Full Court Press

CK MacLeod in reply to Chris says:

I can’t think of a significant group that fits that profile – except, in a certain sense, the parent who is “anti-abortion for own family,” but makes specifically the choice that the NYT editorial defends as “personal” even while it acknowledges that a “significant majority” or women presented with the diagnosis do proceed to abortion, as one suspects they would for a range of diagnoses.

Most people supporting a law like the one in Ohio are, of course, consistent in the way you say Tod finds more sympathetic. There are people, of course, who find the bioethical questions particularly compelling, since they begin to refer to a “life unworthy of life” ethic.Report

CK MacLeod in reply to Chris says:

The best explanation of the situation is that we are a somewhat ruthlessly self-interested bunch of so-and-so’s, and much more so than (perhaps for good reason) we prefer to confess or recognize, but that we are also aware of trade-offs, or have developed contradictory values or sentiments, often ones that originate in rationales that operate as second nature, so are difficult to articulate especially for those untutored in moral philosophy.

Now for my habitual proviso: It is difficult to discuss this problem area seriously without sooner or later gravely offending someone, or, same thing, gravely contradicting one or another set of seemingly obviously compulsory moral propositions.

Of course developmentally disabled people are not or must not be said to be of, as Tod puts it, “lesser value” than anyone else. Only a Nazi would say such a thing. Yet the North estimate above seems to suggest that 90% of us will turn out to be Nazis when it comes to our “intensely personal” decisions.

This observation may become even more troubling if one holds to the originally feminist proposition that the “personal is political.” If the personal is political, and we are personally in favor of anti-DD genocide for our own purposes, then we are politically or collectively anti-DD Nazis enacting an anti-DD genocide: That seems to be the result that the combination of the pro-choice position and pro-choice political ideology produces, and that also requires the NYT to attempt to square a certain unpleasant and contradictory vicious circle. The combination not only prevents us from “passing laws” restricting choice, but seems inevitably to require us to refrain from expressing disquiet about, and exerting moral pressure in relation to, these “intensely personal” decisions. We cannot even acknowledge the moral problem, at least not too loudly, because in a law-governed society no harm should be able to occur (ideally no harm of any kind) without implicitly violating the or a law or pointing to a need to clarify or revise the law.

Tod reacts with feelings of apparent outrage to the “message” or “signal” that the NYT circle-squaring perhaps inevitably sends. Chris also seems sensitive to the notion that the bioethical problem is a real problem, though, anticipating the “legal ideal” reflex, he notes that being perturbed by a problem is not, for him, the same thing as calling for laws to be passed against it. This position is the same as placing the “pre-born” DD outside the protection of the law, so remains the DD genocide pre-figured.

There is much more to be said on this problem, which is not unique to issues of reproductive choice, but is put in sharper relief by them. What’s notable in this instance, though I would somewhat expect Tod to deny it, is that his position embodies a pro-life logic or points to it.

When I asked Tod initially whether he disapproved of anti-DD “selection,” he denied doing so, but his latest comments about the bad “signal” strongly imply it. The pro-lifer extends the question of the signal more broadly. The outrageous signal about DD people being of lesser value (or about people being of comparative “value” at all in any moral sense) is the same signal that pro-lifers feel is being sent about (what they hold to be) human lives that for whatever reason are deemed too much a burden to carry to term.

So, using Tod’s terms, the NYT logic also asks us to be appalled by, or strongly differ from, “crazy righties” who would force a mother to carry the child of her rapist, or of her rapist father, to term, or be asked or even required to risk her health to carry a baby in other circumstances to term, but we are also supposed to be appalled by anyone who presumes to judge any of the products of these conceptions as of “lesser value.” So it’s permissible to kill them or allow them to be killed – or to pre-empt their existence if “kill” seems like too strong a word – but not to think less of them on the off-chance that their coming into existence has not been successfully pre-empted.

I’m not going to attempt to answer all of the attendant moral philosophical questions in a blog comment. I have been arguing these issues for long enough to be very well aware of the arguments that, say, zic would be able to introduce here on behalf of women and mothers, and no doubt more credibly and forcefully than I would. I’m surprised that she or someone else hasn’t already attacked this gaggle of menfolk for arrogantly presuming to pronounce on this matter of primary concern to womenfolk. My only purpose is to explain why I think Tod seemed to be saying the opposite of what Tod’s friends and perhaps Tod himself would expect Tod to say.Report