Seán Mac Críodáin wrote:

I think only a minority of the people who think abortion should be legal, and even of the people who think it should be not only legal but made cheap, easy and shameless, are, strictly speaking, "pro-abortion". The impression I get is that most of the "pro-choice" crowd regards it as a lesser evil to the alternatives. This isn't a meaningless distinction, because it's the same distinction by which a person who believes a certain war should be waged because it is just is not, therefore, simply "pro-war".

Well, I think that the context 'pro-X' is ambiguous. The naive reading (which culture warriors sometimes tendentiously adopt even though it's clearly wrong) is that someone who is pro-X thinks X is unqualifiedly good and worth promoting all the time. Generally the terms don't mean that. Pro-lifers don't think there is an obligation to increase the population size as much as possible; they also don't think that all lives (like beetle lives, say) have to be protected the way human lives are. Similarly for pro-choicers: they don't think anything that is a choice is good and beyond critique; perhaps some would say that all choices, qua choices, are good, but I doubt many would say even that.

There's no rule for how someone who is pro-X regards X; 'pro-X' will just be a label that identifies people as subscribing to some set of principles and bearing such and such commitments. Once we know what X is, we might be able to generalize a bit about what those principles and commitments are, but the relationship will be culturally relative, since 'pro-X' is a label of convenience.

People who are pro-choice are pro-a-certain-kind-of-choice. 'Pro-abortion' is an appropriate label, I think, even for those who regard abortions as a somewhat unfortunate thing; they do favor permitting abortion when there are others who would like to see it eliminated. I don't think 'pro-abortion' is really a pejorative label, though, because I don't think the context 'pro-X' has any consistent set of rules associated with it. In other words, it is not necessarily the case that X is to pro-X as Y is to pro-Y.

Last edited by Greg (3/30/2016 5:22 pm)

DanielCC wrote:

Personally I think the term 'Pro-Choice' is stupid, a flagrant attempt to change the subject to some alleged debate re womans rights.
 

This is true, but you do get such people who claim not to care whether a fetus is a person or not; they think it is a woman's body and she always be able to choose, no matter what. Many of them seem to be in academia. Such people are closer to actually being pro-choice. Of course, they are only pro-choice in terms of the mother and her rights to abortion. They ignore the baby and, although the term pro-choice seems to imply a general approach to managing social interaction, they aren't necessarily always for the maximum autonomy.  

 ​And, although it may be unfair to tar all pro-choicers with the same brush, another reason I'm sceptical of the label is that when pro-choicers become dominant, they have a tendency to want the taxpayer to fund abortions. This is certainly the case in Britain and Australia - they act with outrage if free and easy access is not available. No doubt they'd try and draw up some kind of distinction, but for me it looks like rank hypocrisy to talk about how women should be able to make up their own minds about such delicate moral issues, but then expect others to pay for the abortion no matter what their moral views are.
 

Seán Mac Críodáin wrote:

In theory, no, it isn't a pejorative, and yet, it is, so much so that very few people are willing to apply it to themselves, and they'll get offended if you do so. That ought to be a clue as to the moral status of abortion, eh?

Well, I think it's true that people regard it as pejorative and don't want to apply it to themselves. Part of the reason is that there is an (false) conceit that the person who is pro-choice regards choice like the person who is pro-abortion regards abortion. But these may not be exactly analogous.

Parallel: Pro-lifers aren't huge fans of the labels 'anti-abortion' or 'anti-choice'. I don't mind them though. I don't mind being anti-choice if that means being opposed to the choice that is referred to in the term 'pro-choice'.

In short, I would like to do away with all these labels and conduct discussions in ways that presuppose less about people's motives, without lumping together potentially disparate positions. It's a fantasy, for sure.

Moonfall wrote:

The difficulty is, I think, more fundamental than labels. The folks who think abortion is a reasonable choice to make generally do not believe that a fetus is human.

I think the disagreement is certainly more fundamental than labels. The labels, though, become over-reified. Taken as names of groups (in fact broad coalitions), they make a lot of sense; taken as "phrases" that describe people's ideological positions, they don't make sense, although people sometimes treat them as such. So pro-lifers are sometimes critiqued for being hypocrites for supporting the death penalty or for not being vegetarians. But this is just to take a label too seriously. There might be some inconsistency here, but it depends on what the particular pro-lifer believes.

Moonfall wrote:

Furthermore, the position is exacerbated by confusion with the legal categories. For instance, it can be rationally argued that Roe v. Wade was correctly decided because the Constitution provides its protections to those "born or naturalized" in the US. No mention of the unborne. So the only parties before the court were the individual Jane Roe and the state.

Well, this point would be far from sufficient for showing Roe to be correctly decided. That the Fourteenth Amendment does not apply to fetuses does not imply that states cannot restrict abortion access however much they want. The additional claim to a right to privacy is necessary.

In any case, it would be odd if it were unconstitutional for states to prevent American citizens from doing whatever they want with non-citizens, since the latter are not covered by the Fourteenth Amendment. It would also be inconsistent; the Court ruled that abortion may be restricted in the third trimester, though such fetuses also have not been born or naturalized.

Your general point is correct: one can distinguish legal from moral arguments, and one can argue that abortion should be legal (either absolutely, or in the American political context) even if one thinks it is immoral. I think Roe's credentials are pretty tenuous, and I think the sort of living constitutionalism on which it depends is contrary to constitutional rule of law--but these are all things about which one can have arguments.