I think that if the Pope even hinted that he was leaning in that direction, a “heart attack” would soon follow. The Church will not yield that much control to their female followers.
I think there’s too much heat in the conversation in the US. So, sadly, I don’t think any substantive debate is going to change any minds, particularly at the pro-life end, who have been told over and over that it’s a fundamental part of their Christian faith.
You need some of that hot air to dissipate before you could realistically have a debate on the issues.
But, in a hypothetical environment where that happened, then we could talk about what level of consciousness is actually present at an early age of development, that abortion is not explicitly forbidden in the bible (indeed seems to be condoned), and that in a secular society, religious arguments are irrelevant to what is legal or illegal.
Yup. If they actually believed that there was a wholesale slaughter of babies, they wouldn’t simply be against it. They’d have long ago burned every Planned Parenthood to the ground and killed all the abortion doctors.
Obviously there is no argument. Essentially by definition.
They’re pro-birth, not pro-life. Despite countless Bible verses about treating the poor with dignity, providing for the poor and that the poor will always be with you.
In one simple quote, Sister Joan Chittister, O.S.B. sums up so much hypocrisy that we see so often in ‘pro-life’ discussions.
“I do not believe that just because you’re opposed to abortion, that that makes you pro-life. In fact, I think in many cases, your morality is deeply lacking if all you want is a child born but not a child fed, not a child educated, not a child housed. And why would I think that you don’t? Because you don’t want any tax money to go there. That’s not pro-life. That’s pro-birth. We need a much broader conversation on what the morality of pro-life is.”
The article goes on summarizing many other hypocrisies related to this discussion:
- Pro-life crusaders want to shut down women’s healthcare in general. Mothers in poor health are less able to provide adequate living conditions for their children.
- Pro-life crusaders want to repeal the Affordable Care Act which would destroy universal health reforms which protect the needs of millions of children.
- Pro-life crusaders cut government programs like school lunches for children and block government financial aid to families who are homeless and/or in need.
- Pro-life crusaders want children conceived under ALL circumstances to be born. They won’t come forward to adopt children from unplanned pregnancies. This frequently forces those children and their mothers into the lives of hardship that the mother was trying to avoid.
- Pro-life crusaders will not fund the extra care needed for children forced to be born into hardship.
- Pro-life crusaders are usually against funding sex education, which would prevent the need for many abortions.
- Pro-life crusaders continually want to cut access to birth control, which would prevent abortions.
I think if someone went back and changed the New Testament so that it spent more time on being good to your fellow man and charity and less time on abortion, that might change some minds. Especially if someone could go back in time and edit out the parts where Jesus called abortion murder, and when He made abortion the greatest of all sins, worse than greed or infidelity, for example.
Now I haven’t looked at the Bible in over 38 years, (afraid it would burn me) but I don’t recall that part at all? Was that the King James Bible or maybe the Chick Bible?
I know you were joking to make a point
I’m a philosophical pro-lifer–I believe abortion is immoral from a deontological philosophical perspective; while I was raised Catholic I have been an atheist (with some level of virulence at points in my life, although I’ve calmed down a bit), but I think abortion should be broadly legal within some constraints, so in political terminology I am pro-choice.
I have successfully, within the last year in fact, had a conversation with an ardent Pro-Lifer where I didn’t get them to the point where they were “okay” with abortion, but I got them to agree that laws banning abortion probably aren’t the best idea–which to be frank, is probably a more important goal than getting people to agree with you about abortion. Like many of the hardcore pro-abortion-is-great people would find me very frustrating to discuss abortion with, because I have a fairly fleshed out view on why I think abortion is immoral, and it already encapsulates lots of nuance so it’s unlikely you can change my opinion with common gotchas. However I agree abortion should be legal, so do you really need to change my mind? My philosophical opinion hurts no one, and in fact the more people you could create like me the better off you’d be–or the people like the ardent pro-lifer who I got to concede that anti-abortion laws are not good policy.
Some things I think could go a long way in communicating better with pro-lifers:
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Stop leading with your opinion that the only reason someone is pro-life is because they hate women, or are anti-woman. Without discussing it too much, even if your opinion is true, and even if it covers every pro-lifer (I take issue with both beliefs), there’s literally no better way to get them to tune you out. So say it all you want, and be made irrelevant to them. [FWIW I think a lot of these people don’t want to try to change the minds of pro-lifers anyway, so they probably don’t care–but they also probably don’t read threads like these.]
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Don’t point out hypocrisy around people that are against abortion but also against social welfare policies, or who are against abortion but are pro-death penalty, or other common hypocrisies. Believe it or not a lot of people who are anti-abortion/pro-life have actually spent more than five seconds thinking about the difference between capital punishment and abortion–and it’s kind of easy to counter argue that people sentenced to death are adults who received a full criminal trial and appeals, and who were found guilty of very heinous crimes. They’re being compared to fetal human life which isn’t the same thing. The social welfare argument is even weaker, it’s perfectly logical to oppose abortion but also oppose social welfare. You may disagree with it, but it is not a magic gotcha wand.
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Recognize that most people actually have nuanced views on abortion. The public perception on abortion is two hardliner, intractable camps. The reality is the vast majority of people have more nuanced opinions on abortion. There’s plenty of people who vehemently think abortion is wrong for personal moral, or religious reasons, but who also don’t think the government should be criminalizing it. There are plenty of women who are passionately pro-choice, but who would be deeply opposed to the idea of getting an abortion themselves, and would even counsel say, a teenaged daughter to carry to term versus have an abortion. There’s lots of people who have different opinions about abortion based on how far along things are in the pregnancy. Ignoring this nuance makes it hard to communicate with someone on abortion from the “other side.”
So in my conversation with an ardent pro-lifer how did I get him to at least concede that criminalizing abortion was unwise? First, using my own shared moral disapproval for abortion, I created a dialogue in which I could acknowledge his opinion–that he thinks abortion is deeply wrong. But then I segued into–“I also think there’s lots of other things that are immoral, like cheating on a spouse, but is it really government’s job to criminalize things purely on grounds of simple morality?” His response was that killing a baby was a lot different than cheating on a spouse. To which I responded “That’s absolutely true, but it’s just me pointing out that we don’t always criminalize every behavior just because we know that it’s wrong.” At this point the discussion was really getting started, but he was by no means persuaded. I think talked about the history of abortion, about how it has been widely practiced since Ancient times, and while often criminalized, it was a crime that in most cases the authorities turned a deliberate blind eye towards. In late 19th century and early 20th century New York City and London for example, just about any woman who knew anything knew of a “place to go” to get a pregnancy ended. The police almost certainly knew about these places as well. Occasionally, raids would even occur. But the sheer volume of illegal abortions occurring and the low amount of enforcement activities highly suggested society had been in a long term “detente” about abortion. Don’t do it too openly and don’t attract too much attention, and we aren’t going to say anything.
Why is this? Because desperate women, often young and facing serious problems, are going to do desperate things. I then pointed out that prior to Roe v. Wade estimates of illicit abortions ranged from 200k a year to over 1m, which means it’s actually possible that in the years immediately after Roe, the total number of abortions in America did not change all that dramatically, highlighting that while the law reflected society’s opposition to abortion, its weak enforcement highlighted society’s unwillingness to deal with the serious issues underlying abortion.
Finally, I mentioned again that I too, have moral problems with abortion–but that I think the way to solve them is to decrease unwanted pregnancy and to produce an environment in which mother’s feel better able to support a baby. This is when he agreed that it really is more an education than a legal issue, and that while he “likes the idea of the law against abortion being society’s way of saying it is wrong” he understood that in many ways it was bad law that would lead to lots of problems and probably not serve its intended purpose.
This is my summary of what was like an hour long discussion. So there, it’s possible. Can you scale it up? I suspect not. So I don’t really know where that leaves us. A big issue with our politics in America is there are many issues like this where a real discussion could lead to moderation of opinions and views, but no one is willing to have real discussions, at least not at “scale” enough to matter. Everyone wants to be on a team/tribe and to go hard at the other side.
Whoa! Someone took that stuff out? I wonder if they could use that time machine to kill Hitler or something.
Right which is my point. They don’t want to have anything to do with the kid once it’s born, they just want to force the woman to bear it.
It’s punishment for being immoral and having sex outside of marriage. But, if they have to help bear that punishment, too, then they may lay off.
Honestly, if someone is against abortion, then they should be pro-birth control and sex education. Anyone who is pro-life who is against birth control is just about controlling the sex lives of women.
Channeling my inner @Bryan_Ekers, what about if someone pointed out that Canada has no abortion laws at all and they seem to be doing OK as a country. In fact, they have 5 fewer abortions per 1,000 people than the US does, and we have all kinds of draconian abortion laws in huge parts of the US.
(Cite for the abortion rates)
I think that knowing where they are coming from is useful.
If they are for birth control, sex ed, and a robust social safety net, and against abortion, then we have a lot in common. The only difference is whether we think that the govt should enforce our preference on being against abortion. I think a discussion can be had as to whether the govt should be enforcing our preferences on others.
Maybe they change their mind, they probably don’t, but it can be a productive conversation.
If they are against birth control, sex ed, and a robust safety net, then it is not the child’s welfare that they are worried about. It is the woman not having sex outside of marriage. They see her action as being immoral, and believe that pregnancy should be a punishment for her immorality. The welfare of the child is unimportant, as they don’t see the child as a person to be cared for and protected, but instead as something that exists to humiliate, shame, and punish the woman for her immoral behavior. Preventing it from being conceived with birth control or helping to care for it after it is born would entirely defeat the point.
So yes, the former can be talked to, but I don’t really think that there are all that many who haven’t already come over to the “legal and rare” side of the divide. The latter, OTOH, cannot be reasoned with, because abortion is not the issue, control over women is the issue, and discussing abortion is a distraction. In order to make them become OK with abortion, you’d have to make them okay with women having sex outside of marriage, and I don’t see how you can change such a fundamental bias.
As a baseline something a lot of people are unfamiliar with is how much the teen pregnancy and abortion rates have declined.
Teen pregnancy is down to like 16.5 / 1000; in the late 60s it was up at like 96.3 / 1000. Abortion rates at the time of Roe were around 23 / 1000, down to 10.5 / 1000.
Teen pregnancy is not a sole driver of abortion, but certainly is a common reason for them.
I think this excludes an awful lot of alternative points of view. For example, say I was a hardcore libertarian who doesn’t think it’s appropriate for the government to take money from wealthy people to raise the children of the poor, but I’m also a Christian who thinks life begins at conception. There is a big difference between me having a view that it isn’t government’s job to cover the costs of raising a child and thinking it’s okay to kill a child (again in this hypothetical I’m a Christian who views a fetus as a child.)
I think a common reason these points of view get excluded is there’s a broad sense of disbelief that anyone can view a fetus as anything but a soulless clump of jelly. But the reality is even a lot of non-Christians aren’t so dispassionate about fetal life–including plenty of expectant mothers who are devastated by things like miscarriages. There’s also a lot more nuance on this part of abortion than most people want to talk about. A 10 week fetus is a lot different from a 30 week fetus, both in how it looks and the level of humanity a person is inclined to ascribe to it.
Even a less extreme example–someone could favor things like the Child Tax Credit, Children’s Health Insurance, but might oppose expanded social welfare programs. In fact I suspect lots of pro-life Republicans do favor the Child Tax Credit and Children’s Health Insurance–for example some polls show upward of 80% of Republican voters support making sure every child has health insurance coverage. So when you lump someone into this category of “anti-abortion but also anti-social welfare” you have to get a little more down in the weeds. Are they really against all social welfare? Or do they support large portions of the extant social welfare system (which has a number of significant programs that accrue to children–Food Stamps, WIC, the CTC, CHIP etc), or do they just oppose the “current Democrat / Bernie Sanders proposal of the day.” Those are not the same thing.
A change on the religious stance on abortion I feel would be needed. Some authority to say that God defines murder in a way that excludes abortion or defines murder as Jesus did (anger) and work towards the understanding that these women who opt for abortion are frequently the object of anger towards them when they have to make a very hard and very real decision
Anti-abortion sentiment seems to be so strong though among these folks that if some authority figure like Trump or the Pope did say that abortion is OK and everyone should be chill with it, these folks would be likelier to brand those leaders traitors rather than convert to pro-abortionism. (Yes, I know Trump isn’t a religious authority, but he’s often treated like one)
Well yeah, that’s exactly what happened when Trump encouraged his followers to get vaccinated.
Right, even in a strongly hierarchical religion like Catholicism, there is a lot of opposition when the Pope proclaims something people do not like (and this works both ways), liberal Catholics, even including some of the Bishops, were often in states of open rebellion against JPII and Benedict, and conservatives have been so toward Francis for his entire Papacy.
A lot of Trump supporters that I can tell are perfectly fine supporting Trump as long as he supports some core things that are really important to them–specifically making liberals miserable, being anti-woke, and being anti-immigrant, and are happy to just ignore or not care when he disagrees with them on other things. I think one of the few things Trump could do to torpedo his political power would be to come out as an immigration reformer / liberalizer, I think it would cause him to crater to like 15% support in the party. I think he could come out as pro-choice and the hit wouldn’t be nearly as big as long as he promised to keep appointing Federalist Society judges–mainly because I think a lot of the religious people who support Trump already have reconciled the idea he isn’t a “moral leader.”
Well, sure, but libertarians always want to have it both ways and don’t understand how society or government works.
If they want to mandate that women have these children, then there is a cost to society. If they don’t want to pay that cost, then they shouldn’t mandate that women have these children. Otherwise, their actions are to assuage their own moral guilt over knowing that someone is doing something that they disapprove of, but they are not doing it for the benefit of the children themselves.
It’d be like a libertarian thinking that we should lock people up for jaywalking, but refusing to pay for the prisons to house them.
Not surprising that a libertarian would hold this kind of view, but that’s because they usually have impractical or unworkable ideas, but that’s completely separate from the abortion debate.
That’s a bit of straw. Many of us see it as much more than a soulless clump of jelly. We see it as a non-sentient group of cells that, in the right conditions and environment, could grow up to be a person.
Right, but that’s because they had hopes and dreams for that group of cells. I’m entirely against forced abortion. Anyone who wants to keep their child should be able to keep their child.
Well, yes, but pro-lifers don’t ascribe that nuance. They say the moment the sperm hits the egg, it should be afforded all the rights as a fully grown human.
Well, you are mixing two groups here willy nilly, and I don’t think that they should be. Not all Republicans are pro-life, so showing what percentage of Republicans favor these programs means nothing. You need to break it down to actual pro-lifers in order for it to have any relevance.
Also, as I already said there are different reasons to be pro-life, and I was talking about the pro-lifers who are against helping to take care of the child once it is born.
But, while we are at it, children’s health insurance is pretty crap, I know people who have kids on it. It’s better than nothing, but not by a whole lot. The child tax credit helps a little bit, but it’s certainly not going to feed or clothe a child. It’s more of a subsidy to the middle class than a safety net for the poor.
The social safety net as is barely functions, and doesn’t function at all for quite a number of people. So, if you support the status quo, then you aren’t really caring all that much about the children who are born to those most likely to get abortions, you just don’t want them to get abortions. Many would like to see what we do have cut further. Tell me, would you rather pay less taxes, or have children you don’t know get health care, education, housing and food?
So no, unless you actually support a solid social safety net, and nevermind your little snide “current Democrat / Bernie Sanders proposal of the day.”, then the reason that you are against abortion is not because you care about the welfare of the child.
This post is a good example when someone asks “What would it take to make pro-lifers become OK with abortion?” The answer is send anyone other than @k9bfriender to talk to them about it. You start with a pre-disposition to having the most negative possible view of the pro-lifer position in every single point you outline. As I said, most people aren’t interested in having a discussion with people who disagree with them. The idea of a pro-lifer who is in favor of at least some social safety net for children is uncomfortable to the biases you want to serve, so you dismiss it even though logically there are certainly pro-life Republicans who favor programs like SNAP, WIC, CHIP etc. What number is hard to say, but they certainly exist. In fact many evangelical Christians lean more towards social safety net programs than libertarian Republicans (and libertarian Republicans are less likely to be all that concerned about abortion, most of them have limited philosophical conviction about abortion and are simply content to trade away abortion rights transactionally as part of a policy to curry evangelical votes.)
Also you note you are “talking about the pro-lifers who are against helping to take care of the child once it is born”, what % of pro-lifers would you assume are against any help at all for a young child? I actually think very few Republicans, if put to the test, would say “throw the baby out into the street to starve.” It’s almost like you aren’t interested in having a discussion about abortion where you take time to consider the position of someone else and try to integrate acknowledgement of their views as part of a conversational strategy to change their minds perhaps on some element of abortion policy.
Instead you are quite content to be part of the two team system. You want to limit your discussion to “obvious hypocrite” pro-life people because it is more convenient, and I suspect more enjoyable, for you to talk about that than to have to consider more nuanced and difficult questions. You also conflate the idea of “believing the moment the sperm hits the egg, it should be afforded all the rights as a fully grown human” with the entirety of pro-life people, which is factually not true. There are actually many ways in which most pro-life people do not ascribe a fertilized embryo the same rights as a human infant. This also ignores that frankly some people who identify as pro-life support keeping Roe in place, which I suspect also undermines the way you’d prefer to think about the issue.
We know that roughly 40% of Americans want abortion to be “illegal in most cases”, but something like 75% do not want Roe v Wade overturned. From a Marist poll:
At the end of the day there is certainly nothing against just wanting to play team ball–I personally don’t find such people terribly interesting to discuss things with, because well, I don’t need to, right? People that just want to play the part of their team–I already know what they are going to say. Literally your entire post could have been copied and pasted from innumerable other people on your “team” who say the exact same thing. And that’s fine, there’s no requirement to be different, and if it represents your beliefs and desires, more power to you. However the thread was about “what would it take to make pro-lifers become OK with abortion”, and I had an actual incident in my personal life where I talked a pro-lifer into at least being okay with abortion being left up to personal conscience as opposed to the criminal courts being involved. My theory is that you can sway people like that, and you can’t do it by attacking them with an assumption that they are fundamental dishonest hypocrites. But some people just really want to attack people they don’t like as dishonest hypocrites–which again, perfectly fine, just not super interesting to me (I can consume “performative outrage” at various political groups in any number of places, sometimes performed by professionals, so there’s obviously a demand for that sort of thing.) But I do think such behavior has basically no place in the “art of persuasion.”
I’ve heard salesmen talk about making your first sale as being “akin to losing your virginity” and making a sale is akin to getting someone to have sex with you. I think the reason for that is because there’s a sort of psycho-social element to sales that is actually quite like that. In finding a sexual partner you’re putting yourself out there and trying to do it in a way that someone will reciprocate interest, as a professional salesman you’re trying to leverage your interpersonal skills and the details about your product and customer to close a deal. In many ways I believe the art of persuasion is very similar to these activities, or even a superset of those activities. What has almost no place in hooking up, making a sale, or persuading someone to change their opinion is the practice of “getting angry they don’t agree with your first take and then telling them how terrible they are.” When I see people who are only capable of pulling out the trite old arguments about abortion where they only want to talk about “bad pro-lifers” who hate women (and then won’t really say what % of pro-lifers they think that represents, but it’s vaguely suggested it could be all of them–who knows they’ll say, they don’t have the data), that’s what I’m seeing, someone who isn’t interested in persuading, only in bludgeoning someone in the head because you dislike that they disagree with you.