I’m pretty sure I’ve written about this here before, but since this view seems to be conventional wisdom to a lot of smart people I know, it probably won’t hurt to repeat myself and reiterate what I just wrote in the comments to this post over at TAPped. Responding to Sen. Jim Talent’s position that abortion laws should draw a “different balance” in cases where a pregnancy was “not voluntary,” Scott Lemieux writes:
Aha. Talent, needless to say, doesn’t explain which factors he’s balancing, but note that it’s not the moral status of the fetus but the moral status of the mother that changes; reproductive rights attach in this case, apparently, because a woman who is a rape victim isn’t engaging in moral behavior that Jim Talent disapproves of. Which serves to remind us, again, that the policies generally favored by the American pro-life movement display considerably more commitment to regulating female sexuality than to protecting fetal life.
Now, I’m the last to deny that some pro-lifers seem rather grotesquely obsessed with compelling women to “pay the price” for being sexually active. But I also think there’s a perfectly coherent set of beliefs that justify being opposed to abortion, but favoring an an exception in cases of rape and incest. They are:
- Fetuses are people.
- But people have very strong rights over their own bodies. Even if the only way to save some person was to let them share part of my circulatory system for several months, I would have the right to refuse to do this. (This is the “famous violinist” thought experiment.) People’s bodies are their own, even if refusing to share them has the effect of “killing a person.”
- Except that I may not refuse if my own intentional actions are the cause of the person’s being in that state of dependency. Taking some action that risks putting someone else in such a position means tacitly waiving some degree of your autonomy.
I’ve written before about why I find the first premise implausible, but the second and third are at least defensible—though there is a further wrinkle that the “person,” if it is one, doesn’t exist until after the relevant action, which makes this interestingly different from ordinary cases of compensation. Still, that aside, I’m not sure why this seems like such a weird view to some folks—the weird part is that first step, not so much the reasoning to the exceptions.
3 responses so far ↓
1 Aethelred // Oct 15, 2006 at 1:43 am
That’s a coherent set of beliefs for rape. I don’t see how it applies to incest (assuming the incest was consensual). Sure, the fetus resulting from incest faces several problems a significantly higher rate than a random fetus (e.g. higher probability of several genetic problems, not to mention being squicked by his/her parents later in life), but since the “pro-life” people don’t, for the most part, consider a 100% probability of, oh let’s say Tay Sachs, adequate grounds for abortion I fail to see why any extra burdens for incest should matter. Care to elaborate?
2 Julian Sanchez // Oct 15, 2006 at 9:41 am
Well, I think “incest” there is supposed to refer to children or young adults molested by older relatives — the idea being that the sex in these cases will often not be consensual in any meaningful way, even if it doesn’t meet the legal definition of rape. A girl conditioned for years to accept this kind of abuse from her father/uncle/older brother, for instance, may well continue to do so past the legal age of consent, and may not put up much resistance on any one particular occasion — but nobody would really describe that as “consensual.” There are clearly other kinds of cases of incest where this wouldn’t apply.
3 Aethelred // Oct 15, 2006 at 8:54 pm
If the key point has to do with consensuality, with the observation that rape is a subset of non-consentual intercourse, then the “right” answer for our hypothetical would be [as an ethical stand] no abortion except for pregnancies resulting from non-consensual intercourse, with the legal language as needed to cover the extension of rape beyond the felony rape predicates, such as the examples of incest which you mention. What about a woman impregnated by an abusive husband (whom she subsequently leaves/divorces)? I don’t here much call for an exception there. I still think the incest exception comes from people being squicked by incest, rather than looking a focus on consent.