Thoughtful pornographer of outrage Rod Dreher has put up another staple post on the abortion issue to offset his newly featured filler photos of dining tables, which understandably do not draw as many page hits, and several current and former of our Authors appear to be acquitting themselves quite well there in the predictable arguments, many of which become quite arcane, and some of which this go-round also utilize the recently resurrected Schrödinger, this time to indetermine the nature of Schrödinger’s fetus. Our own former Author Hector makes probably the most straightforwardly classical, not immediately moralistic didactic case against the choice to abort a fetus:
Re: I do not approve of abortion in the abstract,but I think the final authority has to be the woman whose body is involved.
Why? That’s nonsense. The whole idea of us exerting absolute control over our own bodies, and lives, is predicated on a distinctly modern, capitalist-era anthropology, that neither classical Greek thinkers nor medieval and early modern Christians would have been able to make the slightest sense of. There’s nothing intrinsically natural, or reasonable, about the claim ‘we should have total control over our own bodies.’
The virtues of abortion in the service of blogging notwithstanding, all of this sound and fury, however, is predicated on the current condition that women must have external medical assistance to safely and confidently abort their fetuses.
The question I, at least, never hear being asked or answered, though, is what happens when the safe, rice grain-sized abortifacient pill appears, smuggleable en masse in a box of Uncle Ben’s or singly in an ear canal, and women gain the power to abort themselves, completely by themselves, in total privacy?
Long ago Frank Herbert, in his Hellstrom Chronicles, did envision a community where selected members not reduced to broth for the others were retained as “sexual stumps”, biomechanically maintained sections of humans of both sexes roughly hewn from navel to mid-thigh, which could be inseminated, gestated, and subsequently delivered of children containing their preferred genes for the benefit of the community.
Short of rendering a woman into such a sexual stump or of even simply keeping her comfortably restrained until after delivery, what exactly do those who believe as our good Hector does, above, propose to do to enact their beliefs, particularly when they may never again be able to determine with any reasonable degree of certainty which women have been pregnant and which have chosen to abort?
At that point, short of standing on street corners wearing scolding sandwich boards, what exactly is to be done?
Update: For those less interested in flogging the same old mare, two occasionally intersecting moons orbiting her: medical mediation and the public-become-private.
H. M. Stuart
Alexandria
He is getting so predictable lately. He’ll find some five year old article about some gay, female, or Muslim outlier and fulminate against teh Gay or Muslim or whatever well past looking foolish. That, or getting his facts completely wrong, shown clearly to have his facts wrong, and jabbering blithely on. He’s really become an embarrassment to TAC.
Why not just go become the food columnist for VDARE?
My good Kim,
If that is the case, and there is a noticeably phoned-in aspect to his current enterprise as a whole – the labor-saving appropriation of Sullivan’s “View From Your Window” is a case in point – I would attribute it to something akin to the syndrome suffered by those who win the lottery: with his book deal, he really has no need to worry much about his current income any longer, and at some level that complacency must become inescapably enervating enough that visible flaccidity becomes the norm.
None of this bears on the question at hand, though.
H. M. Stuart
Alexandria
Rod Dreher on a bad day is immeasurably smarter, more decent, and more morally aware than Matthew Yglesias, Hugo Schwyzer, Amanda Marcotte, or Kaitie Roiphe on a bad day. I’m unclear why he should pay the slightest attention to the natterings of the Georgetown peanut gallery.
My good Hector,
My own perception is that, save for his dubious personal insecurities and man-crushes, Hector_St_Clare on a bad day is immeasurably smarter, more decent, and more morally aware than Rod Dreher on his best. But where would the Rod Dreher’s of the world be without their Hectors, and vice versa?
H. M. Stuart
Alexandria
Just as a slight correction, the Herbert novel is Hellstrom’s Hive, very loosely based on (or maybe better, inspired by) the quasi-documentary, The Hellstrom Chronicle. I saw the movie back when–it’s pretty good. I’ve heard that the book is interesting, but I’ve not read it yet.
My good Turmarion,
Ah, you may be correct. I was under the impression across a fog of years that Chronicle was Herbert’s original title, hence my fastidiousness. If as nothing more than an iconography, I believe it would be worth your time.
H. M. Stuart
Alexandria
Update: For those less interested in flogging the same old mare, two occasionally intersecting moons orbiting her: medical mediation and the public-become-private.
H. M. Stuart
Alexandria
what happens when the safe, rice grain-sized abortifacient pill appears, smuggleable en masse in a box of Uncle Ben’s or singly in an ear canal, and women gain the power to abort themselves, completely by themselves, in total privacy?
One possibility: abortion opponents start looking to the drug warriors’ playbook for policy ideas.
The drug is made prescription only (as long as Roe v. Wade holds, it can’t be banned in the US anyway). Whether it’s safe enough to be OTC or not, any attempts to make it OTC meet huge battles. Laws are passed, in various states, to restrict doctors’ ability to dispense the drug unless their particular clinic is prepared to deal with all possible side effects, however rare. Laws are also passed ensuring that individual pharmacists who refuse to dispense the drug can’t be fired, even if their refusal prevents the pharmacy for which they work from carrying out business in which it wishes to engage. A black market then develops in the smuggled drug. Attempts are made to ban the drug altogether, with the hope that eventually (with the appointment of sufficient Supreme Court justices who don’t like Roe), Roe v. Wade will be overturned and one of those laws hold. If Roe v. Wade does get overturned, then abortion opponents start looking to the drug warriors’ playbook for policy ideas, as MI suggests. If Roe v. Wade isn’t overturned, they have to settle for placing obstacles in the way of legally dispensing the drug (framing such obstacles in terms of safety).
Apparently my acquaintance with strong-willed female smugglers is far more extraordinary than I would have thought. In any event, my rather rhetorical query begins with the assumption that any woman who wants such a hypothetical safe, self-administered abortifacient can get one with even less difficulty than acquiring the equivalent mass of marijuana and has already done so. Is such an assumption premature? If not, even so, the other side, of course, would be ob-gyn, individually and collectively, becoming far more a subject of ongoing mass public interest than it already may be, a cultural inversion of public and private realms I do believe our good Hector’s classical Greeks, if no one else, would find rather astonishing.
H. M. Stuart
Alexandria
I would very much enjoy hearing about the adventures of strong-willed smugglers who are female. Tales of smuggling strong-willed females might also be interesting.
But, given your hypothetical, I would hope that the result would be that the citizenry would decide that trying to police female reproduction would be pointless and drop the whole matter.
Otherwise, I’d expect to see a rather Handmaid-tale-ish where Fertility Police, a la those found under the unlamented Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu, investigated the menstrual cycles of American women with an eye towards evaluating their pregnancy-indicating hormone level and investigating and changes that show termination. Perhaps there would be investigations to determine if such were the result of natural miscarriage or the use of the hypothesized abortifacient.
For simplicity, devices that detect such changes in hormone levels could be built into women’s cellphones and the results automatically transmitted back to a central database.
Other restrictions on fertile females might be implemented, such as requiring females to show, upon leaving the US, that they are not pregnant, or if they were, requiring them to return either still pregnant, with a child, or with an approved certification from the visited country showing a natural miscarriage.
Well, that’s all rather creepy, isn’t it?
My assumption would be that the pro-life movement would prefer completely ineffective anti-abortion laws to no laws at all, so if I assume H. M. Stuart’s premise where a thoroughly effective smuggling network exists to a supply a very safe abortifacient, and also assume that the pro-life movement gets its legislative way (after Roe v. Wade is overturned), I’d predict a situation where the drug is illegal and also so widely used that the police quit even bothering to try to enforce the law.
At that point, some might call for a Handmaidish Fertility Police, but the overwhelming majority of pro-life women would bail on having their own pregnancies monitored to that degree, and those pro-life men who give a damn about their wives and daughters would also bail, leaving any Fertility Police proposals with too little political support to prevail.
Abortion aside, I wish that those that claim a woman should have control over her own body really believed that. Many of the same people that use that logic for abortion fight against use having control over our bodies in many other ways, stripping, porn, prostitution, overeating, consuming salt, smoking pot, other victimless crimes, etc.
Sad, but true.
Consistency is rarely found.
Many of the same people that use that logic for abortion fight against use having control over our bodies in many other ways, stripping, porn, prostitution, overeating, consuming salt, smoking pot, other victimless crimes, etc.
Reply
I apologize. For some reason I thought you were a guy.
There are male strippers, prostitutes, and porn models too…