Blogging for Choice

Jan. 22 is the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, and so it has become Blog for Choice day. I am a little late, so I will stray somewhat off-topic but in the same spirit. Kevin Drum seconds a post which argues that we should resist granting, for political expedience, that choosing to have an abortion is or should be always a seriously difficult decision to make, morally and emotionally. I agree.

If you have read my blog before, you have probably seen one of my favorite posts, entitled, "moral education and ass-fucking". In the conclusion of that post, I suggested that arguing that sexual orientation is an unchangeable part of an individual's biological nature is, if not counter-productive, at least useless for changing the moral outlook of those who believe that homosexuality is the gravest sin. What kind of argument is it to grant that point and then insist that some people are simply, by nature, sinful? It would be akin to acknowledging that cowardice is a vice and then excusing my cowardly actions by insisting that I have a cowardly nature. In such a case, if the sin is serious enough, any intervention would be justified to counteract the influence of my flawed nature. I suppose it is for something like this reason that we take extreme pains to restrict the activities of pedophiles and other sex offenders and force upon them various therapies. Indeed, such interventions have been thought to be justified for homosexuals at some times and places (see, for example, the sad case of Alan Turing, in which the government went so far as to strip him of his security clearance, presumably because one proven vice calls into doubt any reputation for other virtues, however unrelated, or may be exploited to undermine them).

Similarly, if we grant that abortion is a morally difficult decision, because we ought to give serious (if not indefeasible) moral weight to the so-called "right to life" of the fetus, then arguments against keeping abortion legal have a leg to stand on. There are still arguments available: not everyone has a strong enough will to make the right or unselfish choice, we might point out, and so we ought to avoid compounding their mistakes by forcing them into dangerous coat-hanger abortions that may end up taking the woman's life as well. But this is a weak argument. If we grant the fetus standing as a person, it seems to me difficult to resist concluding that taking the life of that person is morally bad enough to justify legal prohibition. If we can find some middle ground in which we grant the fetus some lesser but still weighty moral standing, we will still have a difficulty proportionate to the weight we give it (this seems to me like it would be a popular position--indeed, perhaps the politically expedient one--but I am not sure how it would go). We may then also note that the life of the pregnant woman is worth saving as well, and agree to take serious steps to prevent it from being lost. But that will be a second problem, not our only problem.

As a final note, this same dynamic plays itself out in the battle over whether sex-ed in public schools should stress abstinence or teach that abstinence is the only effective method for preventing pregnancy and sexually-transmitted infections (teaching that it is the only effective method would be lying, and so the latter case is much more difficult to make). I recently watched a documentary, The Education of Shelby Knox, about a teenager in Lubbock, Texas, who fought unsuccessfully to change her school district's abstinence-only sex-ed policy. She herself took a pledge, which she never seriously questions in the course of the film, to delay having sex until she is married. Her argument, then, for improving her school district's sex ed curriculum is that kids will have sex anyway, and if they are not taught how to prevent disease and pregnancy through condom use, they will fail to prevent them. The rates of teen pregnancy and infection in Lubbock bear witness to to this fact. This is a very common argument against abstinence-only sex ed: if the goal of sex-ed is to reduce pregnancy and STI rates among teenagers, then it is clear that abstinence-only fails to achieve this goal. The problem with this argument is that that is not the primary goal of the abstinence-only crowd. They want to reduce the rate of premarital sex among teenagers. The only way to do this is to get them to choose to abstain, through propaganda campaigns, since nearly everyone agrees that premarital sex is not bad enough to warrant legal prohibition and the extraordinary costs that would be involved in enforcing such a prohibition.

The argument against abstinence-only has to be: premarital sex is not only not bad enough to warrant legal prohibition; it is not bad enough to warrant any intervention by the state at all, including teaching, in public schools, an abstinence-only sex-ed curriculum. Since premarital sex as such is not bad at all, this should not be hard. The only problem with this argument is that having sex is sometimes a bad choice for some people in some contexts, and being a teenager greatly increases the chance that you will be such a person in such a context and fail to see that. Some people may even weigh the risks and decide that abstinence during the teenage years (which is the real issue for most people that think there is an issue here at all--witness the incredulous reaction when the hard-core abstinence-until-marriage crowd started pushing their message for people over 18) is a prudent choice. On the part of others, though, the possible pitfalls of teenage sex can justify at most intervention by parents, peers, and other individuals who may have the teenager's ear and some knowledge of the context in which decisions about sex are being made, since context is so crucial. It also makes for a compelling case that one aim of a sex ed curriculum should be to train teenagers to better predict the consequences of their sexual choices, where those consequences ought to be more broadly construed than pregnancy and infection (so that, e.g., discussing what constitutes rape and sexual harassment ought to be part of the curriculum). But, crucially, the argument against abstinence-only sex-ed is significantly weakened if we grant that there is something morally problematic about premarital sex.

These three arguments are not exactly analogous, despite the common temptation to avoid moral argumentation for the sake of political expediency. Abortion is the hardest case, and sex-ed the easiest. But all three involve moral questions, and it is crucial not to cede the moral high ground to the right-wingers and then adopt a purely pragmatic argument. That cannot succeed. That the right-wingers have not achieved their goals is not a testament to the power of pragmatic arguments or to the irrelevance of morality to legislation. Rather, it is a hopeful sign that the American people are not as morally backward as the right-wingers would have us believe.