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What Conservatives Could Learn From Lawyers
I flirted with a law career for about a semester, but quickly discovered that, while I can comprehend the language used, I cannot tolerate the general lack of common sense. Lawyers, especially prosecutors, do know something, however, that conservatives could really use when it comes to dealing with liberals: when quizzing someone in public, stick to questions whose answers you already know.
That principle would have been extremely useful for Idaho Representative Vito Barbieri. If you haven’t caught the headlines about him, this idiot decided it would be a good idea to ask if a woman could swallow a camera to find out “something” about an unborn child she might be carrying. I apologize for pointing out this stupidity, but it is sadly just one in a long list of stupid things said or asked by conservative men in government hoping to pass legislation that will control what women do with their bodies. Yes, I am using the liberal terminology here for a very good reason. When “stupid” is all that the conservative side has to offer, it should face the liberal ridicule it deserves.
When it comes to the pro-life movement, there are piles of examples like this and, for a conservative woman that is ambivalent at best on the issue, it’s painful. Throw in the fact that this conservative woman spent the better part of 20 years crafting messages for politicians, and it’s downright excruciating. First of all, any legislator on either the state or federal level who wants to tackle this issue needs to be sure to have done some real research before they speak publicly. When you make a fool of yourself by not knowing the answers before the questions are asked, you hurt not only your own credibility, but also the movement. Recall how Wendy Davis rocketed to fame: fighting a law that protects women in Texas from ending up with someone like Kermit Gosnell treating them. How is that “pro-woman”?
The opposition claims that the evil conservatives are trying to deny women needed health care. Instead of promoting the logical reasons why it is good to guarantee that doctors treating women in these clinics have privileges at a hospital, the response degrades into yet another moral argument about what women shouldn’t have. And because that happens, there also isn’t much information given about the fact that many of these clinics have people that aren’t actually licensed physicians doing surgical procedures on women. Complaints about onerous building requirements come up from the left, and the right doesn’t point out the fact that building codes dating back over a decade in most regions have already had these requirements for outpatient surgery centers and, in some cases, even basic physician’s offices. If the state in question took the federal guidelines without amendments, the latter is the case. No one bothers to ask liberals why it is a bad thing for ambulance workers to be able to easily access all patient treatment rooms in a medical facility.
Probably the biggest lie that conservatives don’t call liberals on is the fact that these clinics are, in fact, outpatient surgery centers. Just because these clinics serve only women, liberals say that they should be exempt from the requirements that any other surgery center for any other medical specialty must meet. And then they dare to say that is “good” for women? Meanwhile, conservatives focus on what? The unborn child.
Conservatives want to stop abortions after 20 weeks, but instead of using statistics from the liberal Guttmacher Institute as ammunition (scroll down and read under “Safety of Abortion”), it’s the emotional argument of saving unborn children. It’s better to cover the Internet with pictures of aborted fetuses instead of using legitimate and generally unbiased sources to make the argument that especially “surgical abortion” should be treated by the law as “surgery”?
After years of already knowing the answer to the question of what people care about more — women or unborn children — this debate is still framed almost solely from the perspective of saving the unborn. And this is in spite of legitimate medical and scientific evidence that could be used to show that at least certain types of abortion, especially the types that conservatives want stopped more than any other, are much more harmful to women than others.
This is not an “ends justify the means” argument here. This is simply pointing out the insanity of repeating the same thing while expecting a different result. It is also pointing out the failure to frame an argument in terms that actually matter to people and might move them to our side. And it is no different from the fact that conservatives are still failing to point out that many crisis pregnancy centers do more than just counsel women on options other than abortion. Many provide other services to help women make it through life as a new mother, or to prevent themselves from ending up with an unwanted pregnancy again by teaching them that they are worth more than what is between their legs. But no, there aren’t commercials or websites featuring women that are happy to report that they were helped by these organizations. There is just the liberal accusation that they are brainwashing women into not having abortions or lying to them so they can’t get one.
If this issue was handled only by prosecutors, I suspect that we would be seeing more of what I’ve mentioned here. At the least, there would be fewer misguided statements and questions like Barbieri’s. I don’t have an emotional investment in this issue; as I said before, I am ambivalent. I am not a social conservative, and do not take up moral arguments in politics. On the contrary, I learned long that politics is barely moral. However, I might find myself standing on the side of pro-life activists if the lives they were seeking to protect included the women that are harmed by abortion, as I’ve shown can be the case here.
Published in General
We do not have to “believe in souls, a deity, spirituality, etc” in order to make a moral case against abortion. All we have to believe in is the Golden Rule, “Love your neighbor as yourself”.
Is the unborn child a “neighbor”? Suppose a researcher removes part of a newborn infants brain to determine how the child will develop during the rest of his life without that area. Most of us would see immediately that such an action is a gross violation of the Golden Rule. But what if the same researcher performed the same operation on an unborn child? Would that operation be more or less wrong based on the fact that the child hadn’t been born yet? Again, I submit that the answer is obvious. The two children have received equal injuries, equally damaging to their lives. If the Golden Rule is violated in the one case, it is equally violated in the other. Therefore, the unborn child is just as much of a “neighbor” as the newborn infant.
There. A simple philosophical experiment requiring no supernatural beliefs of any kind whatever.
Liz: ” I don’t have an emotional investment in this issue; as I said before, I am ambivalent. I am not a social conservative, and do not take up moral arguments in politics.”
…………………………………………………….
No? Could have fooled me.
Maybe you should have finished law school. I did and practiced many years. “Don’t questions if you don’t know the answer”. That’s dramatic TV lawyer talk. But lawyers do in fact. Especially in an area called discovery. You get tangled up on some fanciful version of law boiled down to cross examination of from Inherit The Wind.
That aside, abortion is not the only issue that Republicans screw up on. Not necessarily on the merits; on how to articulate your case in a comprehensible manner. Are the only conservatives who can complete a declaratory sentence on talk radio or Sunday morning TV news shows? Sometimes I think that for most elected officials on the right English is a second language.
For example, any subject that is even tangentially about race has a chilling effect on Republicans. Most get tongue tied. And the ones who can speak directly are the racists who need to shut up altogether. It’s like a total black out (poor choice of words) when discussing racial aspects of Obama/Holder/Rice/Sharpton policies. Best they can do is talk around it. “Radical”, is the word most used when denigrating the administration. Mark Levin comes the closest with the word “racialist.” Then again, there are hardly any of this type in or running for public office. Oh, a Cruz here and there, but they get dissed by the bumblers in charge.
I share your frustration Liz. You see the Republican communication problem in the context of a failure to command pin point accuracy as in cross examination. No. Trials are the exception. Cases settle, but if you insist on a trial context summation would be the appropriate phase. That’s where you make your pitch for understanding and empathy – intelligently.
B/t/w, practically speaking, what prospects would a candidate have if he or she hung their hat on an anti-abortion campaign? This thread focuses on one issue. Not to say you’re wrong. The poblem is abortion is simply not high on the list of voter concerns.
The local centers have developed sophisticated counseling methods to help post abortion women overcome the guilt and psychological scars left from abortion.
Wow. Do women who feel guilty and psychologically scarred after an abortion really go to their local pro-life center to get help from the folks who publicly diagnose their pregnancies as the merely “inconvenient” result of “wanting sex without consequences,” and have openly named them “murderers” and “serial killers” (all terms I’ve encountered not from foolish politicians but from thoughtful Richocheters)?
Counseling methods that could work on such monsters must indeed be sophisticated—have these counselors offered their services to the guys down at Gitmo? Surely a method that works on women who have murdered their own babies might do wonders for terrorists who merely kill strangers?
Okay, that’s snarking.
Yet while, to an ambivalently pro-choice person like me, pro-choicers are too prone to claim that 1.) unwanted pregnancy always results from some sort of victimization and 2.) a woman’s decision about abortion will be moral by definition and thus should be protected from both information and criticism, how enthusiastic can I be about pro-lifers who haughtily dismiss the real risks to life and health that even a relatively uncomplicated pregnancy entails, and often appear motivated by a reactionary discomfort with female autonomy and sexuality, not to mention a complete disinterest in protecting human life beyond the bounds of the uterine wall?
Generously acknowledging a history in which men have had disproportionate power over women’s reproductive lives, adding in some compassionate remarks about the troubles of the already-born might—if combined with basic (sixth-grade) understanding of human anatomy and reproduction—-go a long way toward encouraging the reasonable pro-choicer to listen long enough to the pro-lifer to realize they agree.
Incidentally, while I don’t know millennials galore, I know (and am related to) quite a few, and they are indeed less tolerant of abortion. Their reasoning is that, for their generation, the facts of life have been so routinely talked about (comprehensive sex ed, anyone?) and birth control is so widely and easily available, there is little excuse for getting pregnant in the first place.
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Back in the pre-Roe days every single state law against abortion had an exception to allow abortion to save the life of the mother. As far as the complete disinterest in protecting human life beyond the uterine wall goes, I have always favored anti-homicide laws myself. I was unaware that any pro-lifer (or anyone else in society for that matter) was in favor of their repeal. While our society is not perfect it obviously goes to a lot of trouble to protect human life, which only begins with laws against homicide. No one has to starve to death for example, which was a serious threat in previous eras. Where is this evidence of “a complete disinterest in protecting human life beyond the bounds of the uterine wall”?
You see, on the one hand there is female autonomy–on the other side is the hateful moralistic reactionary man. Neither common decency, nor a walk down history lane can cure this kind of conflict. You’d think that with all the abortions since the ’70s, talk about female autonomy could sound quite grisly now & then. Au contraire–it’s the future–women are apparently the victims of the reactionaries in this kind of story & the story-tellers are pretty sure that they’ve got history on their side. Now, as a matter of fact, is not a small majority, or almost a majority of women in America, at least in the polls, pro-life? That, however, does not figure in the political stories that justify what is a rather serious form of partisanship…
Oh, by the way, speaking about a reactionary discomfort with female autonomy and sexuality, and men’s “disproportionate power over women’s reproductive lives” would you favor granting men an “equal right of choice” over reproductive decisions?
Under current law sexual decisions and reproductive decisions have been completely separated, and the right to make reproductive decisions is vested exclusively in women. A man who objects to a woman aborting his child may beg and plead for her to save the life of that child -but she can simply reply that her decision is none of his business and have the abortion regardless of how he feels about it. On the other hand, a man who doesn’t want to accept the responsibility to support a child that is unwanted from his perspective, may beg and plead, offer to pay for the abortion plus something extra for the woman’s trouble etc. and also be told that it is none of his business. She may then go ahead and have the child against his wishes and sue him for child support. If reproductive decisions are none of the man’s business, one way or the other, why should he have to pay for something that is none of his business?
When I brought this objection up to one of my professors, she suggested that while she saw my point, it would be unfair to allow men to abandon women who have religious objections to abortion. My answer was that this amounted to requiring one citizen to subsidize the religious beliefs of another citizen, regardless of whether he agreed with them or not. That would definitely be a violation of his civil liberties. On the other hand, if the woman had no moral objections to abortion, but simply thought it was the right time to have her child, why should he be required to pay for her decision? Maybe it isn’t the right time for him to have a child, or maybe he would like to have a child with someone else?
Of course I strongly favor compulsory male child support, regardless of the existing regime of legal abortion. Two wrongs don’t make a right. But I guess you can chalk that up to my discomfort with masculine autonomy and my reactionary view that men should be held responsible for their sexual decisions.
As far as the complete disinterest in protecting human life beyond the uterine wall goes, I have always favored anti-homicide laws myself. I was unaware that any pro-lifer (or anyone else in society for that matter) was in favor of their repeal. While our society is not perfect it obviously goes to a lot of trouble to protect human life, which only begins with laws against homicide. No one has to starve to death for example, which was a serious threat in previous eras. Where is this evidence of “a complete disinterest in protecting human life beyond the bounds of the uterine wall”?
Hah! Touche, Mr. Collins!
This is what I meant: To an ordinary pro-choice citizen half-listening to the politicians yak, it seems that the same people who argue passionately against abortion on the basis that an innocent child should be protected nonetheless enthusiastically support bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age (I know, I know, possibly redundant) and nuking Syria. They favor cutting welfare benefits to welfare mothers, and declare 40,000 gun deaths in the United States the price we have to pay for Liberty. Each of these is a conversation in itself, and not ones I’m trying to get into, I’m just saying that when it comes to the problem Liz is describing—that is, that the rhetoric of the pro-life movement tends to be counter-productive— remarks about the already-born along the lines of “kill ’em all and let God sort ’em out” makes the solicitude for fetuses contained in the next sentence sound like it’s about something other than reverence for life. (Doesn’t mean it is! Just sounds that way.)
But never mind–I should’ve left that whole idea out of my post anyway. At least I have the satisfaction of knowing I gave you some seriously low-hanging fruit to pick! (Love it.)
The stronger point is about the tendency Pro-Lifers have of dismissing the specific physical burdens pregnancy places on women. This comes across not just as mean but as clueless.
I don’t recommend describing pregnancy as an “inconvenience” when talking to pregnant loved ones—the hormones make us tetchy—and I don’t recommend being quite so cavalier about the contribution made by a birth mother when talking to the adopted child that you (like all Right-To-Lifers) have taken into your home and family. (“Your mom was a non-murderer” isn’t going to do it).
Politically, it’s lousy rhetorical strategy to assert that a woman bears no special burden in human reproduction. A disproportionate number of women are pro-choice (and vote for pro-choice candidates) and few bother to listen to pro-life proposals anymore because they’ve already decided that pro-life people are willfully ignorant, and mean, when they aren’t just goofy. (Don’t tell me that pro-choice activists also sound willfully ignorant, mean and goofy: I hear you, but we aren’t talking about how they might win more voters).
Michael Collins
Oh, by the way, speaking about a reactionary discomfort with female autonomy and sexuality, and men’s “disproportionate power over women’s reproductive lives” would you favor granting men an “equal right of choice” over reproductive decisions?
Remember, there is a time-warp in politics: Anyone older than forty came of age in a different time, and we adjust only partially to this or any new reality. My pro-choice peers (that is, women over 40) tend to say things like “well, but do all girls really get good information about where babies come from?” “Is birth control really easy to come by?” These people vote. Knowing where they’re coming from, and addressing their concerns would be smarter than pissing them off. So I’m not sure I’d go with the “what about the man forced to have/not have the baby” thing—that is, it’s a fun way to keep an argument going, and I’m not unsympathetic, personally, but it won’t win converts, and converts is what we’re after.
Too many women know that having a baby not only affects a woman’s health (pregnancy always affects a woman’s health) but also that a woman will probably bear primary responsibility for his/her care. Too many women know that baby-daddies are seldom required the bear the whole cost of childrearing, so the injustice of an involuntary father’s financial burden won’t seem quite so heart-rending by contrast with all the burdens, including financial, that she bears.