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Suffer The Little Children

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Fostering a Better Community for Children and Youth | City of Boulder

On Children

Kahlil Gibran

And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, Speak to us of Children.
     And he said:
     Your children are not your children.
     They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
     They come through you but not from you,
     And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

     You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
     For they have their own thoughts.
     You may house their bodies but not their souls,
     For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
     You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
     For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
     You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
     The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
     Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
     For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

https://poets.org/poem/children-1


[Content warning: because people accuse liberals/teachers/LGBTQ+ people of committing sexual assault against children, I talk about that issue and those accusations.]

They keep saying it’s for the children. That’s why.

That’s why they’re censoring books, and harassing librarians, and persecuting teachers, and trying to outlaw the teaching of specific ideas and topics.

Because they want to protect the children.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen it on the dumpster fire that used to be called Twitter and is now (sort of) called X: some conservative putz of a commentator says something like “You know, I didn’t really care about [CRT or racial equity/LGBTQ people/sex education] UNTIL THEY STARTED COMING AFTER OUR CHILDREN. BUT THEN I HAD TO SAY ‘HELL NAW!’” See, that’s where we liberals crossed the line, they say: we went after their children.

And they want to protect the children. So they say. Over and over and over again, generally growing louder every time.

Now, I understand this. I want to protect children too: I want children to be free to exist as themselves without being hated or abused or ostracized. I want children to be happy. I want to help them create opportunities to achieve their goals in life, to be who they want to be; that’s most of the reason why I became a teacher and why I still do it, even after 23 years, even despite the ways that others (mostly conservatives) have tried to stop me from teaching. I want children to live: I won’t say that I would put my life on the line to save a child’s life, because I also want to live; but I would fight to save a child’s life. And I am a pacifist: I wouldn’t otherwise fight for anything. But I’d fight to protect a kid.

(Also I would fight to protect my wife or our pets. I’d lose, but I’d fight. Just sayin’.)

The truth is that liberals, along with schools, and Democrats, and LGBTQ+ people, are not “after” their children. Inasmuch as most of those groups of people want to help educate children, we are actually seeking to make children happier and stronger: not to take them, and not to harm them. Personally, I REALLY don’t want to take anyone’s children: I don’t want children. Not at my house.

But I’m being disingenuous here. They don’t think I’m after their children because I intend to kidnap them and take them home with me; that would be absurd. No: they think — at least they say, and yell, and scream — that I and everyone on the left, in schools, involved in LGBTQ+ issues, or even just someone in drag reading stories to their kids, are sexual predators. Pedophiles, who are grooming their children by exposing them to inappropriate material.

Let me be very, very clear here. Democrats and liberals and schools and LGBTQ+ people and those who fight for racial equity and all the rest are not in any way groomers or pedophiles. Of course there are pedophiles and abusers among every group, but there’s no particular reason to claim that they are more common on the left, and to say that any teacher who talks about gender or sex is grooming children in order to rape them means that I will punch you in the fucking face. Even though I’m a pacifist. Because fuck you if you think that, or you make that accusation. How fucking dare you? The one time I got a conservative to agree with me immediately was when, during a Twitter argument about something in education, some asshat called me a groomer and I blocked him; another conservative commenter asked, as conservatives are wont to do, why I had blocked him, saying something about how I was hiding from the argument; I said “No, I’ll argue with anyone all day about these issues — but if you break out that disgusting fucking pedophile/groomer slander about me, you can fuck right off forever.” He liked the comment and let the subject drop. Because fuck you if you actually think that. And I expect that rational people would see my point on this.

I recognize, of course, that all of you reading this are rational people who see my point on this. None of you reading this think that I or teachers in general are groomers; none of you reading this believe that, because I teach novels and short stories that relate to sexual activity or gender identity or anything along those lines, I am intending to make the students in my class easier to rape; but the whole disgusting fucking slander makes me just foam at the mouth with rage. I hope that’s understandable. That is, naturally, the goal; it’s hard to debate the issues when someone is accusing you of raping children, and it’s harder when their evidence is a gross and appalling and absurd misinterpretation — an intentional misinterpretation — of what you actually do. Because then I feel like I have to start justifying the things I do, like teaching a book that might have a sex scene in it or might talk about gender roles, to show unequivocally how wrong they are: as if there’s any justice in claiming, for instance, that To Kill a Mockingbird (which does have a “romantic” [actually it’s sexual assault] scene involving sexual touching, and also accusations of rape and hints of incestuous sexual abuse, and does question gender roles pretty extensively through the character of the ‘tomboy’ Scout) is actually intended as a way to make it easier to rape children; and it’s even harder to walk away and refuse to dignify their slander with a response, which is the right thing to do, but then that fucking asshole is back there still calling me a groomer and I have to ignore him rather than punching him in the fucking face.

But their goal is to make me lose the argument, or even better, walk away, leaving them alone on the soapbox, because I’m so pissed off about what they said to me that I can no longer address the argument they are making. And it’s effective: because here I am dignifying this bullshit with a response, and speaking to people who know better. But I can’t help it. It upsets me.

It’s upsetting to be someone who spends so much of my time and energy, so much of my life, trying to help and also protect children, and then to have people, generally for crass political gain, use my own dedication against me by claiming that my very desire to help children implies that I want to rape them. And for them to justify these attacks, these various attempts to take apart our democracy and our education system, along with that disgusting slander, by saying they are — protecting the children.

It’s been happening a lot. It’s very upsetting to me.

So I wanted to talk about it some. Because I don’t want to leave conservatives alone talking on the issues here because I’m too mad to speak.

(Another caveat: I do know that not all conservatives support these arguments, and certainly not all conservatives make those disgusting accusations. All I can say is: it sucks to be stereotyped, doesn’t it?)

But let’s focus for now on the actual arguments. 

So first, the argument that CRT and similar (intentionally misinterpreted) ideas are taught in schools and that this is damaging to children hearing about these ideas. We all know, I hope, that CRT, Critical Race Theory, which is a framework used to describe TO LAW STUDENTS IN GRAD SCHOOL how the historical institutions of racism in this country have made it harder for equitable outcomes to exist in the modern era, is not taught in any K-12 public school in this country. But that’s not the main point, just like arguing over whether the AR in AR-15 stands for “Assault Rifle” is not the main point in a gun control debate, is only in fact a red herring. (By the way, if you ever are arguing about gun control with someone who cares about this particular nonsense, it stands for Armalite Rifle. ArmaLite was the company that originally designed the weapon.)

The real objection is not to CRT, it is to teaching the idea that the US is a racist nation, and that historical racism has impacts on the world today. Conservatives don’t like hearing people say that this nation is a bad place, or that it has done bad things to people, or especially that it continues to do bad things to people. They think that we are united in our love for our country, and that’s how it should be. 

But the problem is, we’re not united in our love for our country, we are united in our love for the ideals our country represents for us. And we should all be appalled by the corruption of those ideals in our country’s actual actions and impact on the world. We are supposed to be a country that stands for liberty: and instead we promote the oppression of billions of people around the world, in various ways — from subsidizing economic slavery in every poor nation that makes our shoes and electronics, to allowing climate change to devastate people’s homes and livelihoods because we won’t fucking stop driving Ram 35000s, to directly overthrowing democratic governments because they stand in the way of our economic exploitation, or because they are, in our sordid little fanatic-minds, associated with the greatest enemy of the corruption of our actual ideals: Communism/Marxism/socialism.

Speaking of red herrings. This one is the reddest: and it has thrown us completely off the rails for coming up on a century now. We have, literally, assassinated political leaders, and overthrown governments, and blocked democratic elections, because we thought they would create a stable Communist/Marxist/socialist state, and for some goddamn reason, we can’t let that happen. We’re supposed to be about liberty? Us? We’re supposed to believe in free expression, and live and let live, and the free marketplace of ideas — and yet we have to stamp out Communism/Marxism/socialism wherever it exists, both in our “free” nation and in other nations? Somehow that became our most important ideal, around the world: the nation that supposedly stands for liberty actually stands for taking it away from anyone who uses that liberty to freely choose Communism/Marxism/socialism. And why? Because we don’t defend liberty: we defend capitalism. 

Sorry: I got off the topic of racial equality, and historical racism and institutional racism. So feel free to go back over everything I just said, and wherever I talked about Communism/Marxism/socialism, go ahead and replace those words with “racial equity,” and the word “capitalism” at the end with “institutional racism.” All still true. We have contributed to the oppression of free people, and overthrown governments, and blocked democratic elections, and assassinated leaders, because those situations and people promoted racial equity in some form; and this country defends institutional racism, and always has. Almost every evil and disgusting thing we have ever done as a nation also has a racist element to it. 

One of the more amazing examples I know of how appalling and unrepentant we are about our racist culture is the running argument in modern partisan bullshit about which political party is more racist: is it the Republicans, who support racist policies? Or the Democrats, who used to support even more overt racist policies? Or both parties, who participate in institutional racism even while either decrying it or claiming it doesn’t exist? 

You know what? FUCK WHO IS MORE RACIST, LET’S JUST STOP BEING RACIST! What do you say? How would that be? And you know who that would help?

The children. Who really shouldn’t have to grow up in a racist world, and who shouldn’t be taught to believe racist ideas. Like the idea that the United States, which is unequivocally guilty of countless racist acts including multiple genocides, is not actually a racist nation. Do we not see how pretending that this country is innocent of harm is one of the most harmful racist things we could do? That that pretense not only allows the harm to continue, but also states clearly that the past harms don’t matter? Which could only be true if the people who were harmed did not matter?

The problem with trying not to teach these ideas in school — that the US is a nation with racist institutions that came from a historically racist past and foundation — means we can’t teach the truth. And as Fox Mulder (not the Fox News Channel; Mulder is the reliable one) told us, the truth is out there: which means kids are going to learn it eventually. And that’s when they’ll realize that not only has this country been racist in the past, it still is now: because the people now tried to cover up that racist past.

Trust me. I had that experience. I grew up in Newton, a wealthy suburb of Boston; and not until college did I learn that Boston was where the last and worst riots — actual fucking riots, that is — [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_desegregation_busing_crisis] over desegregation of schools occurred in the 1970s. 40 riots. Carried out by white people, in the place where I grew up.

Gee, I wonder if they were as bad as the BLM riots of 2020. They certainly were not precipitated by the police murder of an innocent man like the BLM riots were. They were caused by a bunch of racist people who didn’t want people of other races in their kids’ schools.

Nobody in my schools told me that. Which is — let’s use the word “interesting,” because a lot of my teachers had been teaching, in Newton, for 20 or 30 or 40 years. I graduated in 1992, which means my teachers? They were there. Not all of them, of course, but some of them were. And nobody told me about it. So when I learned about the Boston bussing riots, how do you think I felt about my teachers?

I lost faith in them, a little. I realized that some of them were racists. 

Shall I mention here that nobody in my high school was LGBTQ+? 1600 students, and not a one of them was gay or bisexual. 

To be clear, literally hundreds of them were gay or bisexual or in some way queer; but none of them were out, none of them were open about it: because they would have had the shit beaten out of them, if they were not actually murdered. My hometown was not welcoming to LGBTQ+ people. I wasn’t, either: one of my most distasteful moments is when, in the middle of the hilarious and silly home movies my friends and I made in high school, we burst casually into multiple homophobic slurs and jokes. Just a stream of them, many coming directly from my mouth. I hate it. 

But that’s how I was raised: not thinking that any of these issues were real, that the people who lived them were real people; or at least that they didn’t involve ME or MY town or the people I knew. All of that was, y’know, somewhere else, and in the past, racism in the South before the 60s and homosexuality and so on in San Francisco. 

Never heard of Stonewall, either. Not until after college, even. And before I lived in Newton, I lived on Long Island. A suburb of New York City. Though of course, I wouldn’t have heard about the Stonewall riots then; I moved when I was in 3rd grade, and you can’t tell a 3rd grader about race riots.

You sure can tell him about war, though. The Shot Heard Round the World, and the Minutemen plugging away at the Redcoats. Cowboys shooting Indians. Allies fighting the Nazis. Cops fighting robbers. Pretty sure I heard about some of that before I was 8.

So the point is, when you conceal the truth, you open yourself up to the righteous and deserved accusation of — being someone who lies to hide the truth. And what reason could you have for hiding the truth other than — something nefarious that probably includes a continuation of the problem that led to the truth you concealed? Only racists would want to hide the truth about racism, because they want to minimize the reality in order to maintain it, or because they think the victims are not deserving of consideration — which is a racist idea. I never heard about the Japanese internment during World War II, either. 

I mean, maybe my high school education just kinda sucked. I admit I didn’t pay all that much attention.

But the point is that I did learn the truth later, and it made me lose faith. And rightfully so.

But on the other hand: my dad told me, when I was a kid, that his mother, my grandmother, had been an alcoholic, and it had caused my father a lot of pain and a lot of problems in his life. He told me that he was attending AlAnon meetings — actually they were mainly meetings of a group called Adult Children of Alcoholics, which was the heart of the issue; but he had also, at one point, gotten concerned about his own drinking, so he went to some AlAnon meetings, too. And he told me about it. Which gave me great and abiding faith in my father: in his honesty, in his courage, in his respect and concern for me, for our family, for himself. I was inspired by his willingness to tell me the truth of the problems that he faced, and by his willingness to try to address them. I still am. 

The same goes for issues not of race, but of sexuality: and here, as with race, let me point out that many children have an experience I did not have, which is recognizing that they themselves are the secret that is being concealed, that is being ignored. I learned that my nation’s history was concealed from me — or whitewashed; I graduated in the same year as the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s voyage, in a city that has strong Italian roots, and so as you may imagine, my understanding of Columbus was… incomplete — but I never had to recognize that the person telling me that racism wasn’t really an issue was ignoring my own lived experience of racism, or that the person telling me that men should only love women was denying my own right to exist and be myself. But the larger point is the same: if we pretend that LGBTQ+ people don’t exist, or that they are somehow less real than cis-het people (because queerness is contagious, is taught, is socially constructed and influenced; not like the “natural” and “normal” sexuality of the dominant paradigm [NB: I am writing bullshit to represent what other people think; that statement I just wrote is not true.]), then the LGBTQ+ people who are listening — anywhere between 3% and 10%, or up to 20% if you recognize the more different aspects of sexuality we have been recognizing and learning about for the last few decades, which means in my high school of 1600 people there were anywhere between 50 and 300+ people who were LGBTQ+, only in one year of the four I was there — will recognize that we are lying. And the only reason why we would lie is because we want to do LGBTQ+ people harm, or we deny their right to know the truth about themselves and their world. And both of those are, to be clear, very, very, bad. Telling people they don’t exist or don’t matter is not how you protect the children. Lying to children in order to convince them that LGBTQ+ people don’t exist: that’s where I’m not sure how we can even conceive that we are protecting them. What exactly is the danger to children in the existence of LGBTQ+ people?

And here, exactly right here, is where we get to that disgusting fucking slander: because they have to invent a danger in order to conceal the truth: that there is no danger to protect children from, it’s just that the people who don’t want children to learn about gender or sexuality are bigots and homophobes, and they want to continue and promote their hate. That’s all.

By the way: my school, 1600 students? I think about 20 of them were Black. They all rode a bus to Newton North from Boston. I never heard about why. I just remember thinking that they were being given an opportunity for a better education in the rich white school in the rich white suburb. A thought I never confronted or analyzed. Because my racist environment tried to put racist ideas into me. I am thankful that my parents were not racist, and so did not encourage the growth of those ideas in me, and that I was later educated in a more open-minded and free environment, where I did learn the truth. 

You know what’s another thought that bothers me, now? My parents unquestionably chose a town to live in because it had a good school district, and good property values, and a low crime rate, and all of the other proxies by which people in this country choose predominantly white-skinned, white-collar neighborhoods. And though I don’t for a moment think they thought about sticking with a white community, I don’t think they confronted or analyzed those thoughts, or the reasons why that town was the safest and richest and best educated. They just picked Newton, even though my dad’s job which brought us to Massachusetts from Long Island (Also an extremely white enclave on the edge of a more racially diverse city) was based in Cambridge. 

To be fair, Cambridge is pretty close to Newton. I’m just saying: they fitted us comfortably into a privileged environment, and that’s how I grew up. Oblivious to the truth. Sheltered. Safe. And, if I had not learned the truth, I suspect I would have ended up racist. I surely had enough bigoted ideas and behaviors when I lived in Newton. 

So. Keeping these issues, these truths, out of schools is not about protecting the children: it is about protecting racism. I’m not saying that people who try to protect children are aware of what they are doing to protect and promote racism, any more than my parents were aware of the consequences of putting me in such a sheltered white enclave; but the proof is in the pudding, so to speak: the result of these policies is bigotry, not safer children. As proven, I hope, by the fact that people have to invent slanderous attacks on teachers in order to justify their crusade. 

The same is true of all the other crusades that are ostensibly taken on to protect children: the attempt to eliminate gender-affirming health care, which helps save the lives of trans children, and the concurrent attempt to deny the existence of trans children by keeping them from playing games with other children (Because calling those games “sports” doesn’t make them not games. They are children’s games. And people in this country are trying as hard as they can to stop some children from playing the game. Because that’s how much we suck. And then we crow about being the land of the free? And the home of the brave? Where we’re afraid of a trans kid?), are not intended to protect children, and they do not protect children: they help to destroy children, their happiness and their complete understanding of themselves and their world, if not their actual lives. The attempt to keep children from getting free lunch, which isn’t even supposed to help children other than the vague “protect them from drowning in debt” while we continue to pay nearly a trillion dollars a year for the military that is not currently fighting any wars, and we cut taxes for billionaires and subsidize toxic industries, while we ignore climate change and don’t talk about how that will lead to the world’s children literally drowning in rising ocean waters, is not even deserving of refutation. The attempt to keep parents in absolute control of their children’s education is not actually protecting children either: it is protecting those parents from having children who might disagree with them, or who might ask questions the parents don’t want to answer. And it is creating the danger for those children of living in a country that is less safe and less open, because it would be less educated — since “school choice” is just the choice to choose worse schools. If you want to make schools better, then make schools better: don’t make it easier to leave them and go somewhere else. I work for a charter school. It isn’t better than a traditional public school. Trust me.

And then there’s the big one: the most important and dominant wedge issue, the one that has made people pick sides, and plot and plan and center their entire lives, political and otherwise, around this one single topic: abortion. Because conservatives want to ban abortion, in all cases, whatever compromise they may temporarily accept about the life of the mother or cases of rape or incest; whatever lies they tell about states’ rights and judicial activism while they try to impose federal , national, judicial injunctions on birth control and chemical abortifacients — and they say they are doing it to protect the children. The children who their mothers murder, they say. Innocent children. It’s all for the children.

Except it’s not.

Never mind the points that have been raised for fifty years, about how the same conservatives who argue for saving children’s lives by banning abortion, also argue against those children having free lunch at school, or even a school to have a free lunch at. Never mind the very clear truth that the best way — the only way — to lower abortion rates is to improve both sex education and access to birth control, both of which conservatives oppose because they think, somehow, by keeping children from a knowledge of sex, they will stop those kids from having sex. Which doesn’t work any better than protecting children by keeping them shielded from knowing the truth about history, or about sexuality and gender, and which does just as much harm as all such lies do. Personally I am grateful that my mother, saying clearly, “Well, I don’t want to tell you about that stuff, so I’m glad they will” while signing my permission form to get sex ed in my elementary school, understood that I needed to learn about sex, even though she didn’t want to talk to me about it; if she hadn’t done that, I might have been left with the knowledge of how sex worked which I gained from my friend Benjy when we were 9 — and suffice it to say, Benjy did not have the straight dope about how sex worked. I will also say, that several years later when I understood how sex worked physically but not the harm it could do emotionally, it was a story my mother shared about her past experiences that showed me why I shouldn’t have been doing what I was doing — so even though she was uncomfortable with it, my mother had the honesty and the honor to tell me the truth, and the courage, as well; and that gave me even greater respect for my mother. 

But never mind all of that. Here is how we know it is not about the children. Because when Judge James Ho wrote his opinion in the recent Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals decision regarding the limitation of mifepristone, he showed us that the abortion arguments of the right are not about the children. We always knew they were not about the women, not about the mothers, that the entire argument showed a callous and wanton disregard for the rights, the sovereignty, the simple human value of the women whom conservatives want to force to bear those precious children to term: but Judge Ho showed us that it’s really all about — the men.

Judge James Ho, who was sworn into office by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in his billionaire benefactor Harlan Crow’s library in 2018 (Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz was also there), wrote his own opinion in the case in order to expand on what he sees as “the historical pedigree of Plaintiffs’ conscience injury, and to explore how Plaintiffs suffer aesthetic injury as well.” 

Antiabortion doctors suffer a moral injury when they are forced to help patients who have complications from the use of mifepristone, Ho wrote, because they are forced to participate in an abortion against their principles. 

Those doctors also experience an aesthetic injury when patients choose abortion because, as one said, “When my patients have chemical abortions, I lose the opportunity…to care for the woman and child through pregnancy and bring about a successful delivery of new life.” Indeed, Ho wrote, “It’s well established that, if a plaintiff has ‘concrete plans’ to visit an animal’s habitat and view that animal, that plaintiff suffers aesthetic injury when an agency has approved a project that threatens the animal.”

In cases where the government “approved some action—such as developing land or using pesticides—that threatens to destroy…animal or plant life that plaintiffs wish to enjoy,” that injury “is redressable by a court order holding unlawful and setting aside the agency approval. And so too here. The FDA has approved the use of a drug that threatens to destroy the unborn children in whom Plaintiffs [that is, the antiabortion doctors] have an interest.” 

“Unborn babies are a source of profound joy for those who view them,” Ho wrote. “Expectant parents eagerly share ultrasound photos with loved ones. Friends and family cheer at the sight of an unborn child. Doctors delight in working with their unborn patients—and experience an aesthetic injury when they are aborted.” 

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-16-2023

So. Now we know. Conservatives don’t want to protect the children. They want to protect their right to possess those children. To treat them as spectacles, as attractions; as something that exists for the adults to admire, to appreciate, to enjoy. To use. To own. 

That’s what all of this is about. Control: treating children as the property of their parents, of the conservative leaders. I’ve seen the point made, in regards to the abortion debate, that the unborn are the perfect special interest to fight for: because they have literally no demands, no requirements, no arguments of their own: they don’t even exist as separate human beings. Conservatives never have to confront them, never have to talk to them, never have to treat them as their own people who might disagree with the politicians who work so hard to “protect” them. Using children, conservatives can promote their own agenda, and always, always, claim the moral high ground — because they are protecting children. Closing down and militarizing the border isn’t because we are racist and want to deny entry to people who aren’t white; we’re protecting children from fentanyl. Shutting down schools isn’t because we recognize that educated people tend to lean liberal politically (almost as if the truth pushes people in that direction); it’s because we’re protecting the children. Destroying the lives of women isn’t because we are essentially misogynist and supremacist: it’s because we want to protect — okay, actually, that one really is all about us; it’s because we like seeing the little pink babies. We think they’re cute. And so we feel that women should be enslaved in order to produce more of them for us to make goo-goo noises at.

So say the conservatives. And again, I realize and admit that not all conservatives feel this way — but those who don’t agree with the policies and arguments I have described here, also don’t separate themselves from those policies and arguments. Do they?

And me?

I make my job much, much harder than it has to be because I honestly do not like telling children what to do. It might be different if I taught the younger children: but the children I teach are nearly adults. I know that they have minds of their own, and wills of their own, and desires and dreams of their own: because they tell me about those things, they show them to me, on a daily basis. And I cannot stand the thought that I would take away any of that, their dreams or their abilities or their thoughts or their wills, simply to replicate my own thoughts or my own desires through them. I hate that thought. Even when it would be a good idea, I hate it. 

Because they are not my children. They are themselves.

That is the message I want to give to conservatives, in the end. You do not own children. You can try to protect them — preferably from actual threats — but you cannot control them. They are not yours to do with as you will, not even when you want to guide and shape and mold them into people you think they should be. It is not up to you who they should be. It is up to them. If they cannot decide for themselves now, then you still do not have a right to decide for them: all you can and should do is help them get to the stage where they can decide for themselves. You cannot, and should not, keep the future decision hidden from them, even if you hold back all the details until they are ready for them.

And you know who decides when they are ready to hear all the details? They do. 

Your children are not your children. They are their own. 

Treat them with respect.

This Morning

Dusty Leave a comment

This morning I didn’t want to do this. I didn’t want to do it yesterday, either, but that’s when I knew that I had to.

I don’t want to write about abortion any more. I already said everything I wanted to say, as well as I could; it was exhausting and depressing — though happily, I got a positive response from the post, for which I’m grateful (though that also tells me that I was mainly preaching to the choir, which is expected, but unfortunate) — and even though I said in it that I would try to present an emotional argument to complement the logical argument I was aiming at, I just couldn’t make myself do it. Not least because I don’t want to exhaust people who read this blog with post after post of difficult, tiring, angst-inflicting subject matter like abortion.

But I have to do this. Because Clarence goddamn Thomas is on the Supreme Court of this country, and therefore has a platform for his bullshit that I can never match: and it is exactly that reason, that imbalance in our respective influence and reach, that means I have to throw myself at his mighty marble pedestal of bullshit, and try to knock off a chip or two.

Let’s start with this: Thomas shouldn’t be on the Court in the first place. He was underqualified, having spent only two years as a federal judge when he was nominated by President Bush in 1991 — not a disqualifying fact, of course, but certainly not in the “Pro” column. And then Anita Hill stood up. The accusations brought against Thomas by Hill during his confirmation were supposedly nothing but “He said/she said” claims. The same sort of thing that Brett Kavanaugh also recently stamped past, waving his chubby fists angrily in the air,  winking at the other bro-type fellers who we all knew would be frowning seriously for a full thirty minutes before they voted to confirm him (As an aside, there’s a remarkable quote from the article about the Hill/Thomas hearings which I will be referring to in a moment: ‘When apprised of Hill’s accusations, Senator Howard Metzenbaum, the Ohio Democrat, said, “If that’s sexual harassment, half the senators on Capitol Hill could be accused.”‘ The idea that it couldn’t possibly be considered sexual harassment because all kinds of rich powerful white fucksticks are guilty of it is really a stunning position to take on, well, anything.). Except in the case of Hill and Thomas, they weren’t just a “He said/she said” set of accusations:

For viewers at home, it looked like a typical he-said, she-said sexual-harassment case, in which it was nearly impossible to determine who was in the right. Believing Hill required believing that a federal judge on the verge of Supreme Court confirmation would perjure himself; believing Thomas required believing that Hill would have fabricated vivid allegations out of whole cloth.

This appearance of irresolvable conflict was neither wholly accurate nor accidental. Four friends of Hill’s testified that she had told them about the harassment at the time, lending more credibility to the claims. Three other women were willing to testify about being harassed by Thomas, too. But Biden chose not to allow one of them, Angela Wright, to testify publicly, instead releasing a transcript of a phone interview with her. Strange Justice, a 1994 book by reporters Jill Abramson and Jane Mayer, concluded the Judiciary Committee had failed to follow up leads on allegations against Thomas and had conducted only a cursory investigation. Whether such testimony would have been adequate to convict Thomas in a court of law is unclear, but perhaps also beside the point. It was as strong or stronger than the evidence that has toppled several members of Congress, including Senator Al Franken.

Source

A corroborated story, part of a pattern of behavior, should have raised enough questions about the man to shift his 52-48 confirmation vote the other way, even if they were afraid to appear racist by voting against him. I certainly see the value of having an African-American person on the Court, but I personally find it pretty hard to believe there wasn’t another, better, African-American nominee than Clarence Thomas to replace Justice Thurgood Marshall. (Perhaps a black woman?) But we all know perfectly well that Thomas was not nominated for his race, he was nominated for his conservative views and his willingness to follow the script. He was confirmed because of his race. The fact that the  ultra-white Senate and particularly the Judiciary Committee ran away from confronting Thomas head-on shows one of the many reasons why the government should not be monocultural. Can you imagine if Thomas had told Maxine Waters that she was carrying out a high-tech lynching? Or Kamala Harris?

(And though I really don’t want to get off the topic, let’s all remember who headed the Judiciary Committee in 1991, who failed to follow through on the leads in this investigation, and gave us this piece of shit on the bench because he couldn’t stand up to a black man who played the race card, as Thomas did [Too many asides and I should have written about this whole thing when Kavanaugh was pitching his hissy fits: but how the fuck were Anita Hill’s accusations against Thomas a “high-tech lynching?” Because it was being broadcast on the televisions? That’s fucking high tech? Seriously? You talked to her about how big your dick is, sir: this is not high anything: it’s low brow, it’s low class, it’s low quality. Enough, sorry.]: Joe Biden. Please, I don’t want to pick the Democratic nominee before the process plays out, but whatever you do, don’t fucking vote for Biden, okay? Pretty please?)

So as I was saying, Clarence Thomas shouldn’t even be on the Court. Once he got there, he should have been impeached for his consistent refusal to recuse himself despite serious conflicts of interest mainly through his wife, a political activist who started a Tea Party PAC in 2010. Thomas has had clear conflicts in the Citizens United case, and in the Affordable Care Act case, and yet, he voted, and we have those decisions in the books.

(Summary of Thomas’s conflicts of interest, though it is out of date)

So here we are: and Thomas has something to say. About abortion.

It’s racist.

That’s right, abortion is racist, sexist, and ableist, Thomas opined in his concurring opinion on Tuesday after the Supreme Court voted 7-2 to split the decision on an Indiana abortion case: because abortion is the tool of eugenicists.

I mean, it’s not.

But Thomas says it is — and Thomas is an honorable man.

Here: this is Thomas’s opinion. It’s full of legalese, of course, and the writing is honestly pretty bad, but you are welcome to look and judge for yourself. Let me give you the tl;dr version of it.

Essentially, Thomas claims that abortion is a weapon used by eugenicists to reduce the number of unwanted people in the world in order to purify or improve the genomic quality of the human race. He says that people who want to make the human race better want to remove anyone who is of low intelligence, or who is not white, or who is a woman. To prove this, he cites Margaret Sanger, Alan Guttmacher, and various members of the American eugenics movement of the first half of the 20th century. He takes the Court’s decision not to decide on part of the Indiana case as a reason to get all fired up in defense of all non-white babies, women babies, and babies with limited capacity or genetic complications.

Here are the problems with his argument. Ready?

  1. Margaret Sanger, while she had some genuinely fucked up elitist views, never promoted abortion. She promoted birth control. She never conflated the two; and Thomas fucking admits it in his opinion: ‘She [Sanger] recognized a moral difference between “contraceptives” and other, more “extreme” ways for “women to limit their families,” such as “the horrors of abortion and infanticide.”’ That’s right, Clarence: she thought abortion was a horror. Not a tool of eugenics. Not birth control. (But Thomas says that Sanger was a pro-abortion eugenicist; and Thomas is an honorable man.)
  2. Alan Guttmacher, while he was arguing that abortion should be legalized in the 1950’s, said this (Taken from Thomas’s opinion):

    He explained that “the quality of the parents must be taken into account,” including “[f]eeblemindedness,” and believed that “it should be permissible to abort any pregnancy . . . in which there is a strong probability of an abnormal or malformed infant.” … He added that the question whether to allow abortion must be “separated from emotional, moral and religious concepts” and “must have as its focus normal, healthy infants born into homes peopled with parents who have healthy bodies and minds.”

Here’s the thing, Your Honor — and stick with me, now — it should be permissible to abort any pregnancy for any reason whatsoever. In fact, it is permissible to abort any pregnancy for any reason whatsoever. We can talk about the proper time to do it, and I suppose we can wax poetic about why women should want to keep their children and all that jazz: but none of that fucking matters. What matters is not why a woman chooses: what matters is that the woman chooses. Period. The end. Full fucking stop.

But let’s stick to the matter at hand. I will agree that Guttmacher’s comments can be seen as preferring people without genetic abnormalities or birth defects. “Feeblemindedness” of course is a code word for conditions such as Down’s Syndrome (Which Thomas also refers to in his opinion, also getting his facts wrong on that as a reason for abortion — but Thomas says Icelandic women abort 100% of children with Down’s Syndrome, and sure, he is an honorable man.), and so Guttmacher might be saying that people with such genetic conditions should be aborted.

No, wait: no he’s not. He’s saying that abortion should be allowed. Not that it should be sought. Not that it should be promoted. Not that it could be used to build the Ubermenschen. He’s saying that the debate over abortion should focus on healthy children in healthy homes: meaning that situations that are unhealthy are reasonable places to see abortion as an option, as a means of avoiding a dangerous and harmful situation. You want to read that as referring to parents or infants with Down’s Syndrome? Go for it, but that’s not what Guttmacher said. The closest he comes to it is the one word “normal” in reference to the children: and if you are going to read “normal, healthy children” as referring to only children without Down’s Syndrome, then you are the one arguing that Down’s makes one abnormal and less than healthy. Which makes you, Justice Thomas,  the ableist.

Motherfucker.

But I was trying to enumerate the problems with Thomas’s argument that abortion is the tool of eugenicists. Let me just boil it down: the eugenicists he refers to, which did include Sanger and might have included Guttmacher, never promoted abortion as a means of accomplishing eugenic goals. They preferred birth control — and where they were fucked up Nazi types (and plenty of eugenicists were fucked up Nazi types), they promoted forced sterilization. [Great article about this: Thomas refers to a book about Carrie Buck, a woman who was forcibly sterilized by Virginia, and then the Supreme Court in 1927 supported the state’s right to do that to her. Except Thomas misunderstood the book’s point. Because the book is not at all about abortion. Weird.] And even if they did really want to use abortion as a means to a eugenic end, THOSE PEOPLE ARE ALL DEAD NOW. None of them are setting the policy for the country, for Planned Parenthood, for abortion providers, for anyone. They are not behind the laws the Supreme Court is ruling on, they are not behind the challenges to those laws. They are irrelevant. They provide interesting historical context: but they do not show problems within the modern day argument over abortion. It’s like saying that the Republicans are corrupt because Warren G. Harding was a corrupt Republican. Or that they’re tall because Lincoln was. This is (ironically) called the genetic fallacy: presuming that something is wrong because of where it came from — that Planned Parenthood is evil because Margaret Sanger thought we should sterilize poor people. It’s also an ad hominem attack, going after the people rather than the argument; and it’s a red herring, because Sanger and Guttmacher and the rest were not arguing for abortion even when they were arguing for eugenics, and they weren’t arguing for eugenics when they were arguing for abortion. It’s the Fallacy Trifecta. I know we see that kind of shit all the time on the internet — but God, why do we have to see it from a Supreme Court Justice?

The nonsense continues: Thomas pulls out some shit about African-American women seeking abortions at a higher rate than white American women, which is true — but he never even tries to examine the real reasons, which are the systemic poverty and the lack of access to health care which ensure that African-American women are less likely to have good access to birth control, or to have the resources to carry healthy pregnancies to term. Instead he throws down this tired, out-of-context quote from Sanger: ‘We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.’ (To be clear, she is not saying that she wants to hide their true motive of genocide from the African-American community, she wants to make sure that people don’t come to this INCORRECT conclusion, exactly as Thomas is doing here. The proof? The phrase “straighten out that idea” does not mean “cover up the truth,” it means “correct a mistake.” And she wasn’t writing to the ministers themselves, so she’s not trying to sugarcoat her actual meaning. My kingdom for a Supreme Court Justice who understands rhetoric.) So apparently, because he misunderstands Sanger, Planned Parenthood is still following her direction and aborting African-American children more frequently than white children.

Sure.

Then he grabs some crap about Asian women seeking sex-based abortions, meaning that Asian women abort female babies more often than male babies, which is also true — but he never even tries to show how that means we should limit abortion access in this country. Come on: try to make an argument out of it. Chinese women, under that country’s disastrous and appalling one-child policy, more frequently aborted female children, a trend that is also common in India because of the social importance of sons over daughters. And therefore American women should not be able to abort their pregnancies because . . . ? As goes New Delhi, so goes New Jersey? If America ever imposes a one-child policy then Asian-American women will repeat this pattern — uh . . . because . . . ?

Here: this article spells it out well. Read it just for the point about Down’s Syndrome abortions and Iceland.

Look, this is really pretty simple. The right to an abortion, which Thomas opposes (And he gets salty about in his conclusion, when he claims the court created a Constitutional right to abortion which didn’t exist previously), is an individual right, and it is protected within the Constitution under the right to privacy. But whether it is protected as private or not, it is a right: because a woman has the right to determine what happens in her own body. She has the right to decide if she is going to be pregnant or not. You want to argue with me about that? Read this. But otherwise, start from that point. A woman’s choice to abort is her right.

Now: tell me that women might abort pregnancies because of the fetus’s presumed race.

A woman’s choice to abort is her right.

Tell me that a woman might abort her pregnancy because the fetus is female.

A woman’s choice to abort is her right. 

Tell me that she might do it because the child might have genetic abnormalities or birth defects, or ill health, or any other serious complication.

A woman’s choice to abort is her right.

Do you see? Do you get it? The question is not what happens to the infant: it dies. We know that, and it’s ugly. And we may frequently disagree with why a woman makes the choice she does. But that does not matter. That is not the question. The woman having racist or sexist or ableist reasons does not change her rights: she has the right to bodily autonomy, she has the right to privacy: she has the right to choose. That’s it. And though I was being facetious earlier when I said that Thomas’s reading of bias in Guttmacher’s statements reveals Thomas’s bias, this is for real: the theory that eugenicists would use abortion as a tool to achieve some kind of racial purity presumes that women have no ability to think and decide for themselves, but would simply be led to abort pregnancies they otherwise would want, because eugenicists told them to do it. And that is about as sexist as it gets. (Or else it presumes that women with the very qualities that eugenicists deplore would wish to eliminate their own traits from the gene pool and would therefore abort their own pregnancies to accomplish that goal. Which is just — I mean, it just exhausts me.)

So to sum up.

If you tell me that you have the right to freedom of speech, and then I say you might use that free speech to call Clarence Thomas a fucknugget, I hope you can see that I have in no way argued against your right to free speech. If you tell me that you have the right to bear arms, and I say you might use that right to bear arms in such a way that it would lead to the deaths of disproportionately high numbers of African-American men (Won’t . . . bring up . . . police killings . . . NO!), you should respond that my comment has nothing whatsoever to do with your right to bear arms. (A better example: if you use your guns to hunt legally, and I say that’s gross, it doesn’t mean you don’t have the right to bear arms. Even though hunting is gross.) If you say you have the right to refuse to allow British troops to be quartered in your home, and I say that means they’re going to be trampling all over the azaleas and shitting behind the rhododendrons, you should still not allow redcoats into your home and give them your Netflix password.

Want me to keep going? I can keep going. There are a great many personal rights specifically enshrined in the Constitution, and a great many more protected by its strictures on government power. Not a one of those personal rights is granted by the Constitution: they are human rights and civil rights, rights that we possess as a condition of our personhood and our citizenship. Not a one of them is predicated on the reason why we use them or how we use them. Not a one. There are restrictions on how we use those rights, as there are restrictions on how abortions can be performed; but never why. The argument Thomas is trying to make — and he comes reeeaaaaalll close to making it explicitly — is that abortion is a violation of the fetus’s rights. That abortion is discrimination against the fetus on the basis of sex or race or physical or mental disability.

But the fetus doesn’t have rights. Not in preference to the rights of the mother. Neither does society. Not even if the mother does decide to terminate her pregnancy for eugenic reasons. It is still her body, it is still her right.

Period.

This Morning

Dusty 2 Comments

This morning, unfortunately, I am thinking about abortion.

And since I’ve been doing it for four hours, now, while I’ve been writing this, it is no longer morning. I am not happy about this. But why should I be?

None of us should think about abortion. None of us should have to. There should be no unwanted pregnancies. Birth control should be universally effective and universally available, and no one should ever be a victim of rape.

To be clear right from the outset: the simplest and most effective way to eliminate unwanted pregnancies, and therefore to put an end to abortion, is to give every man a  vasectomy as early as is practicable. Vasectomies are simple, safe, reversible, and extremely effective birth control. [Information here]

However: since not every vasectomy is reversible — and in fact, it is easier to reverse a vasectomy the sooner it is done after the initial procedure, which tends to put a damper on my “as early as practicable” plan — even this system does not ensure there will be no unwanted pregnancies. There is no way, with our current understanding of medicine and fertility, to ensure there are no unwanted pregnancies without additional unwanted consequences.

Therefore we have to think about abortion.

I would like to limit this post to the logical, rational aspect of the debate. The rational argument regarding abortion hinges on definitions, and on rights, and essentially, it all comes down to one question: is abortion murder? Because if abortion is murder, then the pro-choice argument can’t proceed; there can’t be a legal nor a rational argument for murder. If abortion is not murder, then a woman’s right to choose can override the needs of the infant.

This was pointed out to me in a recent Facebook debate, and the person who commented to this effect also pointed out that the abortion debate never comes to a final decision on this critical question — neither side. And indeed, though the overall debate where that comment was made went on for scores of posts, not one person touched that specific comment  that tried to get to — or at least point out the way to — the heart of the matter. I suspect that the reason is because we have such a hard time separating the two aspects of this debate, the logical and the emotional; which is why I’m going to do it here. Because logically, I think it is clear that abortion is not murder, but emotionally, it certainly feels like it to a lot of people — people who generally come down on the pro-life side because of that feeling.

That’s why I’m starting with this argument: because I think it is simpler. Not easier to deal with or accept, but simpler to make and to understand. And because it is not easier to deal with, I’m spending all of this time hemming and hawing, hedging and prefacing everything I want to say. But enough waffling. Here we go.

(One brief note: because I am trying to remove emotion, I’m going to use the term “infant” or “child.” Fetus and baby are both too charged and aligned to specific sides of the debate.)

Is abortion murder? It is not, for two reasons: the definition of murder, and the unique status of the unborn child within the mother.

The definition of murder: “Murder occurs when one human being unlawfully kills another human being.” Wex Legal Dictionary  Therefore, since abortion is currently legal in this country, abortion is not legally murder.

Of course that’s an oversimplification. But there are two considerations that also prevent abortion from being murder. One is the mother’s intent in killing the infant. Murder statutes contain some element of intent: first degree murder is generally predicated on the idea of “malice aforethought,” or premeditation and intent to harm. While abortion is of course premeditated, there is clearly no malice present. Women who get abortions are not intentionally seeking the death of the infant: they are seeking the termination of the pregnancy. I can’t really imagine a scenario where a woman seeks an abortion with malicious intent, abortion sought expressly to harm the infant; such a scenario would require a highly disturbed woman, one I would term a psychopath, and such an extreme case does not define the standard. I presume in most cases, women regret the inevitable death of the infant as a necessary but horrible part of the intended goal.

So at most, an abortion is some form of manslaughter, unintended homicide, or accidental death. But I would argue that it is not any of those: rather an abortion is justifiable homicide (if it is homicide at all, which I’ll get to in a while with the question of fetal personhood) because the mother is acting in self-defense.

Wex defines self-defense this way: “The use of force to protect oneself from an attempted injury by another.  If justified, self-defense is a defense to a number of crimes and torts involving force, including murder, assault and battery. ” Law.com offers a fuller explanation:

self-defense

n. the use of reasonable force to protect oneself or members of the family from bodily harm from the attack of an aggressor, if the defender has reason to believe he/she/they is/are in danger. Self-defense is a common defense by a person accused of assault, battery or homicide. The force used in self-defense may be sufficient for protection from apparent harm (not just an empty verbal threat) or to halt any danger from attack, but cannot be an excuse to continue the attack or use excessive force. Examples: an unarmed man punches Allen Alibi, who hits the attacker with a baseball bat. That is legitimate self-defense, but Alibi cannot chase after the attacker and shoot him or beat him senseless. If the attacker has a gun or a butcher knife and is verbally threatening, Alibi is probably warranted in shooting him. Basically, appropriate self-defense is judged on all the circumstances. Reasonable force can also be used to protect property from theft or destruction. Self-defense cannot include killing or great bodily harm to defend property, unless personal danger is also involved, as is the case in most burglaries, muggings or vandalism.

Source

An abortion is a woman’s attempt to protect herself from harm. She may justifiably use force to do it, even lethal force, which is necessitated in this instance, because there is no way to stop the pregnancy without killing the infant.

Absurd, you may say; an unborn child is not a danger to its mother. But of course it is. It is a danger to the mother’s health — and quite a serious one — and a threat to the mother’s life: 700  women die each year in the U.S. from pregnancy or childbirth. [Source] 26.4 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births. (Three or more times the rate in other industrialized Western countries, by the way. Makes one question the argument that America respects the sanctity of life, particularly since the majority of deaths in childbirth are preventable. Information here.

But there’s more than that. Because life is not the only right that a woman has to protect: she has a right to liberty, as well.

Pregnancy is enslavement. It is biologically, as the infant uses hormones to control the mother in every possible way, causing biological changes that last for the rest of her life; it is, without the right to abort, legally enslavement, as a woman is required to surrender her bodily sovereignty to the child. I think there cannot be any argument that one would have the right to use force to defend one’s self against enslavement. The right to liberty is not less important than the right to life: both are inherent, both are inalienable, both are necessary components of our existence as distinct individual persons.  And in pregnancy, these two rights — the mother’s right to liberty and the child’s right to life —  are in conflict. For the child’s right to be protected, the mother must lose her right, and vice versa.

There is no way around this conflict. Perhaps someday we will have the technology to remove an infant from a woman at whatever stage she wishes to terminate the pregnancy, and then gestate that child to full term; but our attempts to create an artificial womb are extremely preliminary — and if we do ever manage to produce such a device, it will only exacerbate the issue of overpopulation, particularly within the already burdened foster care system. But regardless, we can’t do that yet, so for a woman to terminate a pregnancy — the only way to retain control over her own body, her own person — is to kill the child.

Most people who are pro-life but not anti-woman argue that the woman’s consent to sex is what removes her right to liberty, that this is essentially a contract she has entered into and she must surrender her bodily sovereignty as the “consequence of her action;” but this falls apart for several reasons. First, consent to sex is not consent to pregnancy, and consent to pregnancy is not consent to carrying an infant to term and giving birth, and carrying an infant to term is not consent to motherhood. That is not how consent works. Consent must be informed, positive, and constant: contracts have termination clauses. The contract is only legally binding as long as both parties continue to agree to it. A more fraught but more appropriate analogy is consent to sex: if at any point a person having sex removes their consent to the continuation of the sex, it is no longer consensual; it becomes rape. Instantly. We can argue about whether both parties are  aware of the removal of consent and therefore whether the rape is prosecutable — but there’s no question of its definition. Consent to sex one minute does not even imply consent to sex the next minute: how could it possibly imply consent to nine months of pregnancy? To a lifetime of motherhood?

Furthermore, consent has to be informed, and not based on deception or fraud. Contracts cannot be put forth as promising one thing, but actually promising something else: if I sign a contract but don’t read the fine print, it is legally binding — but not if I was told I was signing a contract to buy a toaster, when in fact I was signing a contract to give away my car. Not even if the fine print said so. Subsequent consequences are also not part of a contract: if I agree to teach for the next school year, it does not oblige me to teach for the year after that, not even if that is expected, not even if that is what  the school wants, not even if that is what happens 99% of the time. So unless the woman intentionally, knowingly, before the  sex  act, consents and expresses her consent to pregnancy, then that consent is not implied by consent to the sex act.

People argue that pregnancy is a natural and expected consequence of sex, but it isn’t: because the cause and effect relationship is not direct. Each instance of sex does not create an instance of pregnancy. Even when people are trying, and doing everything possible to get pregnant, it frequently requires more than a single instance of sex to produce a pregnancy. Sex increases the probability of becoming pregnant, and that is all. It is, of course, a necessity for pregnancy to happen (Except in the case of artificial insemination), but that doesn’t tell us the probability of pregnancy happening from a sex act. Imagine if we could always know, with certainty, when pregnancy would result from sex: if a tiny imp popped up next to a couple right before sex and said, “Hi! This sex act will result in a pregnancy,” can you imagine how often that sex act would not occur? If that surety existed, then we could logically argue that a woman’s consent to sex was also consent to pregnancy, because the consent would be informed, the consequences known and assured; but it doesn’t work that way. So while there is some reasonable expectation of the probable results, they are not sufficiently causally connected to associate consequences with them. The best we can do is argue that the known chance of the increased probability of pregnancy implies some logical consideration of the probable results, but since we can’t make an informed prediction of pregnancy, we certainly can’t say that a woman should lose her unalienable right to liberty based on a possibility.

An analogy: if I walk into the street, there is a known chance that I will be hit by a car and killed. If someone drives their car down the street, there is a known chance that they will hit and kill a pedestrian. Neither result is possible without that initial choice to create the conditions necessary for the result, but the choice to walk into the street is not the choice to be hit by a car, and the choice to drive down the street is not the choice to hit a pedestrian: if I get hit by a car when I only intended to walk, it would not be suicide; and if someone hits me when their only intent was to drive, then it wouldn’t be first degree murder with malice aforethought. There are subsequent choices with direct connections to the result, which are the determining factors: if I walk directly in front of the car without allowing it time to stop, then it does become suicide; if the car sees me and refuses to stop, it becomes murder. Even though the initial choice of walking or driving was a necessary pre-requisite for the later choices, that initial choice does not imply the later choice. There are also conditions entirely out of each person’s control that are determining factors: how fast the car is moving, how quickly I cross the street, the visibility, our separate reaction times, the functionality of the car’s brakes and the surface of the street, and so on, so on. A thousand things that determine whether I live or die, and even though my choice to walk into the street is necessary  for me to be hit by a car, it is clearly not the only cause of it.

Coming back out of the analogy: a woman becomes an intentional carrier of a pregnancy to term when she chooses to do so — in other words, when she decides not to have an abortion, she becomes a mother, at least of her unborn infant. She did not choose to become a mother when she had sex: because otherwise there would be women who chose to be mothers (by choosing to have sex) yet did not become pregnant and do not have children, and that removes all sense from the definition of motherhood.

So here we are: consent to sex does not logically imply consent to pregnancy (A brief repetition of that argument, because it is crucial: if consent to sex implies consent either to what is possible afterwards, and/or what is best for the child, then consent to sex should also imply a commitment to child-rearing on the part of the father, because that is what is best for the child. In other words, if a man has sex with a woman, he is marrying her and agreeing to provide her with a stable home and life partnership. Also, if the mother dies in childbirth, then it should be considered either suicide, as she consented to the possibility of her own death when she consented to the sex act, or murder on the part of the man who impregnated her and created that result with his choice to have sex with her, since pregnancy and death in childbirth are known potential consequences of the sex act, which could not occur without the sex act. These would be logically consistent positions. Does anyone hold them?), and therefore a woman who has sex cannot be considered to have given up her right to liberty  voluntarily. The conflict between mother and child is a conflict between two unalienable rights, the child’s right to life and the mother’s right to liberty, neither of which is necessarily more important than the other, but either of which would justify the loss of a right to the other party — that is, if the child’s right to life is paramount, then the mother should justifiably lose her right to liberty; if the mother’s right to liberty is paramount, then the child should justifiably lose its right to life. Simply saying “Wait nine months and the conflict will be resolved” is not acceptable; imagine if I was holding a gun to your head and threatening your life, but I promised to stop after nine months — clearly that doesn’t mean you can’t fight back against me to remove the threat  to your life, nor, I would argue, to your liberty.

So who wins?

The final piece of this argument is personhood. Only living persons have unalienable rights to life and liberty — though it is an interesting argument that the dead have the right to bodily sovereignty because we cannot legally take their organs to save the living — so if the mother and child are both persons, then it becomes difficult to argue who has the right to decide the outcome. (Not impossible, and I’ll try to get to that one too. Hold on.) But here is the final answer: An unborn child is not a person, and does not have a legal or logical right to life.

This is something of an ugly position, and even I don’t like all the implications of it. But it is impossible to determine otherwise. Because personhood, as a legal concept, has to come with autonomy: there is simply no way to legally protect a person’s rights if that person cannot be separated from another person in a meaningful sense.

Let’s begin with twins as a test case. First, the argument that a unique genetic code, created at the moment of conception, is the defining characteristic of personhood, falls apart with identical twins. Because there you have two people with identical, non-unique genetic codes, and yet they are not considered the same individual in two bodies, even though monozygotic twins came from a single fertilized ovum — which supposedly gained personhood at the moment of conception, before the moment of separation into two separate twins. But if I marry one twin, I am not simultaneously married to the other; if one commits a capital crime, we do not execute them both. Unique genes are not the standard for personhood. Also, let me note that mothers and children exchange genetic material during pregnancy: and so the mother is a part of the child and the child is a part of the mother on the most basic level. (Also let me note, for the sake of fairness, that this exchange of cells is probably quite beneficial for the mother, much of the time; but it can also lead to serious consequences, including cancer and an increased chance of future miscarriages. The article has more. Microchimerism. Fascinating stuff.)

So if the child is part of the mother and the mother is part of the child, then the pregnancy should be seen as somewhat akin to conjoined twins. There’s a video I watched, from Steven Crowder, in which Mr. Crowder (A pro-life sophist — change my mind.) asks his pro-choice opponent how many hearts a pregnant woman has, how many toes, how many spinal cords and so on. He was trying to get the young man he was debating to accept that the mother and child are two unique, separate individuals: but clearly they are not. This article and this article both show how intertwined the two beings are: the infant relies on the mother for everything, from oxygen to nutrition, and invades the mother’s body via hormones in order to serve its needs to her detriment; at the same time, the mother receives health benefits from the child as part of the gestational process, in order to protect the child. It is not reasonable therefore to call the child a parasite — but neither can they be separated and both live.

Like conjoined twins. And I would ask Mr. Crowder: if conjoined twins share a torso, how many hearts do they have? How many lungs? How many livers? If we imagine a case where two conjoined twins share a single liver– which was indeed the circumstance of Chang and Eng Bunker, the eponymous Siamese twins — then we have two persons, two individuals, with one liver; thus it shouldn’t be any more distressing to accept that twenty fingers and twenty toes and two hearts can very easily be contained in one person, when one person contains a second being. Clearly we define personhood not by number of organs and not by unique genetic code. These are elements, naturally, but not exclusive ones.

The way we define personhood philosophically is through two elements: body and mind. The body must have autonomous viability — in other words, it has to be able to exist on its own — and there must be a unique mind and sentience. If I think of a future where my mind has been destroyed by disease or misfortune, even if my body continues to survive, I would not conceive of myself as the same person I am now. Similarly, if my mind and thoughts were removed from my body and put into a different body, then I would not be the same person I am now. These seem self-evident to me. I am aware that pro-life people do not want them to be: because the only logical conclusion from these two elements of personhood is that an unborn, pre-sentient child, which would not be viable outside of the womb, is not a person. But that’s the problem with logical argument: the conclusions cannot be escaped, even if they are against what we would wish.

Here’s the other side of that: it implies that a sentient unborn infant does have some sort of personhood, at least potential personhood; this means that elective abortion in the last trimester should not be legal, and if sentience in the developing infant is provable prior to that, then abortion should not be legal post sentience. That leaves us with one question: what to do in the case of medical necessity, where the life of the mother is at risk should the pregnancy continue through the third trimester?

But you see, despite what fanatics may argue, this has already been resolved, in the only way that makes any sense: in the case of a viable infant, labor would be induced or (much more likely) an emergency C-section would result in a premature infant who is then cared for in the NICU. In the case of a non-viable infant, one that could not live on its own, late-term abortion may be the safer course for preserving the mother’s life: and since a child that could not live does not have the same right to life that the mother does, not being a full person as it lacks one of the two necessities of personhood, then the law must allow for such a procedure in such an extreme circumstance. This is precisely the legal status of abortion at this very moment in this country: abortion is legal while the child is non-sentient and non-viable, and therefore is not a person; abortion is legal after sentience only when the mother’s life is at risk and the child is not viable. If the child has both viability and sentience, then separation is possible without death, and that is the right solution.  The goal is and should be to find a medical solution to the problem, a way to separate mother and child while preserving the rights of both.

But when that solution is not available, then the mother has the right to abort the child.

There are a last few loose ends: one is whether or not my definition of personhood implies that I would lose the right to exist were I in a vegetative state, whether I am a full person if I am brain dead. The answer is that I would not be a full person without sentience, but first, that sentience is not always detectable and so there should be some benefit of the doubt (This is why abortion is often limited to before 20 weeks of pregnancy, to give the benefit of the doubt to the infant who may be sentient; there is still some debate to be had over this, but it is a particular issue and not what I’m talking about today), and second, that I would retain the right to live only so long as I was not impinging therefore on another person’s unalienable rights. If my survival required that someone else be chained to my bed so that they could provide me with constant CPR, to blow air into my mouth every thirty seconds forever, to constantly push blood through my heart one hundred times a minute, in order to make up for my lungs and heart that could not sustain my life, then clearly I would die, since I have no right to make someone else breathe for me, to make someone else’s heart beat for me. If a machine could do it, well and good; and so for the theoretical artificial womb of the future.

But I have no right to make someone else breathe for me. To make someone else provide me with nutrition straight from their blood stream, to carry my body within their own, to risk certain injury and pain and suffering and damage in order to provide me with a life I could not have on my own.

Another loose end is the question of a woman’s right to bodily sovereignty, and whether or not continuous informed consent is still necessary up to the very end of pregnancy, or if a mother could choose to have an infant removed after, say, eight months of pregnancy simply because she no longer wishes to be pregnant. Logically, I would say that a woman could very well make that choice so long as it would not risk the rights of the child, who if viable and sentient has some right to personhood; but as I understand it, there is an unacceptably high risk to the child if it were to be surgically removed at the mother’s say-so. So there is some gray area when it comes to consent on the mother’s part as well, and at some point– around the point of viability and sentience, around the 6th month of pregnancy and the start of the third trimester — she does in fact lose some of her ability to choose. She can no longer choose not to be pregnant without taking the child into consideration.

But that’s the last point I want to make. If there is anyone who can reasonably be asked to make the decision for the child, it has to be the mother. Who else? Who do we ask to make decisions for born children, including decisions that many people might disagree with? Who, for instance, decides to give a child up for adoption? Despite the fact that such a choice clearly runs counter to the ideal of a nuclear family and the Western adoration of children? Even though the child may absolutely oppose such a choice? We ask parents to make those decisions for their children, because we assume that they are the ones most qualified and most likely to do the right thing for their own children; because children are not capable of making an informed, rational choice. Why would we ever take that choice away from a mother? Who else could possibly make it better?

It is, therefore, not only a woman’s right to choose: it is a woman’s responsibility to choose. Hers before all others’. Even the child’s.