Sunday, July 3, 2022

Coming to grips with Dobbs

Through most of my adult life (I am almost 50), I have claimed to be pro-choice. I usually voted in the pro-choice direction when it came to ballot measures. I usually voted for pro-choice candidates for office.

I took that position on the cheap. Roe v. Wade created a distance between me and whatever abortion policy I claimed to endorse. As long as Roe was the law of the land, my pro-choice position mattered less. How I voted affected the policy along some margin, but it was a very slim margin.

For me, that mattered because in spite of my professed support for the pro-choice position, I also hold a deeply felt sense that human life begins at conception. If I carry that deeply felt sense to one logical conclusion, then it requires me to hold that the decision to abort is the decision to kill a person. I'm not quite there yet, and my never get there. But I'm almost there, and I cannot escape the implication at any rate.

To be clear, mine is not an absolute, rock solid belief. I cannot articulate exactly why I hold it or exactly how I came about it. I have no strong evidence or arguments. For any point I might offer to support that deeply felt sense, I can think of  counterarguments, contradictory evidence, and reductios ad absurdum that challenge my belief at every turn.

But still: I can't or won't forsake my deeply felt sense about when life begins. I can't do it in the same way I can't will myself to be who I am not. I won't do it in the same way that if I claim to have a disposition to the truth, I must follow where the truth, as I'm given to see the truth, leads me. How I act on that belief; when, whether, and with whom I choose to share it; what tone and what degree of understanding and compassion I bring to any discussion--those I can change as the circumstances warrant. But absent some sea change on the order of a religious conversion, my base belief won't change.

As long as Roe was the law, I could debate abortion with myself as a mostly abstract proposition. I could explain to myself that however we settle when life begins, abortion should be legal as a matter of policy. And going beyond the question of policy, I could explain to myself that I supported a woman's near absolute prerogative to choose an abortion. I have indulged in some heroic mental gymnastics to get to that second point. And frankly, I fear my reasoning is ad hoc and motivated. But while Roe was the law, I could engage in such musings and call it a theoretical exercise.

Now, Roe is not the law.

Now, how I vote affects abortion policy more than before.

Now, I must consider how much and in what ways I support the pro-choice position.

Now, I must ponder the, for me, terrible and terrifying prospect of taking a more active stand, of more directly causing more abortions to happen that otherwise wouldn't happen. I could--I have the means--donate money to those who would help women obtain abortions.

(Of course, I could also do nothing. That's probably what I shall do. But I hold seriously to my other belief that abortion is and ought to be a woman's prerogative, that impeding that prerogative is a deep wrong, and that the primary and secondary effects of criminalization make for a dangerous and unjust policy.)

I always knew that under Roe, taking the pro-choice position enabled abortion. I never agreed, as a factual matter, that "people will just get abortions anyway, just not safe ones" even though some will get indeed risk getting unsafe abortions, especially if abortion is banned nationally.

But now any stance I take is of more consequence. The margin along which my actions can affect the outcome is larger. I can no longer outsource my supposed pro-choice convictions to the Supreme Court.

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