Theater of Abortion

Since Aziz posted about abortion, I figured I would give it a try. Unlike many people who assert that they personally oppose abortion but back the right to choose, I personally support first trimester abortion without qualification but am ambivalent about the courts imposing its universal national legality via the right to privacy. Though in the generality I support Roe vs. Wade I worry about the corroding impact it has had on the legitimacy of the courts and the respect for law by the citizenry of the republic. But I come here not to rehash my own qualms, but to address something a bit different: the reliance on reflective thinking on the issue of abortion and its limitations.
When individuals speak of abortion in a political context, they have their talking points. For example, if you are "pro-choice" (support abortion-rights) you believe that a woman has a right to privacy, a right to her own body, etc. (if you are an anarcho-capitalist you would reframe it as a woman having a right to her own bodily property). If you are "pro-life" (oppose abortion-rights) you would assert (more or less) that life-starts-at-conception, or that there is a sanctity of life, and so on.

The general mode of thought here is to present axioms, infer propositions and offer up a chain of reasoning by which you support your argument. This is great in terms of clarifying the positions linguistically, but I believe it has resulted in a perception of more polarization than actually exists substantively on this issue and tends to expose contradictions in behavior.

For example, pro-life individuals often question the logic of pro-choice Catholics who believe that abortion is wrong personally, who even grant that it is murder, but still support its legality. I tend to sympathize with their confusion because I share it. Nevertheless, I must go one step further, and ask, why do the pro-life individuals not take up arms (as some have) in defense of the rights of human beings, persons, who they believe are being exterminated, acts of infanticide which in their literature are labeled a Holocaust? Some pro-life individuals might be pacifists, but many are not. In the past year many conservatives have defended an invasion of Iraq, resulting in the shedding of American life, in the name of freeing Iraqis from the bondage of a dictator. Why is it that these same pro-life conservative Americans simply choose to use political means (which have for the past generation been rather ineffectual) in opposing what they believe to be the murder of millions of innocents, potential co-citizens?

I think the problem is that we are overemphasizing reflective rational thinking. I don't believe that language expresses well the gray area of personhood that the fetus encompasses. Though pro-life individuals will assert an identity between an autonomous person and the fetus, their actions belie such a belief. Rather, the fetus exists in a gray land between non-human and human, it demands political action in its interests, but does not command the moral outrage that is necessary for violent action. Similarly, though some abortion-rights supporters might be unequivocal about their support for the legality of the practice and might even assent to the assertion by some activists that the fetus is just a "clump of cells," if like Bill Clinton they were confronted with an aborted fetus in a jar they would recoil. Though they might make the assertion that the fetus is just a clump of cells, intuitively they feel that it is something more, it is the gray land between cells and person, and so its naked presentation can elict revulsion, shock and outrage.

At this point you might be wondering if I am suggesting a Kassian "Wisdom of Repugnance" argument is appropriate to this issue. Not really, because I don't think repugnance is inherently wise. It just is. We must not deny that we have predispositions, biases, that issue from the basic structure of our brains, shaped by evolution and given form by the interaction between our genetic template and environmental input. When I titled this post the "Theater of Abortion" I am playing upon Daniel Dennett's idea of the "Cartesian Theater," that we have the conceit that all our actions and beliefs are exposed to the world and under the guidance of the conscious mind. When it comes to abortion we behave in such a fashion, as if our religious teachings or secular political beliefs are the sum totality of our feeling on this topic. I think this is a superficial element that is easily extracted and repackaged for political debate, but there are things going on "under the hood" that must be addressed.

Many cognitive scientists have suggested that the human mind is organized as specialized modules, independent functions designed by evolution to deal with certain problems. Additionally we have cognitive predispositions to various behaviors and mental constructs. We learn language with ease, all humans share a similar taxonomy for animals (folk biology), we tend to have similar interest in gossip (Theory of the Mind), even toddlers have a basic understanding of physics (folk physics). Infants when presented with animals or objects can clearly anticipate that the animal will move and interact with it in a protean fashion, while mechanical objects tend to be stable or reactive. They are surprised when objects disappear or reappear in peculiar ways, or manifest behaviors outside the anticipated range for their "kind." I am not saying here that humans are born with a knowledge of rocks and birds, I am just saying that we have predispositions, templates, neural channels, that are ready to receive inputs that express certain ideas or feed us specific stimuli.

What does this have to do with abortion? Well, let's look at the example of a dead body first. If you are a Abrahamic monotheist you officially accept the idea of bodily resurrection so the body is sacred. Fine. I am skeptical that most Abrahamic monotheists emphasize this idea over the alternative that the soul ascends to heaven after death leaving the body to decay (the more Hellenistic rather than Hebrew strand in Judeo-Christo-Islamic thought), but you have an axiomatic out. Nevertheless, I would assert that non-Abrahamic religionists and nonreligious people still imbue the body with some amount of sanctity that their axioms would deny as rational. After all the body is not going to be resurrected, it is empty of life or soul, it is an inanimate piece of decaying flesh. But still the body is generally revered in some fashion. Why? The dead body still looks human! It triggers cognitive templates of "humanness," and so you still want to interact with it in a human like fashion. You also note that the dead body is inanimate, as if it was an object. So you know it isn't human no matter what your gut tells you. The body is in a no-mans land, it is not recycled organic matter quite yet, but neither is it an animate human being. We need to honor and respect it, after which we can bury it (where it is decomposed and dehumanized) or cremate it (a conscious attempt to blot out its signs of human-form). After this it ceases to trouble our imaginations and we can focus on the memory of the individual as they were when they lived.

Now you probably know where I am going: just as the dead body stimulates the human template, so images of a fetus, or the knowledge of what a fetus looks like will tend to stimulate the human template. I don't care how much N.A.R.A.L. tells you it's just a clump of cells, once the cell develops and organizes to the point where the fetus is recognizably humanoid, then you enter the gray land of not-human and human. But the fetus is not a fully fleshed person, it does not interact with us, it is not autonomous and not normally animate. In other words it does not trigger all the cues that tells us that someone is human and we should interact with them as a human. And so you have the reason why pro-life people can get enraged, but not enraged enough to pick up their guns and prevent murder.

Of course you aren't going to get pro-life and pro-choice people to get together and admit, "Yeah, the fetus is somewhat human, somewhat not," and make peace. Nevertheless, I think the Japanese have one answer: they mourn the aborted fetus. Perhaps the perception by some pro-lifers that abortion-rights supporters are callous about life could be mitigated if there was more public acknowledgement and ritualistic mourning, something that indicates that something not quite animal and not quite human was killed, if not in any rationally definable fashion, at least on some instinctive level. Human beings are social animals. The rhetoric of abortion-rights tends to deny this, that is, it is a choice between a woman and her God (or what not), but that woman lives in a world filled with other human beings who care about her and her choices. I do not mean to imply that women should be ashamed or repentant about abortion, but I have known women personally who make a great effort to assert that they are cavalier about the act. Pro-life tracts which glorify and depict post-operative women as traumatized no doubt play up the stress for effect, but I do think they are effective propaganda because it seems highly plausible that abortion is a traumatic and psychically charged act. Acceptance of this reality is the first step to some sort of operational modus vivendi between the two sides of the debate. It is a nod to the reality that there are things outside the rational and explicable at work here, forces deeply personal and private that defy simply clarification into talking points.