Mike Pernick’s column about abortion politics is so discombobulated and lazily argued that I hesitated to write a response. But honestly, who can resist an abortion debate? To begin on a positive note, I applaud his use of the term “anti-choice” as opposed to the more conventional “pro-life.” Yet even this irks me when I really think about it, for I feel that he is simply appropriating a feminist political concept in order to cast a warm pro-choice glow over the decidedly un-feminist, disrespectful views he expresses about abortion. First and most importantly, his assertion that “mindless emotional pleas” are to blame for the polarization of abortion politics, and that abortion can and should be perceived “based on…simple logic” rests on a bizarre separation of the concept and practice “abortion” from the real women’s bodies in which abortion occurs. Abortion is deeply personal and deeply emotional; for most women it demands a certain moral struggle. I dare Pernick to walk into an abortion clinic and tell the women to calm down, it’s about crime and economics! Any political discourse about abortion that ignores or denies an emotional element is a discourse that ignores and denies women’s experience of it. Perhaps such a discourse is appealing to Pernick because it would be politically expedient, neater, more “logical;” for me, this is too great a sacrifice.
Second, it is morally reprehensible, not to mention politically irresponsible, to speak approvingly of a generation of would-be poor children that “was now aborted before it could enter this world.” I have not read “Freakenomics,” but even if Levitt’s theory is correct in identifying causality, I see two fundamental errors. First, there is an implicit assertion that these unborn persons were necessarily destined for a life of crime. Existence precedes essence, kid, read your Sartre. Sure, it’s more likely that he means their disadvantaged social context would have led them to a life of crime, but therein lies the rub, or, error #2. Crime rates could be reduced by improving the social conditions of people’s lives-health care, education, job security, and yes, access to contraception and abortion, not so that people are never born, but so that those who are born are wanted and cared for. It has nothing to do with “canceling” people before they can carry out their criminal destiny, and has everything to do with the government taking responsibility for each of its citizens no matter how poor.
Finally, what I find so incredibly morally and politically dangerous about this “Freakenomics” argument, beyond the errors already noted, is that it more or less justifies population control. Population control calls for the imposition of contraception and abortion from above in order to reduce the numbers of “undesirable” persons and thereby improve society. Fewer poor people, less crime, better world. The history of forced or coerced sterilization, particularly performed on poor, women of color, is well-documented in our country and in others. In the 1990s politicians proposed giving women on welfare cash incentives to have the contraceptive implant Norplant placed in their arm; Norplant was taken off the market at the end of the 90s, yet to this day there are women who cannot find or afford a provider to remove it. Any argument that posits “too many undesirable/unwanted people” as the cause of poverty/crime/famine/etc. can become an argument for population control, that is, an argument for coercion and infringement upon people’s reproductive rights—nay, their human rights.
Moral debates about abortion politics can be petty, illogical, hateful, and are perhaps fundamentally irresolvable (I would never call them “trite” but to each his own). Nevertheless, if we are ever to lose touch with the moral, emotional element of reproductive politics, dangerous logic like that of Pernick and Levitt will assert itself in undoubtedly despicable ways.
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