Well, I never
Jill of Feministe writes, in Abortion is a Moral Good
The “I think abortion should be legal but I would never have one†argument grates on my nerves. You don’t know what you would do if faced with an unwanted pregnancy. You don’t know how the circumstances of your life will change, and what will influence your future decisions. Saying that you think the little ladies should have the right but you are morally superior enough to never terminate a pregnancy is condescending and completely unhelpful to the abortion rights movement. It feeds into positioning the conversation around fetal rights rather than women’s rights. It supports the idea that abortion is more an issue of personal morality than one of medical access.
The argument, here, is about whether abortion is in the set of things which you might not want to legally restrict, but are still wrong (such as adultery), or whether it’s in the set of things that people have wanted to legally restrict, but never should have considered wrong in the first place (such as miscegenation). (People who do want to legally restrict abortion have been placed outside the bounds of this particular argument.) What catches my eye, though, is something else – what it means to pronounce that you’ll never do something. Any something. Maybe something that you and I and Jill ought to agree is wrong, or maybe something that even you don’t actually consider wrong in a moral sense, but at a gut level you don’t think you can bring yourself to do it, for whatever reason.
What Jill says about abortion is in some sense true, not just about abortion, but about nearly anything that you might intend never to do. You don’t know what you would do until you’re faced with an unplanned pregnancy. Or, even if you know what you did do when you were faced with an unplanned pregnancy, you don’t know what you would have done if that pregnancy were the result of rape. Or if you were told that a planned and wanted pregnancy involved a defect incompatible with life. Or, perhaps, you don’t know what you would have decided about that unplanned, maybe unpartnered and unsupported pregnancy that you did, nevertheless, keep, if you had different circumstances – some one thing or another that changed it from difficult but endurable to difficult and impossible. None of us know all our limits, because none of us can possibly have been in all the situations that would test them.
At the same time, we need to think ahead of time about our intentions, about what we think we would do or want to have done, because it affects the choices we make now.
Say you plan never to have an abortion (if you’re a woman), or you hope any child you conceive will never be aborted (if you’re a man). Does the person you’re sleeping with agree with you? If not, and you’re a man, well, sorry, that may not be your choice. If not, and you’re a woman, you still can choose not to get that abortion, but it would be a whole lot easier to hold to that intention, if you do have an unplanned pregnancy, if you were with a guy who shared that intention.
Or say you plan never to have an abortion, and you’re going in for fertility treatment. The fact that you aren’t willing to have a selective reduction darn well better matter when you are, say, deciding how many embryos get implanted.
Of course, part of the reason we don’t always refrain from doing that thing we said we’d never do is that these choices that we make up front aren’t necessarily easy, either. It’s much easier in the abstract to say that you wouldn’t sleep with a person in a certain case – before you’re married, without having talked about what you’d do if the contraceptives fail, unless you agree about what you’d do if the contraceptives fail, whatever – than to turn down someone you actually find seriously attractive, who doesn’t meet the criteria you had set. It’s much easier to say you’d never give in to a strong impulse, with the wrong person under the wrong circumstances, than to consistently do that, for years.
Still, though I may not know I’d really always be a pacifist in a dark alley, I have to bear my pacifism in mind in the choices I do get to make, and, the same holds for any other choice that you think you’d never make.
The problem is, saying you’d never do X is cheap. Always. I’m not sure it’s worth very much, even when X is something we agree is wrong. It’s actually living a life that’s consistent with never doing the things you never intend to do, that matters. And part of that is trying to remove the occasion for other people to be obliged to do that thing that you’re sure you’d never do – doing the best you can not to put them in the position where not doing that thing will be catastrophic. They may still do it – assuming they don’t share your conviction that X is a thing one ought never to do. But there will sure be a lot more X if the people who don’t like X feel they have no obligation to make things any easier for the people who might otherwise be in a position to need X.
(Sexuality tag added for figleaf, though the post isn’t only about sexual choices, since he’s already joining in the abortion discussion.)
February 27th, 2007 at 11:57 pm
Oh I read almost everything you write, you know. But thanks for keeping me in mind.
I remember that, at an early age, I swore I’d never kiss a girl on the mouth. Like most kids I’d squirm at the “kissing” parts of movies and shows. Right around puberty I recognized that other kids who had once forsworn kissing seemed to have fallen into it. I remember my horror when it dawned on me that I’d probably do it too.
Not knowing much about the formal philosophy of decision making I think there are probably two degrees of “I never.” One might be called ill considered — a simple reflexive “not me, no way, never” when presented with anything new. The other would be well considered, thought through, and perhaps practiced. And hmm. Now that I think about it there might be a third type as well, one where we would actually do the thing ourselves but say otherwise because while we think we “know better” we don’t think others do. (Think parents who drink sodas when their kids aren’t around, or anti-abortionists who get abortions themselves because they’re “decent people with futures to consider.”)
figleaf