Sunday, December 28, 2008

Pandagon Watch: Abortion Arguments

I really love it when Amanda Marcotte decides she's going to rebut pro-life arguments. Her answers are filled will twisted logic or just utter fallacies, but I'll run through them here:

1. A baby isn't unique because of its DNA because there are identical twins. Oh, and babies don't have consciousness before 29 weeks, so they aren't people, either. This misstates the use of separate DNA from the parents as proof that the baby inside his/her mother is, in fact, a separate human being. While there is truth to the idea that both sperm and eggs have different DNA from the whole person, I've yet to hear that cells in and of themselves are humans deserving of protection. The argument is that, unlike one's appendix--which Pandagonistas have compared abortion to--a baby is actually a separate being from the mother. And while the child is dependent for about 40 weeks inside the mother, he or she isn't a bodily organ over which Mom should simply decide to get rid of. We don't typically allow Mom to take out, say, her kidney, her intestine, her lungs without a lot of counselling and paperwork. To treat the killing of an infant with less concern is barbaric.

Now for the consciousness argument. People in comas aren't conscious either. And Alzheimer's patients have an enormously limited sense of consciousness. To take people who are not conscious off life support requires more paperwork and what can amount to a court order. We don't allow "consciousness" to be the rationale for killing Grandma, so it's hard to see how this is acceptable for the abortion argument.

2. People who think women use abortion as birth control just hate women and think they are sluts. Amanda's reasoning here is so golden that I have to quote it directly:
It’s assumed that a woman who chooses abortion for the simple reason she doesn’t want to have a baby is somehow getting away with something, and that something is having sex. However, the underlying assumption is that there’s a rational reason to oppose sexual liberation for women, and so far, I haven’t seen it. What few and tenuous social benefits we get from controlling women’s sexuality and shaming it are minor compared to the damage that this control visits upon women. Shaming and controlling female sexuality may make a few men’s lives easier because they can keep women in unhappy, servile relationships by invoking slut shame if they leave, but it makes women’s lives much harder. Sexual shaming of women contributes to bad outcomes on a number of levels: worse health care, lower incomes, lower self-esteem, and even violence against women. Sexual shaming also hurts the majority of men at the expense of the few. Most men are better off in a system where people can try partners on without shame until they find one that suits them best. If half the human race can’t engage in sexual contact freely, the other half has pretty limited options, except for the few that are gay, and even that presumes that misogyny doesn’t lead to homophobia, and we know in the real world that it does.


This is the argumentation I point to when I say how utterly out of touch Amanda and many feminists are with the pro-life position. Pro-lifers don't disagree with abortion as birth control because they want to punish women for having sex. Pro-lifers disagree with abortion as birth control because it is killing a human being for the convenience of someone else and life should be considered more precious than that. It's just not complicated. This has nothing to do with not wanting women to enjoy sex. Plenty of women with children still enjoy having sex. Not only this, but many women actually think that their ability to help create and nurture life makes them more powerful, not less. The pathetic attempt to white wash abortion as woman hatred is delusional.

3. Abortion has nothing to do with self-loathing. I actually agree with this statement, but it isn't what Amanda actually means. Here's what she says:
Abortion is the behavior of neurotic women who don’t enjoy being women. This one very rarely trickles up to the official discourse (emphasis mine), but there’s still this lingering belief that motherhood is every woman’s destiny and that abortion must therefore be a neurotic rejection of your biology. Pointing out that most women who have abortions have children already---and that the rest probably will eventually---shuts this avenue down pretty quickly. But it’s worth noting, because it used to be, from what I can tell, a very popular secular anti-choice argument.


I have never, ever heard this argument from a pro-life supporter. Not in any form or fashion. No one on the pro-life side argues that women who have abortions hate being women. This is the type of argument pro-abortion supporters like Amanda use to dismiss the logical arguments against abortion.

Here's a little warning. Whenever Amanda says "there's this lingering belief" without giving a link to some reasonable, normal source of information (as opposed to a church with three members that she found in a Google search), it means "no one thinks this but I gotta lie about it anyway."


This is the first time in a while that Amanda has actually tried to rebut pro-life arguments, and it's obvious why. She would never be able to actually debate pro-life supporters in any forum that wasn't heavily stacked in her favor (say, her blog where she can lie to people and shut down debate when she loses). Instead, she builds the kinds of strawmen not seen outside of corn fields in Iowa. Pro-lifers don't hate women and they don't spend too much time thinking about whether a pregnant woman is a slut or not. Instead, they spend their time and energy on helping to preserve life, particularly the innocent life of children. If this is the best argument Amanda has, it's no wonder she shuts down debate as often as she does.