Sebastian Holsclaw is a conservative who has put in valiant effort struggling against liberal arguments at CalPundit and elsewhere. He now has his own self-titled blog. He has a post today on abortion, and I think it's worth looking at in detail. Overall, it seems like an honest attempt to present the issue fairly from the pro-life side, although it does have serious problems. (He also had a post the day before with advice for the pro-life movement, which was very good, and of which I can't criticize a word.)
Holsclaw begins by acknowledging that he is pro-life, and therefore won't presume to give pro-choice people advice on how to argue. What he wants to address are pro-choice arguments that he says "poison the well of the debate." By this, I take it to mean that he thinks they obscure real issues or otherwise make rational discussion impossible. His first is the basis for the whole debate (emphasis in original throughout this post):
The debate is not just about private choices, it is also about the personhood of the fetus. I must admit that the framing of 'right to choose' rhetoric is a brilliant coup. But even in fairly hardcore libertarian circles, which is certainly not where most of you travel, there is an understanding that personal choices don't give unlimited permission to hurt third parties. ...
Really this focus on a 'right to choose' plays into a misconception that many Americans have about rights. Rights are often in tension with one another. ...
The right to kill another human being is very tightly controlled. ... Very few choices lead to permissible killing of other people. So the central issue is not that of choice. The central issue is whether or not the fetus is a person with rights protected by the state. If you want an obscuring political slogan, pro-choice is great. If you want to actually talk about abortion policy, choice is a component far less important that the personhood of the fetus.
This is a good exposition of the issue. I agree that focusing on the freedom of the woman to control her own reproduction puts the pro-life side at a big disadvantage. As is pointed out in the comments to his post, however, the answer to the question of whether a 4-month fetus is "alive" in any meaningful sense is hardly clearcut. It might be born if all goes well, or it might spontaneously abort for no discernable reason. It has no way of existing except as supported by the woman's body. While Holsclaw holds out the hope (from his perspective) that the abortion debate will sharply shift public opinion, I think the indeterminacy of whether a fetus is alive will remain largely unresolved. On the other hand, the liberty interest of the woman is clear-cut and well-known. Balance an inchoate life and a real woman's liberty, and I think the woman and the American public will come down on the side of liberty fairly consistently.
Holsclaw also doesn't seem to acknowledge that even if one believes a fetus is alive, there may be good reasons not to require a woman to carry it to term. Nowhere else in our system of law do we require a person to give up the use of their body to directly sustain another's life. Parents are not legally compelled to donate organs or blood to keep a child alive, even if not doing so means the child will certainly die and doing so will certainly prevent them from dying. Why should we treat the abortion case differently?
Holslaw then steps onto what I think is even less firm ground:
Abortion is unrestricted until the very second of actual birth: the life or health exceptions are being abused. It is commonly understood by a vast majority of people that abortions should be allowed when they threaten the life of the mother. ...
Even many liberal states theoretically restrict third trimester abortions except when a continued pregnancy threatens the 'life or health' of the mother. The health part of the clause has been so broadly interpreted as to allow ANY mental distress of ANY intensity to be a 'threat to the health' of the mother. As a result, despite intensive searching, I have not found a single case in the history of legal US abortions where the mother was not able to qualify under such a clause.
Holsclaw is engaging here in a little poisoning of the debate himself. He simply asserts that "the life or health exceptions are being abused." The problem, of course, is that Holsclaw presents no evidence to back up that assertion. Pointing out that he could find no case where the mother was not able to qualify doesn't even begin to address the question. If the mother were not to qualify, how would Holsclaw find out about it? Presumably, a woman would be seeking an abortion from a medical provider who, if the woman did not qualify for a late-term abortion, would turn her down. Are statistics collected in all states on such matters? Has Holsclaw found them? It's not clear.
If such health statistics are not available, then the issue becomes even murkier. Holsclaw would only be able to examine reported court cases for his review of how the law is being enforced. Only a fraction of court cases result in some kind of reported decision. There may be cases Holsclaw is unaware of brought by women seeking late-term abortions that resulted in a denial. And even if there are no such cases, it still does not prove his point. The demand for late term abortions is so low - Holsclaw himself gives the rate of 0.4% of all abortions (which, I estimate, is 0.1% of all pregnancies) - and the medical profession so effective at applying the law that it is very possible no such challenges are ever filed.
The absence of a denial hardly proves Holsclaw's implied point that women are seeking and getting such abortions for frivilous reasons or mere convenience. And the manner in which he argues this point undercuts some of his claim to be attempting to inject reason into a muddied debate.
As an aside, I note that in two longish posts about abortion, Holsclaw uses the word 'women' never and the word 'woman' once, in this sentence: "In the case of abortion a right to choose involves ending the growing life in a woman's body." From a rhetorical standpoint, I can understand why a pro-lifer would avoid addressing the topic of women. But not doing so tends to detract from the power of the argument.
I do like his closing paragraph very much:
Bonus warning to Pro-Life advocates: You can want to restrict abortions. You can want to restrict contraceptive use. You can want to severely restrict welfare. But you can only want two out of the three of those things simultaneously unless you are an uncaring bastard.
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