On Second Thought: Let's get down to cases, senators

Argument is a way for people with differing perspectives on an issue, abortion, for example, to test and reshape each other's ideas and, sometimes, even reason out a new idea together. Unfortunately, not much reasoning together happens when everybody insists on the kind of high minded principles that inspire Facebook memes and protest signs, such as Life Begins at Conception versus My Body, My Choice.

Arguments on the order of--Abortion is always wrong-- based on grand principles — Because life begins at conception — don't win converts, Worse, that kind of talk guarantees everybody is going to get so riled up arguing about the principle — Life begins at conception — that nobody gets around to saying anything useful about the abortion issue itself. Imagine the voice of the unpersuaded: If you want me to treat a one celled fertilized egg like a person, how about tadpoles? And since cloning technology means any cell in my body is a potential new me, does that mean I have to be extra careful clipping my toenails? Notice, the chance that anyone will say anything useful about public policy on human reproduction has disappeared after just a couple of sentences.

The My Body, My Choice line doesn't do a lot to promote reasoning together either. Here are a couple of easy rejoinders sure to derail the conversation: Glad to hear you're finally with me against those vaccine bullies... So, you're telling me, about twenty months on, women just start kicking themselves in the belly?

The problem with righteous principles is there are so many of them jostling for attention and shouting over each other. Even the Ten Commandments get interrupted all the time (Where would the military industrial complex be otherwise?). Newcomers like Life Begins at Conception and, My Body, My Choice don't stand a chance.

Public opinion surveys hint at the pile up of competing principles in American minds. A couple of months ago, a two to one majority hoped the Supreme Court would let Roe vs, Wade alone. Fifty five percent of us said we were Pro Choice on a Pew poll, though only about one in three agreed that abortion should be legal in every case and, as of 2018, only one in five thought abortion should be legal if a woman simply doesn't want a child.

While you might say results like these indicate confusion, I see evidence that most Americans are aware of moral complexity and aware that one case differs from another, an awareness worthy of emulation by Congress people.

One thing those polls definitely show is that if people in Congress want to try representing us, they could stop talking about rights of the unborn versus reproductive freedom, and start talking cases. How about if pregnancy is killing the woman? What if it's the fetus that is dying? If there is no money for another child? And surely nobody in the Senate thinks it's okay to force a 10-year-old rape victim to go through with a pregnancy?

It is hard to know exactly where that kind of senatorial argument on our behalf might arrive because it hasn't started. But history, as well as contemporary poll results, suggest some new/old ideas might emerge in Congress.

In the past, in many places in the world, any early days decisions about ending a pregnancy seem to have been up to the pregnant person and a local Wise Woman knowledgeable about abortion inducing concoctions. Through most of Christian history, the authorities tend to leave the whole pregnancy venture mostly up to women — wise women, female relatives, midwives — right up to christening time, perhaps because early Christian authorities are not as quick to speak of rights of the unborn as some of their modern counterparts. Augustine, for example, calls abortion a sin but sees no reason for legal action because the fetus, at least until some late stage of pregnancy is a body “without a live soul.”

Pollsters don't ask the questions needed to untangle the theological views of modern American, but there are hints, especially in some apparent contradictions. On a PerryUndem poll that did ask followup questions, one out of three voters who said abortion should be illegal after three months also said they didn't want legislators coming up with laws to make it illegal. It is impossible to know exactly what those self contradicting respondents were thinking without a longer conversation. But these and other poll responses do suggest that if Congress were to embark on that conversation, the practical resolution might not be that far from Augustine's: moral principles here, yes; reason to get the authorities involved, nope.

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Will Rawn of Havre is a retired Montana State University-Northern professor