Deconstructing Pro-Life and Pro-Choice

For exceedingly good reasons, it is difficult for men to write about abortion. We should have to be careful what we say; after all, we are not the ones who are ultimately responsible for taking on the biological risks of both pregnancy and its termination. I had some thoughts about the abortion debate, though, and I thought it would be good to get them into a post. Two disclaimers, though:

1. I am trying to write this as an impartial observer, rather than with a preset opinion on the issue. Basically, I want to deconstruct what it is we actually talk about when we talk about and argue about abortion, rather than offering an opinion of my own.

2. I'm not a huge fan of "pro-life" and "pro-choice" as labels, but I will use them here because that is the commonly used term. To change one term would require changing both, for purposes of fairness, and I'm not that interested in getting into a long discussion about language (today).

At its core, I see the abortion debate as being about sanitization and normalization. In other words, pro-choice activists want to remove the problems that could befall someone who chose to have an abortion, while pro-life activists want the decision to be as painful as possible. I see four areas where this is the goal:

- Legal sanitization: Women should not risk prosecution for simply seeking out this medical procedure. They should face no legal sanctions at all for the decision.
- Medical sanitization: Kermit Gosnell and his ilk aside, no pro-choice activist would tell you that they want abortions to be unsafe. I think it is actually fairly safe to say that if there were a broad consensus in favor of abortion, activists would be deeply concerned with the safety conditions of medical facilities. As it is now, this is a secondary priority to access.
- Economic sanitization: No woman should be prevented from getting an abortion simply because she is not economically well off. Costs should not be borne by the poor on this issue.
- Emotional sanitization: Women should not feel emotional guilt over getting abortions; it should just be a medical procedure like any other.

Meanwhile, on the pro-life side, you see varying degrees of resistance to each of these forms of sanitization:

- Legal sanitization: At their most ardent, pro-lifers want to criminalize abortions. They want to prosecute practitioners, and they want to prosecute the women who get abortions. They see this as the only way to ensure that innocent human lives aren't ended.
- Medical sanitization: This is less of an issue on the pro-life side, but some pro-lifers would affirmatively argue that they would rather abortions be phyisically risky, in a sort of Machiavellian, "ends-justify-the-means" position. If abortions are risky, perhaps that will dissuade women from seeking them out.
- Economic sanitization: The pro-life right makes common cause with the libertarian movement here, as both are strongly opposed to taxpayer funding of abortions, either via direct subsidy or via cost-shifting. Because they are bolstered by libertarians and business conservatives, this is the most fertile ground for the pro-lifers.
- Emotional sanitization: To the pro-life right, abortions should be difficult for the women who choose to get them. They should have to feel the guilt of terminating life. With luck, it will deter them from having the abortion at all.

Buffer zones are part of the normalization process. We don't, after all, see people getting harassed as they walk into the hospital for surgery to remove an appendix or a gallbladder. But we do often see it for women getting an abortion. So, how would we make an abortion more like an appendectomy? Well, for one, we have to simulate the conditions of the former, in terms of the lead-up to the operation. This means that we don't want our patients getting harassed by activists. But activists want to harass. So one way to prevent that is to grant the clinics an exemption, of sorts, from activists, via a buffer zone. The law will then assist abortion in the long road to normalization or sanitization.

The larger the buffer zone, the harder it is for activists to make the decision uncomfortable. 

It is really emotional sanitization where the rubber meets the road on this issue. Pro-lifers feel this one intensely: if society ever gets to a point where people no longer have emotional guilt over the procedure, then the pro-life cause will have lost. Sure, they can put up roadblocks in other ways, but once the average person stops worrying about the moral consequences of the decision, the other sanitizations happen sort of happen automatically, over time:

- If it's just another medical procedure, how can we tolerate unsafe medical conditions?
- If it's just another medical procedure, how can we possibly prosecute someone for it?
- If it's just another medical procedure, why wouldn't Medicaid or the ACA have to cover it?

So one can see why the pro-life cause takes the buffer zone issue so seriously. The emotional distress caused by abortions is the absolute center of gravity of this issue for the pro-life cause; it is the source from which the cause draws its strength. And pro-choicers, in classic Clausewitzian fashion, are smart to attack it.