You know the story: Alabama, Georgia, Missouri and other states are competing for the strictest anti-abortion laws in recent memory. “Heartbeat bills” are rising, and millennials and younger that grew up only knowing the safety of Roe v. Wade fear its inevitable overturn. Pelosi clarifies that one does not have to be pro-choice to run Democrat. The pot of left-of-center young adults that gradually bubbles socialist renounces centrism for failing to fight this reinvigorated war on women and reproductive rights. The leftists want to kill more children, and face no timely restrictions at all on turning their womb into a uterine death chamber. Also, this is all Trump’s fault.
Or so everyone is saying about each other.
Of all the hot issues where the principle of charity is ceremoniously burnt alive in public theater, abortion stands out as the most sulfuric: “old white Christian men” want to “control women’s bodies” and make them “sexually subservient to the law” by “setting us centuries back”; alternatively, “irresponsible juveniles” want to “have sex without any consequences” by getting “abortion on-demand” and “killing babies at will.” In reality, the pro-life camp is a wide demographic pool, male and female, theist and atheist, old and young, white and not, that doesn’t give a fuck about what you do — in fact, they really seem to just not want to hear about it — as long as you’re not killing children (in their eyes), and the pro-choice people are motivated, in their most vocal advocates, by stories not of free love and reckless abandon but horror, shame, pain, trauma over their experiences with abortion in its current shackles… (in their eyes).
People are good, mostly, but the most antagonistic and moronic take the spotlight instead of the good faith representatives. Abortion is a debate between two people that hate each other but don’t have a shared language to reconcile their differences. And like the rest of political warfare, the fractures build new pits in the bipartisan schism; if abortion is Ares, then racism and sexism are its Phobos and Deimos.
Although I lean heavily on the side of choice, my peers expose their bubble by labeling some of the recent proposed litigation as “extreme.” None of it is extreme with sympathy to the opposing worldview. To the other side, we, the people with “the right ideas,” have had it extremely in our favor for a long time.
Texas recently introduced a bill transitively allowing the death penalty for women who get abortions (by allowing the conviction of homicide, which can be issued the death penalty in Texas). The pro-choice reaction to this is disbelief, a harbinger of a new Dark Ages, domestic terrorism by conservatives: extremism. I had a fruitful conversation on Facebook about the fringeness of this belief. It’s not fringe of a position at all, accepting basic tenets of the pro-life philosophy.
Anti-abortionists consider abortion to be murder, and thus their reaction to abortion should, logically, be consistent with their reaction to murder. This should be true for moral and legal questions both before and after abortion. Opposition to the death penalty is mostly about jurisprudence — it takes in many factors that supervene on a million things without the slightest relation to abortion — but moral equivalencies are not.
So, IF abortion is homicide, and IF homicides can be justifiably prevented by killing the would-be murderer, THEN abortions can be justifiably prevented by killing the abortion doctor or mother to intervene.
Further, IF abortion is homicide, and IF homicides are morally punishable with the death penalty after due process, THEN abortions are morally punishable with the death penalty in the court of law.
It’s not necessary to be pro-life and require the death penalty or self-defensive killing when it comes to abortion, but it is consistent with other basic premises that many people hold. It is not extremist.
Now, there can be lots of exceptions to the conditional premises above (killing to prevent a homicide might not always be justified, etc.), but I sincerely doubt pro-lifers accept the common ones — e.g., if I wanted to kill my vegetative spouse because I don’t feel like I could take care of her, that won’t earn me any sympathies and, consistently, should not in the analogous case of abortion (accepting the premises above…).
More pro-life people should, therefore, argue the morality of murdering abortion doctors and would-be mothers; they should also see the death penalty as reasonable if they think the death penalty is already reasonable in the case of mens rea homicide. Abortion, if murder, fits homicidal criteria like premeditation, etc. If someone who is pro-life disagrees that he needs to take this stance because the question of abortion is so socially conflicted, then it probably means he himself is actually conflicted.
Posting thoughts on abortion should be more like encouraging discussion and less like summoning Cenobites. The “extremist” pro-life position outlined above that has started to surface is not “extremist” at all; it’s part of a consistent Weltanschauung completely different than mine own. The more accepted view, the Roe v. Wade decision, appears extremist to the others.
We should all seek to understand our interlocutors as fellow pilgrims on the same journey toward truth, all of us stuck applying archaic moral and scientific categories onto new problems of autonomy, all of us quietly trying to pass a conch while the megaphone of Twitter opinion screams on. Maybe the above conclusions place pro-life into a reductio, or maybe it prompts pro-choice into a more “extreme” logical position to counter. Either way, we’d be better for it, seeing each others’ views as parts of a foreign and strange, but concrete, whole, instead of the fevered, conspiratorial plans of a hostile enemy.
Notes On Liberty 
Really good post, Mr. Rein. It’s truly astonishing how many pro-choicers (more often of the progressive variety than libertarian) ascribe evil intentions to pro-lifers. My cynical side knows, of course, that it’s more politically advantageous to label the opposition as “extreme,” that they’re soldiers of the patriarchy bent on controlling women’s bodies, than to simply acknowledge that pro-lifers have a different definition of when personhood ought to be recognized. (Good-faith pro-abortion protest signs aren’t quite as eye-catching as “no uterus no opinion”).
Exactly how I feel.
Here is what I find funny about the whole deal. For decades since Roe v. Wade Pro-Life people have been rather abolitionist. No abortions, never, ever, ever. Well, maybe if the child is a result of Rape or Incest and maybe if the woman’s life is in danger. That’s been the position.
Now they say “Until a fetal heartbeat can be detected.” This is HUGE! They are offering a compromise. They are willing to discuss a cut off point. They are giving women who are irresponsibly sexually active time to get their inconvenient problem dealt with. A massive shift in their position. Now is the time for the Pro-Abortion people to come in with a counter offer, like say first trimester or some other easily understood milestone and come up with a compromise on the when you can no longer have an abortion.
But no. They don’t come to the table with a compromise offer. They name call and post memes that insult the people who are pro-life. My least favorite is the guy in KKK robes with the words “Welcome to Talibama!” in huge letters over his head and “Where we know how to keep women in their place!” beside the robed figure carrying a torch. They spread disinformation about the wording of the bills making them out to be total bans forcing women to be second class citizens.
I’ve heard conservatives say that Abortion is the first sacred rite of the Femynist. I always figured that was a huge exaggeration. However with what I’m seeing out there on the interwevbs I’m starting to think they are right.
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