Pro-Life and Pro-Choice

I confess that I am Pro-Life and Pro-Choice. This is not a problem for me. Like all humans I am capable of holding completely contradictory positions on any number of issues. Take the Vietnam War for instance. In my formative years, the 60s, the burning issue, the number one issue, the issue that was front in center in everyone’s mind, was Vietnam. Well, I confess that sex was the number one issue in my mind, but right after sex came Vietnam. In those college years, over our gourmet cafeteria meals of meatloaf or fried liver and onions, during bull sessions in the dorm, and while getting drunk on cheap beer or wine, my friends and I indulged in endless hours talking about the war in Vietnam (because we didn’t want to spend any time indulging in the war). Perhaps we didn’t talk nearly as much about sex because we spent so little time indulging in it, and we didn’t want to discuss our failures.

We didn’t talk much about civil rights because we were mainly white, pre-baby boomers, and raised in a former slave state

We talked about the war and especially the draft. Well, mostly about the draft. I was opposed to the draft, mostly out of self-interest, and got swept up in my newly found principles of pacifism and my Pro-Life stance that any kind of killing, even in war was wrong. Well, not all war. I was born during WWII, which was a good war of course. Well, war is never good, but that was a necessary one. I confess that I had not actually heard about the dubious concept of Just War until I was actually in one. In Charm School, I was forced to bake under the midday tropical sun while listening to a lecture on Just War given by a mumbling priest, who seemed uncertain of the concept. Or was he simply intimidated by the well-armed congregation that faced him? Some members of the congregation were busily flouting the rules by defacing their new camouflage helmet covers with religious quotes, such as: “Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil because I am the meanest motherfucker in the valley.” The guy next to me misspelled valley and meanest. I confess that I was intimidated by some members of the congregation. Even had I understood what that priest was mumbling about, I would have been dubious about the concept, dubious because who gets to decide on the Justness? LBJ? Tricky Dick?

I believed that WWII was a Just War, but I was dubious about the Korean War, and opposed to the Vietnam War, even more so after participating. Well, police actions. (I am unaware of the existence of any philosophical concept about a Just Police Action.) I certainly didn’t buy the Domino Theory. I had absorbed a little history. For instance, I knew that Ho Chih Minh had been our ally during WWII. But then so was Stalin. But Ho merely wanted freedom from the colonial oppressors, the French. He was a nationalist. Colonies all over the world were struggling for freedom, as did the Thirteen Colonies before they became colonizers. But Ho was a communist. And all the dominoes around him were teetering. On the whole I was wholeheartedly opposed to the war and thought Vietnam should be free. At the same time, I bought the line that if we, the public, knew what the national security types in our government knew but couldn’t tell us, we would be wholeheartedly in favor of the war. At the same time once again, I was cynical about the national security types.

With minimal effort, I was capable of holding completely contradictory positions about Vietnam and Just War.

My college buddies and I never, that I remember, talked about abortion. The topic never came up. After all, we were all sexist males and Roe v. Wade wasn’t decided until long after those halcyon college days. I must have read novels in which some female character died or nearly died of a botched illegal abortion, and I saw Hollywood movies in which the female star decided at the last minute not to go through with the illegal abortion and got back with the boyfriend and he made an honest woman of her. Whew! In one movie they married while the nurses were wheeling the dishonest woman into the delivery room. Thank you, D. Day and R. Hudson for enlightening us.

Neither did we discuss the question of what life is or when did it begin. In some zoology and physiology courses we might have touched on the what-life-is topic, but, that I recall, we never came to any definite conclusions, unlike many Pro-Choicers or Pro-Lifers who seem to split endless hairs about when life begins and is human life the same as human personhood. Is it a religious/philosophical question or a purely physiological one? For many of the religious-minded, human life/personhood begins when their god breathes life, i.e., soul, into the fetus. Well, when does that occur? For literalists as well as biologists that can only occur after birth because the fetus doesn’t breathe in the womb. And what is a soul, what is consciousness, what is will? Except to zealots, these are objectively unanswerable philosophical or religious questions, and I cannot bother my pretty gray head with them.

I have certain beliefs about religious beliefs, which I will discuss in a later post. For now, let me confess that I am only somewhat consistent in my beliefs. As I said, I am Pro-Life and Pro-Choice. Unlike the case of my unyielding stance on the Vietnam war, which I was forced to yield, my Pro-Life and Pro-Choice position is not contradictory or a symptom of my inoperable case of cognitive dissonance. To my mind they are compatible.

It is simply that I am only an imperfect human and my Pro-Life stance has a few imperfections. On the whole, I am opposed to capital punishment, but I do wonder if some who have committed truly horrific crimes—think the jealous husband who murders his wife and six children—can ever be redeemed and might be better off dead rather than living with their guilt? If they come to terms with their guilt. While I am opposed to executing even mass murders, I am wishy washy in that opposition. I would prefer that criminals who committed truly horrible crimes—think Pol Pot—be given the opportunity to commit suicide. I confess that I am a believer in the ritual of seppuku, not only for murderers but for those who commit atrociously disgraceful acts, like inciting a violent invasion of the Capitol, or commanding the light brigade to make a suicidal charge. It would be the honorable thing to do. And it needn’t be a painful death as in seppuku.

Yes, I am an imperfect Pro-Lifer, as are a good many Pro-Lifers. While politicians, generals, and the generally religious debate what is a Just War, many Pro-Lifers debate what is a Just Abortion, i.e., in cases of rape or incest or a threat to the woman’s life or health. (But a woman’s freedom seldom enters their equation and it took the Supreme Court to throw in privacy.)

Perhaps a more apt description of our beliefs would be Partially Pro-Life. Simply Pro-Life has the ring of a moral absolute and doesn’t allow for the exceptions discussed above. While we’re on the subject of appropriate names, let me return briefly to capital punishment. Many Pro-Lifers and Pro-Capital-Punishmenters maintain that the person about to be executed had a chance to grow up and lead a good life but failed and therefore deserves to lose his or her life. Yet they are adamantly opposed to abortions, except in select cases, claiming that the fetus is innocent and deserves a chance to be born, grow up and make his or her own mistakes. By definition then, they are only Pro-Fetal-Life. And some might go so far as to be only Pro-Gamete- and -Oocyte-Life.

Note: The Pro-Gamete group are literalists when it comes to Onan’s spilt seed story, while the metaphoralists claim that his only sin was not fulfilling his duty by marrying his deceased brother’s widow.

I have a friend who is a nun—she prefers the noun “religious,” which I thought was only an adjective before she set me straight—who is a moral absolutist, or reasonably close to it, and completely consistent in her Pro-Life belief. We don’t discuss abortion but I believe she is opposed in all cases. She is also adamantly opposed to capital punishment, lynching, and religious wars. And drone murders. And murders of abortion providers. Every Easter Sunday at sunrise she goes to Livermore to demonstrate against nuclear weapons. I would go with her, but my anti-nuclear-war commitment doesn’t extend to getting up before dawn. My friend is equally concerned with the born and the unborn. Me, not so much. I believe that the Peter Principle also applies to evolution and we, homo fauxsapiens, who believe we are the sublime culmination of evolution have perhaps risen to a level of incompetence the world could well do without. On the other hand, nuclear winter would kill off most innocent animal and plant life.

“Competing interests” is the cliché the Supreme Court chose for the conflict between the Pro-Lifers and the Pro-Choicers, making it sound like a game of tug of war. As these competing interests are heavy, they should have come up with something that sounded more like sumo wrestling. In my Just Police Action days I had “competing interests.” On the one hand I was Pro-Life: I didn’t want to shoot anyone and didn’t want anyone to shoot me or my buddies. Well, I confess that I was more Pro-My-Life, i.e., just plain scared. On the other hand I was Anti-War: I was determined to do as little as possible, yet at the same time, I wanted to perform well. And the state certainly limited my Choices. “Competing interests” simply does not convey the complexity and seriousness of the issues. Not for my contradictory positions.

Another of my contradictory positions is on Roe v. Wade. Seven Supreme Court Justices relied on the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, LIBERTY, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” (emphasis added). They went on to state that a woman’s right to privacy was paramount in the decision of whether or not to abort a fetus and that right could not be abridged without due process, which in this case involved the balancing of competing interests: a woman’s right to privacy versus the state’s interest in “potential life.”

The majority then came up with a trimester standard: only until the last trimester, when the fetus was potentially viable outside the womb, did the state have a legitimate interest that would tip the scales and allow the state to violate a woman’s right to privacy.

Those Constitutional literalists, White and Rehnquist, dissented, arguing that there was no right to privacy in the Constitution, and the word “privacy” does not even appear anywhere in that quasi-holy document. They claimed it was an egregious example of judicial activism to invent this right to privacy, akin to coming up with an Eleventh Commandment. I confess: the Commandment part is mine, not theirs; it seemed appropriate because of the religious element. White’s and Rehnquist’s argument also sounds convincing, except they somehow failed to note the long history of decisions based on the privacy issue, as well as the perhaps embarrassing fact that eight years earlier, wishy washy Whizzer White concurred in Griswold v. Connecticut that it would be a violation of that same due process clause to prohibit married couples in the privacy of their homes from using contraception. Possibly he had a horse in that race. To be fair, White said it would be a violation of their LIBERTY, not privacy, and that married couples should be “free of regulation of the intimacies of the marriage relationship.” To be unfair, that sounds suspiciously like privacy. I wonder if the Whizzer would have dissented if the majority in Rowe had followed his LIBERTY argument. There was never any hope for Rehnquist.

My wishy washiness about Roe results because I am dubious about their legal argument yet approve of the result, sort of. Well, I am also dubious about the result. I don’t say they shouldn’t have gone with the privacy argument, but I do say they should have loaded their legal canons with the Thirteenth Amendment for greater accuracy and firepower: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

Here’s where I leave my wishy washiness behind. It is my unwavering belief that I would complain of slavery or involuntary servitude if the state forced me to vomit every morning for three months, and then followed that by forcing me to strap an UNWANTED and increasing load of sloshing liquid, ten pounds in the ninth month, to my belly 24 hours a day for nine months, forced me to sleep on my back when I could sleep, caused me dizziness, discomfort, and insomnia, and distorted my body, increased my appetite for food while decreasing my sexual appetite for the duration. And only a true zealot would say that pregnancy is punishment for crime.

Roe v. Wade was a product of its time. The court focused on due process/privacy and not slavery because the court is a slave to precedent–they prefer “stare decisis” because Latin is the officious language of the United States. My dubiousness about the result results from the court’s ruling that the state had no legitimate interest in the fetus until the last trimester because, in 1973 when Roe was decided, fetuses were viable only in the last trimester of pregnancy. That result is a moving target. Zealous Pro-Fetal-Lifers have been hammering away at Roe, and in 1992, they succeeded in knocking a big chip off the moving target, thanks to a changing of the Justices and to progress in medicine. In Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the court, still a slave to precedent, upheld the basic principal of Roe but substituted the expandable concept of viability for the trimester plan. Fetuses were then viable as early as 21 weeks, which means that states, judiciously weighing the competing interests involved, could prohibit abortions earlier still.

And five years after Roe the first test tube baby was born. What will that mean to the Pro-Gamete and -Oocyte Lifers who claim the state has a legitimate interest in the potential life at conception?

The Court has constructed a clumsy balancing act of “competing interests” between the woman’s privacy and the state’s interest in the viability of “potential life,” with only Privacy weighing in on the woman’s side, while allowing the state to put its thumb on the viability side. Privacy is not as compelling, does not weigh as much, as LIBERTY. Could the court justify slavery or involuntary servitude, which is expressly prohibited in the Thirteenth Amendment, by the state’s compelling interest in the viable fetus? Can they justify a direct harm to an actual life for the sake of what they call a “potential life?”

Pro-Fetal-Lifers argue that if the woman doesn’t want to be burdened by the baby she should carry it to term and then give it to the state for adoption, and because the state believes that it has a compelling interest in the baby, it will bear the burden of raising it or finding someone who will. If medical advances can be tossed onto the scale of competing interests, why shouldn’t the state take viable fetuses (beginning at 21 weeks), without harming the mother, and raise them or arrange for adoptions? As medicine continues to advance, the state could possibly take fetuses even earlier, perhaps even at the test tube stage. All parties would be satisfied. The pregnant woman would have her LIBERTY, as well as privacy, and the Pro-Fetal-Lifers would have the living fetus they could nurture. Well, the state might not be happy with the expense, but how would they balance money against a “potential life?”

For the Pro-Lifer in me this is all very complicated, while for the Pro-Choicer in me, the question is simple: to force a woman to go forward with an unwanted pregnancy is slavery or involuntary servitude. I am more Pro-Life than many Pro-Lifers, but less Pro-Fetal-Life than many Pro-Fetal-Lifers. For me it comes down to a question of choice. Not mine, not the states, not anyone’s but the woman’s.