A personal reflection on "the current thing"
Abortion snuffs out more than just a life; it destroys possibility
When I was not that much younger than I am now I held a number of positions that were far more libertarian than where I’ve ended up more recently. I’ve certainly become more conservative as I’ve gotten older, but make no mistake there are still plenty of libertarian-ish opinions floating around in the stew of what would be my preferred, minarchist fantasy-land… it’s just that…<Drags from Cigarette> I’ve seen things that tempered my youthful enthusiasm, man.
This is particularly true when it comes the the question of abortion, a subject about which we’ve all been given the opportunity to assess our feelings anew in light of a certain upcoming Supreme Court ruling.
Like me, it seems certain that many people are of two minds on a subject as big and complex as this, so talking about the fight inside my head might illuminate what’s going on in theirs.
I. Quantifying the conflict
We’ll get to my thoughts on the particular topic of abortion in a second, but this talk about “Libertarianism” vs. “Conservatism” begs the question of how those positions relate to one another, where they come into conflict and how they sit on some absolute ranking. Are they relatively unrelated, or are they first cousins? Are the two ideologies diametrically opposed?
Let the Simpsons tell you about the Libertarian part:
I kid because I care.
More seriously, as a means of exploring the relevant differences between conservatives and libertarians I’ll ask you to imagine a political spectrum with 0 being the least imaginable liberty at the left and as you head to the right you encounter a condition of maximum liberty at 10.
If we map this spectrum onto real world governments, at the furthest left pole is the absolute, necrocratic tyranny represented by the Hermit Kingdom of North Korea. The opposite pole is therefore completely stateless anarchy - a condition that doesn’t really exist on our planet. At least, it doesn’t exist for very long before exogenous forces appear to exert authority over people and territory. The closest comparison I can think of might be “Libya immediately after the Obama Administration toppled Qaddafi”… but with fewer roving gangs of Islamic Fundamentalists.
Between these extremes is where the vast majority of modern nation-states operate, and Western-style democracies are, as a rule, much closer to 10 than 0. Even so: a single axis analysis labeled “liberty” is probably too simplistic a method by which to rank-order such middling nations as “Norway,” “Canada” and even “The United States” because there remain myriad dimensions of liberty one could choose to assess them on, from Economic to Political, Religious or Expressive. And that’s just considering official government policy without contemplating hard-to-quantify cultural factors that serve as a type of prior restraint on people’s behaviors which might obviate measurable government interference or regulation. Fortunately, we don’t have to spend a lot of effort figuring out the quantifiable portions, being as Libertarian think tank Cato performs their annual ranking of the world’s nations via their “Human Freedom Index” for us.
One supposes that if you like arguing over how many angels dance on the head of a pin that this could prove definitive in some form or fashion, but something doesn’t quite ring true to me about Canada (8.85) outstripping the U.S. (8.73). This should also indicate to you that as an objective matter, anybody who argues with a straight face that we are anywhere near the left-hand side of this spectrum is not a person whose thoughts on the matter need to be taken seriously.
The relatively thin slice between 8.73 and 10.0 is the zone where the fight between Libertarians and Conservatives mostly takes place, which in some sense explains why the fighting can be so acrimonious… because the stakes are so small. Yet this numerical compression doesn’t get at the most interesting dimension of difference between the philosophies, which is the lens through which they focus their views of society.
II. A Question of groupings
Numbers are nice because they can give you a basis of comparison, but they also have the effect of homogenizing and obscuring things that don’t lend themselves to quantification. For instance, would Cato rank a completely anarcho-capitalist society as a perfect “10”? I sort of doubt it, but this is due to the fact that Cato’s rankings and our objective ranking of tyranny to liberty aren’t really operating in the same space. The US and Canada each have huge national, state and local government footprints, which means there would need to be a pretty steep drop-off (in an absolute sense) between the quantity of government we currently have (which they rank close to a 9) vs. the amount we wouldn’t under anarchism (at notional 10’s). These things don’t really add up.
This bust between our rating systems has to do with the fact that the question isn’t really about the absolute quantity of liberty present in society as much as it has to do with Libertarians and Conservatives largely agreeing about the question of what the purpose of government is: that being to serve as a guarantor of natural rights. So far, so good; In order to have liberty, there must be a guardian of the rights that define it. The differences in opinion therefore come from what level of society these ideologies believe the state should be applying those protections at.
Libertarians believe that the the primary focus of the government should be to defend liberties as they emerge at the individual level while Conservatives believe they emerge not just at the level of the individual but crucially at levels which emerge at scales greater than that of the individual - particularly at the scale of the family and sometimes at larger groupings. This disagreement is about what the most granular unit of society the government should be concerned with defending consists of.
This distinction - one which I’ve struggled to express - was made clear to me while listening to Yoram Hazony discussing the question with James Lileks and Peter Robinson and I’m sure this idea is not entirely novel to me, so please don’t accuse me of some manner of plagiarism. You know an idea may be worth considering if multiple people develop it independently.
I wouldn’t say that this represents a secret decoder ring for comprehending all such fights, but it does seem to possess some useful explanatory power if applied across our theoretical spectrum of liberty: As the level at which government’s gaze is applied grows wider, you move inexorably towards 0; As that focus approaches that of the individual you move towards 10.
III. But what about ABORTION?!?
The gears of my mind have turned this topic around for years and the most interesting aspect to me lies within the question of whose rights are being defended. Is it the individual’s? More importantly: which individual? The current situation is clear; The Roe decision in 1973 focused the State’s gaze solidly at the level of the individual.
The mechanism by which Roe did this was to assert that there existed a Constitutional right to procure an abortion as a function of a similarly implied individual “right to privacy” to be found within the due process clause of the 14th Amendment. (Yes, this is precisely as stilted as it sounds.) The ruling then required each state to allow abortion and created the trimester test for abortion regulation. This construction was altered by the Casey decision which implemented a test of “fetal viability” in place of the trimester test.
The Libertarian part of my brain finds this to be an excellent situation at first blush; the rights of the individual are held sacrosanct and free from interference by state actors for any or no reason whatsoever. Cato would probably rank this outcome much closer to a 10 than a 0.
However: this analysis has a gaping hole in the sense that it completely ignores any potential rights for a second, unmentioned individual in this formulation, that being a genetically distinct creature developing inside of a woman. This is also a being over whom that woman has had (in almost every case) an active role in creating and nurturing.
What bothers me about the way that libertarians (and those on the left) discuss abortion is the implicit assumption that “choice” only begins to present itself after the procreative act between a man and a woman is completed. Everybody has choices. You make your preferences known to the world by your choices. A person's capacity for choice does not switch on and off by magic because individuals wish to avoid the consequences of the choices they made in the recent past. This holds for almost every other facet of life, particularly when the cost for such evasion is principally borne by other individuals. There is an economic textbook definition for this: externalities. These are costs pawned off on other people that are unaccounted-for by a normal financial report.
Conservatives would say (I think correctly) that there is more than one person involved when making such decisions. I would argue in fact that they’re not just defending an individual but the very right of a future which nobody can predict to come into being.
This is where my personal stake in this argument emerges.
IV. The Door Unchosen
I was raised as a nominal Lutheran after my parents exited the Roman Catholic church (which I was baptized into) but my adult opinions differ from my parents regarding the veracity of religious teaching. Put bluntly, I’m an atheist. Without quibbling too much over words I would technically categorize myself as an agnostic with all-but-metaphysical certainty that the Christian concept of God is incorrect. YMMV. This information is relayed as means of establishing that my opinions do not emerge as the result of religious inculcation or fundamentalism.
My default position on abortion growing up was mostly impressed upon me by my mother, who is virulently opposed to abortion. Yet taking an extreme position on the question (no abortion under any circumstances) seemed completely inhumane to contemplate to young me, and I favored a more Benthamite analysis of cost/benefit. The Clintonian construction “safe, legal and rare” (heavy emphasis on the rare part) seemed to be the best compromise we could expect in our fractured political environment, and to place my cards completely on the table… when viewed through the eyes of a young man, the notion of consequence-free sexual activity has a certain appeal. I worry that this yearning for unbridled carnality cannot be underscored enough in aiding the formation of people’s opinions on this topic. The hedonic appeal of sex and the ability of modern technology to “erase” its consequences creates a strong temptation to intellectualize such actions because otherwise the self-motivated reasoning is all too obvious. Indeed, if you could survey the unvarnished opinions of the mind of a male child (a thing ruthlessly focused on itself) it would almost certainly cry out: why shouldn’t people have practically unlimited agency when it comes to reproduction? Sex is awesome and I want as much as I can get. Add in that children are a massive commitment in terms of time, energy and financial resources. Why wouldn’t it be preferable for people to be able to choose with perfect fidelity the time and manner under which they bring children into the world?
I shouldn’t leave women out of this because they have desires as well, even if those desires differ in the aggregate from men’s. This position, assumed for different average reasons than those of men nonetheless points to the same outcome and not because people are intrinsically evil… merely imperfect.
What now-me would say to young-me (which might bounce off because I was a yutz) is this: young people frequently take positions that seem good or noble to them at that moment; they justify this to themselves as such, but those positions are the result of what is in all actuality an intolerable and grotesque selfishness deriving from the short-sighted idea that you are entitles to a life which will proceed exactly according to some pre-set plan or pathway that you laid out courtesy of your extraordinary prescience. The fullness of experience renders this notion… comical.
At 16 years old I had serious thoughts about becoming a lawyer. When I say “serious thoughts” I mean that I had read Clarence Darrow’s biography and thought his argumentation in the Scopes Monkey Trial was a heroic defense of truth in a time when opinions such as the ones I held were socially taboo. I thought I could be just as persuasive. This was about as complex as a 16-yr old’s thoughts about their own future are likely to get because you have no idea what life has in store for you… of course, it’s arguable you don’t even know all that much about yourself until you’re well into your 20s.
At 18 I was going to become a chemical engineer because it seemed cool and difficult, and I was ready to conquer the world. My conquest was put on hold by events by the time I became 20 - mostly due to my own choices.
There are reasons we don’t trust children writ large to make big decisions about their futures without adult input. They simply lack the intellectual, emotional or requisite life experience to cover the checks that their ignorance might write for them.
Yet people make those decisions anyways and I was no exception. Without getting into lurid details, suffice to say that I became romantically entwined at too young an age with a person whose life ambitions turned out to be radically different from my own. As often happens when young, clueless people form such bonds, consequences follow actions and so it was that in the Fall of 2000 my (by that time) long term girlfriend announced to me that she was pregnant.
How can you describe the number of compromises you begin to think about when something like this situation walks through your door? Should I turn over my entire life in the face of this reality? How is that going to work? How can I have a baby and still be in college? I shared all of these doubts with my partner and her angry reaction was, in some sense, justified if only because I was proving insufficiently enthusiastic about participating in a project which I had a direct hand in creating.
She promptly announced to me that I needed to make good on all of my talk or that she was going to immediately seek an abortion.
This moment - this decision thrust upon me - became the hinge around which the rest of my life has subsequently turned. Through one door, I could simply choose to “undo” the thing I had done and no one would be the wiser. Through the other door lay an undiscovered country - one that promised hardship as well as the possibility of great good. The first door seemed easy. Too easy. That’s probably how I knew it was wrong.
Experience has further taught me that what I said about the first door is simply not true. There is no “undoing” things you’ve done. Had I told her to do that thing - that easy, terrible thing - my life would have been irrevocably altered in ways that I could never have foreseen on that fateful day. The first door was just as much of an undiscovered country although I didn’t know it at the time, and one that I regard now with horror for the emptiness contained therein. Forget for a moment that the relationship between me and my soon-to-be wife would have been irrevocably broken. Think also about the potential lives that simply failed to happen had I chosen differently. That is, if had I chosen childishly; had I chosen selfishly. Many wondrous things wouldn’t have happened. The possibility of my life as it is today would have perished then as well.
We did ultimately marry and my daughter was born in May of the following year. My son followed two years later. Our marriage lasted 6 years. 6 long and difficult years between two people who, given the wisdom of reflection should never have been coupled. Yet we were, and the things we made together were beautiful. Their lives shine like flowers blooming in an otherwise desiccated waste.
How I love my children. I couldn’t contemplate my life without them - these people that we made together. You build your life around them and you do it gladly. There is nobody else on the planet for whom you would make such sacrifices - that is if you are a morally normal, well-adjusted person. In return, you receive the joy of watching them grow and mature and thrive. This is a pleasure that has filled my life in ways too numerous to describe - even considering the times that they break your heart. And be sure: your kids will break your heart some day. But that’s OK. You can’t help but love them anyhow.
To live is to choose, and the consequences of choice aren’t always the good and the beautiful. To appreciate the good it must at times be cast against sullen and angry skies if you want to see the contrast.
V. A final addition
So that was a bit personal.
Of course it would be nice if I hadn’t veered off from the heights of libertarian philosophy into the weeds of my lived experience, but I would be lying to you if I said that the course of living this life - the one I actively chose - hadn’t changed my heart.
But what about my head? Does this mean I’m in favor of an absolute ban on abortion? No. Ideally, none would be necessary, but we don’t live in an ideal world. The questions of rape and incest bedevil conservatives in their desire (frequently) to be intellectually consistent, so I’ll handle this briefly.
Most would consider it the height of cruelty to force a woman to bear the child of her rapist against her will. Even so, there exists a sensible limit to how quickly such a decision needs to be made. The preferable time would be “immediately” through emergency contraception or not at all.
Bear in mind that rape - particularly forcible rape - is a crime for which people regularly do substantial prison time. The notion that abortion must exist in order to deal with the results of all of these rapes doesn’t offend me in the abstract, but if abortion proponents were being consistent themselves they would concede that the vast, vast majority of all abortions (some 99%) are elective and have nothing to do with criminal sexual attacks.
If you were raped, forcibly, by a stranger (another vanishingly rare event) you have a moral duty to report this to the authorities because it’s very likely that offender is a serial rapist and your silence in the matter may be consigning another woman down the road to a similar fate.
Let’s not forget about incest, another - fortunately rare - criminal act. How many separate crimes are committed there prior to worrying about abortion? The first order of business should be stopping the criminal activity of an incestuous rapist.
Sensible exceptions to policy are the hallmark of a decent society, as opposed to a tyrannical one.
So, how far this can be taken also bumps into the question of what is politically possible and, yes, even what is wise. To attempt to dominate people with the iron fist of the state over what is, after all, an intensely personal matter is bound to engender resistance and alienation.
My advice to pro-lifers is: continue the work you’ve done for the past 50 years of persuasion. Changing hearts and minds is what led us to this point, not the imposition of laws we like. Politics is downstream of culture, and it’s taken the work of a lifetime to change enough minds to get here. Don’t squander it all in a fit of overzealous exuberance.