Dr. B.: Thank you for this post. It’s one of the best things I’ve read in a while on the bottom-line importance of a consistent pro-choice position. This whole argument reminds me of nothing so much as the arguments between immediatists and gradualists over the abolition of slavery — and not coincidentally, of course, since banning abortion just means legalizing slavery in the case of pregnant women.

amy: Hold the bus. Did I say “women in general don’t think about their abortions”? No. But I do believe that in any large group of people, you’re going to find some who ain’t all that thoughtful or responsible. That’s who laws are for.

This is not so. Laws (as opposed to advice or legislative resolutions) are for authorizing men with guns and clubs to enforce compliance with a proscription. Passing a law against something means, ultimately, being willing to cuff, beat, imprison, and/or shoot someone over it.

This is an important fact about government action that had better not be ignored. When you talk about using legislation to control people—women—that are declared to be irrational by some process of public deliberation, you are not just talking about telling them what to do. You are talking about attacking them if they do not do what they are told to do.

This is important to remember, because not thinking about it can lead people to sign on to the most monstrous sorts of views and argumentative methods.

amy: I do not regard a 10-week fetus as a baby. I do regard a 38-week fetus as a baby, and I suspect the vast majority of pro-choice voters agree.

But being pro-choice is not a matter of letting “pro-choice voters” decide what Julia can do with her own body. It’s a matter of defending Julia’s right to decide what she does with her own body. The pro-choice position is not a majoritarian position; it’s a position about rights.

bitchphd: You do not have a fundamental civil right to tell me what to do with my own body. That is slavery.

amy: b, of course I do. As part of a legislative process, I have a fundamental civil right to influence laws on what both women and men can do with their bodies. Can I tell you directly what to do or not do? No. I can only do it as legislator to citizen, though I can be pretty powerful about it if people ignore the issue and leave most of the billwriting to me.

You’re either not responding to bitchphd’s point or you’re saying something which commits you to a crazy position. If what you are saying is that freedom of political speech and freedom of conscience is a fundamental right, and so you have a right to go around saying that you support bans on abortions under conditions X, Y, and Z, well, of course you do. But that’s not a response to the statement that you don’t have a right to tell another woman what to do with her own body, since bitchphd is clearly talking in terms of enforced government policy here, not merely in terms of your rights to hector and admonish other people.

If, on the other hand, you’re saying that you are a citizen in a democratic polity and you therefore have a right to enforce your ideas about an abortion ban if you can get it done through the political process, then the argument only goes through on the premise that anything that comes about as the outcome of a democratic political process is therefore something that the government has the right to enact. Which is an absolutely crazy position. Political victors in democracies do not properly have totalitarian authority over the citizens. There are lots of things that nobody has any right to enact no matter what political process approves them—laws permitting slavery for example, or laws authorizing the extermination of Jews, for example—and any political theory which would regard these outcomes as possibly legitimate is frankly one that’s beyond the pale for civilized humanity.

You might claim that you’re not arguing from the universal claim that any decision issuing from a democratic process is therefore legitimate, but only that abortion is a field where majoritarian decision-making is appropriate. Fine; but then you’d have to give some argument for that, rather than just appealing to polls and pointing out that we live in a quasi-democratic polity. You’d also have to give up the claim that you are pro-choice, since allowing for abortion laws as long as they are supported by a majority may not be anti-abortion, but it is also not pro-choice.