using coercive solutions to attack perceived Others and outsiders, while treating the in group with kid gloves.
Ignoring all that political psychology leaves us with no explanation for why the people who constantly wax poetic about the sanctity of life never seem to apply that concern except for when it lets them police groups they don’t like .
We don’t like to feel like jerks. And liberalism as an ideology has so fully succeeded that it’s made it so that openly admitting to a fundamentally, metaphysically bigoted worldview where some have greater essential values than others is a political liability and a personal shame even for the worst of neo-Nazis . (Reactionary politics in the 21st century has been heavily about playing that shell game). So what can happen is that a person has a feeling about a topic (“This idea of abortion bothers me”) and they will come up with a self-flattering reason for why it did (“I must really care about the unborn”). But without interrogating their fundamental biases and values, they won’t be able to arrive at the actual reason they felt that way (or at least felt that way so strongly), which was that it rubbed up against their idea of What Woman Should Do. And accepting that, and then processing that that idea is fundamentally about a misogynist world view where women have essentially less worth and capability (something that Christians have had to be very mealy-mouthed about in terms of discussing Biblical submission), would actually change their position.
I’m not an expert on biology (or morality, or religion). I just don’t think we should kill innocent human beings unless it’s absolutely necessary.
There are no human beings inside fetuses any more than in your hair follicles.
If you do not accept that fact, you must have some emotional motive you will not confess here. I have two guesses what it might be.
Sorry for the late response. It looked to me that my comment didn’t get through.
I don’t quite understand your answer. A human being inside the fetus? The fetus is the human being.
And you guessed it right: my stance on abortion is indeed based on emotion. I feel pity for the innocent who are killed.
You are engaging an equivocation fallacy, switching the meaning of words mid-sentence. A cadaver is also a human being. The morally relevant entity is not a body, but a person.
A person does not exist without a particularly complex brain (not only existing, but functioning). Scoop the cerebral cortex out of a body and you can keep it alive (like in a womb, just hook it up to an oxygenated blood supply), and what you have is still technically “a human being” in the sense of a body, but you no longer have “a human being” in the sense of a person. You’ve destroyed them.
That’s what killing a person is: killing an actual person. Killing an unoccupied body does not kill a person, because there is no person in there. It’s just a chassis, waiting to be occupied. Like the unoccupied bodies Paul says God has already built for us and are sitting waiting for us in a warehouse in heaven: until they are occupied, those are not people. They are just bodies in suspended animation. Paul literally calls them houses or coats. His analogy is correct.
Dr. Carrier, for some reason I can see no “Reply” button under your second answer. I hope it won’t mislead anybody if I put my answer to it here:
Maybe I wasn’t quite clear. Let me try again: the fetus is a living human being. A zygote, embryo, or fetus without a brain is not at all like a brain-dead human whose organs are kept alive. It develops. It manages its development. It changes its environment. When the time comes to build a brain, it builds a brain. It’s alive and kicking.
The word “person” means different things to different people. That’s why I didn’t use it.
Technicals: Because it becomes impossible to format an indented thread beyond a certain point, it won’t let you. The solution is to go back up one step in the thread (or more; wherever the next Reply button appears) and use the reply option there. It stunts the indenting. But it continues the thread. Alternatively, start a new thread and just refer back to the one you are extending (you can even use the hyperlink: the date stamp on any comment is a hyperlink as well; or you can just use quotations or paraphrases to make clear what you are responding to).
Philosophicals: You missed the point. A brain-dead person is also alive, when we keep the body alive mechanically. It does not matter if a cell or an organ is alive; it’s still not a person. Moral relevance only attaches to persons and their bodies. No person, no moral salience.
You are thus committing to that same equivocation fallacy I was pointing out, only using a different word to pull it off, this time conflating “living body” with “person.” But scoop out the cerebral cortex and connect an umbilical cord, and you have a live human body with no person in it. It’s just a chassis waiting for a person to take up residence. Exactly as I said.
You can’t get a person from just cells and organs and chromosomes. Persons can only exist as the product of a specific organ (in large and necessary part, that means a fully developed cerebral cortex). So you can’t conflate “human” with “person,” and you can’t pull that trick by conflating “living body” with “person” either. That’s the same semantic trick.
You simply can’t change what something is by changing what you call it. And unoccupied bodies, not being people or containing any people, aren’t morally relevant to anyone—apart from any value assigned by the mother, which she is free to assign however she wants, because it’s her womb and body being hijacked, and there is no other person involved in that yet (until possibly in the third trimester, when a cerebral cortex develops).
I don’t think I’m conflating anything. We’re talking about different things. Thank you for the technical help and the conversation.
No, you are the one who is talking about different things. I am talking about people. You are trying to insist bodies are people. You have no basis for this false equivalence. So you just avoid giving any reason to believe in it.
That’s fair, Zemoeki, and maybe you are actually consistent about that, also opposing the death penalty, illegal wars, drone strikes, etc.
But hopefully you recognize that, even if this is your position and your key motive, many other people who seem to also oppose abortion are not being so compassionate. Because most of them do support a tremendous amount of violence, including state-sanctioned violence, against the innocent and against those who presently pose no harm. And you should certainly recognize that banning abortion is always the worst solution. To actually reduce the number of abortions, we should be making family planning easier and making the economy less brutal. Restricting legal abortion access actually does not reduce human suffering or death much even if we count fetuses: It only leads to more mangling and death of female (and trans male) bodies. Which means those supporting this state restriction are either doing so ignorantly or not doing so to protect lives.
I have no strong opinion on the death penalty. But I was talking about killing innocent human beings. That’s why I oppose wars in general.
I know that sometimes the loss of innocent lives is a possible (or even inevitable) outcome no matter what we do: a country is invaded, a pregnancy is endangering the mother’s life, two people are drowning but there’s only one lifebelt, etc.
And I’m sure I don’t agree with many other pro-life people on many issues, but that’s normal.
But, Zemoecki, if your stance is really that it’s wrong to kill the innocent, then you better not be against any murder of anything besides the unborn. Because no one is perfectly innocent. When we think about innocence, if we’re being rational and not just being bigots of some stripe we realize that “innocence” should mean “not guilty of some kind of crime that required me to act”. I don’t care if the guy breaking into my house and menacing me is normally nice or cruel, or even if he’s off his rocker on meds or a disease. I will protect myself from that threat. I am actually taking no position on his moral character.
What people actually do is define “innocent” as “below some arbitrary (and usually biased) threshold I’ve chosen for myself”. But that’s immensely dangerous. It creates an Out group who you believe are metaphysically unworthy of life. Ironically, exactly what anti-abortion advocates accuse pro-abortion advocates of thinking.
But you are in fact in favor of killing the innocent if you are in favor of the death penalty. Because one knows, both a priori and a posteriori, that no system will be perfect and some humans will die. And while that implies to imprisonment too, imprisonment is both less severe (especially if it’s humane) and also in principle reversible.
And your totally blase unwillingness to actually really interrogate if the death penalty can be justified, or if mass state-sanctioned murder can be justified, or all the other ways our society routinely turns a blind eye to mass death and serious injury (even things like not caring about workplace safety which costs tens of thousands of lives unnecessarily), says something. It says that something about abortion is scaring you to make you actually care about thinking about it, while, say, mangled workers dying because their boss didn’t put in a handrail isn’t.
So what is that, Zemoecki?