Melinda Gates announced that the $40 billion Gates Foundation will no longer fund abortions. While she declines to discuss her own views on abortion, she explained that her first allegiance is to providing parents--especially women--support for contraception, prenatal care, and newborn care. She finds that her preferred policies enjoy a broad and deep consensus, while abortion is a lightning rod for controversy. Conflating abortion with family planning complicates her primary task, so she's opting out.
Organizations like Planned Parenthood, in contrast, seem to go out of their way to conflate abortion with family planning, for at least two purposes: to permit them to accuse any opponents of interfering with both, and to stymie efforts to sort out what portion of their funding pays for abortions.
17 comments:
I think that's right.
Opposition to contraception-as-such is almost completely limited these days to those making a moral case for electing not to use it. There are contraceptives that are abortifacients, but that isn't contraception-as-such, it's contraception as a stalking horse for abortion.
The only other way in which it is a political issue is when someone tries to force person X to pay for the contraception of person Y; sometimes, here as elsewhere, X objects that Y should pay for his or her own goods. Though nominally about contraception, this is the kind of debate that will happen any time one person tries to push his or her costs off on another. It's not really about contraception at all; it's about the propriety of forcing someone else pay for something person Y will get to consume.
Precisely because it's so advantageous to abortion advocates to conflate the issues, though, we've heard a ton about how opposed conservatives are to contraception-and-abortion. And, of course, if you're opposed to contraception-and-abortion, naturally you're opposed to women, which is another position it would be helpful to abortion advocates to convince everyone to believe.
The war-on-women meme is very useful to the Dems, and is best kept active by propagation of fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
A very significant % of young women, including some who are very intelligent, truly are afraid that the Republicans will (a) ban contraception, and (b) limit them to having sex only in the missionary position, without foreplay.
What I have observed in other contexts is that if a person is very, very afraid of something, logic is of limited value is eliminating or reducing the fear. For example, if someone is deathly afraid of flying, it probably won't do much good to quote the statistics, talk about redundant systems, etc....the mental image of those last few terrified seconds before the crash is just too strong.
Ms. Gates also will continue to fund abortifacient pills.
David Foster, I agree with that, and have said something like it often in the past. The equating of abortion with rape, for example, because it is "making a woman have a baby," or some variation of that, is clearly emotive and not logical.
Yet reading your comment, I have to ask "But why? Why this?" The fear-based argument works, even with some generally rational women. I am going to hazard a guess that it ties in at some primal level to a collection of "men just don't get it" ideas: how much they hate being leered at, how vulnerable they feel on the subway and other areas, how catastrophic a baby would be financially and career/statuswise (and men don't have equal risk). Everything is simmering in the same stew, and to challenge any piece feels like a denial of them all.
PP is still making profits off Gosnells. Or perhaps it is the other way around.
The Left doesn't like profit. Except when it is their profit at risk.
AVI, it's true. I'm quite anti-abortion, but I bristle at 90% of what I read from conservative men about the subject the moment they stray from the fundamental concept that a fetus is a human life. If the right can turn me off, they're on really thin ice with young women voters.
I used, Tex, to take the position that women should be free to set their own standards and enforce them on each other; I think it was just because my mother was very much of your position. She had very strong moral views about correct behavior, but just try to let a man say something about a woman and....
Cass talked me out of that position, with this argument: in stating that I won't hold women to any moral rules, and will refuse to judge them for moral choices, I am effectively saying that I don't take them seriously as moral actors. How could I, for example, undertake a business relationship with a woman if I wouldn't hold her to any moral standards? I couldn't possibly: I'd need to do business only with men (or women I happened to trust implicitly).
Now that's not what I meant to say: what I meant to say was that I did take women (certainly my mother) seriously as a moral actor, but that practically I recognized that she could only hold women to account for immorality if she and other women were doing the work. I trusted her to come to the right moral decisions, but only if she felt free of male influence.
Still, Cass' argument swayed me. I have tried for the last ten years or so -- since she convinced me -- to structure moral arguments for women as well as for men. I still think women and men need different rules in some cases, and I'm still willing to leave women freer to make their own codes. But I will now undertake to condemn them, sometimes, because of Cass' point.
As you know, I agree fervently with Cass on this subject. It's not that I'm unwilling to hear an argument from a man, it's that the style common to many conservative men on this particular subject frequently sets my teeth on edge. It's an area where I'm not in the conservative mainstream. I sometimes disagree with conservative women on the subject, too, but they tend not to fall into the same traps that conservative men do, perhaps because it's much harder for them to view the world as though it were entirely about men. They instinctively take into account both halves of the human race.
One effect of this is that I do now write about abortion, which I used never to do. The proper position from my pre-Cass stance was fully pro-choice: whatever my thoughts about the status of the child, which haven't changed, the decision needed to be left to women alone.
Since being liberated by Cassandra, I've become the staunchly anti-abortion advocate that you know: I can feel free to say just why I think destroying the child's individual human life is wrong, and just when and why there might be an exception to that general principle. I think that puts me in the position of having to condemn the decisions of a lot of women, who are doing something I think is really horrible.
Yet if I won't do this, if I won't condemn them, I can now see that I'm failing my own duties -- both to the children, and to the women themselves.
I know what you mean. I'm extremely libertarian about most issues, but even a libertarian can feel a duty to intervene to protect a helpless human from violence. Obviously the pregnant mother is in a peculiar relationship to the fetus that no man will ever face, but the whole point of believing the fetus is human is that it's not all about the mother. She's an adult human being with moral duties, not just a poor creature facing a personal crisis she deserves to be rescued from at any cost.
Nevertheless, the argument so often strays from this fundamental human truth into notions about the inherent nature and role of women that I can't stomach for an instant. As long as my interlocutor and I are agreeing that almost no dilemma faced by the mother justifies killing the fetus--short of a non-viable pregnancy that endangers the life of the mother--we're in synch. Beyond that, most arguments about what the mother should be cheerfully prepared to put up with sound very hollow when uttered by someone who believes he's biologically exempt from the burdens of childrearing beyond breast-feeding (as many conservative men do, and far fewer liberal men do). Being infertile, I'm biologically exempt from those burdens, too, and yet I'd think twice before breezily advising a pregnant mother to resign herself to them, perhaps because I can at least remember a time when I expected to have to face the problem personally. It's too easy to preach dutiful resignation to people whose shoes we'll never have to walk in. We may be completely right in our message, but we're unlikely to be effective.
It's a bit like me preaching courage under fire in battle: I'd be correct, but who wants to hear it from me? If I approach the subject at all, I have to tread very carefully, guard against hypocrisy, and emphasize the common ground of respect for courage and generosity rather than minimizing the sacrifice I'm asking for. No one wants to be viewed as cannon fodder.
It's a bit like me preaching courage under fire in battle...
Like at 1:40? :)
Exactly!
"You've heard he has a temper;
He'll beat you every night,
But only when he's sober . . .
So you're all right!"
I see your point. :)
Of course, just like in the case of the abortion discussion, what is being mocked here is something that -- done properly -- is really valuable and valid. Naturally it is good for society to support their warriors, encourage them to show courage and be forward in battle, and when they come home to show them loving respect for the sacrifices they have dared or made.
So yes: tone is important, even when you're doing the right thing.
Sure. The message may be completely correct, but if it's said the wrong way, we're wasting our breath. Even then, the message doesn't become wrong, only unheard. But "unheard" is a lot.
People made anti-abortion arguments to me for a long time before I could hear them past the static. The same is true for a lot of conservative positions. All I had to hear was a man advocating for me what he couldn't imagine for himself, in order for me to tune him out completely--and usually on all subjects, not just the one on which he had given offense. It's the "Let them eat cake" problem.
The same still goes for liberals who want me to pay for charitable programs they wouldn't dream of funding from their own pockets. They may be right about the charitable projects, but my ears are closed to them.
So, what is the proper tack, for a man especially- on this issue?
The common ground is concern for an innocent fetal life, which anyone male or female can argue and understand. The tricky part, if you're male, is to avoid minimizing a burden that you can't personally experience. It doesn't mean you can't argue that the burden is one that, in justice and mercy, has to be borne. It's that you'll get nowhere implying that the burden is no big deal, or especially that, though it would be almost unimaginable for a man to tie himself down (probably alone) with a baby, it's trivial for a woman.
I also think that the very idea that someone else presumes to make the decision for her causes a lot of women to close their minds. She has to be able to see why she should make the decision herself, according to her own moral standards, regardless of the cost. That requires sticking to basic moral standards on which you and she have common ground--such as sacrifice for the protection of innocents--and which apply equally to men and women.
Perfect, thanks.
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