Abortion: crime and punishment

cricket chirp: I’ve been trying to figure out what the Religious Right is really thinking, lately.
atheist friend: In any particular respect? Or just in general?
cc: Well, specifically as regards sex and pregnancy.
cc: I am able to understand the religious right’s party line in a way that doesn’t preclude compassion, but that doesn’t mean that’s the true understanding, you know?
af: Yeah, it really is pretty mysterious, unless the caricature that liberals like to make about ‘Sex Is Bad’ is really correct.
cc: No, but look at it this way:
cc: Say you believe the following: sex is pleasurable and profitable if used as intended by God for the purpose of procreation and as a seal of the holy bond of marriage between a man and a woman.
cc: Would you characterize that belief as anti-sex?
af: Hmm.
af: Well, you mean that to be an only if, right?
cc: Well, yes.
af: I guess that’s sort of anti-sex in a way… but not the way that the caricatures make it look. Point taken.
cc: Because if the purpose of sex is a) procreation and b) the cementing of a holy commitment, then sex between people who clearly are either or both a) not interested in procreating and/or b) not interested in commitment is actually dangerous. Like using Super Glue as a lubricant.
af: Dangerous? I don’t know about that… it depends on the nature of purpose, right?
cc: Postulate, then, that it is not only the purpose but the nature of sex to do those things.
af: Like, the purpose of my pen is for writing, but it’s not dangerous or bad of me to use it to help dig the crumb out of the keyboard.
cc: (And I think we can agree that it’s the nature of heterosexual sex to produce kids, barring exceptional circumstances or human intervention.)
af: I’m not sure exactly what you mean by ‘the nature’. If all you mean is that heterosexual sex sometimes causes kids to be produced, then I certainly agree.
cc: Say frequently, barring human intervention. 😛
af: Human intervention? You mean things like birth control?
cc: Yep. Birth control, abortion, condoms.
af: Ok, I grant that in the absense of birth control, abortion, and contraceptives, it is not terribly unusual for heterosexual sex to result in childbirth. (I don’t really know what the proportion is… do you? Maybe something in the 10% range? I really don’t know.)
cc: No, I have no idea.
af: *nod* Ok, go on.
cc: So given that one believes that sex is FOR procreation and marital bonding (both in that its purpose is to produce them and in that it tends to produce them even when not desired to produce them, it’s not completely insane to believe that it’s dangerous to experience sex in an explicitly anti-procreational and anti-bonding situation.
af: No, not completely insane. Ok.
cc: OK. So given all that, I’m going to start talking about what will appear to be a different discussion entirely, but it has something to do with all this.
af: oh, ok. Go for it.
cc: OK. The pro-life argument that I understand is: at some point a fetus becomes a human being. There’s no real way of determining what that point is. I think life should be considered to start with brain activity, since life is (I think) legally considered to end with the end of brain activity, but given the choice between conception and birth, conception makes way more sense to me than birth.
af: Well, ‘brain activity’ will probably not have a clear point either.
af: I agree that birth is an utterly arbitrary point to draw a line.
cc: Yeah. I suck at science. Right.
cc: So do you have an opinion about when a person/fetus/embryo should fall under the protection of the law?
af: Sure. But it’s not a simple one. I don’t know that it’s a simple yes/no question. Fall under protection? Well, definitely, in one sense. I think that animals should fall under the protection of the law, too — it should be illegal to breed puppies for the intention of torturing them.
cc: *nod*
af: So, more protections for more moral worth. It’s bad to destroy a futus at, say, five months. How bad? I don’t know… it depends on what sort of cognitive activity it has. Now we look at the question: why does she want an abortion? We weigh the values.
cc: hmm.
cc: That’s very Catholic of you.
af: *blink*
af: Explain?
cc: Most pro-life arguments don’t consider the motivation of the aborter, and most pro-choice arguments argue that the motivation should not be a subject of scrutiny by any law. The people who do consider the motivations are mainly religious people. For example, in the Catholic church, it’s an excommunicating offense to have an abortion unless you were in a series of mitigating circumstances, such as: you were young, you were scared, you were raped, you didn’t know it was a mortal sin, you were in danger for your life, you were pressured into it, etc.
af: Well, hmm. I guess that’s further evidence for what I already knew: most people don’t engage this issue honestly and clearly. Obviously it should matter what end is being served — most of our moral and legal judgments take this into account. It’s wrong and illegal to kill people, except in certain circumstances. Etc.
cc: Which is sort of how I get back to where I was: many liberals who think the religious right thinks “sex is evil” extrapolate from that, that the reason why the religious right is anti-abortion and (in some cases) anti-birth control, is that they view pregnancy as a just punishment for having evil sex.
af: wow.
cc: I think that’s false. But, I have heard members of the religious right say that abortion is impermissible except in the case of rape or incest, which takes away from the “protecting the innocent” rationale and makes you start to wonder, since apparently abortion is okay if the pregnant person is innocent of the sex, but not otherwise.
af: That’s a really good point. If abortion is wrong, it’s odd that that would make a difference.
af: That’s a fascinatingly good point, actually. I think I’ve had this idea that there’s something fishy there for a long time… but you have a compelling explanation for it.
cc: It still doesn’t have to mean exactly that, though. Because, going back to the initial thing about the nature and purpose of sex, it’s possible to view their beliefs about abortion and birth control NOT as the result of the pro-life argument I was arguing with before, about fetuses becoming children at some point but nobody knows when (and that doesn’t explain the birth control thing anyway), but as a product of a worldview where God created sex for a certain purpose and thwarting it can only end in chaos and heartache.
af: I find the inference from p to God intended that p to we should not make it the case that not-p to be very frightening.
cc: Well, there you have the whole Christian worldview in a nutshell. 😛
af: sigh. Yeah.
af: But hey… apparently you have been thinking about it! Good insight, as always.
cc: hee, thanks. 🙂