Dialogue on Abortion
Do pro-lifers hate women?
1.
Alice is an accountant for Planned Parenthood.
She saw the job opening right after she passed her licensing exams, and jumped at it.
In university, she’d been a part-time activist for feminist causes—her campus was too far from DC and she had a midterm the day of the Women’s March, but she spent an hour or so at a local event in the freezing rain.
Alice is, of course, decidedly pro-choice. She’s never really had to think hard about it—all her friends and professors always felt the same way—but she has a strong intuition that abortion is mostly indifferentiable from other medical procedures.
She gets her news from progressive outlets, and has been increasingly concerned by reports of women losing access to safe, legal abortion in red states. Her state legislated the right to abortion until fetal viability (around 24 weeks), but a grassroots movement has been growing to pass a ballot measure that imposes a stricter limit, galvanized by Trump’s victory and the general unpopularity of progressive politics.
One day, a group of protestors show up outside Alice’s office building. They hold signs reading “abortion is murder” and “child not a choice.” Alice is a little stunned, but pushes past them and sits down at her desk. She’s disgusted by the protestors’ blatant misogyny and complete disregard for the rights of women to their own bodies.
Alice tries to start her work, but the protestors begin chanting outside and she can’t focus. So she looks out the window and tries to spot the specific organization they’re affiliated with.
She notices they all have matching backpacks, and googles the name written on them. On the protestors’ website, they have a list of policy priorities. Opposing abortion is among them, and also listed are:
“Supporting religious values in education.”
“Encouraging fashion trends which highlight conservative, traditional dress.”
“Advocating for policies to support two-parent households.”
Alice happens to agree with the last one—she and her two younger brothers were raised by a single mother, and though their mother wasn’t neglectful at all, she always felt that her childhood would’ve been much improved by an extra income and set of hands.
But these protestors are misogynists! Good Bayesian that Alice is, she resolves to update her credences negatively on all of their policy positions. If a misogynistic attitude predicts support for some policy, she reasons, it’s necessary to decrease her confidence in that policy given her opposition to misogyny.
2.
Bob works at Planned Parenthood too, also as an accountant.
He applied because the pay was a little better than his last job, and considers himself mostly apolitical, if a bit socially liberal.
Of course, he’s been at Planned Parenthood for six months now—in that time, he’s absorbed some of the conventional wisdom that abortion is just a medical procedure, but hasn’t given it much specific thought.
He saw the protestors too this morning, and recognized a face or two among them from his church.
Bob walked into the office a bit confused. He hadn’t encountered the other side of the abortion debate before, and after seeing trustworthy representatives of the pro-life cause, he’s beginning to question the wisdom he absorbed from his coworkers.
Before sitting at his desk, he goes over to the water cooler, and overhears some colleagues talking about the protestors.
“… can’t even believe that married men would get involved with this,” one is saying.
“I know,” says the other, “Don’t they care about their wives or daughters at all?”
Bob sits down at his computer, but is too distracted to work. He’s not sure whether to trust his colleagues’ intuitions that the protestors are mostly misogynistic and motivated by a desire to control women.
After a bit of googling, he finds an essay by Very Charitable Substacker
that argues against treating pro-lifers as inherently misogynistic, and starts reading it.3.
Alice has decided to take an early lunch, and walks over to Bob’s desk to see if he wants to come with her. As she walks up to him, she sees what’s on his computer screen over his shoulder, and is a bit disgusted.
She asks Bob what he’s doing reading a piece of misogynistic apologia from a known theist, especially one who failed to vote for Kamala Harris and (shudder) endorses deontology.
She tells him about how misogynistic the protestors are. About her earlier exercise in Bayesian reasoning—how she even updated against her prior belief that the nuclear family structure should be encouraged.
Bob listens thoughtfully, then asks Alice a question. “Did you update your credence in the protestors’ misogyny given their agreement with you on the nuclear family?”
Alice tells him no, why would she?
Bob says, “It’s kind of like Newton’s Third Law. Bayes’ Theorem cuts both ways—if your low confidence in someone’s perspective leads you to update against a conclusion you had high confidence in, you also have to update your appraisal of their viewpoint positively a little bit.”
“No,” Alice says, “that would only be true if I supported the conclusion for the same reason they did. Since I support the nuclear family for non-misogynistic reasons, my respect for their misogynistic viewpoint shouldn’t change at all.”
“But you don’t know for a fact that their attitude is defined by misogyny. In fact, it seems pretty unlikely to me that woman-hatred is a motivating factor at all for most pro-lifers.”
Alice thinks for a moment before responding. “I guess I should think it’s a bit less likely that the pro-lifers are misogynistic based on this one value we share. But by the same token, I should update in favor of misogyny based on their other views that I disagree with.”
“Well,” Bob says, “I think that would only be true if you had good reason to believe their other viewpoints really were motivated by misogyny. From what you’ve told me, it seems significantly more likely that religiosity and traditionalism are their primary motivating ideologies.”
“Hm,” Alice says.
“And,” Bob cuts in, “by the principle of charity, we should probably assume that the protestors have more coherent reasons for their beliefs than wanting to oppress women or hating reproductive freedom or anything silly like that.”
“Hold on. Misogyny isn’t as simple as wanting to oppress women,” Alice begins, but is interrupted.
4.
Alice and Bob have been speaking with raised voices—conversations about Bayesian epistemology tend to get people riled up—and their nosy coworker Eve overheard the last few pieces of dialogue.
Specifically, she heard “principle of charity,” leaped out of her chair and over her cubicle’s wall, and has been sprinting toward Bob’s desk for the past eight seconds or so.
She arrives panting, and manages to get her question out somewhat intelligibly. “You want charity?” she asks. “Here you go.”
“It doesn’t matter why the pro-lifers believe what they do. It could be misogyny or Christianity or whatever—they still have just as much of a right to believe it, and it’s still just as true.
“See, to us, no matter what they say, it’ll still be right to do our work here. Our progressive cultural norms have taught us that safe and legal abortion care is an undeniable moral good, so we’ll continue to act to provide it. And we’ll continue to advocate for legislation that makes abortion access as free as possible, because then we’ll be able to do it exactly as much as our norms dictate.
“The pro-lifers, of course, will also be legitimately motivated to protest against us and to not get abortions themselves, no matter what we say. Their religious or misogynistic or whatever norms have taught them that abortion is undeniably evil, so they’ll continue to act to prevent it. It’s fully justified, and we shouldn’t bother engaging them in debate or trying to impose our own cultural norms on them.”
Eve exhales. Alice and Bob stare at her, stunned.
Then a great chasm opens up in the floor between the three of them. A black mass with 30 viper heads and 40 scorpion tails rises out of the abyss, subsumes Eve into its demonic core, then returns to the depths of hell.
“Good riddance,” Alice says.
“No kidding,” says Bob. “From your perspective, and mine, and hers too. Christ.”
5.
“Anyway,” Alice continues, “as I was saying: misogyny doesn’t just consist in wanting to oppress women qua oppressing women. Most of the religious and traditional motivations that you’re talking about are misogynistic in effect, which is what really matters.”
“Maybe from a moral point of view,” Bob says, “but not an epistemic one. Shouldn’t the intent behind their ideology matter more with regard to their reliability? Otherwise, you’ll end up dismissing well-intentioned viewpoints in a specific case simply because loosely-related viewpoints lead to bad consequences in totally different cases.”
Alice scowls. “I think you’re being a little uncharitable yourself now, Bob. Clearly there’s good reason to expect that religiously-motivated viewpoints that restrict one aspect of women’s behavior are closely related to religiously-motivated viewpoints that restrict some other aspect of their behavior.
“So if the protestors also believe women should be wearing modest clothes under the auspices of their religious belief, I have good reason to think their religious beliefs are more or less a repackaged misogyny, and probably that same misogyny permeates their reasoning about abortion.”
Bob thinks for a while, then nods. “That seems right,” he says. “But I guess I’m still worried that your priors for pro-lifers being misogynistically motivated are too high. I mean, have you really considered the entire space of possible reasons that someone would reject totally free access to abortion? Or are you being extremely selective with the evidence you consider—only paying attention to the loudest, most-in-front-of-your-office-building voices, and not making a good-faith attempt to understand the merits of the best-possible pro-life position?”
Alice frowns at first, but her expression slowly becomes a smile. “Yeah,” she says. “I could probably be a bit more charitable to pro-life philosophy at large. But it’s not my fault that the loudest and most accessible voices are also the least convincing ones!”
“Ah, but when’s that ever not the case?” Bob asks, chuckling. “Hey, what’d you come over here for anyway?”
“Oh, right,” Alice says, “You want to get lunch? At this point, I’m kinda starving.”
“Sure.”
Epilogue
Bob and Alice did not get lunch.
After spending so much time engaged in serious philosophical dialogue, they couldn’t help but feel an intense mutual attraction. And Bob lived only a block away.
Their lovemaking was so urgent and passionate that they completely forgot to use contraception. Twelve weeks later, Alice had a safe, legal, and reflectively equilibrious abortion.
Lukethoughts
(Lucas will soon be in Miami, but not just yet. Here are his still-Michiganian thoughts.)
“I missed my fucking flight today for the first time in my life.” (Ed. note: I told him not to go to Chick-fil-A before the flight [for the gays, of course]. Frankly, this seems entirely karmic.)
“Everyone should just sleep all the time so we can all just not talk to each other because people talking is annoying and sleeping is good so why don’t we all just collectively sleep all the time.” (Ed. note: Um, Luke may not be doing so hot. Honestly, though, I’m almost convinced, it’s a tight argument. Then again, I’m on the record as very anti-sleep. Agh, I guess some kind of compromise is in order—maybe 8 hours a day or so?)
“I am watching this show invincible and it is pretty good so far, so many plot twists all the time AND MORE IMPORTANTLY, they namedrop Ari’s blog in the show, ‘Mistakes Were Made’.” (Ed. note: Wow! I’ve really broken through.)
very unsong with those 40 scorpion tails 🔥