This is way up on the tasteless scale, so feel free not to follow this link. (But you did, didn't you...)
Greg Gutfeld, the satirical Molotov Cocktail of the Huffington Post, decided that people needed to lighten up about the abortion issue and posted a couple pages worth of abortion jokes. However, the mostly pro-choice readership found them deeply offensive. Why? Well, because most of the jokes involved what abortion is -- and the pro-choice camp really doesn't tend to like to talk about that.
So for those of you who did decide to skip reading it (I told you it was tasteless, didn't I?) here's one of the more on target ones that stuck in my head:
A woman and a fetus walk into a clinic together. The fetus says, "I'm scared." The woman says, "You think you're scared? I'm the one who's going to have to walk out of here alone."
Now, why is this funny? It's based on the humor inherent in a character who doesn't realize how out of proportion her problems are to the other character's problems. When the woman complains that she'll have to walk out alone, it reminds the reader that the fetus has a much bigger problem, she's about to be killed. However, despite the fact that the woman is about to participate in killing the fetus, she wants the fetus to feel sorry for her because soon she'll be alone.
It's said that explaining a joke is a sure way of making it not funny, but the reason I went through the exercise is that in a way the joke gets to the core of the abortion issue. Pro-choice advocates often like to say that no one is in favor of abortion, it's a terrible decision that people only make when they have no other choice, it's private and painful and whatever other platitudes come to mind. Now, I don't question that it is a difficult decision for many women, and that they wish that didn't have to make it. However, one of the prime elements of the pro-life movement is to point out: Look, there's someone else here who has an even bigger problem. Having a baby will mess up your career and cost a lot of money and put a strain on your person relationships. But having an abortion kills the unborn baby. There's a sense in which all the fuss about how hard the decision is boils down to pretty much the same line of thinking that felt sorry for the Menendez brothers because they were orphans.
The other point behind the joke deals with the other half of the pro-life movement's message: that no matter what people may tell you, you will be alone after an abortion in a way that you weren't before. Despite the lack of proportionality between the woman's problem and the fetus', the pro-choice movement doesn't even want to deal with the fact that the woman has something to be scared about. She's going in with someone (in a very true and intimate sense) and coming out without. She's going in whole and coming out broken.
According to the narrative of the joke, both people are ending up for the worse in this situation. The baby is being killed, and the woman will be alone. That doesn't fit with the tidy narrative of "choice" and so the joke "isn't funny" over at the Huffington Post.
FROM THE ILLUSTRATED EDITION.
13 hours ago
2 comments:
I would probably go in the exact opposite direction and say that moral claims based upon function capacities are necessarily arbitrary, because any detectable funcation capacity admits degree, and the first emergence of a functional capacity is almost impossible to detect.
The other difficulty, in my mind, with functionality is that most of the types of functionality one can successfully assign to a human being (as in, an individual of sub-species homo sapiens sapiens) in either the very early stages or very late stages (say, a three week old baby or a extremely disabled or near death person) are functionalities one could also detect in individuals of other species.
Some of this is arguing backwards. It seems to me pretty clear that one could humanely put down a cat, dog or indeed higher primate for reasons of convenience. A dog can feel pain, respond to stimulus, express desires, retain memories, and appears to exhibit a certain degree of personality. Indeed, a dog can do some of these things rather better than a newborn baby or someone in the last stages of dying. It may be that a newborn or someone in the last stages of dying has more cognitive abilities and experiences a feeling of consciousness in a way that other species cannot, but even if this is true we have no way of verifying it from the outside.
So based on the idea the newborns, the severely disabled and dying people must be "fully human" it seems to me that we must take essence and identity to be the primary defining traits of humanity rather than functionality. And at that point, if it is the human organism itself that deserves respect and protection, then it makes sense that this protection should extend all the way back to conception.
Clearly, I'm starting from certain assumptions, primarily that post-partum humans who are alive yet cannot be verified to possess cognition or consciousness are still worthy of full protection as a human person. But it seems to me that if you accept that, then you pretty much have to accept a definition of humanity based on being and essence rather than functionality.
*cough*
Ya know, there's the problem with morality that trys to build itself... you end up arguing that some animals are more worthy of protection than some humans.
The cough is because I know no other way to phrase that to cause less anger.
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