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August 9, 2007 12:20 PM
Consequences
The ACLU (one of the groups Working Assets is supporting this year) is well known for their work to protect free speech and privacy. Less well known to some is their tireless work to protect women’s reproductive privacy.
Yesterday, I received an email from the Northern California Chapter of the ACLU. Their offices are across the street from ours, and I admire the work they did to block the right wing “Parental Notification” initiative last year.
The email featured this YouTube video (unfortunately you have to view this one on the YouTube site)
I first read about this series of interviews in a Newsweek column by Anna Quindlen. The video asks the powerful question, “If abortion were illegal, what would be the appropriate penalty for a woman who had an illegal abortion?” The answers are stunning in their lack of thoughtfulness. Quindlen makes the following conclusion:
…there are only two logical choices: hold women accountable for a criminal act by sending them to prison, or refuse to criminalize the act in the first place. If you can't countenance the first, you have to accept the second. You can't have it both ways.
Many of the anti-abortion protesters interviewed lamely stated that they couldn’t answer the question because they aren’t a lawyer. Thank goodness the ACLU has a great bunch of lawyers on the case.
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Discussion
This is absolutely brilliant...
Yes, this is amazing. "The answers are stunning in their lack of thoughtfulness" is exactly right. Wow.
In addition to the "only" two logical choices is at least the one additional choice of making it illegal for a physician to perform an abortion, with the sanction of revoking said physician's license to practice medicine upon conviction. It's not a choice I'd recommend, but it is certainly one logical choice.
And, yes, this choice is one that has contributed, in the past, to a sometimes quite lucrative black market for abortions done under questionable conditions of safety... one of the entirely logical alternatives to abortions that are safe, legal and (as is the case in countries where birth control is readily available) relatively rare.
Choices abound. People with access to the most complete information tend to make the best choices for themselves... "for themselves" being the operative phrase.
Jon -- while I agree with you that choices abound, I disagree with your logic. The point being made in these interviews is that while "pro-lifers" think it should be illegal for a woman to get an abortion (not just for the doctor to perform it) they are not comfortable with penalties being assigned to the woman who makes this choice. Why make something illegal if there are no ramifications for breaking that law?
Politicalgrrl-- The revocation of one's license to practice medicine IS a "ramification for breaking that law."
As far as I know, the woman has NEVER been convicted either for abortion or for soliciting an abortion in either the U.S. or Britain.
Yes, the producer of the video is correct in pointing out the irony that the pro-life folks filmed continue not to think that women should be penalized when the question is put simply in those terms, but the question about penalizing the physician performing the abortion is conveniently not even asked. Framing the people answering the sort of question that might be asked by someone doing a push poll in an effort to either elicit a particular response or to make the person answering appear stupid, however, is not really useful BECAUSE the question does NOT only have two answers.
Asking pro-lifers whether prosecuting the doctors performing abortions with the intent of reducing the frequency of abortions is something they would support, yes or no, would very likely elicit responses of, "Yes."
So, framing the question in a way that leaves only two choices, does not make the other choices go away; it only ignores them as possibilities. This may be convenient for the sake of self congratulation, as in, "Aren't these people shallow?" But, really is there any other purpose?
I would like to think that critical thinking would more likely get us to where we need to be, than "exposing" the stupidity of people with whom we disagree by ourselves ignoring inconvenient facts. Simplifying questions down to such black and white thinking seems to me to be intellectually dishonest and mean spirited, and ultimately not even useful.
Again, as far as I know, women were not convicted even when abortion WAS illegal. Probably because punishment of the woman was never the goal.
In all fairness, it is possible, probable even, that many modern pro-lifers have NOT ever thought of the issue in terms of punishing the mother because that is STILL not their goal.
The goal of most "pro-lifers," they say (and I believe them) is to eliminate abortion as a legally available procedure.
Their basically flawless logic is that, a procedure not available legally will be more rare than a procedure available legally. Further, some of the meaner among them may allow that the punishment for women who go to back-alley abortionists will be the effects of going to back-alley abortionists. We've all heard the stories, and they're real.
So that, IF their goal is simply to make abortion less available than it currently is, penalizing physicians convicted of performing abortions would certainly be one way of achieving their stated goal.
There are thoughtful individuals on both sides of this. Ideology is rampant, and critical thinking doesn't always win out. However, whitewashing all pro-lifers as thoughtless by showing a few with no good answers to an intellectually dishonest question is, in my opinion, itself intellectually dishonest and not really useful.
Regardless of their goal, the protesters absolutely should have considered this. That the interviewer didn't ask a second follow-up question in no way invalidates the original question.
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