…er, okay, actually the article is called “Lady Parts,” by William Saletan. He doesn’t really talk about any lady parts in it, though, so I thought the above title was a far more accurate descriptor of his latest offering of emergency toilet paper (just hit “Print!”).
You know, that observation is worth pursuing a little. William Saletan, in this article about abortion, in vitro fertilization, pregnancy and surrogate motherhood, manages to discuss them all without once referring to a mature human female uterus. He does manage to refer seven times to a developing human embryo, though. What a surprise!
Clearly I (and Amanda*, and others) are not the only ones who have been steadily repulsed by Saletan’s concern trolling about abortion for, well, years now. Apparently, he has gotten a flood of inquiries on the subject!
…I’ve had a few curious exchanges with friends, readers, and bloggers who wonder why I keep writing about this stuff: abortions, pregnancies, IVF, surrogates—what some of my critics jokingly call “lady parts.” What’s my agenda? Do I have a problem with women controlling their bodies? Am I a frontman for the religious right, a useful idiot who pretends that compromise on these issues is possible when, in fact, it isn’t? Even Vorzimer, in a tweet posted on his blog, initially responded to my article by remarking, “The lengths (or depths) abortion foes will go to make a point.”
(Answers, in order: Saletan’s agenda is shaming anyone who disagrees with him about the evils of abortion on demand, clearly he has a real problem with women controlling the fate of anything lodged in their uteruses, and no, he’s not a frontman for the religious right, though I would venture to say that he is, indeed, quite useful to them.)
Saletan goes on to give one of the best descriptions I’ve ever read of the workings of the mind of a anti-choice concern troll. A masterpiece!
This may sound strange, but I don’t consider myself a real abortion foe. I have friends and sparring partners who think abortions should be illegal or at least heavily restricted. To me, that’s the chief dividing line in the debate. I don’t feel comfortable crossing that line. I don’t think a regime of abortion restrictions enacted in the name of life would make this world a better place. I think it would cause a mess—hypocrisy, deceit, interrogations, amateur home surgery, moral crudity backed by the force of law—as ugly as any war fought in the name of peace.
I don’t equate abortion with murder. I don’t even think it’s the worst option available to a woman facing unintended pregnancy. Every abortion dilemma is different, because every situation is different. The person best situated to make the right decision is the pregnant woman. A few years ago, I wrote a whole book on this point.
So why do I keep bringing up abortion as a moral problem? Because it is a moral problem. It’s the destruction of a developing human being. For that reason, the less we do it, the better. When I say abortion is bad, I’m not saying it’s necessarily worse than bringing a child into the world in lousy circumstances. I’m saying it’s worse than avoiding unintended pregnancy in the first place. That’s why I keep pushing contraception. If you cause an unintended pregnancy and an abortion because you didn’t want to wear a condom, you should be ashamed.
I mean, it’s beautiful in its perfection. I don’t get to see these too often in the world of choice debate; the place where I usually see them used over and over is in the gay/lesbian debate world, under the rallying cry of “Of course we don’t hate homosexuals themselves! What we hate is homosexuality. Hate the sin, love the sinner!”
Let’s recontext what Saletan has to say, and see if it starts to sound awfully damn familiar to you too:
This may sound strange, but I don’t consider myself a real
abortionhomosexuality foe. I have friends and sparring partners who thinkabortionsame-sex marriage should be illegal or at least heavily restricted. To me, that’s the chief dividing line in the debate. I don’t feel comfortable crossing that line. I don’t think a regime ofabortionrestrictions enacted against homosexual relationships in the name oflifemorality would make this world a better place. I think it would cause a mess—hypocrisy, deceit, interrogations,amateur home surgery,** moral crudity backed by the force of law—as ugly as any war fought in the name of peace.I don’t equate
abortionhomosexual intercourse with murder. I don’t even think it’s the worstoptionsin available to awomanperson facingunintended pregnancyan attraction to a member of the same sex. Everyabortionhomosexuality dilemma is different, because every situation is different. The person best situated to make the right decision is thepregnant womanperson having the homosexual feelings.A few years ago, I wrote a whole book on this point.***So why do I keep bringing up
abortionhomosexuality as a moral problem? Because it is a moral problem. It’s the destruction ofa developing human beingthe traditional family unit. For that reason, the less we do it, the better. When I sayabortionhaving a homosexual relationship is bad, I’m not saying it’s necessarily worse thanbringing a child into the world in lousy circumstancesnever marrying someone of the opposite sex. I’m saying it’s worse thanavoiding unintended pregnancy in the first placehaving homosexual desires in the first place. That’s why I keep pushingcontraceptionconversion therapy. If youcause an unintended pregnancyenter into a homosexual relationship andan abortionget married to that person becauseyou didn’t want to wear a condomyou didn’t want to undergo conversion therapy, you should be ashamed.
In other words, frothing at the mouth on the subject doesn’t really impress anyone who doesn’t already agree with me, so why not try to subtly ooze into the debate by affixing a large-eyed, sorrowful look to my visage and offering up some gentle-voiced shaming? As long as you listen to me and bob your head and agree that yes, you have done a terrible, monstrous thing and you are a bad, wicked person and you are very, very lucky that Lord Saletan is such a noble person that he is willing to restrain himself from campaigning to have you put into prison for your actions!
Best line in the whole piece:
And I write about the value of unborn life because that’s the problem my fellow pro-choicers don’t like to talk about.
Pro-choicers talk about the value of unborn life all the time. They love to talk about the value of unborn life. They simply don’t assign it the same value that Saletan does. Given that, one might consider the entire sentence to be one flaming whopper, except that there are no such people as Saletan’s “fellow pro-choicers.” There are such people as his “fellows,” and there are “pro-choicers,” but William Saletan can’t have fellow pro-choicers, because he’s not really pro-choice. Tout finis!
*I mention Amanda because I was bragging on Facebook to her just yesterday that even though I did see Saletan’s two latest pieces on the soul-rending tragedy that is aborted fetuses, I didn’t give in and blog about them. Clearly I overestimated my own strength and underestimated Saletan’s ability to deliver the final straw up so quickly afterwards.
**Probably not amateur surgery–the only real FAIL in the comparison, though.
***He hasn’t written one about homosexuality. But I wouldn’t be at all surprised to discover that there was one in the works.
****If you don’t want to read the entire blog post, the short answer is, Because he’s both smarmy and pro-life.
Well perhaps I fit into his camp then, because I am certainly pro-choice and would never look to remove that option from the woman-in-question’s control, but I also think that abortions are a bloody bad idea.
Irrespective of the health issues, they often represent a failiure to take adequate precautions before sex (or even immediately afterwards – unless the morning-after pill is lumped in with abortion?)
Still, most of those failiures are at least as attributable to the male half of the tryst as the female, and I’ve engaged in a couple of unprotected one-night stands, so I don’t feel I have any right to judge someone having one (and incidentally, I don’t think anyone else has that right either).
As a matter of public policy though, I’m not sure that it’s a good idea to promote abortion (the UK Government is intending to relax the laws on advertising abortion services), and I would prefer to see more money put into male contraceptive alternatives to the pill than see it spent on advertising what should be a method of last resort.
Perhaps I’ve fallen for the propoganda that swills around the MSM and other outlets, but I’m certainly under the impression that abortions (in the UK anyway) are used almost as a routine form of BC. That’s something that we shouldn’t be (even inadvertantly) encouraging
Abortion is not a bad idea, James. You’re suggesting that taking an aspirin and drinking a gallon of water the next morning is, in itself, the overindulgence. No, that’s cleaning up the mess you made the night before. The mess is a bad idea, but the cleaning up is just being responsible.
But your notion that abortion is largely the result of carelessness stems from a failure to understand how very little most women want to have an unintended pregnancy. Truth is, half of women getting abortions were using contraception. Many of the rest are too poor, too stifled, too undereducated, or in abusive relationships, and they can’t use contraception.
James,
Nobody, as far as I know, in the pro-choice camp ever runs around suggesting that abortions are a wonderful idea. At the minimum, they are an invasive medical procedure, and like all medical procedures they have a chance of going wrong and causing injury, even death–clearly something to be avoided if possible.
However, there is nothing particularly tragic about an early, voluntary abortion. If the termination of a “developing human being,” as LS puts it, was such a terrible thing, then we’d see the same reactions of sorrow and horror over the millions of embryos that women miscarry without even being aware of it every year–but we don’t. For instance, when a child is accidentally run over while playing too near the street, by an individual who simply didn’t see the child dash out in front of him until it was too late, everyone involved with the child is prostrated by misery and grief–the entirely accidental and unpreventable by the driver nature of the situation in no way lessens the sorrow over the child’s death.
There is a big difference in advertising where certain services can be obtained, and advertising the service itself as a fabulous thing. I have never, ever seen or heard the second engaged in, and I really can’t imagine it, when the service is abortion, no matter what or how many laws are relaxed. Nobody, ever, is going to see a billboard for a women’s health clinic that includes “abortion services” as a bullet point, instantly say to herself “Man! They’re offering abortions? I gotta get one of those right now!” and run out and get knocked up on purpose so she can sign up asap. The only thing an advertisement is ever going to do is let women know that that particular place offers them, period. So, what you’re saying is, you want abortion to be an option for women, but you want to make it harder for them to find a location that performs them…? Can you explain why, exactly?
Abortions are used as a “routine” form of birth control by practically nobody. The average woman of childbearing years would be able to get pregnant at least once every three or four months if she engaged in nothing but unprotected sex with fertile men. Say she started having sex at age 18 and didn’t stop until age 35–if abortion was her primary form of birth control, she’d have about 51 abortions during her adult lifetime. What have you been seeing or reading in the UK that gives you the impression that that is the case for any woman, anywhere, ever?
Guys! Will Saletan has nothing against abortion, he just wishes that women would feel worse about it, then they would be morally serious just like Will Saletan, who routinely plays the world’s tiniest violin for the world’s tiniest human beings.
http://www.slate.com/id/2135209/entry/2135210/
I can’t recommend enough this exchange on Slate between Saletan and Katha Pollitt, Pollitt basically gets Saletan to admit every single thing all his harshest critics have ever said about him, without him realizing it. It’s like watching a great boxer who let’s his opponent become an unwitting accomplice in his own ass-kicking.
See also my home-base for my full take on Saletan and his “Lady Parts.”
http://dearleaderblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/easy-answers-to-stupid-questions.html
So why do I keep bringing up abortion as a moral problem? Because it is a moral problem. It’s the destruction of a developing human being.
It does not surprise me that Lord S. is able to clearly to identify abortion as the destruction of a developing human being (an assessment which I don’t really disagree with, BTW). But: why am I certain that Saletan would never be willing to classify the testing-to-demolition that many junior-high-to-high-school-age girl/young woman undergoes in the same manner: that is, as the destruction of a developing human being? Why am I certain that, so far as Lord S. is concerned, young girls and women may die from the core outward by the thousandfold, so long as a fewscore of their fetuses survive? Why do I know that I am right about this? And does it have anything to do with the burden of unfairness to which Saletan imagines he is subject?
I think it only fair to pose the question.
Sorry about the screwed-up HTML tags…
@bekabot: Fixed! And your question is entirely fair.
@Dear Leader: Katha Pollitt destroyed Saletan with kindness– nice trick. There’s something to learn there for all of us.
@Lisa K: “**Probably not amateur surgery”
However, if instead of replacing all those bits with “homosexuality”, you replaced them with “kinky sex”…
@me: I’ve decided I like @ marks now. Expect more in the future.
@lol@
“So, what you’re saying is, you want abortion to be an option for women, but you want to make it harder for them to find a location that performs them…? Can you explain why, exactly?”
Come on now Lisa, that’s a touch disingenuous (at least for the situation in this country).
Abortions are free, and freely available on the NHS. Sexual health clinics are pretty prolific and even I know where my local one is (and not only because I had the snip there).
All school kids are given sex-ed classes (which are compulsory) and there’s a well-publicised (and confidential) NHS telephone service which will give full details about clinics and other services in a given area. School nurses are able to give out morning-after pills, as are chemists (without prescriptions).
“We’re” already very well informed. TV advertising will just be money thrown away, and thrown into addressing the wrong end of the problem (IMO).
I hate dressing up behavioural ‘goals’ in religious clothes, but I live in a society where an increasing proportion of the population seems to have abandoned a commonly-shared sense of morality.
Some of the tighter strictures were intolerable and needed to go and (contrary to what I know some will think) I am not advocating chastity belts or a return to some (largely fictional anyway) ideal ‘golden age.’ However, we seem to respect one another less. People (men and women both) are more aggressive than they were. Manners seem to be less important (they’ve not disappeared totally, but they’re certainly becoming less evident) and we expose our kids to some very confused and confusing ideas about sexuality and adulthood.
We had my Wife’s sister living with us (she’s at Uni now) from the age of 13. She described (only recently, or she’d have been grounded until now!) groups of her class-mates that practiced group sex and partner-swapping. At 14-15! They weren’t a ‘fringe’ group either – these were the more popular kids. That may or may not shock the regular contributers here, but it sure as hell shocked me.
I’m not particularly prudish, but what happened to a snog and some fumbling around at the back of the cinema? How’s it healthy for ANY of those kids to be experimenting that early, or good for society overall when they get pregnant (highest teen pregnancy rate in Europe) or have an abortion (admittedly, the latter is probably the better of a bad choice of options)?
Sorry if I’ve rambled way off topic, but I see an increase in abortions here as one of a number of pointers that indicate problems within our society. I’d never want to remove or restrict the option, but I feel our money could be better spent in tackling the issues underlying the increase than on further publicising a well-advertised medical procedure.
Ah, no, James, you’re just unfamiliar with the US health care system. It is very not universal for any doctor’s office, hospital or clinic to offer abortion services, and it’s more likely than not that any private insurer won’t pay for them. It’s not that easy to find somewhere to get an abortion.
Sex-ed in the states is also not universally compulsory and varies wildly by type–some of it is “abstinence-only,” which provides precisely zero information about abortion and the only birth control information provided is typical-use failure rates.
We’re not very well informed here, and it’s on purpose.
“However, we seem to respect one another less. People (men and women both) are more aggressive than they were.”
I don’t really understand this statement–more aggressive defined as how? crime rates? And what past time frame are we comparing the present to? 10 years ago? 20? 50? 100? 200?
I have a 16 year old son and none of his classmates are having group sex, that’s for sure. He and his buddies don’t even hang out with girls. Please don’t assume that one person you know is somehow descriptive of all teens everywhere, or even a majority of teens everywhere–to make blanket predictions about the frequency of teen sex orgies, I think you’d need to provide some studies to back that up, not the statements of one single teen girl.
The US has even higher teen pregnancy rates than the UK, but teens still get pregnant far less often than the next age bracket up (I think that’s usually defined as 18-25) does. The US also has had declining abortion rates for the last 15 years at least.
“Please don’t assume that one person you know is somehow descriptive of all teens everywhere, or even a majority of teens everywhere–to make blanket predictions about the frequency of teen sex orgies, I think you’d need to provide some studies to back that up, not the statements of one single teen girl.”
Oh, I totally agree – I wasn’t intending to paint all teenagers with the same brush at all. I’m only 36 so I’d like to think (however misguidedly) that I’m not THAT far down the path to a slippers-and-pipe mentality. However, are you intending to convince me that teenagers today aren’t exposed to far more, and far more graphic, sexual images and content than we were? Do you honestly believe that these don’t have an effect?
I appreciate that a lot of the ‘information’ put out in newspapers and magazines is anecdotal, and a lot of their ‘surveys’ aren’t especially rigorous or scientific, but they do point to a trend of earlier and earlier sexualisation. Would you be happy if either of your boys had lost their virginity by 12 (assuming they would have been able to)?
One girls magazine in the UK (aimed at 14 year olds) has a ‘position of the week’ feature as well as articles that wouldn’t look far out of place in a top-shelf mag. A readers’ survey they conducted suggested that 6% of the respondents had lost their virginity before age 13.
A boy at my school ‘photographed’ (the camera didn’t have any film) up the skirt of a classmate and was (rightly IMO) expelled for it immediately. These days he could save himself the trouble – she might well have already ‘sexted’ pictures to her entire year-group (or find her ex-boyfriend’s done it for her).
Your system of sex-ed and sexual health provision, at least as I understand it, seems to vary wildly State by State. At least we have some consistency. However, that consistency doesn’t seem to be producing the results we want any more than your inconsistency does (ie abortion rates continue to grow as do teenage pregnancy rates).
This goes massively against my liberal instincts, but perhaps a better route to tackling the immediate problem (ie abortion and pregnancy rates) will lie in the male contraceptive they’re field-testing in India at the moment. It’s 100% reliable (at least it’s proven so to date, with only one pregnancy which was due to an error by the doctor), lasts 10 years and is fully reversible.
It wouldn’t affect the massive increase we’re seeing in the incidence of STDs, but perhaps compulsory treatment of all sexually-mature boys might eradicate the teenage pregnancy / abortion problem.
Of course, I have absolutely no doubt that it will have other, unintended, consequences. It might well, for instance, increase the pressure exerted on girls to have sex early, and it would do nothing for STD rates either. Those issues, however, could continue to be tackled by education programs – beefed up by the extra funds saved from fewer terminations and from the lower housing and care provision required by teenage mums.
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