Pro-Life and Pro-Animal: The conscience of a pro-life vegan conservative

[lavenderviolet]

Pro-Life and Pro-Animal: The Conscience of a Pro-Life Vegan Conservative

As a pro-life vegetarian myself, I know that this combination of views exists, but I was really surprised to see this article was posted by the National Review. I am used to the two party system in America causing pro-lifers to ally with apologists for factory farms and to hear vegans who would readily defend a honeybee’s right to life aligning with those who defend late term abortion.
It is a lengthy article, but I think it makes a number of interesting points and I think it’s worth taking the time to read it.
An excerpt:

Abortion on demand and the cruelties of factory farming, in the more candid discussions about the reasons for both, are presented to us as necessary evils, essentially on grounds of pragmatism and economics. (There is even a similarity, at the depths of the depraved thinking that goes into both, in carefully couched attitudes of class, with dirty-shirt operators like Gosnell understood in certain circles to be useful in controlling the population of the poor, and the factory farms — harsh and distasteful as they are — useful in feeding and employing the poor.) Both industries are blunt, practical solutions to hard moral problems that the people who advocate them have despaired of dealing with in some gentler way. They’ve given up, and they won’t feel right about it until we give up too. We’ve got to be realistic, we’re told. Maybe in some ideal world every child could be wanted and loved and every creature treated compassionately, but it’s just not that way, here in the real world. Sometimes we just can’t afford to be humane, much as we’d all like to. So, get used to it. Try not to visualize so much. Just do what has to be done and put the rest out of mind. This is the m.o. of Planned Parenthood and other such groups, and it is the whole business model of factory farming.

Consider “mass-confinement” farming, the literal “locking up of all creatures” that John Paul II said it was “necessary and urgent” that we abandon — to little avail, if he was trying to get even Catholic moralists to listen up. This is a scheme of pork production hailed to this day within the industry as a wondrous cost-saver, improving the quality of life for producer and consumer alike. The very term would have stopped farmers of another day in their tracks, being so utterly foreign to a real farmer’s sense of limits and honor. Just one feature of an “intensive farming” system that is now the norm, mass confinement for pigs began in the 1960s with the inspiration of a corporate guy and former Democratic state senator in North Carolina named Wendell Murphy. Later associated with Smithfield Foods, today the world’s largest pork producer, Murphy figured out that if you put slatted flooring in sows’ stalls, so that their waste could fall beneath the structure and flow out to form lakes of excrement nearby, the creatures could just stay there endlessly. He eliminated the inconvenience that animals are, well, animate, and that by moving around they were burning off calories, which only added to labor costs and cut into profits.

This one contrivance removed any further need, practically speaking, for the pigs to go outside, to root and forage, care for their young, mix with one another, or otherwise enjoy, before their death, something resembling a life. With no laws to stop him, and political connections to help him, one supremely selfish man pronounced his own “fiat,” and for all of these creatures there was darkness. And, of course, the tighter the gestation crates, the more “production units” — mothers — could be packed in for maximum profit. So what if they can’t even turn around? “Science,” an industry spokesman has explained, “tells us that she [a sow] doesn’t even seem to know that she can’t turn.” Stuff the sows with vaccines and antibiotics to counteract the confinement-borne diseases that would otherwise kill them, feed their offspring growth hormones, so that “life” for the 350,000 or so pigs slaughtered every day just in our own country is six or seven months of mutilation and pain — and you’re talking real savings. “Science” doubtless proves they don’t even know about those miseries, either. (Keep farm animals in constant confinement and deprivation, in the priceless rationale of Wesley J. Smith, and they “cannot know what they are missing.”) Imagine, to borrow a comparison for sow crating from Temple Grandin, years in an economy-class plane seat — except on concrete, while being sick, atrophied, covered with sores and bruises, and alternately abused and ignored by the flight attendants — and you get the idea.

I think that this article will probably be very unpopular since it has things in it that will make both pro-life carnivores and pro-choice vegans unhappy, but I think it raises some important topics that aren’t discussed often enough.

[BrainGlutton]

Hey, you know who else was a pro-life vegan conservative?!

[levdrakon]

So the way we treat livestock is just like the way we treat women who want abortions? Or it’s like the way we treat fetuses?

[Kimstu]

@lavenderviolet

I think that this article will probably be very unpopular since it has things in it that will make both pro-life carnivores and pro-choice vegans unhappy, but I think it raises some important topics that aren’t discussed often enough.

I think its biggest flaw is the muddy travesty it offers of logical reasoning.

While I have nothing against either people who sincerely oppose all abortion because they believe in a human embryo’s right to life or people who sincerely oppose carnivory because they deplore the sufferings inflicted by factory farming, these two positions have nothing to do with each other, except in the mind of a moral sentimentalist like the article’s author who combines them by way of his own subjective categories of “kindness”, “cruelty”, and “dignity of life”.

If the problem with killing or the modern livestock farming practices that produce animals to be killed is that they’re brutal and painful, okay, but that is irrelevant to the ethics of killing, say, an early-term human embryo that doesn’t even have diversified organs, much less a nervous system capable of feeling pain or suffering with.

If, on the other hand, the problem with killing a human embryo even at the blastocyst stage is that it is considered on philosophical or religious grounds to be fully human with the same human right to life that we accord to every human individual, okay, but that is irrelevant to the ethics of killing a non-human animal for food, or of determining what counts as minimally humane treatment for non-human animals. (In fact, Scully doesn’t seem very clear as to whether he’s advocating radical-vegan-style renunciation of any “trafficking” of animals whatsoever, or just a rejection of brutal factory-farming methods in favor of humane livestock treatment.)

Is Scully’s argument that both non-human animals and human embryos have the same legal right to life that we all recognize for born humans? If so, then you can’t kill any animal to eat it under any circumstances, no matter how non-cruelly you treat it prior to killing, and animal cruelty per se becomes a secondary issue.

Or is Scully’s argument that both non-human animals and human embryos must be protected from “suffering and violence”? If so, then you can’t use this argument to justify banning abortion of human embryos before they have any consciousness or feelings to experience suffering or violence with. (Nor can you use it to justify opposition to any use of animal products that doesn’t involve suffering for the animals.)

Instead, Scully tries to encompass both anti-abortion and pro-vegan positions with vague and emotional button-pushing buzzwords about “cruelty”, “dignity”, “pro-life”, “protecting the weak”, “children”, “moral intuition”, and so forth.

These are not in any way adequate arguments to offer to anybody except those who already agree with you in their subjective “moral intuition”. Sentimental morality is full of such self-regarding pleasant feels. But feels are ultimately no substitute for thinks.

[Boyo_Jim]

I certainly agree that eating human fetuses is a bad idea and should be outlawed if it’s not already.

[John_Mace]

So, it’s OK to eat meat as long as it doesn’t come from “mass-confinement” farming?

@Boyo Jim

I certainly agree that eating human fetuses is a bad idea and should be outlawed if it’s not already.

[lavenderviolet]

If the problem with killing or the modern livestock farming practices that produce animals to be killed is that they’re brutal and painful, okay, but that is irrelevant to the ethics of killing, say, an early-term human embryo that doesn’t even have diversified organs, much less a nervous system capable of feeling pain or suffering with.

You can make arguments about where exactly the line should be drawn for both the pro-life issue and cruelty to animals. This article is not really focusing on early term abortion as I read it. In fact it makes numerous references to a rather notorious late term abortion case.
I am not sure if you are familiar with the Kermit Gosnell case that the article brings up. That case involved viable late term fetuses who were born alive and then brutally killed by Gosnell stabbing them in the neck with scissors. I think that it is very difficult for anyone to argue that a viable newborn is not “suffering” when someone stabs it with a pair of scissors.
Do you think this article’s point does apply when talking about a fetus that clearly does have formed organs and nervous system?

[John_Mace]

@lavenderviolet

You can make arguments about where exactly the line should be drawn for both the pro-life issue and cruelty to animals. This article is not really focusing on early term abortion as I read it. In fact it makes numerous references to a rather notorious late term abortion case.
I am not sure if you are familiar with the Kermit Gosnell case that the article brings up. That case involved viable late term fetuses who were born alive and then brutally killed by Gosnell stabbing them in the neck with scissors. I think that it is very difficult for anyone to argue that a viable newborn is not “suffering” when someone stabs it with a pair of scissors.
Do you think this article’s point does apply when talking about a fetus that clearly does have formed organs and nervous system?

Who on earth would defend Gosnell? That has nothing do with being pro-choice or pro-life.

[lavenderviolet]

@John_Mace

Who on earth would defend Gosnell? That has nothing do with being pro-choice or pro-life.

Now that he’s in prison nobody is defending him, but he was able to get away with what he was doing for so many years despite multiple complaints because of politicians who favored abortion.
The only reason that he is in prison right now is because a complaint about illegal drug prescribing led to a DEA raid - not because of all the complaints about his abortion practices.

Abortion-supporting politicians intentionally chose not to inspect abortion facilities for a number of years. As the Grand Jury Report on Gosnell explains in their section about how he got away with it for so long:

Staloski blamed the decision to abandon supposedly annual inspections of abortion clinics on DOH lawyers, who, she said, changed their legal opinions and advice to suit the policy preferences of different governors. Under Governor Robert Casey, she said, the department inspected abortion facilities annually. Yet, when Governor Tom Ridge came in, the attorneys interpreted the same regulations that had permitted annual inspections for years to no longer authorize those inspections. Then, only complaint- driven inspections supposedly were authorized. Staloski said that DOH’s policy during Governor Ridge’s administration was motivated by a desire not to be “putting a barrier up to women” seeking abortions.
Brody confirmed some of what Staloski told the Grand Jury. He described a meeting of high-level government officials in 1999 at which a decision was made not to accept a recommendation to reinstitute regular inspections of abortion clinics. The reasoning, as Brody recalled, was: “there was a concern that if they did routine inspections, that they may find a lot of these facilities didn’t meet -the standards for getting patients out by stretcher or wheelchair in an emergency-, and then there would be less abortion facilities, less access to women to have an abortion.”

Bob Casey, as my article at the top of this thread points out, was a Democrat who opposed abortion. Tom Ridge was an abortion-supporting Republican.
In the aftermath of all this, Texas made an effort to restrict late term abortion and regulate clinics more stringently, which of course met a lot of resistance from abortion advocates.

Now, that being said, I certainly do not think that the average person who supports abortion actually wants such things to happen - just as the average person who eats meat doesn’t even know what goes on in a factory farm. However, I do think that there are meat producers and abortion advocates who know but choose to look the other way.

[Kimstu]

@lavenderviolet

You can make arguments about where exactly the line should be drawn for both the pro-life issue and cruelty to animals.

Certainly. And the chief problem with this article, as I see it, is that it isn’t making any such arguments at all in any coherent way. It just flops back and forth between the issues of abortion and industrial meat production, whimpering “Hey! Don’t be cruel! Cruelty and violence bad! And liberals bad! Liberals callous towards suffering! Don’t listen to liberals! Because life! Dignity! Animals!”

There there, Mr. Scully, have a tissue and take a deep breath. Everybody agrees that suffering and violence and death are bad. But since all of them have always been inextricably entangled with life itself since life itself began, what we as intelligent beings need to do is work out principled agreements about how much and in what ways we should strive to limit them. Just blubbering about how bad they make us feel and how awful it is to hold any ethical opinions about them that differ from ours is not constructive.

@lavenderviolet

I think that it is very difficult for anyone to argue that a viable newborn is not “suffering” when someone stabs it with a pair of scissors.

Sure, and as John Mace already pointed out, no sane person in the world is arguing that abortion rights should include stabbing newborns in the neck with scissors. Yeesh.

Again, this is characteristic of Scully’s focus on emotionalism and the shock value of extreme cases. It lets him slide away from confronting the fact that these are actually pretty complex issues, on the non-extreme aspects of which not all reasonable and ethical people necessarily agree.

@lavenderviolet

Do you think this article’s point does apply when talking about a fetus that clearly does have formed organs and nervous system?

The article doesn’t really have a point, beyond indulging in the unfocused moral sentimentalism that I mentioned previously.

Are you asking whether its author Mr. Scully would support the legality of early-term abortion while opposing it later in pregnancy on the grounds that, unlike factory farming practices, early-term abortion isn’t inflicting suffering on a conscious being capable of feeling suffering? If so, I seriously doubt it: I get the impression that Mr. Scully is vehemently opposed to abortion of any kind, based on a belief in an absolute post-fertilization right to life that isn’t logically connected with anti-cruelty arguments per se.

Or are you asking whether the article’s focus on animal cruelty sheds any light on the morality of late-term abortion? If so, then no, as I said before, I don’t think it really makes a coherent moral argument of any kind.

[Kimstu]

@lavenderviolet

Now, that being said, I certainly do not think that the average person who supports abortion actually wants such things to happen - just as the average person who eats meat doesn’t even know what goes on in a factory farm. However, I do think that there are meat producers and abortion advocates who know but choose to look the other way.

I’m sure that this is true, and it’s reprehensible. (Just as I’m sure that it’s equally true, and also reprehensible, that many vegans and abortion opponents would gladly exploit inspection opportunities to get meat producers or abortion providers (respectively) shut down on the basis of trivial or false accusations. Many people on all sides of an ethical issue are willing to be dishonest or unfair to their opponents for the sake of pursuing what they see as a more important moral imperative.)

However, none of this has anything to do with the questions of whether meat consumption and abortion are wrong in and of themselves, or where we as a society should set boundaries for regulating them.

[lavenderviolet]

@John_Mace

So, it’s OK to eat meat as long as it doesn’t come from “mass-confinement” farming?

For a lot of us, it does make a difference whether the animal had a normal life before death or was tortured before death.

My husband eats meat - but only from local farmers who treat their animals humanely.
He loves animals and does not enjoy the thought of an animal being tortured for his meals, even though he isn’t ready (and maybe never will be ready) to become a full vegetarian.

[Ulfreida]

Muddy logic and appeals to sentiment are kind of all we have to work with on both these (separate) issues, as far as I can tell.

Anecdote: this year I went in on a turkey co-op, in which several people chipped in to buy baby ‘heritage breed’ turkeys (these things ain’t cute folks) and one of us raised them on her ranch to butcher size. They all just ran around and did their turkey thing – one of them took to herding the geese around for no apparent reason – and come thanksgiving they will all be slaughtered, plucked, dressed, and distributed. I have zero concern or guilt about the treatment of these birds.

I avoid factory farmed meat, for moral and ecological and personal health reasons. But I don’t think factory meat farmers are evil. They are trying to make a living in a world full of unemployment and despair. If there was a leveled playing field such that such cruel treatment of animals was not economically rewarded, I’m pretty sure they’d change.

[Ludovic]

I too wonder why there aren’t more pro-life vegans. Most pro-lifers are against all non-medically necessary abortion, and it’s pretty much a given that there are any number of animals that we eat that can feel more pain and are more intelligent than an embryo.

Of course, the answer is that they think that their holy book tells them that humans are more important than animals no matter what their size or sapience.

[Qin_Shi_Huangdi]

@Ludovic

I too wonder why there aren’t more pro-life vegans. Most pro-lifers are against all non-medically necessary abortion, and it’s pretty much a given that there are any number of animals that we eat that can feel more pain and are more intelligent than an embryo.

Of course, the answer is that they think that their holy book tells them that humans are more important than animals no matter what their size or sapience.

And that is the position of the law also, unless you think people who kill chimpanzees should be charged with first-degree murder.

[Ludovic]

@Qin_Shi_Huangdi

And that is the position of the law also, unless you think people who kill chimpanzees should be charged with first-degree murder.

People who destroy embryos should be charged with first-degree murder? Or at the very least worse than those who torture and murder primates or pets?

[Kimstu]

@Ludovic

People who destroy embryos should be charged with first-degree murder? Or at the very least worse than those who torture and murder primates or pets?

To be fair, whatever one’s position on abortion, Qin Shi Huangdi was technically correct in noting that the law concurs that “humans are more important than animals”.

The whole point of the principle of abortion rights is the premise that human fetuses, at least prior to some point in their development, are not equivalent to “humans” per se. They are undeniably a form of human life, but they are not yet human individuals and don’t have all the rights of human individuals.

The (post-fetal) humans who are universally acknowledged as human individuals, on the other hand, do indeed rank higher than non-human animals in the eyes of the (humans’) law.

[Ludovic]

I am not proclaiming that an embryo is a human. I am saying that

they think that their holy book tells them that humans are more important than animals no matter what their size or sapience.

Are you saying that they would not tell you that they believe a Homo sapiens embryo to be a human?

[Kimstu]

@Ludovic

I am not proclaiming that an embryo is a human.

I don’t think I suggested that you were. I was just pointing out, possibly not very clearly, that the beings that the law does recognize as humans are considered in law to be “more important than animals”.

[Richard_Parker]

I agree with everything **Kimstu **has said here about the logical flaws in the argument. However, I would suggest that moral persuasion is not principally about logical consistency. It is much more about emotion and intuition, including often logically contradictory intuitions.

How far has Peter Singer gotten asking why we would jump into the swimming pool wearing an expensive suit to save a child while we wouldn’t spend $10 to save a child in Africa? Not very far, I would suggest, because while the argument is perfectly logical, it does not appeal very strongly to our moral intuitions.

An effort to analogize human fetuses to factory-farmed animals is logically silly, but it has a certain emotional logic that some people find compelling.