The forty-year anniversary of Roe v. Wade was on Tuesday. With all the cliched left-right posturing that the abortion controversy engendered, it is instructive to read the great conservative sociologist Robert Nisbet’s thoughts on the subject. Nisbet was one of the leading conservative intellectuals of the last century and most famously argued that the decline of traditional community was responsible for the rise of paternalistic statism.
But on abortion, he defied the left-right cliches, and took a decidedly pro-choice position:
The contemporary preoccupation with abortion has its roots in the late nineteenth century, a period of many moral preoccupations and of causes to advance them. Although abortion had been a sin in the Christian church from early on, it had taken its place with a large number of other sins. Now, however, abortion became the centerpiece of a moralistic crusade. So did a good many other matters, including alcohol, tobacco, premarital sex, masturbation, meat eating, narcotics, Sunday saloon openings, and Sunday baseball. . . Never have so many laws been passed, first by the states, then the federal government, prohibiting so many actions which for thousands of years had generally been held to fall under family authority. It can be fairly argued that the present infirm state of the family in Western society is the consequence as much of moralistic laws assertedly designed to protect individual members of the family from one evil or another as it is of anything else. Current efforts to prohibit abortion categorically and absolutely might be viewed in this light. It is not so much the “woman’s right to choose” that is being assaulted as it is the ethic of family and its legitimate domain.
Nisbet attacks Roe v. Wade as the centralized government interfering with local communities, but continues:
[In the abortion crusades, on both sides, f]orces of total good are arrayed against total evil, the sure sign of a dogma encased in the struggle for absolute power. . . . But repugnant as this whole spectacle is, it does not present the danger to the social fabric and to individual liberty that is posed by the ranks of the aggressive antiabortionists. In denying the right of the woman or her family to terminate pregnancy, these soldiers of righteousness strike at the very heart of both family and individual rights.
Beyond the GOP 
Compelling argument, and very true however I think abortion is slightly different. I don’t argue the sin point of view because that requires faith. I would argue the science of life’s beginning perspective, but everyone’s heard and debates that. I argue a point made far less often. Abortions are bad for the economy.
The average population of the country is getting older and while this is a long term trend it can easily be delayed. With an estimated 50 million abortions since Roe v Wade that makes a difference as to the average age. Abortions statistically are usually carried out by middle and upper class families (though not proportionally to economic class, as a percentage of total abortions), as well. This means a smaller tax base and the loss of potentially higher opportunity individuals that are more likely to get higher educational levels. They would therefore be more likely contribute positively to the higher specialized and more innovative industries in this country.
Probably could be developed on more, but I rarely discuss this issue since I feel adamant about my position but not passionate about it, while many I’ve talked with get emotional. Just not worth the time spent.
Part of Nisbet’s thinking on the position may be due to his writing this position in 1983. Scientific knowledge, however, has advanced by leaps and bounds in the intervening three decades (suggest that a philosophical position may be invalidated by science? On a conservative blog? Shun the nonbeliever! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRB8Jor8tPs). However, the last decade or so of the abortion debate has made one fact undeniable: a person who claims to desire individual rights yet is also an abortionist should not have passed high school biology, is a psychopath, or does not understand what individual rights are.
When Nisbet wrote his position on abortion, he probably held the (now absurd) position that a fetus is not a living human being. One may notice that no serious abortionist continues to make this Luddite argument (indeed, some swing to opposite extremes: http://www.salon.com/2013/01/23/so_what_if_abortion_ends_life/). It is now no more valid to pretend that a fetus is not living than it is to pretend that the earth is flat and the moon is made of cheese (http://www.prolifephysicians.org/lifebegins.htm ). More expert testimony here (http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2008/08/18/when-does-human-life-begin/). This should fairly conclusively demonstrate that a fetus lives. Now, one could argue that a fetus is not a human: I would love to meet the Nobel-winning scientist who has conclusively proven that the human fetus is the only organism that changes species, but I think that it is far more likely that I will see the Cubs win the World Series than it is likely that I will find such a scientist. I would like to think that Nisbet’s position on abortion abolitionists would change if he were alive today due to the overwhelming evidence that a fetus is an individual that should then possess “individual rights.”
However, it is possible for abortionists to then argue that individuals only attain rights when they attain personhood. Almost no one seriously believes this. As Dr. Francesca Minerva explains in The Journal of Medical Ethics (http://jme.bmj.com/content/early/2012/03/01/medethics-2011-100411.full):
“Both a fetus and a newborn certainly are human beings and potential persons, but neither is a ‘person’ in the sense of ‘subject of a moral right to life’. We take ‘person’ to mean an individual who is capable of attributing to her own existence some (at least) basic value such that being deprived of this existence represents a loss to her.”
Obviously personhood is a debatable term, but one would be hard pressed to define personhood without excluding some infants and mentally disabled or diseased individuals. Therefore, if one believes that in order to have “individual rights” the individual must be a person, one must also believe that there is no moral distinction between aborting a fetus and doing this to an infant (warning: sort of gross, it’s from Fargo, so it isn’t that bad http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qWFhDvURLg). Admittedly, this is an unfair comparison: a woodchipper would rip a baby to shreds much more quickly (and thus humanely) than even the most skilled surgeon could hack an infant into pieces. This is pretty charged language: having said that, if you feel bad about the description of the process of killing a kid, imagine how the kid feels having it done to him or her. I am comfortable declaring that a person who embraces murdering children to be a psychopath, but I can use other invective if this term is technically innacurate.
Why does this matter? Most of these arguments have been made since Nisbet published his book, so he would not have been aware of them when writing. It is undeniable that a fetus is a human being. It is also undeniable that a justification for abortion that depends on the personhood argument will necessarily equate abortion with killing infants and some adults. And must accept both. A rational position that depends on the fetus not being an individual must either believe an Akinesque position on basic biology (it’s actually worse: anyone who has taken high school biology probably covered a basic definition of life but most likely didn’t cover human reproduction during nonconsensual sex, so there is less excuse for such embarrassingly stupid ignorance) or must believe that it is morally permissible to take an axe to some homeless people and newborns (again, mechanically a very similar way to die as an abortion).
This takes care of the “individual” part of “individual rights.” Onto the “rights” part.
Some abortionists argue that even though the baby is an individual and should have individual rights, the rights of the mother outweigh the rights of the baby. I am no philosopher, but I would imagine that if one’s right to life can be outweighed by someone else’s rights, then one really has no rights at all, since it is hard to exercise any other rights after being eviscerated. However, it is possible that certain rights, such as the right of innocents to not be murdered, are violable. Stalin and Hitler are certainly partisans of this argument.
If one wishes to deny “individual rights” to babies because of infringement on the rights of the mother, then it is fair to ask when a child stops infringing on the mother’s rights and when the infringement is no longer so severe as to allow the mother to toss the baby into a trash compactor or set it on fire (again, probably as painful as being slowly chopped apart piece by piece). I know several women who found their children to be a greater infringement after birth than before birth. Is it okay to cut little Timmy’s head off because he isn’t potty trained when he’s four? What if it’s a particularly big mess, one that is more inconveniencing than morning sickness? These are perfectly fair questions to ask if one can deny someone else their rights simply because taking care of them might be too difficult.
Moreover, if we have agreed that “individual rights” are this flexible, why should the killing be restricted merely to mothers and their children? Why not extend this bloodthirsty pact to everyone? If my banker loses more of my money than it would cost me to raise a burdensome child, can I go blow his head off? What if I don’t like Jews or blacks and their existence is more of a burden to me than a child ever could be? (This may sound like a reductio ad absurdum: read some Margaret Sanger, the patron saint of abortionism.) When do my “individual rights” become inviolable? They obviously don’t at the right to life. If one is an abortionist, that is.
Infanticide may be one of the actions “which for thousands of years had generally been held to fall under family authority.” Abolition may even dissipate this “ethic of family and its legitimate domain.” I imagine that abolishing slavery might have too. What of it? Sacrificing firstborn infants to the sun god was also integral to many an “ethic of family,” yet I don’t notice too many “conservative” abortionists who support “family rights” demanding a return to Aztec rituals or Moloch worship. It is possible to bitterly cling to all forms of tradition against “moralistic laws,” but any sane person should be able to imagine at least one situation in which “family rights” do not include killing children. If “family rights” do include that right, again, when does it end? At some arbitrarily decided-upon age? At financial independence? Why then?
In summary, “individual rights” must include the right to life of preborn children unless one is anti-scientific, accepts other forms of infanticide and murder, or defines rights in such a way that “rights” are meaningless. There are certainly limits to government intrusion into the family. However, if one of the proper roles of government is not to protect innocents from being brutally massacred, then I’m having a devilishly hard time imagining what its role could be.
I don’t see any evidence that Nisbet believed that a fetus isn’t a person. His argument, as I understand it, has more to do with the position, even if a fetus is a person, that doesn’t give it the right to live at the mother’s expense. It’s like how you don’t have to let me into your house during a blizzard, even if, keeping me out, you were guaranteeing that I’d freeze to death. That is much different from the examples you give. Of course you don’t have the right to murder people that you don’t like–but the abortion issue is about whether other people can demand the right to live at your expense.
Talking about the other side “not understanding high school biology” or being “psychopaths” does not help clarify these issues.
* I should rephrase that: in the linked book, Nisbet does suggest that embryos aren’t people. But on the end of p. 5, he writes that it is wrong to demand that mothers die so that “embryo[s] and infant[s]” can live. So I think my interpretation still holds, even though he doesn’t spell it out explicitly.
While every analogy is imperfect, the analogy of letting someone freeze to death outside your door seems to not work well for abortion because it ignores two critical elements of any abortion: the culpability of the mother in putting the baby in that position, and whether the killing is committed actively or passively. A baby does not decide to put itself in the mother’s womb, the mother decides to put the baby there in the greater than 98 percent of abortions that occur for reasons other than rape or incest (https://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/journals/3711005.pdf, Table 2). Even if you do not intend to get pregnant and you do have sex, you should at least understand that you are engaging in an act that is procreative by nature, assuming that you either took a sex-ed class or have ever had that extremely uncomfortable talk with one or both of your parents or guardians. Additionally, if I let someone freeze to death at my door I am passively letting them die: they die if I do not act. If I decide to kill a fetus then I must actively kill him or her: the fetus will almost certainly live unless I actively kill him or her.
I prefer this analogy: I decide to steal a car for a joyride, find out that someone was in the backseat of the car, and then decide to kill him to protect me from going to jail. I’m not saying that sex and theft are morally equivalent, but in both instances I have performed an act with one intent that leads to an unforeseen consequence (the other individual becoming involved without me or him deciding to involve him). In both instances I will lose a degree of freedom for a lengthy period of time unless I eliminate the other person. In both instances I have to actively kill the other person for them to die. This analogy breaks down in cases of rape and incest (and that is a legitimate ethical quandary), but for the other 98 percent of abortions it works well.
Additionally, if the abortion issue is truly about “whether other people can demand the right to live at your expense,” why does that not extend to the rest of a person’s life? Do children out of the womb have the right to live at their parents’ expense? Is our ideal world one where individual or family rights include the right to cast out an obnoxious toddler and let him or her die of starvation, thirst or exposure to the elements on your doorstep? If not, why not? It seems to me that the only possible reason that one can kill a preborn child and not a postborn child is because one believes that that the preborn child is somehow distinct from a postborn child (which I will address below) or that letting your child’s head exit the mother’s vaginal canal is some kind of implicit contract to not kill him or her from then on. To circle back to Nisbet’s argument about family rights and the fabrics of societies, for thousands of years this has not been part of the conventions of many societies (Sparta, Phoenicia, Carthage, India, etc.). So infanticide is A-OK.
As to Nisbet’s statement that danger to the life of the mother is a sufficient condition to abort a fetus, virtually everyone allows for this exception, including the most consistently pro-life organization (the Catholic Church) and one of the most consistent pro-life countries (the Republic of Eire). However, if his reasoning is based on the key assumption that a fetus is not alive and thus has no rights, then his argument demonstrates that however brilliant he was, he was a product of his times and was limited in his ability to understand the issues on which he opined, just like Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas and every other great thinker.
As to some abortionists and their grasp of biology: Dr. Hymie Gordon of the Mayo Clinic has said “By all criteria of modern molecular biology, life is present from the moment of conception.” Additionally, Dr. Jerome LeJeune, “the Father of Modern Genetics” (University of Descartes, Paris) has said “To accept the fact that after fertilization has taken place a new human has come into being is no longer a matter of taste or opinion . . . it is plain experimental evidence.” Again, a fetus is a living human being. This may be an unfair standard, but I believe that if you cannot even determine that an obviously alive organism is alive, then you lack basic proficiency in the study of life (biology). Similarly, if someone insisted that 1+4=10, I would say that they lack an understanding of elementary arithmetic. There are many debatable aspects of science: for example, string theory. The livingness of a human fetus is not one of them, and if some people find it acceptable to characterize skeptics of debatable propositions such as manmade climate change (such as the authors of CERN’s Project Cloud: http://cloud.web.cern.ch/cloud/) as “anti-science,” then it is perfectly fair to describe demonstrably absurd scientific arguments as, well, absurd.
As to psychopaths: as I tried to explain, if one believes that a fetus is not a person and non-persons can be killed, then one has to include babies and some adult humans as well. I should have mentioned that Dr. Minerva noted in his JME article that his definition of personhood is so broad that it even includes “many non-human animals,” yet still cannot include babies that have already been born. If even such a broad definition of personhood cannot include human babies, then it is unlikely that one can create a coherent definition of personhood that includes babies. Therefore, if you are an adherent of the “personhood” argument, you necessarily have to accept infanticide as morally acceptable in order to have a coherent, rational position. Most civilized people would (I imagine) think that this is a monstrous position and strongly denounce people who hold it. Psychopath may have been unfair, and I probably should have used the more accurate term: babykiller.
Now, you may think that these descriptions are uncharitable, but you did not try to refute them, so the complaint seems to be that I am being impolite rather than untruthful. I am also going to assume that this has nothing to do with you having a life outside of the internet and thus having better things to do with your time than to argue with a friend of a friend.
I should have mentioned this before, but I don’t apply those terms to quite a few abortionists. Most of the abortionists that I have met are loose adherents to an incoherent version of the personhood argument. They may have an irrational view, but they aren’t babykillers. And for that I am grateful. Also, while most abortionists (that I have met at least) are irrational, this is true of any populist movement: most people have better things to do with their lives than sit around and try to put together a thorough, systematic ideology. I am glad when people do, however.
If you don’t like the analogy, then you can just tweak it and get to the same thing. For instance, imagine that instead of not letting someone into your house, you come home and find someone already there. You are entitled to throw them out, which is active instead of passive, but it is still justified, even if it leads to the person’s death. Surely the decision on whether it is justified to throw them out doesn’t depend on who showed up at the house first. And it doesn’t really matter if you “invited” someone in–as long as you own your own body (or house), then you retain the right to kick people out later. That doesn’t give you any kind of license to kill. But there may be situations (as in abortion or in kicking someone out during a blizzard) when death is the guaranteed outcome. If there were a less bad outcome, then people should be obligated to take that. But if there isn’t that doesn’t mean people can be barred from doing anything at all.
As for Robert Nisbet being “a product of his times,” I see no reason to believe that there was some different social consensus about life beginning at conception in 1983 than there is today. You can point to some journal articles, but those really never affected the spirit of the times.
And, no, I didn’t try to refute the claim that I (and half the country) are “psychopaths” or “babykillers.” That’s because I consider that claim to be facially absurd, especially coming from someone who claims to care so much about science.
I never called you a babykiller. I also never called half the country baby killers. To shorten my argument, these are classifications that I have presented for the different camps of abortionists.
A) People who think that the rights of the mother trump any rights of any preborn infant: presumably you fall into this category. These people are not babykillers, as in people who have no scruples about killing babies.
B) People who believe that the preborn infant has no rights
1) People who believe that the preborn infant has no rights because the preborn infant is not a living human being: this is an absurd argument that requires not understanding fairly basic biology. These people are not babykillers, as in people who have no scruples about killing babies.
2) People who believe that the preborn infant has no rights because the preborn infant is not a person: these people almost certainly have to adopt the argument that infants and some adults do not have rights either because they are not persons. These people are not babykillers, as in people who have no scruples about killing babies.
i) People who are unwilling to take this argument to its logical conclusion: they have an irrational argument. These people are not babykillers, as in people who have no scruples about killing babies.
ii) People who are willing to take this argument to its logical conclusion (such as Dr. Minerva): they are babykillers, as in people who have no scruples about killing babies. There are very, very few people who fall into this category. You don’t necessarily fall into this category. The vast majority of abortionists do not fall into this category. Only a few people fall into this category.
However, my question to your analogy: is there ever any time when a person cannot throw another person out of the house? Do people have the rights to let their (postborn) children starve to death? Should parents have a legal/moral obligation to take care of their (postborn) children?
It seems like there are an awful lot of ways to murder people with this interpretation of property rights, although I may be missing something. I understand that you said that there is no license to kill, but if denying people use of your property in a way that will necessarily kill them is not considered murdering them, then many an enterprising assassin could simply let people go a one-way boat cruise. If I want my inheritance sooner, can I go hiking with my father who suffers from Alzheimer’s, refuse to let him use my car (property) to get to shelter, and then let him die? Why not? Taking my diseased father hiking with the intention of preventing him from coming home alive seems pretty similar to having sex with the intention of preventing any children that are created survive.
In your hypothetical, as long as you intend from the beginning to bring him out there so that you can leave and kill him, then I think that what you’re doing is actually fraud leading to death. The refusing to let him into your car is just a part of a broader scheme, and should be able to lead to a legal claim.
If, however, you just refuse to give him a ride home, without doing so as part of an overall scheme to kill him, then I think that should be legally justifiable as an exercise of your property rights. But you shouldn’t be able to interfere with other people trying to rescue him. Of course, that isn’t necessarily how the law is now—it is just what I think it should be.
I think abortion is much more like the second scenario than the first: it isn’t a broader plot to lure people in and kill them; it is just a refusal to let other people use your own property without your consent.