Introduction and Response to Professor Scarnecchia
The contributors have taken considerable time to carefully craft reflections on Beyond the Abortion Wars, and these efforts deserve more detailed responses than I am able to give here. Perhaps even more regrettably, given the setting of academic exchange, I feel compelled to focus my responses on our disagreements rather than building on our considerable agreement. In more public discourse on these sets of issues, however, I argue the opposite approach should be taken.Footnote 23 The life/choice binary of the abortion wars hides more than it reveals and artificially pits interlocutors against each other in ways that miss considerable common ground. Our first instinct in public discourse, therefore, should be to do the hard work of focusing first on the areas where we agree.
This means I must reject the “culture of life vs. culture of death” binary that dominates the vision of Professor Scarnecchia. It breezes over complexity—not only in the actual moral, philosophical, and policy issues, but also in what people actually believe about abortion. In an inherently antagonistic binary like this, one's complexities are reduced to a “side,” and one's identity is defined primarily by opposition.
From invoking the motto of the US Marine Corps, to describing his ultimate goal as “an honorable truce,” Scarnecchia imagines abortion discourse as a war. As should be obvious from the title of my book, I reject that lens. Like all capitulation to the logic of war, this approach risks idolatry. It is also the most likely culprit for the traditional pro-life movement's unwillingness to reach out to our perceived opponents and find the common ground I lay out in the book.
Perhaps because of his war lens, Scarnecchia employs an increasingly and disappointingly common rhetorical tactic we might call the “contamination fallacy.” It is an attempt to contaminate arguments with vague assertions about their connection to things that many agree (on other grounds) are very bad. In this case, Scarnecchia fallaciously asserts a connection between my argument and “advancing the culture of death.”
These rhetorical power plays, though often successful in the short term, have poisoned our ability to have genuine arguments. Especially if we have the most vulnerable as a primary concern, we must resist the temptation to allow public debate on issues like abortion to be decided by those who can “win the war” or “cede the least ground.” That approach merely reinscribes the very logic a preference for the most vulnerable is attempting to resist. Positions on abortion should instead rise or fall based on the result of a good-faith exchange of evidence and argument characterized by solidarity with one's interlocutors.
Response to Professor Colb
Professor Colb insists the positive law shouldn't even consider limiting abortion unless “someone” is harmed. It turns out that “someone,” for her, is a being “with interests in avoiding pain and death.”Footnote 24 But as Peter Singer and an increasing number of other thinkers have pointed out, even newborn infants do not have an interest (in Colb's sense) in avoiding death.Footnote 25
In other work Colb has made it clear she rejects Singer's position on infanticide because being a member of the species Homo sapiens is enough for such sentient-but-not-self-aware beings to have full moral and legal status.Footnote 26 So for Colb it appears a “someone” is (1) a being with interests in avoiding pain and death or (2) a being with interests in avoiding pain and also a member of the species Homo sapiens.
This view has two problems. First, assuming that species preference of this kind is defensible, there is no good reason it couldn't apply to nonsentient members of the species. Second, I agree with Singer's argument that speciesism is not defensible. Colb asserts that “qualifying as a ‘human’ turns out to matter a great deal to Camosy,” but it turns out to matter more substantially in Colb's argument. It is the only thing that keeps her view from mandating the moral and legal equality of mice and newborn human children.
I have rejected this kind of biological speciesism.Footnote 27 Membership in the species Homo sapiens is significant only insofar as it marks a particular creature as being of a natural kind—in this case, a substance of a rational and relational nature. Membership in the biological species Homo sapiens is a sufficient condition for membership in this metaphysical species, but it is not a necessary condition. One could be of a different biological species (chimpanzee, hobbit, Kryptonian, etc.) or of no biological species (angel, demon, jinn, etc.) and still be a substance of a rational and relational nature.Footnote 28
Invoking biological species membership as Colb does here is morally and legally arbitrary. Without a subsequent reference to metaphysical species membership, one's broad support for abortion rights based on the moral status of the prenatal children logically leads one to broad support for infanticide rights based on the moral status of neonatal children.
Colb may not have been aware that I've written a book and several other pieces strongly supportive of animal protection, and this may explain her insistence that I'm using post hoc reasoning to exclude animals from the community of persons. I have not always had this substance view of personhood, but I've been convinced by evidence and argument that it is true, and I'm willing to follow its implications wherever they may lead—including to the personhood of nonhuman animals.Footnote 29
In one of the few disappointing parts of her contribution, Colb fallaciously attempts to contaminate my argument for the moral status of the fetus by labeling it “antifeminist.” This was disappointing, not only because a brief literature search would have revealed many feminists with a similar metaphysics, but because it slides from her usual careful engagement and argument into the realm of power plays.Footnote 30
It obviously goes beyond the scope of this response to make anything like a full argument for it, but mine is a feminist moral anthropology that emphasizes both individuality and relationship as essential to personal identity. We are individual particular substances who become who we are though relationships. Pregnancy, as pro-life feminists in the United States have insisted for over a century, is just such a relationship. The fact that a prenatal child is an individual substance does not downplay the relational importance of pregnancy.
Too often, however, Colb's rhetoric—both in this contribution and in her other work—seems to capitulate to the very thing of which she mistakenly accuses Beyond the Abortion Wars. Her exclusive references to pregnancy not only as a burden, but also as an extreme and unwarranted bodily intrusion, rest firmly on the disease model of pregnancy—a model pro-life feminists have resisted at every turn as relying on the moral anthropology of patriarchal individualism.
She concludes her piece by asserting that the law cannot protect the fetus (even after Colb would grant her significant moral status) without unduly affecting women. But most of Europe has no issues legally protecting prenatal children well before sentience.Footnote 31 Ireland, in fact, has banned almost all abortion and has more favorable maternal health than its abortion-friendly neighbor, England.Footnote 32 Chile banned most abortions and saw maternal health actually improve.Footnote 33 While there are cases to argue and debates to be had over the nuances of certain aspects of public policy, there is good empirical evidence to show that one can legally protect and support both mothers and their prenatal children.
Response to Professor Traina
Professor Traina is one of several feminist thinkers who argue for something similar to a Thomistic-Aristotelian substance moral anthropology and conclude that prenatal children count as persons. On these and many other matters related to Beyond the Abortion Wars Traina and I share broad agreement. Most of the concerns in her contribution, though significant, are not the kind of fundamental objections raised by Colb. For instance, Traina worries I did not compare the “ill effects, psychologically and relationally, for women who have had abortions” with results for women in similar situations who did not abort.Footnote 34 In reality, however, I cited the largest meta-analysis of the relevant studies available, and noted the analysis's conclusion that mothers who aborted were 55 percent more likely to experience mental health problems than those who did not (146).
She also focuses critical attention on my invoking widely shared assumptions that having sex that results in a child brings with it a profound natural obligation on the part of parents to support that child—especially when the child is postnatal and the parent is the father. Traina asserts that such natural obligations are connected to problematic “assumptions about marriage, inheritance, gender hierarchy, the ‘animality’ of reproduction and early parenting.” While I am “correct that we are often obligated in ways that we do not choose,” good reasons for such obligations would include being “near, or indispensable, or hav[ing] made prior moral choices that implicate us.” Mere biological relationship isn't enough.
But I never reduced natural obligation to biological relationship. I rely on “prior moral choices that implicate us” when I insist deadbeat dads who refuse to pay child support are morally blameworthy because their “choice to have sex brought with it the natural obligation to aid any children that might result” (88).
Traina concludes with the following critique:
Camosy misses a chance to engage the reproductive justice movement. Consequently, his argument retains a scent of white individualism (this mother, this baby, and this decision) and misses out on structural critiques friendly to much of his argument that women of color have already developed…. This established movement, which supports both abortion and freedom to parent, makes Camosy's point about the ripeness for new alliances and alignments; Christian ethicists should be self-consciously engaging it, not ignoring it or simply speaking to it.
While Beyond the Abortion Wars does focus on pro-life feminism in making structural critiques, when discussing the limits of the life/choice binary I note the following, “Some advocates for reproductive justice, though they generally favor broad abortion rights, are working to reduce the demand for abortion” (13). When discussing new alliances in the abortion debate, I specifically suggest the possibility of pro-lifers engaging and partnering with reproductive justice advocates (12). Traina's attempt to mark my pro-life feminist argument with “the scent of white individualism” is another unfortunate example of the contamination fallacy. Again, the way out of the polarized mess of the abortion wars involves a stubborn focus on marshaling evidence and argument in solidarity with our interlocutors.
In light of recent political events in the United States, Traina doubts my “hope and prediction” that a new political realignment “recombining elements of the ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ agendas in a way that is both pro-woman and pro-child” is likely to come about. The 2016 election cycle also serves as the jumping-off point for Lysaught's contribution, and might serve as an appropriate discussion concluding my response.
Conclusion and Response to Professor Lysaught
Professor Lysaught argues that “especially in our fractured climate” after the 2016 election cycle, Catholic theologians ought to see “local congregations as crucial places of moral discourse.” She makes her now familiar point that “our primary social location is necessarily the church,” and we must minister there before turning to the public sphere.Footnote 35
I agree, and regularly engage parishes, pastors, and bishops in several different contexts—one of those contexts resulted in the publication of a coedited book titled Polarization in the US Catholic Church: Naming the Wounds, Beginning to Heal.Footnote 36 Many of these engagements have intentionally addressed how the abortion wars have divided the church. My reading of these divisions, however, is that they are not based on disagreements over theological ideas. Instead, as I strongly criticize in Beyond the Abortion Wars, they are the result of Christians holding “idolatrous ties” to our two major secular political camps (186). This problem, however, is not dissimilar to the basic problem with our national abortion discourse—which is also hampered by a simplistic, lazy binary political imagination.
Unlike Traina and Lysaught, I do not see the 2016 election cycle as a disaster for the hopes and predictions of Beyond the Abortion Wars. Not least because it is not clear what Trump actually believes on many issues, it is unclear what his election means in the short term. In the long term, there are at least three reasons the aftershocks of the 2016 cycle may finally collapse the deeply unstable political binary that undergirds the abortion wars.
First, Donald Trump is neither a Democrat nor a Republican and demonstrates that one need not fit our outdated binary political categories to win the presidency. Second, dissatisfaction with both major parties, though already substantial for some time, reached a crescendo during the past election cycle. Matthew Dowd, chief political analyst for ABC News, recently argued that “a new political movement of independents, separate from our current political duopoly,” is coming, and that in “2018 we will see many folks running as independents locally across the country.”Footnote 37 Third, radical dissatisfaction with corporate media—coupled with their being so wrong about the election results—may finally challenge the way they do things. Pope Francis warned such media against “constantly looking to communicate scandal, communicate ugly things.”Footnote 38 Media companies’ focus on antagonistic binaries in politics keeps their shareholders happy, but they are no longer able to deny that their pitting of liberals against conservatives, people of color against whites, women against men, and secular against religious is tearing this country apart. If post-2016 changes in our media culture result in more embodied encounters with the stories of actual people—stories that reveal that the American electorate is far more diverse and interesting than our polarized identity politics allows us to imagine—they will create cultural space to move beyond the abortion wars.
