Interesting thread on abortion. Just a few at random.
• In Mr. Hume’s post and the comments threads we’ve so far turned up Ronald Reagan and Sarah Palin as having carried out legislative actions suggesting that, at the least, they didn’t/don’t mind abortion very much. I’d add Margaret Thatcher, who IMS voted in Parliament for the 1967 bill that liberalized British abortion law, and certainly who as Prime Minister never made any move against the newly-liberalized abortion regime. So … tell me again how
you can’t be a conservative if you’re not anti-abortion?
[I can speak to the liberalization of the abortion laws in Britain in more detail, from observation and countless conversations in that country through the pre-1967 controversy. The two driving forces were (a) class, and (b) our old pal disgust. The class angle was the one most often heard in conversation. Under the old, quite strictly anti-abortion regime (still in force in Northern Ireland last time I looked), it was perfectly easy for well-off women — not rich, just upper-lower-middle-class and above — to get a hygienic abortion in a decent clinic. Everybody knew this. Even the price was well-known: it cost £200 in 1963-4 (about three months wages for a working-class man at the time). Working-class girls, however, had to resort to "back-alley" abortions: older women of the same class wielding bicycle pumps and shirt hangers. (Frank Sinatra's mum was in this line of business, I believe, so things were probably much the same over here, at any rate in Hoboken.) This was regarded as grossly unfair class-wise; and in post-WW2 Britain that was sufficient to get a political movement airborne. The disgust was directed at the biddies with the bicycle pumps. If people are intent on having abortions, as they obviously are, always and everywhere; and if, as is the case, it is rather easy for a doctor to write up the procedure as something else, at least for early abortions ("dilatation and curettage" was the usual formula, making it sound like a sort of gynecological house cleaning — "… and to my great surprise, there was an embryo in there!"); then at least let's make sure the thing is done to some medical standards. Those were the talking points behind abortion law reform in Britain. British people don't go in much for metaphysics. At least they didn't used to, when they were a sane nation.]
• Isn’t there any way to wean people off the silly, prissy, dishonest terminology of “pro-life” and “pro-choice”? What’s wrong with “anti-abortion” and “pro-abortion”? That’s what we’re talking about, isn’t it? Does anyone think the homicide rate among “anti-life” abortion liberalizers is higher than it is among “pro-lifers” (My guess would be, it’s lower.) I understand the marketing strategies here, but there is great clarification to be got from just using plain names for things.
• The whole idea of ensoulment is a fascinating topic in cognitive psychology. Doug Hofstadter has witty things to say about it in his 2007 book I Am a Strange Loop. The common human perception seems to be, though — contra one of the commentators here — that souls come in different sizes. Doug notes, for example, that the English word “magnanimity” and the Hindu (Sanskrit?) title “Mahatma” both mean “great-souled.” He attempts a quantification of soul-size, based on a unit called the huneker — you have to read the book to get that reference. There is a two-page discussion about the size of a mosquito’s soul, coming up at last with 10–10 hunekers, the average human soul size being of course 100 hunekers. Says Doug:
I have never been specific about the kinds of traits a high-huneker or low-huneker soul would tend to exhibit. Indeed, any hint at such a distinction risks becoming inflammatory, because in our culture there is a dogma that states, roughly, that all human lives are worth exactly the same amount.
You thus have one of those doublethink situations that cog-sci types get excited about: on the one hand, the intuition, universal and embodied in language, that some souls are bigger than others, on the other hand, a cultural dogma that all human souls are equi-capacitous. Prof. Pinker, call your office.
• Still on the cog-sci beat, I think the other reader is right that we have, as part of our mental equipment, a module that, for any other human being, computes a sort of “potential-for-accumulating-experience” quotient, and assigns the human being a value on that basis. This module likely only kicks in when confronted with an observable human being, though. Probably our brains just didn’t evolve to have valuation modules for embryos and fetuses, which we didn’t much encounter until recently. Following on from that, I’d guess that much of the salience of the abortion issue in modern life is driven by the good-quality medical imaging that’s become available in recent decades. I’d guess, in fact, that really good quality imaging of fetuses, if cheaply and widely available, would lead to public demands for earlier limits on legal abortion terms. The theocons can metaphysic all they want, but further policy/legal changes in this zone will likely be driven by things we can see and hear, and by the effects those things have on our emotions. Metaphysics butters no parsnips.
• I remember Nat Hentoff all right. He wrote the cover notes for the first British LP issue of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.” Sixties survivors don’t forget stuff like that.
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