A pregnant woman in Alabama (Marshae Jones) gets in a fight with another woman, who shoots her (apparently in self-defense). The fetus dies. The (formerly) pregnant woman is charged with manslaughter for failing to fully defend the life of the fetus by keeping herself and her fetus out of harm's way. This is precisely the kind of Handmaid's Tale consequence of fetus-equals-full-person legislation that pro-choice activists have warned about. Blogger Echidne of the Snakes lays out those concerns well. If a pregnant woman is to avoid getting into fights or risk being prosecuted, she writes,
She probably shouldn't drink alcohol, either, or smoke tobacco. She probably shouldn't go scuba diving or mountain climbing, she shouldn't travel to dangerous places, and she probably shouldn't be allowed to be in the military or the police or the fire brigade. What if she goes out alone, at night, in a potentially dangerous area? What if she eats too much tuna? Fails to take folic acid?Moreover:
Because any fertile woman is potentially pre-pregnant, and because pregnancy is invisible to outsiders in the early stages, this way of thinking can easily slide into the policing of all women between the ages of, say, ten and fifty, including keeping them away from dangerous occupations and hobbies and scrutinizing every miscarriage for possible evidence of a homicide.I've heard radio shows debating fetal personhood in which callers poo-pooed pro-choice slippery slope arguments as silly. A pregnant mother charged with manslaughter for accidental fetal death? That's alarmist. Can we stay on topic here? Yet here (see the comments) we see pro-lifers actively defending this very case. Once you define a woman (or any pregnancy-capable human) as primarily a vessel/servant for someone else, you guarantee they'll be treated as tools, not as people.
I'm hard pressed to imagine any encounter with a supporter of this case that doesn't end in me screaming. This isn't a failure of patriotic empathy. I get their logic. I can articulate their rationale in ways I bet pro-lifers would agree with. I just find that logic deeply scary and morally abhorrent. (And yes, I also get that pro-personhood folk think the same about my point of view about the non-personhood of fertilized eggs, zygotes, blastocysts, embryos, etc.) And I'm not even someone who'd ever be in danger of being forced to be pregnant or of being charged with failure to protect an unborn person I'm carrying.
In this situation, I can see how repellent the thought of a Better Angels-type workshop or debate about this issue with the other side might be. Yet--when the internal, WHAT THE ABSOLUTE HELL screaming in me dies down--I can remember this last weekend when I did participate in a fishbowl-style discussion of abortion and reproductive rights. The take-away there was that most reds (at least those represented in that exercise) weren't on board with full fetal personhood. They had pretty nuanced views (though still well to the right of mine).
I could imagine those reds reacting with concern about this case (as do a few commenters at that RedState article). In the Better Angels workshop I participated in, I saw real, intra-red tension between the moderate reds and the lone red who stalwartly defended fetal personhood. That person seemed painfully aware of their view's minority status in the pro-life movement, prefacing their arguments with a weary, "I know most people on my side think I go to far, but..." I wonder how that exercise would unfold in light of this week's news.
Of course, that hypothetical is of little comfort to Marshae Jones and other pregnancy-capable people in Alabama. They're stuck with a nightmare legal regime. Who cares if that regime seems nakedly dystopian from the perspective of most of the rest of the country? It's still happening right now, to indisputably actual (not potential) human beings. That reality makes arguing for civil conversations between reds and blues on this issue complicated.
And abortion is just one such topic. The how-can-this-be-happening concentration camp situation at the US/Mexico border, the mass-extinction-level threat of global warming, the ongoing systemic oppression/incarceration/murder of black and brown people--all of these are emergencies that demand immediate responses. Actions, not words. Decisiveness, not deliberation.
At what point does the call to discuss respectfully and disagree accurately about these emergencies become an indefensible distraction from the emergency itself?
I'll try thinking through some answers in tomorrow's post,
JF
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