I wrote about a pet peeve yesterday, so why not tackle another one today? Here is Alexandra DeSanctis at National Review arguing that opposition to abortion isn't really based on religious beliefs:
One need not be religious to acknowledge biological reality: The unborn child is a distinct, living human being. Abortion therefore is an act of violence. It is a procedure that, when successful, kills that distinct, living human being. It should be obvious that attempting to restrict or abolish such a procedure does not require imposing God or religion on other citizens; it doesn’t even require belief in God.
This is so tiresome. For the past several decades the anti-abortion movement has been driven by the idea that "life begins at conception." That is, at the moment of conception the embryo becomes a human being who deserves the full protection of the law. But there's no special secular reason to choose conception as the dividing line. It could just as well be based on heartbeat or brain development or viability outside the womb or anything else. It's a gray area. The only reason to insist on conception is if you also believe this is the moment that the embryo acquires a soul from God.
But you hardly even need to bother with philosophical arguments, which will only lead you down a rabbit hole anyway. Just look at what real-life people actually think. According to a Pew survey, virtually everyone who opposes abortion believes strongly in God. And there's this:
Hardly any atheists believe abortion should be illegal. It's almost exclusively a belief held by religious folks, and the more religious they are the more they believe it. In real life, full-on opposition to abortion is very obviously a religious conviction.
DeSanctis is annoyed at people who think that striking down Roe v. Wade puts us on a path to theocracy. Fine. I understand. But at the same time, opposition to abortion from conception onward is very clearly a religious belief. Denying this leads conservative writers to tie themselves in knots, desperately trying to find secular arguments that just happen to produce exactly the conclusions that their particular religion teaches. You are treating your readers like idiots when you do this.
It isn't a person/human being until it emerges from the womb and takes its first breath of life. That's what the Bible says.
That said, conflating "life" in general with "human life", aka a human individual, is just begging for trouble. Cell scrapings are, with modern technology, "potential human life."
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God in the Bible punishes a whole city by causing/forcing all the pregnant women to have an "abortion." God also commits multiple genocides, kills children, supports rape, slavery, pedophile and tortures his own supporters. He kills whole cities and communities because they don't worship Him or because one person did the wrong thing. That is the God billions of people does according to their own bibles. No wonder humanity is such a Santorum show.
Considering the victors write history (or fantasy) one side of the story is that Satan rebelled against God because Satan opposed all the genocide, pedophilia, torture and slavery.
And it is that Old Testament God that all those self-proclaimed good Christians follow, not the life and teachings of Jesus who they are supposed to believe is God. Jesus never mentioned abortion, homosexuality, revenge, etc. and he thought the pursuit of wealth was a serious obstacle to getting to heaven. Clearly these arrogant fools believe they know better than Jesus, their supposed God. That is a massive sin. So is putting their orange idol above Jesus, a clear violation of the very first commandment.
Sometimes I wish I were a believer so I could relish the thought of them going straight to hell when they die, probably from Covid.
Abby Hoffman once joked that in his family, life began when you got your doctorate.
My pet peeve is that the mainstream media won’t make it clear that the anti-abortion crowd’s belief that an embryo is a full person is a faith based belief that they are rea trying to impose on the rest of us. The Catholic Church enshrined the idea that a fertilized egg is a full human person when it declared that at the moment of conception God “infuses” a soul. If that isn’t a blatantly religious belief, I don’t know what is. Evangelicals weren’t always anti-abortion:
“ Both before and for several years after Roe, evangelicals were overwhelmingly indifferent to the subject, which they considered a “Catholic issue.” In 1968, for instance, a symposium sponsored by the Christian Medical Society and Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of evangelicalism, refused to characterize abortion as sinful, citing “individual health, family welfare, and social responsibility” as justifications for ending a pregnancy. In 1971, delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention in St. Louis, Missouri, passed a resolution encouraging “Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.” The convention, hardly a redoubt of liberal values, reaffirmed that position in 1974, one year after Roe, and again in 1976.”
Right wing Catholics like Paul Weyrich and Phyllis Schlafly aligned with them and made abortion a big issue. Before that evangelicals tended to be strongly anti-Catholic. Now their dream has come true because we have a Supreme Court dominated by right wing Catholics willing to impose their beliefs on the rest of us, just like they were. That is another pet peeve of mine because it’s is another subject our media is to cowardly to touch.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133/
Let me propose some other motivations of the anti-abortion movement other than religion:
1. The anti-abortion movement has rarely advocated for the abolition of all abortion, but instead focuses on reproductive services largely serving poor or minority communities. It's not "no abortions," it's "no abortions for *those people*." Abortion has become yet another vehicle for American class and racial discrimination.
Texas illustrates this point clearly: if you have money, you can easily obtain a private, secretive abortion from a select list of clandestine doctors. Abortion isn't illegal per se, it just has to be protected from private eyes. If you don't have the resources to buy into this select group, then you don't get access to reproductive services.
2. Anti-abortion is really just a small part of the push-back against women's rights writ large. It's a casualty in the tug of war between people who want to negotiate a new, fairer social contract for women to participate in American society, verses those who want to hold onto the old contract (either because it benefits them, or because the patriarchy punishes people who break the social contract so severely that people are afraid to let it go).
2.
It's not about religion.
It's about power.
It's about hierarchy.
It's about controlling women.
A distinction without a difference?
One has to wonder where DeSanctis stands on animal research. We share 98% of our DNA with chimpanzees which are unambiguosly distinct living organiziatioms if not entirely human. If her non-religious belief that abortion is an act of violence against a fetus, to be consistent she needs to oppose animal research as well, and then you have to go down the list of "human enough" that violense would be proscribed. There is something a little amusing that somebody whose name is darn close to "The Saints" to be arguing that abortion isn't a question of religion.
Similarly, was recently presented with other "moral imperatives" that I found helpful in this conversation and should similarly be answered:
*) should life-saving blood marrow be forcibly removed to save someone's life?
*) should life-saving kidney or liver portion be forcibly removed to save someone's life? (Extra credit: should it be ok to remove from a deceased person against their will or their heirs?)
I mean, a life's a life, AMIRITE??
I've generally felt that a lot of people who claim to be religious aren't all that religious in practice.
Anyway, it sure is convenient to say you oppose abortion because you believe in some supreme being rather than saying it's because you want the sex lives of women to be controlled by men.
My experience is that many (most?) religious people alter their beliefs to justify their actions, not vice versa.
Big Utah Statehood energy.
I feel like this kind of dovetails into the SCOTUS's use of the shadow docket for religious rulings.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/analysis-us-supreme-courts-shadow-docket-favored-religion-and-trump/ar-AAMEgcp
Why waste time contorting full arguments to justify them when the rulings are based on articles of faith.
Most human conceptuses never result in live birth. God is the greatest abortionist of all time.
Not to mention, sperm and eggs are unique human lives too.
Not really human lives, more like a plan for a human life. There is a difference between burning down someone's house, and burning the plans for someone's house.
"Not really human lives, more like a plan for a human life."
Applies equally well to sperm, eggs, zygotes, embryos and stem cells.
I suppose each human "life" is just the sum of all the "plans for human life" that make up our bodies.
When I say "plans" I am speaking of the DNA that codes for all our proteins. When I say human life I am speaking of beings made up of those proteins. A house embodies all the information contained in its plans, but that doesn't make a house and a set of plans the same thing.
"When I say human life I am speaking of beings made up of those proteins."
Neither DNA nor proteins are "alive." Your definition does not include metabolic activity, which is sine qua non to life.
Consider a person the instant before their heart stops and fifteen minutes later. Same DNA, same proteins, but we can all agree that prior to the heart stopping, that person is alive (and human) and after fifteen minutes, they are not alive (but human).
"Every sperm is sacred"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUspLVStPbk
That's why women should have to register all sexual activity.
/s
I would take a step further back to point out that the idea that there is a hard dividing line between "life" and "not life" is itself flawed.
This seems to be a recurring theme in many fallacious conservative arguments: the imposition of a binary either/or categorization on distinctions that are inherently not binary.
Yeah, it makes no sense. The sperm is human and alive. The egg is human and alive. So in what sense does "human life" begin at conception?
Traditional English common law choose birth as the dividing line. Why? Because it was convenient and unambiguous. Killing a fetus was often regarded as a crime, but rarely considered to be murder.
Killing a fetus is a crime, if it was done without consent of the person bearing the fetus. It is the crime of assault.
The pull quote you picked is the heart of Drum's confusion. That line was first "chosen" by the very secular AMA in the mid-19th century once they decided that the traditional "religious" view--that life began at the "quickening"--was medically nonsensical. The Catholic Church adopted it from them a few decades later, and evangelicals didn't embrace it until 1979. There is absolutely NOTHING in the Jewish or Christian bibles about either the immorality of abortion or life beginning at conception. You're right that the conception binary is also irrational. But its origins are secular not religious.
Drum's macro point, that, practically speaking, opposition is "religious" depends upon assuming that right-wing evangelicals and Catholic are more authentically religious that Jews, Unitarians or Presbyterians. As if the hallmark of true religion is ignorant, authoritarian fanaticism. Which is stupid and offensive.
I agree. Kevin’s said “It's almost exclusively a belief held by religious folks, and the more religious they are the more they believe it.” What an insult to all the sincerely religious people who disagree with the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Evangelicals, and Mormons.
Correlation in Confirmation is Cause
Correlation in Contradiction is Coincidence
Clearly
The Seven Cs…
Religious mania is a kind of social conservatism, which highly values authoritarianism, so it's just a pretend value they can abuse their neighbors with.
It's the abuse that matters, whatever the party hat they're wearing.
"It's almost exclusively a belief held by religious folks, and the more religious they are the more they believe it. " Fixed that for you.
"the more fundamentalist religious they are"
I think abortion opposition rests on non-religious reasoning, although religious affiliation has a lot to do with how people evaluate the reasoning. Kevin's chart is very persuasive that while being religious at all makes a big difference, the particular religion a religious person belongs to also makes a big difference.
How does an atheist decide what is human life? Or is that just a religious construct and human life is nothing more than a clump of cells that talks?
*This* atheist considers it a stupid question, starting with the fact that we can't even define "life" in a useful way...
The problem is not that we don't yet have the right definition of "life" or "human life", it's that these are *not well defined concepts*, like arguing over whether this piece of road is an avenue vs a boulevard.
There are well defined extremes of life and not life, or human life and not human life (or male and female or ...), and there are fuzzy intermediates (like XXY individuals). Insisting that the CATEGORIES are primary, rather than the cases, that the cases HAVE TO fit into the categories rather than the categories being a useful (but imperfect) way to cluster cases, is to choose to be deliberately stupid, to choose to switch off much thinking power.
XXY is a Klinefelter male.
The question isn't stupid. It is a hard question. All people, religious and atheists, should spend more time thinking about it and learn to define life in a way that is the most helpful for society. I agree that categories are a useful but imperfect way to cluster cases. There will always be outliers. There must be compassion. Roe V Wade defines human life as not existing before leaving the womb. Seems pretty binary to me.
Ok. So I am stupid. I did not mean to reply to Joel. Sorry Joel, by I do not know what you are trying to say.
Anyway, here is my reply to Maynard.
The question isn't stupid. It is a hard question. All people, religious and atheists, should spend more time thinking about it and learn to define life in a way that is the most helpful for society. I agree that categories are a useful but imperfect way to cluster cases. There will always be outliers. There must be compassion. Roe V Wade defines human life as not existing before leaving the womb. Seems pretty binary to me.
Sorry for the double reply. I am just learning how this WordPress works.
Just learning wordpress commenting processes here.
Human life is not defined in the Bible, nor does the Bible have anything prohibiting abortions. If you a a Catholic I suppose you can take the Pope's implicit definition of life. If you are an evangelical, do you accept the opinion of your favorite TV preacher? If God really decided, wouldn't he have settled the question a long time ago? Why doesn't He send down a sign, or just destroy the offenders, as He did in the old days? In fact the decision is made by some humans somehow.
Jesus was silent on the topic of abortion. Christians should follow the example of Jesus.
Jesus was also silent on the issue of homosexuality. Yet evangelicals would have us believe he was obsessed about it.
Yes, I often point that out at the same time. I just omitted it here because it is off-topic.
The Catholic obsession with abortion is a more recent development, specifically in the 1960s tribunals were kicking around whether or not to okay birth control, there were factions who wanted to okay it but the more conservative factions won over Pope Paul VI, who put out the encyclical Humanae_vitae that went even further declaring use of birth control sinful forbade abortion for any reason as well as sterilization.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanae_vitae
I can't speak for the whole of atheists, but I can speak for one. My response is in two parts. The first part is the direct answer:
There are at least four reasonable responses to the question, "Is XYZ a living human?": (1) "Yes," (2) "No," (3) "I don't know," and (4) "The question cannot be answered without a relevant (to the contextual scenario of the question) definition of what 'living human' is."
And the problem, of course, is that people such as yourself (presumably), try to take a question embedded in a scenario for which (4) is the most appropriate response, and treat it as if (1) or (2) are appropriate responses in that scenario. For example, if you define human life to begin at conception, then a fetus is a human life, by that definition. If, on the other hand, you define human life to begin a birth, then a fetus is not a human life, by that definition. Neither definition is "correct" or "incorrect," and the answer to the question depends wholly on which definition you choose.
The second part of my response is to note that "Is XYZ a living human?" or "What is a human life?" are very rarely the right questions to ask in any practical setting. In real-life scenarios, the questions are more along the lines of, "Does he have a pulse?" or, "How long is she expected to survive if we disconnect life support?"
Actually, no. According to the Hastings Center, the legal definition of death in all U.S. jurisdictions is brain death. Maybe I'm being simple-minded, but it seems reasonable to me to take higher cortical activity as a potential marker for the beginning of a human life, as its cessation marks the end (Though there remain hard cases). The last I read on this, gestational age at the onset of cortical activity is known very approximately, but may be as late as weeks.
*24 weeks*
Come on, Kevin, this is just a bad take.
Correlation is not causality -- you know that in other cases.
In this case what you are seeing is clearly mostly driven by an underlying factor (political tribalism) that manifests BOTH as religious affiliation and as anti-abortionism.
You could probably create a similar graph for "opposition to, I don't know, affirmative action". Would you conclude from that that opposition to affirmative action is religion-based?
Of course it's confounded by the fact that (IMHO) tribalism comes first, religion second; so the choice to be a hardline Baptist for most people is (IMHO) more a tribal decision than any sort of theological decision.
But if you're insisting that Religion is a useful motivator of attitudes INDEPENDENT OF tribal affiliation, you will have to do a lot better than this.
errr, Roe's decision was political tribalism. It was part of several bad decisions the court had done since the great depression.
I slightly sympathize because I know I believe in things that the majority of Americans wouldn't agree with. And some of them are these I think are very important from a moral sense. However, I like to think that if I had made the same argument from many pulpits, from billboards, from AM Radio, from widely distributed movies and American opinion had not budged an inch in 50 years, I might just save my breath.
It's up to the people to decide, not courts. I really don't care about abortions unless attempts to get by child rearing laws, but even that has a bright warning sign.
Re: "life begins at conception."
Which is a total red herring. Life began several billion years ago and all life today comes from other life. Sperm and egg are alive and there is never a point in the process of gestation when something dead comes to life.
That's not even a religious error, since I'm sure religious people are aware of the facts too. It's an attempt by intellectually lazy and dishonest people to replace a normative question ("When should we confer the legal status of personhood on a developing human organism?") with a factual one ("When does life begin?")
Exactly.
"There’s a straight line from US racial segregation to the anti-abortion movement"
Randall Balmer, at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/08/abortion-us-religious-right-racial-segregation
Ms. DeSanctis has never, not once, been fearful of insulting her audience's intelligence.
People who want to ban abortion want to force a women to provide food, healthcare and shelter for a fetus. If these people actually cared about people, life, or what becomes of a fetus they'd fully support taxing billionaires and millionaires to provide food, health care and shelter for what has been born. The fact that when taxing the rich is mentioned these same people foam at the mouth at the tyranny of it is proof that they are covering their real motives with what they hope sounds better.
honestly wondering why you take National Review seriously when Rich Lowry is the god damned editor?
Opposition to abortion is not religious in the sense that neither God nor Jesus in the Bible show the slightest interest in abortion (maybe they weren't aware that it could be done). The Bible says "thou shalt not kill" but this is obviously not a blanket order as God himself commands the Israelites to wipe out various other tribes and heretical sects, and most of those who oppose abortion are not opposed to killing in other situations. People who claim to be "fundamentalists" can't actually find anything in the Holy Book that bans abortion.
But opposition to abortion is a signal of belonging to the rightist faction and some sects, especially "evangelicals" belong to the rightist faction. Non-evangelicals mostly do not oppose abortion on average - do they have a different bible?
We have seen recently that when partisanship gets strong, quite nonsensical things can be rallying points. Opposition to abortion can actually have a moral basis, whether it is religious or not, but it has mainly been a rallying point on the right, where people tend to be ostensibly religious as well as racist. It allows people to characterize their partisan opponents as murderers, and thus for some subject to killing themselves.
Yes, I agree with your take. If you had taken this survey in 1920 or 1820 or even 20, you would likely see very different responses. Abortion has become a way for right-wing Christians to consolidate political power, and that is a relatively new topic to rally around. For most of history abortion was just something women did without much public or religious discussion of it.
Clearly there is a process by which we become fully indivualized people with rights and protections, and there will always be philosophical arguments about where along that process you have to be in order to qualify.
Interesting. I’m atheist and think the human life begins sometime shortly after conception. The potential for a human life is worth considering as such. I just don’t think that overrides the mother’s right to control the outcome of this event. I’d hope most women get an abortion as early as possible but if circumstances require late term abortion then I’m ok with that.
Contraceptives are the ideal solution.
The idea that religious people value human life as sacred or whatever is laughable. They continuously demonstrate their contempt for human life and have for all of human history.
Although the opposition to abortion and the organizing to popularize government coercion to prohibit abortion are performed by religious institutions, abortion proponents do not protest at Catholic or Evangelical churches. Services at churches which are at the forefront of making abortion a political issue are not targeted for protest and harassment in the ways women's rights opponents protest at Planned Parenthood. Sunday school children should have to pass through a gauntlet of women's rights activists in the same way women arriving for their abortion appointments have to endure. Respect for religious authority and practice at churches involved politically to prevent abortion must be discarded and replaced with the same belligerence anti-immigrant protesters display at churches which protect migrants with sanctuary or at Muslim institutions by Christiand and nationalists.
Well, to be fair there was the late Nat Hentoff, who famously described himself as "a member of the Proud and Ancient Order of Stiff-Necked Jewish Atheists" and opposed abortion. (I'm a member of that order myself, but support abortion rights.) But he's certainly the proverbial exception that proves the rule. For one of the few times lately, I find myself in almost total agreement with Kevin.
If the “anti-abortion” people were truly anti-abortion, they would be super gung ho on birth control (and Planned Parenthood, which probably has prevented more abortions than any other group) . But that would give women more control over their own lives than the “religious” are willing to accept.
Those who are pro life from a non religious perspective generally are in favor of birth control for exactly the reason you say.
But many Christians ( catholics at least) feel that birth control before conception is immoral but for a reason different than why abortion is evil. Note any birth control after conception is just abortion in this perspective - talking about pre conception birth control including condoms.
The concept as I understand it is that birth control is interfering with the potential for human life- i.e. preventing gods will from being fulfilled if God wants the baby. Note catholicism allows the " rhythm method " of birth control presumably because that still leaves it up to God. I am not sure I get the distinction with condoms as God can make the condom break too if he wants . But I think it comes down to how specific the act is towards preventing pregnancy.
Note the issue of pre conception birth control is more open for debate in the church , at least with respect to the church position on secular law. Clearly pre conception birth control would be less grave a sin as compared to abortion ( i.e. murder ) . So, if laws preventing birth control had the effect of increasing abortions, what is the moral position to a Christian?
There is no moral position against birth control. It's all control of women's bodies nothing more.
I knew a few atheists who were against abortion and remember Romania in the communist era was against abortion to ensure the numbers of babies born were kept up. Religion is big on preventing abortion to ensure that enough babies are born to keep the flock going unlike say the Shakers.
I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that most of the white supremacists are against abortion to regardless to participation in religion because they want more white babies born.
I will saw off that limb you crawled out on in your 2nd paragraph.
The rate of abortion among minorities, especially blacks, is significantly higher than for whites . Prohibiting abortion would increase the number of black babies born proportionately more than white babies. Why would a white supremacist want to decrease the white share of new births. This would even be magnified to the extent that whites have greater resources enabling them to get around the ban ( go outside the country) more than non whites.
This meme is especially ridiculous in combination with altrealtimes proposal above that racists are anti abortion because they want to make things difficult for minority pregnant women, ignoring that they would be causing more minority babies to be born.
So we have two different posts trying to link pro life positions with racism but with totally different and absolutely contradictory reasoning. Not everything is about race.
In fact, pro abortion positions ( and yes I use that term instead of pro choice here in this context) was linked to racism and racist eugenics in the past at least - there was some motivation to reduce births among inferior groups .
You're buying into the conservative rationalizations and naming conventions. Majority of the Eugenics crowd were also Dixiecrats whose political descendants are the modern day conservative crowd. Dixcrats were reliable votes for contraception efforts back in the 1960s and early 1970s. The Catholics were against abortion and birth control formally by the late 19th century but the obsession about things did not begin until until Humane Vitae in the 1960s.
The current conservative obsession about abortion grew out of Paul Weyrich's strategy to unite Catholic and Evangelical voters around a common cause in service of electing more conservatives. It was a very cynical ploy to rope in Catholics by promising to fight against abortion and conservative influencers in the late 1970s/early 1980s whipping up evangelicals against baby murders with graphic propaganda films and pamphlets.
The modern pro-choice movement evolved out of the suffrage movement, it is all about women being in control of their own bodies including the right to refuse pressured to prevent a pregnancy. Pretty much any association with Eugenics in the movement died around WWII with the horror over Nazi Germany.
Pretty much nothing you said in the above post contradicted anything I said. And i agree with most of it .
Yes, today, I doubt that a large part of the support for abortion comes from eugenics or racism. There might be some but not too much. There is some factor re supporting abortion to keep population down among those who think there are too many people.
But racism also is not a reason for anyone to be pro life, especially based on your initial idea that they want more white babies because banning abortion is going to cause even more minority babies. If any racist is pro life, it is in spite of being racist, not because of it.
In terms of terminology, if you want to discuss the issue and not just have a pointless rally in your political cocoon, it is best to just use the terms each side prefers for themselves - i.e. pro life and pro choice . And that is what I will do.
Except in the context I was discussing above. If someone supports abortion rights because of eugenics, racism, or population control, then they are not just pro choice, they actually prefer more abortions and fewer babies. But that is not true for the large majority of those that are pro choice I hope.
Personally, I think both terms pro choice and pro life are ridiculous for most .Anti choice is a more accurate description than pro life and maybe antisentient fetus for most pro choice ( although not coming up with a good term there ).
Would it be fair to describe those who supported slavery as " pro choice " back in the 1800s? How about those who resist covid vaccinations? Actually yes they were pro choice - they just wanted the right to make their own choice in the matter. But of course the point is you should not be free to choose to enslave as the slave is a human who had a right not to be a slave. But slaveholders denied that slaves had a status or capability that entitled them to freedom .
Shit, I say legal to terminate a year after birth. Ever lived with one? I've lived with several, hell on earth. Lets shift that Overton window.
If life begins sometime before birth, why do we measure how long our lives are by BIRTHdays?
All police shootings and anyone killed by the military is murder. It doesn't matter if it was self defense or in defense of our country. Killing another human is murder. It is a shame that police and soldiers have to suffer the consequences, of spending years in jail, but they knew the risks of the job when they took it on.
I'm sure there are a few people who believe that but we don't let them anywhere near the levers of power. If they really thought abortion was murder an unwanted pregnancy would be like winning the lottery with people throwing themselves at you to arrange adoption, but no they would rather shame women for having sex which is what this has always been about.