Not Quite the Thing

A listener to my Radio Derb podcast had this to say:

Why you won’t ever be Rush [Limbaugh] is, I think, pretty simple; you are not “pro-life.” I just don’t think the Right Over Here is willing to make room for you. As a Christian, I think the movement to outlaw the death penalty in conjunction with the movement to kill pre-born children (yes, including embryos), is the surest evidence that “The West” is finished. Without a firm popular regard for justice — meaning in-kind punishment for the guilty and protection of the innocent — civilization, as we “knew it” is dead. I know you don’t agree with this, but I certainly hope that my simple analysis of your place in the conservative pantheon is incorrect. In my view, one of the true marks of the Right …  is the freedom to disagree with your allies — something missing from all totalitarian dogmas, such as modern “liberalism.”

The first part is correct, I think. The whole “right to life” business is over my head. I don’t even understand what it means. If I fall down the basement steps and break my neck tomorrow, what happened to my “right to life”? I do of course have the legal right to expect that, if somebody wilfully kills me, he will be punished (by the death penalty, if it’s up to me — no inconsistency here!) I’d extend the same privilege to a new-born baby. Back beyond that — five minutes, or five months before the baby is born — the mother is rather intimately involved (and the father somewhat less so), and you are in a different situation.

I have no patience with the angels-on-pin-heads logic-chopping about “when life begins.” (Though I like the answer a biologist friend once gave: “Life begins in the Pre-Cambrian Epoch …” You have to think about it a minute.) Without a moral metaphysic and a belief in ensoulment, neither of which I have, it’s all hot air.

The killing of embryos and fetuses is intrinsically disturbing and disgusting to normal people, including me. As with other such acts — the eating of corpses, for example — an organized society needs some consensus, embodied in law, about what may and may not be done; though also (I’d argue) an understanding that that consensus is founded on nothing but those widespread common emotions — disturbance and disgust. I’d guess that most people in today’s U.S.A. would settle for unconditional abortion up to 12 weeks, conditional abortion up to 20, severely conditional thereafter. Whatever the consensus is, let’s settle on it and enforce the laws.

I disagree with my reader’s fourth sentence, though. (“Without a firm popular regard” etc.) Worthy and admirable civilizations can co-exist with all sorts of attitudes to fetuses, and even to newborns. The ancient Athenians exposed unwanted babies on the Acropolis. Were they not civilized? Abortion has been a human universal everywhere, among civilizations high and low, and also among primitives. (Geoff Blainey notes it in his history of the Aborigines.)

And what do the right-to-lifers want? A total nationwide ban on all abortions, at any time? Yes, that seems to be what they want. Do they really imagine that’s going to happen? What a waste of political energy!

My reader is correct, though. If you’re not in lockstep with the right-to-lifers, you’re never really quite the thing in U.S. conservative circles. It’s a marker of acceptability. I was phone-in guest on a radio show recently. Waiting for the on-air, some glitch allowed me to overhear the two hosts talking behind the commercial break. “Funny sort of conservative,” said one. “I mean, he’s OK with abortion …?” Yep, I’m OK with it. Sorry, guy.

I doubt there’s anything that can be done about this. I wish, though, that some of the time and energy that conservatives give to thinking about fetuses could be diverted to real problems of governance. As a political prospect, the anti-abortion crusade is just Prohibition redux; as a social phenomenon, it’s off-puttingly cultish (to me, and to a lot of people who might otherwise be more sympathetic to conservatism); as an intellectual construct, it loses most of its point once you drop ensoulment. Yes, I know the arguments to the contrary. I never heard a non-believer make them, though.