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< | | | | Investigating the Devils We Know | |
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< | -- By PaulinaSalmas - 27 Feb 2010 | >
> | -- By PaulinaSalmas - 16 May 2010
Popular response to the stories of John Brown and Joseph Stack illustrate how easy it is to focus so narrowly on immorality of killing that the context in which the killer acted is ignored. When a person dies, the killer is often vilified as a soulless demon; entire news shows are devoted to this theme. In abortion-related killings, this stigma is particularly dangerous because it conceals the otherwise innocuous factors that contributed to the crime.
In 2009, Scott Roeder murdered abortion doctor George Tiller, believing that the killing might save some of the approximately 820,000 “preborn children” (as Roeder referred to them) that are aborted every year. It was not the devil that provoked Roeder to kill, though this is the conclusion that other pro-life activists, discomfited by the violence, would endorse. Rather, Roeder was simply bringing pro-life rhetoric to its logical conclusion. Pro-life activists sentimentalize the unborn until, according to their mythology, a torpid, globular fetus is the equivalent of a plump, beatific infant. The abortion procedure is similarly embellished: this miracle creature is ripped from the womb by sadistic doctors that torture it to death as it gasps for air. To pro-lifers, abortion is war, holocaust, and genocide committed on defenseless infants. Surely, from this point of view, a person that attempts to stop such a widespread murder of innocents should be hailed as a hero. Pro-lifers have constructed a rhetorical platform based on the idea that abortion is murder. From there, righteous homicide is only a step away. Because Tiller performed late-term abortions using procedures that , his practice fit neatly into the pro-life narrative.
Like Stack, Roeder became affiliated with a group whose message misled him (perhaps coincidentally, Roeder also attempted to avoid paying his taxes on Constitutional grounds). Demonizing Roeder for Tiller’s death absolves more moderate pro-life activists of responsibility. Though they argue that abortion is murder and that fetuses are children, most pro-lifers do not know how to translate these supposed truths into criminal law. A woman that conspired with a doctor to murder her five-year-old would be universally condemned, but most pro-lifers are unsure of how to punish a woman that elects to have an abortion. This is because pro-lifers’ conception of abortion’s immorality cannot keep pace with the direness of their rhetoric. The average pro-life stance rests on a sentimental conception of fetuses, distrust of female sexual autonomy, and perhaps a little religious fervor. This translates into a general feeling that abortion is wrong, but it does not carry most pro-lifers to the conclusion that women who seek abortions should receive a jail sentence, let alone that their doctors should be executed. However, Roeder took the message at face value and carried out the justice that he believed the law could not. Instead of stigmatizing Roeder as a criminal anomaly and allowing moderate pro-lifers to distance themselves from his actions, we should recognize how similar his beliefs are to the mainstream movement. If pro-lifers cannot wholly endorse Roeder’s actions, they need to abandon the dramatic rhetoric that declares that abortion is murder. Absent this rationale, pro-lifers will be forced to examine what truly motives their beliefs.
Recently, a seventeen-year-old paid a man $150 to beat her because she wanted to miscarry. Instead of inquiring into the circumstances that made her feel that soliciting a beating from a stranger was her best option, many were outraged that there was no law under which she could be convicted. That was remedied when the governor of Utah signed a bill that allows pregnant women who arrange illegal abortions to be charged with homicide. | | | | |
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< | When faced with questions of death and poverty, many cling to simple solutions which avoid the measured explanations that might lead to uncomfortable revelations about powerful people and celebrated ideologies. Dramatizing this tendency in his poem “Dope,” Amiri Baraka facetiously eliminates capitalism, the police, the wealthy, and Jimmy Carter as potential sources of human pain, concluding instead that it “must be the devil.” Indeed, when a person dies, a common reaction is to vilify the killer as a soulless demon; entire news shows are devoted to this theme. John Brown and Joseph Stack were popularly vilified at the expense of informed analysis, but abortion-related crimes are also likely to inspire squeamishness and vacillation. | >
> | Perhaps the woman that inspired this bill was a selfish sadomasochist that enjoyed her fetus’s suffering. However, it is more likely that, unable to secure the parental consent that is required in Utah for an abortion, she attempted to terminate her pregnancy in the only way her desperation suggested to her. It is also likely that she became pregnant in the first place because she was uninformed about contraception due to the abstinence-only education that Utah mandates. Legal restrictions on sex education and access to abortion in Utah contributed to the situation that this woman found herself in. Creating exceptions to the parental notification law or introducing comprehensive sex education in schools would reduce these hurdles so that such a situation would be less likely to happen again. However, Rep. Carl Wimmer, after learning that the seventeen-year-old could not be punished under any existing law, instead introduced the abovementioned bill that would sentence future offenders to fifteen years to life. In an interview, he stated, “We should not make excuses for a woman who decides to beat her 7-month unborn child.” | | | | |
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< | I won’t suggest that we automatically sympathize with every accused wrongdoer, an admirable goal that would require Christlike levels of saintliness to execute. I certainly cannot read a newspaper without encountering some malefactor or another that I would love to see fry. (Nicholas Sparks, who recently criticized Blood Meridian as “pulpy,” is at the top of the list. In a perfect world, hypocrisy of this kind would be a capital offense.) However, we would be immeasurably fairer to those accused of crimes if we could suspend our judgment until we are capable of reaching a principled conclusion. The stigma attached to criminals should be eliminated because it is not only unfair, but it also irrationally obscures larger issues. | >
> | By analogizing the illegal abortion to child abuse, Wimmer tapped into same narrative that the pro-life position in general thrives on: that fetuses are children and abortion is murder. This is likely intentional, considering that Wimmer is an opponent of abortion whose stated goal is to see Roe v. Wade overturned. But this kind of sentiment is immeasurably more harmful to both teenage girls and fetuses than it is to Roe. To peg the offender as a child abuser makes her actions seem alien, even though in a more humane, medical context what she was attempting would have been recognizable as an abortion and a legitimate exercise of her constitutional rights. Few people are willing to identify with a child abuser, but if people were willing to view her in a more compassionate light the flaws in the system that led her to the choice that she made would be better illuminated. | | | | |
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< | In 2009, Scott Roeder murdered abortion doctor George Tiller, believing that the killing might save some of the approximately 820,000 “preborn children” (as Roeder referred to them) that are aborted every year. It was not the devil that provoked Roeder to kill, though this is that conclusion that other pro-life activists, discomfited by the violence, would endorse. Rather, Roeder was simply bringing pro-life rhetoric to its logical conclusion. Pro-life activists sentimentalize the unborn until, according to their mythology, a torpid, globular fetus is equivalent to a plump, beatific infant. The abortion procedure is similarly embellished: this miracle creature is ripped from the womb by sadistic doctors that torture it to death as it gasps for air. To pro-lifers, abortion is war, holocaust, and genocide, and its victims are defenseless infants. Surely, from this point of view, a person that attempts to stop such a widespread murder of innocents should be hailed as a hero. Pro-lifers have constructed a rhetorical platform based on the idea that abortion is murder. From there, righteous homicide is only a step away. | >
> | Barriers to abortion and sex education and the exaggeration of abortion’s moral import foment crimes like those described above. Stigmatizing the offenders as monstrous people whose murderous plans were concocted independently and not at all socially influenced does nothing to prevent the same crimes from occurring again. | | | | |
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< | Like Stack, Roeder became affiliated with a group whose message misled him (perhaps coincidentally, Roeder also attempted to avoid paying his taxes on Constitutional grounds). Demonizing Roeder for Tiller’s death absolves more moderate pro-life activists of responsibility. Pro-lifers argue that abortion is murder, but the word “murder” is left undefined. A woman that conspired with a doctor to murder her five-year-old would be universally condemned, but even most pro-lifers are unsure how to punish a woman that elects to have an abortion. This is because even the pro-lifers’ conception of abortion’s immorality cannot keep pace with the direness of their rhetoric. The average pro-life stance rests on a sentimental conception of fetuses, distrust of female sexual autonomy, and perhaps a little religious fervor. This translates to a general feeling that abortion is wrong, but, it does not carry most pro-lifers to the conclusion that women that seek abortions should receive a jail sentence, let alone that their doctors should be executed. However, Roeder took the message at face value and carried out the justice that the law could not. Instead of stigmatizing Roeder as a criminal anomaly and allowing moderate pro-lifers to distance themselves from his actions, we should recognize how similar his beliefs are to the mainstream movement. If pro-lifers cannot wholly endorse Roeder’s actions, they need to abandon the dramatic rhetoric that declares that abortion is murder. Absent this rationale, pro-lifers will be forced to examine what truly motivates their beliefs.
This argument would be more effective if it acknowledged that Dr Tiller's practice was especially controversial because he performed legal late-term abortions, including ones using surgical techniques that are readily sensationalized into depictions of something that most human beings recognize as homicide.
Of course, some pro-lifers that wholly believe the abortion-is-murder message express their feelings through less violent channels. Recently, a seventeen-year-old paid a man $150 to beat her because she wanted a miscarriage. Instead of inquiring into the circumstances that made this girl feel that soliciting a beating from a stranger was her best option, many were outraged that there was no law that could convict her. This month, that was remedied when the governor of Utah signed a bill that allows pregnant women who arrange illegal abortions to be charged with homicide.
Perhaps the woman that inspired this bill was a selfish sadomasochist that enjoyed her fetus’s suffering. However, it is more likely that, unable to secure the parental consent that is required in Utah, she elected to terminate her pregnancy in the most effective way possible.
Not, as you know, a
particularly safe or effective method of securing abortion.
Perhaps you mean to say in the only way her desperation suggested to
her.
If the legislature was truly concerned with fetal suffering, it would repeal the parental consent law so that teenagers could receive safe, timely abortions.
That doesn't follow, any
more than it would follow to say that everyone concerned with
end-of-life suffering should therefore want to repeal laws against
euthanasia. This assertion is an attempt to go around all the
obvious objections, and it obviously doesn't
work.
However, instead of recognizing their own culpability, the legislature threw up their hands and blamed it on the devil, assuming that the woman was motivated by sadism when a principled inquiry would most likely indicate a person desperate to overcome state-sanctioned barriers to abortion.
That's not in the
record, and it isn't likely to be true. The legislature of a
Mormon-majority province is likely to regard all killing of unborn
children as a culpable act, which should be forcefully deterred.
That may indeed be a position that takes strong support from shared
religious belief. But unless it is a proposition so general as to be
universally applicable, such that the legislature is also blaming the
devil when it criminalizes especially reckless driving, or negligent
homicide—in which case it has nearly no explanatory
value—the statement here, which supposedly rests on an
assertion about what the legislature thought a particular
individual's motives were as a basis for passing a general
prospective statute, is hard if not impossible to defend.
Perhaps it seems indefensible to value the ephemeral positive qualities of a particular person when the cold number of his body count haunts the background, but to love anything is to compartmentalize. I love my friends despite their obnoxious habits; I love certain sixteenth century authors despite the occasional bigotry in their work. I even love my collection of shoes, which tear up my feet and haven’t yet acquired the sentience to appreciate my affection. If I refused to associate with anything but that which is morally pristine, I would have to disown my friends, gut my library and wear only sensible flats. Most people, I’m sure, engage in similar balancing acts. Surely we could afford to extend this courtesy to people caught in complex situations and in more dire need of our understanding.
In the end, despite the
disclaimers, the essay is solidly in the vein of "tout comprendre,
c'est tout pardonner." Whether it is rhetorically wise to discuss if
abortion is murder in an essay that concludes with a digression on
your "love" for shoes I leave to your better editorial judgment. In
a more general sense, I think it is important to be careful not to
trivialize. The claim at the bottom of this, as of most similar
arguments, is that we understand others' human situations too
shallowly, and impose judgment hastily and callously as a result.
(This is not quite the same as the Christian semi-belief that those
who have sinned should not be quick to cast stones at other sinners.)
Such an argument is fatally undercut by any sign of shallowness or
levity of judgment in its own rhetoric. | | | \ No newline at end of file | |
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