Investigating the Devils We Know

-- By PaulinaSalmas - 27 Feb 2010

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.

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.

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.

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.