One quick question – Should a pregnant woman who is suffering from severe nausea or severe acne be able to take thalidomide or accutane to treat their condition based on their right to bodily autonomy? After all, the fetus has no moral status let alone a right to an environment safe from pathogens. Would that be a morally appropriate choice? (More on this point here: http://lti-blog.blogspot.com/2006/07/do-no-harm-except-for-that-killing.html.)

There is no intellectually respectable argument against abortion rights

If you restrict that statement to the first two trimesters, I think it works much better. However, I think a case could be made for it being morally wrong for an eight-months-pregnant woman to have an abortion simply because she’s suddenly decided she doesn’t want a baby. And I suspect that an overwhelming majority of Americans (including most who call themselves pro-choice) hold this view. That’s where I think your argument goes down the wrong road, because it doesn’t address this, and it doesn’t account for it. You seem to be advocating for an unconditional right to abortion at any stage of pregnancy, for any reason — something which is about as popular (and seems about as wrong) as the opposite extreme position of no abortions ever, at any time, under any circumstances.

The best summation of the abortion debate in the US, for my money, is given here (headphones required).

Okay, here’s the problem. KTK asserts that having the capacity to be moral is the deciding factor with regards to which objects morality should consider, ie. we should be moral to those who can be moral back to us. Firstly, I and many others would disagree. Even if animals and the severely mentally disabled do not have the necessary faculties to be full moral agents, they should still be objects of our morality (even if not to he same extent) because they have interests which can be lost (an interest in life, a lack of suffering etc). What we choose as morally relevant is always in the end based on an unverifiable moral basis. I might say that the depth and extent of our interests determines how far we should be considered moral objects. You may say that one is either a moral object or not, depending on personhood. Someone else may say that the value God places on lives determines how far they should be considered moral objects. None of these are verifiable or falsifiable.

Here’s the kicker. Almost everyone will agree that a key role of the Government is to protect moral objects. But exactly what counts as a moral object has yet to be determined. If the Government allows abortion it is adopting a moral basis we would tend to approve of. If it bans abortion, it is adopting a moral basis we would disagree with. In each case, it has adopted an unverifiable premise. Now, we would generally wish for the Government to remain as neutral as possible with regards to unverifiable moral premises, hence religion-neutrality. But there is no neutral position when it comes to abortion because (and this is the answer to Lara) even though pro-choice may appear less coercive, it assumes that a foetus is not a moral object which must be protected, which commits it to one of those premises. Now we may all here agree to that premise, but in the end we have to defend it rather than saying that it is simply the one which must be adopted, because the alternative requires religion.

To summarise (because I realise that my argument may be confusing!): Although the basis of the general pro-life position is necessarily religious and so unverifiable, the basis of the general pro-choice position is also in the end unverifiable. Therefore, we have to explain why the latter is the better position to adopt.

(I thought “angry train” was clever – it just sounded like something you’d find in a Dr. Seuss special!)

I don’t really think all opponents of abortions rights are misogynists or idiots. I do think that a committed opposition to abortion can only come from either a deep confusion over the issues, or a personal opposition to women’s freedom. (So, OK, they’re misogynists or idiots. It does seem hard to escape that.)

Instead, I have been helpful above by offering a different categorization. Anti-choice arguments fall into two broad categories:

1. Creationism
2. Prejudiced special pleading

You’ll agree that’s better, I’m sure!)

But it really gets to the heart of what I’ve been saying: the “debate” over abortion is not the point for anyone who looks at the issue seriously and honestly. There is no intellectually respectable argument against abortion rights, any more than there is against evolution or in favor of slavery. The issue really is just as clear-cut as those other two – clear enough that no intelligent person should harbor the opposite opinion. And we have allowed ourselves to be blinded from seeing that by the hurricane of obfuscation thrown up by anti-choicers.

When I say “the only morally relevant issue is women’s freedom”, I don’t mean that we should “reframe the debate” in those terms. (We should, and I have said so above, but that’s not my basic point.) What I mean is, literally, the only morally relevant issue in abortion is women’s freedom – in the same way that the only morally relevant issue in slavery is the slaves’ freedom, and the only scientifically relevant issue in evolution studies is . . . well, the relevant scientific issues in evolution, not some right-wing crank screaming out their deluded program as a way of derailing the discussion. The “rights” of the slaveholders, their economic loss, what some clown found in the Bible to support slavery – none of that matters. No intellectually respectable person would give it a moment’s credence (though, it’s true, many did for hundreds of years – they were wrong). The arguments against abortion rights are just as weak and just as vacant, and we – from the mere perspective of intellectual honesty and self-respect alone – shouldn’t countenance them, aside from the fact that doing so is deadly to women.

I guess my primary objection to this post, which I may not have made clear enough, is that you seem to lump everyone who opposes abortion into two broad categories:

1. Misogynists
2. Idiots

I don’t think that’s fair.

And as a political strategy, like it or not, rhetoric like yours is a political loser. The underlying idea is good: that this is a freedom issue, and that pro-choice forces need to constantly reframe the debate in those terms. But your phrasing makes it just too easy to dismiss the whole argument (or any like it) as an “angry rant.”

Sure there is. Two extremes:
1. Women should be prevented by force from having abortions.
2. Women should be forced to have abortions.

The neutral position, for government, is to neither force women to have abortions, nor to criminalise them for it, but to stay the hell out of their uteruses and let them make their own bodily choices.

“The issue is women’s bodies, women’s lives, and women’s freedom.”

It is wrong for the Chinese government to force women to abort pregnancies, and it is just as wrong for the American government to force women to maintain a pregnancy.

Now we can say that the human interests ethic does not necessarily require religion, and that is true. However, it does rest on the claim that human interests are what are morally relevant, which is a value judgement. In a sense, accepting it is a matter of faith. So it seems difficult to argue that the Government should accept this article of faith rather than that, simply because this one does not require religion!

In essence, what I am saying is this. Moral beliefs, like religion beliefs, are also basic issues of personal conscience. Since there is no neutral position with regard to abortion, some personal belief has to be forced on people. We just have to fight to make sure it is ours.