(117)

When reading on the internet about Islamic terrorism, commenters often mention that there is also terrorism by Christian fundamentalists in America, where there have been bombings of abortion clinics and shootings of abortion providers.

How prevalent is this form of American domestic terrorism? In recent years there have been round about 15,000 - 20,000 murders in total per year in the US. How many of these were of abortion providers?

Guess now. Scribble your answer down.

If you had asked me a few months ago I would have said three or four murders per year.

Considered over the last fifteen years I was overestimating somewhat. According to the best-known pro-abortion organisation in the US, NARAL Pro-Choice America,

Since 1993, seven clinic workers – including three doctors, two clinic employees, a clinic escort, and a security guard – have been murdered in the United States. Seventeen attempted murders have also occurred since 1991.

However the phrasing "Since 1993 seven abortion clinic workers have been murdered in the United States" could be re-arranged, with equal truth, to say that "since 1998 no abortion clinic workers have been murdered in the United States."

The last such murder was ten years ago today.

When I first found out this fact I was surprised. Again and again I have read comments that assumed that this type of terrorism was less deadly than Islamic terrorism but was nonetheless a steadily lethal undercurrent of American life - a death here, a death there.

In the fight against any type of crime, no victory can ever be anything but temporary. The most you can ever say is that the trend is down. There have been several attempted murders of abortion providers during the last ten years and the fact that none of them have succeeded must owe something to mere chance. As has often been observed, the terrorist only has to get lucky once. However it does now seem probable there will be zero murders of abortion providers during the presidency of George W Bush. I doubt that he will be given much credit for this, though if the trend had been otherwise he would certainly have been given the discredit.

(11)

A Boston woman who gave birth after a failed abortion has filed a lawsuit against two doctors and Planned Parenthood seeking the costs of raising her child

This case should not long survive in the courts, for the simple reason that the mother can easily avoid all expenses related to raising the child simply by giving the kid up for adoption. She did not want the kid in the first place, so giving it up can not be much of a problem for her, can it? Or has Massachusetts jettisoned the basic legal rule that a plaintiff has the duty to mitigate her damages before seeking to recover them in court? The story does mention that:

The state's high court ruled in 1990 that parents can sue physicians for child-rearing expenses, but limited those claims to cases in which children require extraordinary expenses because of medical problems, medical malpractice lawyer Andrew C. Meyer Jr. said.

But in the absence of the context of this finding, I can not say that it really stands for the proposition that the plaintiff in this case can have her cake and eat it too, by reaping the psychic benefits of parenthood while sending the bill to those who made it possible, however inadvertently and unintentionally.

(199)

Abortion is an issue that is only simple for people at the extreme ends of the debate. Many leftists support abortion (and generally wants it to be taxpayer subsidised, of course) on the grounds it is a woman's right to choose, which is ironic considering the left is dedicated to reducing personal choice in just about every other sphere. In truth I suspect many on the left support free abortion because so many conservatives oppose it.

Religious conservatives oppose abortion because of religious tenets, end of story, and many others oppose it because they feel that it is murder. And that is, of course, the issue. The issue of choice is moot until you deal with the issue of 'is it murder?' because we are not free to choose to murder people.

The way I see the debate is this: treating the chemical abortion of a cluster of cells a few days after conception as murder is preposterous (the general Christian position) because a potential person is not an actual person, but treating the abortion of a survivable unborn child a few days before delivery not as murder is also preposterous (yet that appears to be position of some Objectivists) .

Where does a reasonable person draw the line? I really do not know and upon that basis I think abortion should only be clearly illegal (i.e. murder) if it is late term even though I personally find the entire practice abhorrent. I am simply not prepared to support charging someone with murder unless I am certain a person has indeed been murdered. But how does one define a 'person'? A two day old blob of human cells may be alive but is it a person? I think not but the devil is in the details. It is not an easy issue and as a result I do not regard my own position as fixed on this by any means.

(8)

The Cost of "Choice"
Edited by Erika Bachiochi
Encounter Books, San Francisco, 2004

This is a frankly partisan book, and though subtitled Women Evaluate the Impact of Abortion, it would be fair to say that positive claims for any impact are given short shrift, and the editor is someone who has changed her mind. Changed her mind in what sense? Perhaps the greatest difference between British and American attitudes - and I must make clear that this is not the same as British and American practices - is that while here we regard abortion as a range of moral options, Americans have been polarised by their legal system into only two: for or against. This is an American book (the experience of other countries is hardly mentioned), the editor is American; she was once for abortion and is now against it. Under all circumstances? It is fair to say that this not much discussed.

The landmark decision on abortion in the US was the Supreme Court ruling (which has been strengthened by several subsequent ones) in Roe v. Wade in 1973, five years after the Abortion Act was passed in this country. Both effectively legalised abortion on demand, at any stage in the pregnancy, so that it was it was perfectly permissible to kill someone who, if born, could survive if supported by present-day technology, or even without it (p. 6). Personally I would like to think that such cases are uncommon. However, the on-going US debate on "partial birth" abortion, where parturition is induced so that the emerging baby can more conveniently be killed (p. 19), suggests otherwise. Congress passed a law against it, which was vetoed by President Clinton, but signed by President Bush in 2003; it may yet fail at the Supreme Court, which in 2000 declared partial-birth abortion legal.

Although in this country the matter was debated in Parliament (though without its later ramifications being even suspected) and laid to rest when the Act that legalized abortion passed into law, in the US "the decision of Roe v. Wade launched a civic debacle... [when] the Court abruptly brought this process to a halt (p. xii)". There is no doubt that this decision, tortuously argued from a "right to privacy" not mentioned, let alone enshrined, anywhere in the US Constitution, was correctly called by one of the dissenting judges "a power grab" and by another "an exercise in raw judicial power". And if legislatures could be circumvented in this way, where would it all end?

In fact, it looks as if this short-circuit "legislation by judiciary" is a one-off. Some constitutional lawyers had their misgivings but at least the men seem, as one of them put it in a burst of frankness, to have "been made to understand that the abortion issue was so important to the women in our lives, and it did not seem that important to most of us (p. 12)." And what, to be cynical about it, could be more convenient for the errant male than to be absolved from the responsibility of paternity by paying for an abortion? So much for the "oppressive patriarchy". As for the upholders of the, up till then, conventional morality, perhaps their surrender is best typified by the reply of the Jesuit dean of Boston College: "Well you see, Mary Ann [Glendon], it's very simple. According to Vatican II, abortion is an 'unspeakable moral crime'. But in a pluralistic democracy, we can't impose our moral views on other people (p. 11)." Such passivity, of course, is not the stance of a true activist, but perhaps for Catholics, already overcome by the consensus on fornication, adultery and contraception, a defeat on abortion was simply the inevitable continuation of an unstoppable trend, one they were, if politicians, "personally opposed to" but also could do nothing about and even vote for if electorally advantageous.

So much for scene-setting. Twelve women have contributed essays to this book, but it must be said that anyone hoping to see facts laid out in tables, graphs or histograms will be disappointed; there is one table in the text and one in a footnote - and nothing else. But never mind about that; the aims of the group are unclear. It is obvious from the tenor of the articles that all the writers regard abortion as undesirable - that is their reason for their contributions. "Is the unborn child inside or outside the circle of moral concern? That is the heart of the matter." Such is the rather roundabout statement made in the Preface by a thirteenth woman, University of Chicago Professor Jean Bethke Elshtain. I should prefer the simpler question: "Is the unborn child a human being?" Whether the foetus, at any stage of its existence, has any human rights is uncertain, for these, such as they are, depend entirely on the will of its mother, who can kill it at any time, though it remains criminal to kill it without her consent. Human rights groups, so far as I am aware, have no interest in the subject. Incidentally, it might be noted that the adjective "moral", both here and in the Jesuit's statement above, is merely used for emphasis and quite unnecessary.

According to surveys given here, most Americans do regard the unborn child as human and are far from agreeing that it is a mere lump of parasitic tissue, as the more militant feminists tell them it is. Most of them are also unaware that "the right to choose" has been expanded to include abortion on demand. Even many law professors seem surprised when told this is the case (p. 6). Howover this ignornace is less likely in those in a position to know and two-thirds of all obstetricians and gynaecologists refuse to do abortions under any circumstances, especially those young (under 40) and female, the very category that should be most sympathetic to the pro-abortion message. Most abortions are carried out in clinics set up for that purpose which are, from what is said here, far from being supervised, inspected or regulated satisfactorily.

It also seems to be a fact that the number of abortions in the US is falling, though only slightly - from 1.36 million in 1996 to 1.31 million in 2000. Proportionately, this decrease is not great, but it might be noted that it is twice the number (200,000) of illegal abortions estimated to have been carried out annually before Roe v. Wade. For some readers, it may be a defect in the book that these abortions, which represent 25% of all annual US pregnancies, are not classified in any way, by age, race (it is well known that abortions are disproportionately high for black women), or economic status or at what stage or trimester in the pregnancy they are carried out. Perhaps these data are more difficult to find than I think they ought to be: a quick (amateur) google did not give quick results, and those only from 1974 until 1994, at www.abortiontv.com/Misc/AbortionStatistics.htm. These did, however, show a definite shift from younger to older women during that time, and (confirming the statement given above) an even more definite one from white to black, presumably correlated with the progressive disintegration of black families during this period.

There are two consequences of abortion examined here, additional that is to the elimination of the foetus: psychological trauma and subsequent ill-health. It is probably not too harsh to say that the evidence for the first more than verges on the anecdotal. No one can deny that many women bitterly regret their abortions, whether undergone willingly or under coercion, and suffer greatly. But the evidence here was not gathered by sampling, but by solicitation (e.g. p. 87), and there is no mention of those others who may have had no regrets, didn't suffer and felt only relief. However it is only fair to mention that, in a study based on Finnish statistics, post-abortion suicide was three times the national average for women in the same age-group, which itself was twice the rate for those who had given birth, taking the following year as the time interval (p. 96). It may well be objected that causal does not follow from correlation, and that a woman who has an abortion may have other problems, leading to both abortion and suicide. Yet only the heartless can dismiss the possibility that the prevention of the first might prevent the second.

In the matter of subsequent health problems we are undoubtedly on firmer ground. The evidence for a link between abortion and breast cancer seems well-documented and two authors who believe in it (Shandigian and Lanfranchi) discuss it at length, including the endocrinal mechanism by which the one may cause the other. However, the extent to which the link is still controversial is indicated by their admission that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists did not support their position. On the other hand there is evidence, again anecdotal, that academics are reluctant to discuss the link in the milieu they expect to attain professional advancement, while learned bodies ban discussion of it at their conferences as "too political" (p.85). According to one study (numbers not given), there is an increased hazard for women who have a family history of breast cancer. All pregnant teenagers from such families who aborted their first pregnancy developed breast cancer by the age of 45 (p. 67 and 75). Would this information give such a pregnant teenager pause? The chances are that she would never hear about it.

In the end we confront the question this book does not really face, but which the reader inevitably asks: what is to be done about the 1.31 million abortions per annum? If the nation is comfortable with this, is there nothing more to be said? If it uneasy about it, as surveys seem to show, though in a non-urgent sort of way, then pro-lifers can hope to get their way, to the extent they limit their demands to what is politically possible. For it does not seem unreasonable to suppose that a country as rich as the USA, and from where women travel as far as China to find a baby to adopt, can afford to absorb this hypothetical surplus, or at least some of it. Can this potential supply be manipulated to meet this demand? Can a social climate be generated where abortion is not a first option? The mere suggestion arouses hostility; even organized attempts to persuade pregnant women not to abort seem to face an uphill task. For example, the California affiliate of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League (NARAL) got First Resort, a "pregnancy care service" with this purpose closed down (p. 37), and, of course, such services are entirely privately financed. So, to be sure, are the pro-abortionists, but they do not have to provide any "care services" beyond pointing applicants in the direction of abortionists, who will do what is wanted for the money. It would probably also not be wrong to say that they are by far the better organized, and have the backing, explicit or implicit, of mainstream women's and feminist organizations.

If it would take too long to develop a general social climate in which the unwillingly pregnant were persuaded to give birth, and their unwanted children could be reared, perhaps the answer would be legal coercion to restore the status quo ante 1973. Once the clinics where most abortions are carried out came under State supervision and law enforcement, something could probably be done by legislation to introduce limits which the public would not only expect, but welcome. The situation would inevitably be messy, with "shopping around" between States with lax and severe laws, but would be the only method by which a realist could expect to bring about a reduction in the number of abortions. Quite simply, if it is made more difficult to get an abortion, there will be fewer of them. The first step towards this end, if desired, is of course to reverse the Supreme Court's decisions and return the problem to the State Legislatures from whence it came. This will only come about if more judges who are "strict constructionists" of the Constitution are appointed to replace those who retire or die and if somehow a relevant legal case is brought to reverse Roe v Wade and the other decisions that extended it. I do not need to go into the enormous difficulties facing those who would have to try to bring this about.

The rise in abortion is in fact only one more feature of what has happened to what might be roughly called Western Civilization during the last forty years, put in lapidary form by Louis Roussel, head of the French National Institute for Demographic Studies and quoted here:

It is exceedingly rare in the history of populations that sudden changes appear across the entire set of demographic indicators. Yet in barely 15 years, starting in 1965, the birth rate and the marriage rate in all the industrialised countried tumbled, while divorces and births outside marriage increased rapidly. All those changes were substantial, with increases or decreases of more than 50 percent.

(42)

The federal court sitting in (of course) San Francisco has struck down the recent federal ban on "partial-birth abortion."

First, I agree with this decision, but on federalism grounds, not the privacy grounds cited by the Court. Nowhere does the US Constitution grant the national government the power to ban any medical procedure, as far as I can tell. It is interesting that this particular basis for overturning the statute apparently never occurred to the (liberal/statist) federal court in San Fran. Liberal statists are horrified by any reference to the fact that the Constitution grants the national government very limited powers, as taking these limitations seriously would probably require either extensive amendment of the Constitution or the junking of over half of what the national government does.

Second, it is interesting to observe the politics around this decision. The statement by the abortion rights spokesman that whether a fetus feels pain is irrelevant to a woman's right to choose is utterly tone-deaf, and seems to be telegraphing a belief that at no point does a fetus acquire personhood that would negate or need to be balanced off against the woman's right to choose. That is a losing position with the American electorate, and probably explains the rather noticeable silence from the Kerry camp.

The doctors probably have the law, and the morality of it, about right according to this article. The seminal Roe decision granted/recognized a right to choose abortion up until the point of viability, and was basically silent after that. I am no abortion scholar, but I do not think that the Supreme Court has ever really expanded on this time period in any explicit way, although it has danced around it in a number of decisions on ancillary and peripheral issues. Doubtless the inveterate Samizdata commenters will refine my understanding of the law, but I think that viability is not a bad place to draw a line on abortion rights. The difficulty is, of course, that technology constantly pushes the point of viability backwards, but that is a discussion for another day.

However, whether the common medical understanding of abortion rights is correct in turn begs the Constitutional question of whether the US Supreme Court had any business overturning state laws on abortion in the first place. The underlying reasoning, relying as it does on "emanations" and "penumbras," has been endlessly mocked, and rightly so, for it signalled a Court that no longer cared much what the words on the page said, but rather what they wished the words on the page said.

This in turn showed a Court much less concerned with what the Constitution says than with what the Court says. This disregard for the plain meaning of the Constitution, although arguably employed in the service of individual rights in the abortion cases, paved the way for such utter travesties as a Court upholding extensive and explicit restrictions on political speech. Very little of the US Constitution's substantive provisions concerning the powers of government and the rights of citizens are still operative in any meaningful way, because the primary enforcer of the Constitution no longer cares to apply the plain language of that document.

(10)

State funding of abortions is, however, a completely different matter. The pro-choicers say it's a matter of choice. Let it stay that way, then, without forcing people who oppose infanticide to fund it.
- Tomas Kohl

(87)

I suspect the constant trench warfare in American politics over abortion is somewhat mystifying to our overseas observers, and I think abortion poses some real philosophical problems for libertarians stemming from the unanswerable question of when a "fetus" becomes a "person." Those issues aside, this David Frum blog entry is full of wisdom, not only on abortion, but on the dangers of ideological absolutism in matters political and social.

Now let me say right off: I am not pro-life. I think abortion ought to be legal for the first 12 weeks of a pregnancy and available to protect the health of the mother during the weeks thereafter. I don’t see this as a matter of fundamental human rights, so much as one of accommodating reality. I can’t defend Roe v. Wade as a legal decision, and I would be very glad to see abortion become much more rare than it now, but if the law attempts to suppress abortion entirely, it is the law that will fail, rather than abortion that will disappear. Please don’t email me about this: I have thought about this issue just as hard as you have, and I’m not going to change my mind.

But precisely because I believe in accommodating the realities of abortion, I think those on the pro-abortion side need to acknowledge that the no-concessions approach of the organized abortion lobby is catastrophically mistaken. Abortion rights would be much more secure if they were confined within reasonable limits that squared better with the conscience of the nation.

For that reason, I for one welcome the ban on partial-birth abortion – not only because of the grisliness of the procedure, but even more for exactly the reason that so offends the procedure’s defenders: precisely because it is a way to back into greater restrictions on abortion in the later stages of pregnancy. NOW and NARAL should understand: These restrictions are not the first steps toward a total ban on abortion. On the contrary: They are the first steps toward avoiding such a ban.

While I am not 100% in agreement with this entry, I am about 95% comfortable with it. In politics, as in most of the rest of real life, refusal to accommodate reality is a pretty good guarantee of failure. Arguments about the ideal libertarian society are all well and good (and necessary), but attempting to make the jump straight to that society without admitting any intermediate steps is sure route to failure. This is the sin of the American Libertarian Party, and explains why, even though majorities of Americans agree broadly with its principles, its electoral showing is generally somewhere south of pathetic.

This is heresy, I know, in libertarian precincts. But those same precincts need to stop running from the responsibilities of success, and start thinking very seriously about what compromises to make, and when, and how, if they are ever to make a real difference in society at large. Its all very well to natter on about how taxation is theft, or about how we have an absolute right to own any weapons we want, but if you take this as license to refuse to accept compromises on tax and gun policy that represent an improvement on the status quo ante, however imperfect, then you have consigned yourself to permanent irrelevance and impotence.

Many libertarians, I think, like the outsider pose, and the irresponsibility that comes with it, too much to actually craft real-world solutions and take responsibility for their downsides and inintended consequences. Its always easy to criticize and carp from the sidelines; it is much harder to get in the game.

If libertarians aren't willing to do the dirty work necessary to make a difference in society at large by engaging with and compromising with our opponents, then we should just admit our irrelevance and powerlessness to advance what we profess to be our deepest values.

(45)

I have always taken what I regard to be a classically liberal and ruggedly secular approach to the issue of abortion, a matter which I feel is best dealt with by reference to degree rather than dogma.

It is for these reasons that I have (and still do) lean towards the view that abortion is a matter for the individual conscience rather than the dictates of the state. This does not mean that I think aborting a foetus is a good thing. It simply reflects my belief that a blanket prohibition would be a cure that proves to be worse than the disease.

However, there is abortion and then there is 'partial-birth abortion', a process that is conducted between the 20th and 26th week of gestation when the infant is dragged from the womb feet-first before being killed by a blow to the skull. For the life of me I cannot see how this barbaric process can be distinguished from murder most foul.

So I have no hesitation in endorsing British conservative Peter Cuthbertson in his welcome of this decision of the US Senate:

The Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003 received a 64-33 vote. It now heads to the Republican-led House, which passed the ban last year before it was stopped in the then-controlled Democratic Senate.

Peter has uploaded some photographic evidence of the horrific aftermath of a partial-birth abortion. He should make no apologies for doing so. That the truth is ugly and unpalatable is all the more reason for confronting it and it is not anti-liberty to protect a small human being from this brutal and undeserved fate.

(112)

Capitalism Magazine's article, Abortion Rights are Pro-Life, has convinced me that my position in the debate on abortion is weak. I used to take the view that abortion violated the rights of a child, and that therefore it was immoral (in most cases). On the other hand, I didn't believe the government should do anything about abortion. As Milton Friedman said: "The government solution to a problem is usually worse than the problem." The last things I want to happen are backstreet abortions, mothers killing themselves and so on. It would be morally acceptable for government to protect the rights of the fetus, but not practicable.

The fundamental shift in my thinking is that I no longer believe that a fetus has individual rights - or, at the very least, I'm not so sure as I once was. As the article says:

"what it actually is during the first trimester is a mass of relatively undifferentiated cells that exist as a part of a woman's body. If we consider what it is rather than what it might become, we must acknowledge that the embryo under three months is something far more primitive than a frog or a fish."

I'm very happy for fish and cows to be killed to provide me with food, and the reason is that I do not believe they have the same rights as humans. If a fetus is more primative than these, how can I justify saying its rights are greater?

The accumulation of medical information by the state is a bad idea for too many reasons to list here. The reason its being done is part of the desperate attempt to make the National Health Service work at any cost. For my part I look forward to the News of the World (a very downmarket British tabloid) informing us which cabinet minister's wife has head lice, which one takes Prozac, who's receiving treatment for haemorroids and which cabinet minister's children won't have the autism jab.

Of course it is rather difficult arguing against breach of doctor-patient confidentiality on pragmatic grounds: first national databases could be handy in a bio-warfare emergency, it would be handy for the state to know where the greatest threat of smallpox epidemics are. Second, lawyers caved in on this issue of client confidentiality, banks on financial records, now doctors. Oddly enough the most principled professionals are the media. Perhaps it makes a difference that journalists, unlike doctors or lawyers, aren't working in a licensed sector: a journalist who rats on sources is competing with others who will protect theirs.

The existence of the blogsphere and web media provides a "back street" media which is what the medical profession needs right now. If we had a flourishing industry of back-street abortionists, state centralized records would be meaningless. I confess that's the most unlikely argument I've ever put forward for banning abortions.

Chris Cooper's Blog is slowly getting into its stride. It may never proceed at faster than a slow walk, which is fine by me. So far the postings have been longish and rather scholarly, in keeping with the new title at the top, Blogosophical Investigations. If Chris sets a slow pace but sticks to it, then all honour to him, I say. On current evidence I recommend a visit about once a week, with Friday being the day when the most seems to happen.

The latest posting is a meta-contextual comment on the abortion issue, which concludes thus:

There is no such thing as a right answer here. That's not sitting on any fence: pointing to the existence of a hundred-foot high fence isn't the same thing as sitting on it.

So chew on that, objectivists. It means that in a free society, people are going to divide into communities of divergent moralities, and the anti-abortionist ones are just going to have to live alongside communities of people whom they regard as murderers. As they already have to do, of course - but they're not reconciled to the fact.

A week ago, there was a piece, with lengthy quotes, concerning the argument between Bjørn Lomborg and the Scientific American. No sitting on that fence either.