Roe v Wade & Lawrence v Texas were decided on the right to privacy. In both instances, Congress should have followed up public acceptance of the change with comprehensive legislation. One reason this did not happen was because 'activists' wanted to tack on all sorts of provisions far beyond the scope of the Bench's decisions. By overreaching themselves, the Left ensured that what SCOTUS had granted, SCOTUS could take away. Public intellectuals, in this as in every other instance, proved a public nuisance.
Amia Srinivasan, whose stock in trade is serving up the warmed sick of the early Seventies, writes in the LRB
The most famous philosophical treatment of abortion is an essay by Judith Jarvis Thomson published in 1971, two years before Roe v. Wade was decided, in the inaugural issue of the journal Philosophy and Public Affairs.
Nobody outside Srinivasan's shitty little field has heard of Thomson. Aquinas is a philosopher people have heard of. His view of abortion is influential. More generally, horror of abortion arises from the notion that God wanted a particular child to be born. It was killed in the womb for some contingent reason of a mercenary or meretricious kind.
‘A Defence of Abortion’ opens by dispensing with the standard pro-choice premise that the foetus is not a person.
In the same sense that a person is not a person under some contingency.
A ‘newly implanted clump of cells’, Thomson writes, is ‘no more a person than an acorn is an oak tree’,
but an oak tree is not an oak tree if it has been cut down and burned.
but ‘we shall probably have to agree that the foetus has already become a human person well before birth.’ But is that what matters? Imagine, Thomson says, that you wake up to find that the Society of Music Lovers has hooked your circulatory system up to a famous violinist with a life-threatening kidney ailment.
In which case, a cognizable offence has been committed. The police will arrest them and free you.
Unless you stay in bed, attached to him for nine months (you are the only one with the right blood type), he will die. Are you morally permitted to unplug the violinist?
Yes. You aint his Mummy. However, in this scenario, there is a guy standing over you with a gun. Also you have been tied up. Then the police break down the door and arrest the bad guys. They release you.
The hospital director explains why not: ' Tough luck, I agree, but you’ve now got to stay in bed, with the violinist plugged into you ... Because remember this. All persons have a right to life, and violinists are persons. Granted you have a right to decide what happens in and to your body, but a person’s right to life outweighs your right to decide what happens in and to your body.'
You reply- 'I'll stay in bed only if you chop your head off and shove it up your pooper. Tough luck for you, but you need to show me you really care about this violinist.'
Thomson suggests that most readers will find the doctor’s logic ‘outrageous’.
We find Thomson outrageously silly. Did she really get paid for talking such bollocks? Do students sit quietly as this crazy lady babbles nonsense? How fucking stupid are they? No wonder smart peeps, like Bill Gates, dropped out of Collidge.
Yes, the violinist is a person; but no, obviously, his right to life does not trump your right to bodily autonomy. Similarly with the foetus: it might be a person, but even so don’t you have the right to abort it?
Sure, in the sense that you have the right to kill people ahead of you in the queue at McDonalds. They may be people, but they are delaying your getting your Happy Meal.
The intuitive power of Thomson’s thought experiment is undeniable.
only if you are as stupid as shit or have to teach a worthless subject to cretins.
But its intuitiveness rests on a liberal individualism that feminists, including those who were fighting for access to abortion at the time Thomson was writing, have long wanted to resist.
Amia is mad. Most Feminists were liberal individualists. Some crazy Leftists pretended to be Feminists just as they pretended to be pro-Black or pro-Working Class. But they weren't really. They were drooling over the prospect of a Stalin massacring or Gulaging vast classes of people.
For social conservatives, the foetus – better yet, ‘the unborn baby’ – is an object of hysterical devotion
Whereas social liberals want to kill it.
(giving rise to what Lee Edelman has called ‘the fascism of the baby’s face’),
There you have it. Anything these guys don't like- babies included- is 'Fascist'.
just as a famous violinist might be to his fans.
Very true. Fans often pick up violinists and croon lullabies to them.
But foetuses – not the idea, but the creatures themselves – exist at the borders of life, on the margins of humanity.
No. The baby is the center of family life. Relatives turn up from distant places to coo over it.
And it is at the borders and margins of ‘the human’, ‘personhood’, ‘consciousness’ and ‘life’ that feminists have identified those most in need of protection and liberation: women, disabled people, queer people, people of colour, immigrants, children, non-human animals, nature.
All of whom chase feminists away because they are as stupid as shit and smell bad. This is even before they start babbling about abortion.
To assimilate a foetus not only to an adult, but to a famous, high-status adult (an adult with a fan club!) is
foolish. Everybody likes to see a pregnant lady. On the other hand, I was deeply offended when a young woman came up to me and asked if she could put her ear to my belly so as to listen to the baby's heartbeat. The fact is, some peeps might be able to tolerate violinists. Everybody loves a baby.
to distract from the vulnerability of certain forms and stages of human life.
The reason I didn't punch the young woman in the face is because I'm very weak and vulnerable. Still, I did seriously consider joining Weight Watchers.
This vulnerability, the fact that none of us is a perfectly independent and autonomous self, means that, like it or not, we need each other.
Nobody needs Amia. Doctors and Plumbers are useful. We need them. Moral philosophers are a waste of space. Still, they can be utterly hilarious.
We are all the violinist; and we are all his host.
No we aren't. Our 'interdependence' is economic. It is based on transactions and the 'incomplete contracts' that are relationships.
This is, yes, an outrage:
No. It is a stupid lie.
but it is the outrage of human existence.
Economic arrangements may be inequitable or repugnant. But nothing wholly imaginary is an outrage. Why not say 'it is outrageous that all of us have our lips stitched to the anus of another dude while having our our anus stitched to the lips of someone else. Thus when the guy at the head of the chain eats a burrito and has explosive diarrhea, we have to swallow that diarrhea which then gives us diarrhea which the next chap has to swallow.'
To elevate that outrage to an ethical principle, as Thomson encourages us to do, is to indulge the destructive fantasy that we can simply unplug and be free.
Fuck that. Thomson was simply stupid. She didn't get that what had occurred was a cognizable offence. The police would have to intervene. In some jurisdictions the arrangements would be per se illegal. In others you might be able to consent but only for consideration. That is an economic matter.
What would it be to have a pro-abortion politics that did not flee from vulnerability and dependency
You could have a 'eugenic' theory such that a woman who wants an abortion must have shitty genes. Better kill her kids so as to improve the gene-pool.
– that did not take as its implicit starting point the perspective of the sovereign, perfectly autonomous individual?
You could have a misogynistic theory that women are shit. They are bound to have shitty babies- some of whom may be female. Keep kicking them in the stomach till they miscarry or their wombs get ruptured. Better still, just kill them. Abortion is a good thing but some women think they are 'sovereign' and should have babies. Killing them will stop this nuisance. Sadly, everybody kicks your head in if you propound this theory.
It would be an abortion politics that, as feminists of colour have long been urging, shifted its focus from ‘choice’ to ‘justice’, drawing a connection, for example, between anti-abortion politics, campaigns of forced sterilisation of Black and poor women, and the demonisation of ‘welfare mothers’, ‘benefits scroungers’ and the ‘hyper-fecund’ women of the global south.
Why stop there? Why not mention the demonization of terrorists and serial killers? Why are we not encouraging maniacs to shoot up more schools? There is a clear link between anti-abortion politics and the carceral State which locks up diligent rapists and sadistic murderers.
It would be a politics that made safe and free abortion part of a much broader package of social provision
for terrorists and rapists
that recognised human need as a public rather than a private concern:
human need is the concern of public corporations and other enterprises which make a profit by catering to them.
universal healthcare,
Amia lives in the UK where this exists. It could exist in the US. Sadly, voters prefer a highly differentiated system were some employers offer superb health plans while a lot of other people are stuck with very expensive or quite poor quality health care.
childcare, housing, basic income and so on.
All this can be provided if voters want it. The trouble is that provision will tend to decline over time unless productivity rises faster than 'Baumol' cost inflation. This is an economic matter.
It would be an abortion politics, not unironically, that would advance the aim conservatives claim they care so much about: the reduction of foetal killing.
Why not simply pay women not to abort? Obviously every pregnant woman would then claim this bonus. Still, that's the free market solution.
But there’s the rub of anti-abortion politics: it does not, on the whole, meaningfully reduce the rate of abortion.
Yes it does. Ceaucescu proved this. The trouble is that you then get lots of abandoned kids in Romanian style orphanages who may grow up retarded and malnourished. Babies need Mummies. Daddies need babies coz it's nice to have someone in the house who is your intellectual equal.
What anti-abortion laws do guarantee is an increase in the suffering of those with unwanted pregnancies, and in the state’s ability to punish those people – especially poor women – who seek or facilitate abortion.
This is not guaranteed. On the other hand, anti-abortion laws are likely to increase the number of babies put up for adoption. This is likely to increase the power and influence of organized religion. This will have 'non-linear' effects. Politically, it may push the country towards 'Corporatism' as opposed to Free-Market policies.
This is a feature, not a bug, of anti-abortion politics.
No. Anti-abortion politics is associated with Religion which teaches us that life on earth is brief. You need to do a lot of charity and be really sweet and nice so as to get to Heaven and then spend all eternity laughing heartily at the torments of the damned.
Anti-abortion laws are designed not to reduce foetal deaths, but to punish those who resist the prevailing reproductive order.
Very true. The prevailing reproductive order insists on penis being inserted into vagina. Those who try to get pregnant through their anus are sadly disappointed. Look at Rahul Baba!
They are a reminder that it is the function of women to devote themselves, psychically and bodily, to the maintenance of social and economic life, and the prerogative of the state to ensure that they do so.
Why has the State not forced Amia to have lots of babies? Is it coz she is actually a dude?
The word ‘sex’ is not used in ‘A Defence of Abortion’; the word ‘intercourse’ appears just once.
This is because there was no Pornhub back in the Seventies. Pedants knew that if they used the word 'sex', their students would immediately start jizzing or fisting themselves.
For Thomson, the fact that human foetuses are produced by sexual activity was ethically irrelevant to the question at hand.
Coz famous violinists kept getting hooked up to innocent dudes- right?
But for most ‘pro-lifers’, sex – in both its senses – is the fundamental issue: playing non-voluntary host to a parasitical violinist may be an outrage against individual liberty, but playing host to a foetus is, for a woman who chooses to have sex, the appropriate outcome.
Amia thinks Lesbian sex can get you preggers. It can but only if your partner has just had sex with a dude. Such is the teaching of Holy Mother Church. On the other hand, Lesbians are so constantly at each others clits that the clits grow and grow and turn into dicks. Then, those Lesbians grow facial hair. There were two nuns who turned into monks for this reason. By contrast, in Protestant England, Sir Edward Coke remarked that the offense of 'buggery' included having sex with a baboon. Apparently a 'great lady' had gotten pregnant in this manner.
What’s more, for the woman who chooses to have sex for reasons other than reproduction – for pleasure, for money, for the hell of it – carrying a foetus to term is her just dessert.
Not if she is fucking another woman or a baboon.
This is why Thomson’s thought experiment, for all its power,
but it is a power only to make us feel contempt for her discipline
exercises little grip on the patriarchal worldview.
Coz patriarchs don't read the ravings of stupid females.
At the slightest incursion on men’s liberty, patriarchy bridles wildly.
Nope. Patriarchs want criminals and Commies of various descriptions to be locked up.
But the unspoken condition of men’s freedom is women’s unfreedom.
Only in the same sense that a woman's freedom is contingent upon the unfreedom of the neighbor's cat.
Every abortion wanted, sought and completed is an offence against the social order.
Only if the thing is illegal. The social order is encoded in the legal order.
In this, at least, the anti-abortionists are right.
As are the pro-abortionists. The law matters. Amia's drivel does not. The Democrats did try to pass a Federal Law making abortion legal but could not get a majority. The question is why this was not done previously when the Dems had majorities in both Houses. One answer is that the senile nutters, Amia is in lurve with, were still around talking dated bollocks. This scared off the straights.
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