Hi all, I am closing this comment thread and leaving it for paid subscribers only now. The kind of bloodless, abstract philosophizing about the lives of women and other pregnant people evident in these comments has always struck me as a deeply unethical manifestation of contemporary ethics in the analytic tradition. It is, to be fair, what my discipline often encourages in students. But I won't indulge it further on my posts. People's lives are on the line and that has to be discussed with a certain basic sensitivity.
Thank you Kate for advocating for your space and your community, and for stating your boundaries.
Several years ago I watched a video in which you self-corrected about something small, and explained to the interviewer that you like to show your students that making an error and then correcting it is absolutely fine and not catastrophic (apologies if I am misrepresenting this exchange - this is how I remember it). I have used this example many times since to explain to friends who are nervous about pronouns, for example, that it is fine to make a mistake - just amend the error and apologise with grace. I can see that it is a relief to them when I explain this.
So in this context, when you state your limits about how you want a sensitive topic to be discussed on your posts, I want to thank you again for the strong example you set and the standards you embody.
My visceral, response is that women's suffering and lives are incidental to the prolife position--part of our general cultural/social indifference to women. The Pelicot case comes to mind. Women are seen as containers, providers, free laborers and as such not deserving of the same universal rights and laws that apply to white cis men. I wonder if these cases of women being denied life saving medical procedures could be seen as medical manslaughter by lawmakers. It seems like voluntary manslaughter because there is intent--treating a woman as inconsequential is malicious. I would also like to know how all of you are coping with the burden this bystander trauma.
Not well. It has never been more apparent in my lifetime in this country that women's lives are essentially disposable and our suffering is essentially invisible. Even among supposed allies, our needs (like basic emergency medical care, for example) somehow always seem to be secondary to other "more important" political issues. Like the cost of eggs. It takes a lot of inner strength to maintain a sense of self-worth in such a hostile/indifferent world.
21 years ago, on a vacation in Florida, I suffered a miscarriage (my third) at 11 weeks, and was able to go to the emergency room and receive appropriate care. It is sickening and horrifying to me to know that today women in Florida (and so many other states) are being denied that care. The point you make about the fetishization and prioritization of the fertilized egg only when it is in the mother’s body, as a means of extorting emotional and reproductive labor from that body, is so brilliant and revelatory (like all your work)— it has helped me to understand a cruelty I honestly couldn’t make sense of. Thank you for these wonderful sub stack essays. They are a bright and guiding light in these dark times.
I’m pro-choice, but having actually talked to pro-lifers and read their arguments, I find articles of this tenor baffling. Can’t we just admit that people in the pro-life movement are — by and large — motivated by the belief unborn human organisms have a right to life and that abortion should be stopped because it violates that right? If I believed that, I hope I’d have the decency to fight for the ending of abortion! (Cf. https://open.substack.com/pub/wollenblog/p/are-pro-lifers-driven-by-a-subconscious?r=2248ub&utm_medium=ios).
I did read the article — here’s why (for now!) I don’t find that argument convincing.
The standard pro-life view is “about life” in the sense that it opposes the direct and intentional killing of human persons. In this sense of “about life”, the fact that pro-lifers support laws that result in women dying from pregnancy-induced medical complications doesn’t show that they’re contradicting themselves, IMO. WRT women who die from pregnancy-induced medical complications who wouldn’t have died had it not been for pro-life laws, pro-lifers will say — I think consistently — that such laws are still permissible under the Doctrine of Double Effect. These tragic deaths, they’ll say, are the foreseen but not intended consequence of pro-life laws. Suppose, by analogy, that infanticide were widely practiced and that many women inculpably believed that infanticide is permissible. (Assume it’s not permissible.) Suppose, also, that a psychic connection existed between mothers and newborn babies, such that — in a tragically large number of cases (the % that matches maternal mortality rates in Texas) — the babies accidentally kill their mothers by sneezing in the wrong sort of way. In a case like that, the pro-lifers I know would endorse the following claim: it’s permissible to ban infanticide even though, as a counterfactual consequence, many women will be caused to die by their babies. Under DDE, the state hasn’t murdered these women.
Now: perhaps we disagree with this type of claim! I don’t think it’s beyond dispute — DDE is controversial; but I also don’t think pro-lifers are shown to be inconsistent by the fact that they want to impose laws which will, as a foreseen but unintended consequence, result in women dying.
The DDE is standardly invoked to show that a hysterectomy would be permissible in cases where it is needed to save the life of the mother and has the foreseen but unintended side effect of causing fetal death. So the principle, which is indeed controversial, could well be argued to favor offering to empty the patients' uterus to save her life in the kinds of cases under consideration.
In the actual cases we're considering, fetal death is inevitable in mere hours, at most days. So not following this standard of care has the monstrous consequence of foreseeably saving nobody and possibly killing the mother. These lawmakers do not care about HER life. That's my point
Thanks, Kate, for making these arguments and for continuing to write with such precision and clarity about such difficult subject matter. Also, just to say, I don't know how you deal with guys like this presumably *all the time* and still manage to keep yourself sane and contribute so much important work to the world. You are carrying a much heavier burden than I realized!
“In the actual cases we're considering, fetal death is inevitable in mere hours, at most days. So not following this standard of care has the monstrous consequence of foreseeably saving nobody and possibly killing the mother.”
The pro-lifers I know endorse the principle that direct and intentional killing in an intrinsically impermissible act, even when the victim only has a few hours left to live. I agree with you that that sort of view is wild, but I don’t think it’s that much more wild that the standard bullets that most mainstream normative theories have to bite — and when, e.g., Kantians bite the bullet in the Nazi at the door case, I don’t think one can reliably infer that they don’t care about human life.
"The pro-lifers I know endorse the principle that direct and intentional killing [is] an intrinsically impermissible act, even when the victim only has a few hours left to live."
These supposedly "pro-life" philosophical distinctions have no meaning to the pregnant person who is killed as a direct result of (the supposedly unintended consequence of) giving a cluster of cells more dignity, respect, and right to life than she, apparently, is thought to deserve. Furthermore, there is no legitimate difference between directly and intentionally killing her and forcing her to die an entirely preventable death—*forcing her to bleed out or die of sepsis is a direct and intentional act.* Notice how you and "the pro-lifers [you] know" never seem to frame HER as a victim of state-sanctioned murder.
You'll make some smug philosophical argument about why I'm wrong and you're right because you have the privilege of being free from such callous indifference to the taking of your own life. In the real world. For keeps. You'll never walk into a hospital with massive blood loss and then be sent back out to the parking lot to wait. You'll never be sent home with sepsis until some supposedly "pro-life" law says that you're near enough to death that you're finally allowed to be treated (and who cares how many organs you lose in the process). They'll just take care of you. Because *your* life is valued.
And if it really was "about life" as you say, then where are all of these so-called "pro-lifers" when it comes to safeguarding the lives of children *after* they are born? Where are they when it comes to getting assault weapons off the streets, for example, now that firearms are the #1 killer of children in the US? Where are they when the same republican politicians who enact abortion bans describe federal funding to help feed the actual children of people living in poverty as "unnecessary big government programs"?
They're pretty glaringly unconcerned about life whenever that life is not directly connected to a woman's womb.
(Also, WRT to the comment about mansplaining — if these messages were private I would’ve just said “because of DDE” and known you’d have made the inference; but I take it that some people might read these comments without a philosophy background, so I thought I should say what the principle is.)
In Medical Ethics, for the Doctrine of Double Effect to apply, the intended outcome of the action has to be reasonably expected to be possible. There is not a single instance in the medical literature of a miscarriage at 17 weeks gestation resulting in a living child. Thus, the "intended" outcome of a living person is not possible, if the history of medicine is to be a guide. And thus the Doctrine of Double Effect does not apply. I'm not sure what your motivations are in making this argument, but your facts are wrong.
I also find the claim that abortion to save the mother’s life (even if foetuses are people) hours away from the foetus’s certain death is highly implausible — I take this to be one of those times where pro-lifers are privileging intuitions about principles over intuitions about cases. Like you, I agree that they shouldn’t do that in this case, but only the most hardened particularist would never privilege intuitions about principles over intuitions about cases — so I don’t think the move is 100% illicit. When my consequentialist friends do this wrt their views, I think they’re reasoning badly, but I don’t infer, e.g., that they don’t care about the hypothetical plus-sized man in the bridge case
I wrote about this type of inconsistency argument a few days ago — I think there are a range of reasons (which aren’t as hoc, since we can see them operate) which jointly explain why some pro-lifers aren’t as vocally opposed to IVF as they are to abortion:
“Finally, with respect to IVF, there are a slurry of reasons why pro-lifers are increasingly lax about IVF: (1) many pro-lifers are in the MAGA cult, and Trump calls himself the “father of IVF”; (2) many pro-lifers have been taken in by simplistic arguments that IVF is ‘pro-life’ because it’s about making babies, combined with heart-breaking stories of infertility; (3) many pro-lifers think that IVF can be reformed so that embryos don’t get discarded in the process, so they don’t oppose IVF as such; (4) not all pro-lifers — at the grassroots, anyway — are wedded to idea that personhood starts at conception. Some just think that abortion is murder very early on, but not as early as fertilization; (5) some pro-lifers see a difference between intentionally killing an embryo, and allowing embryos to die as a foreseen but unintended consequence of IVF — this might not be a plausible view, but some people have it nonetheless.”
In retrospect, here are a few other reasons I would’ve added:
(6) Some pro-lifers are less vocal about IVF for PR reasons — they want to pick their battles, and while banning abortion isn’t a winning position politically, banning IVF *really* isn’t a winning position. (As for why it’s not a winning issue politically, I’d kick the explanation back to some of the other reasons I’ve suggested.)
(7) Sometimes, movements don’t collectively realise the entailments of their views for historically contingent reasons. (E.g., many people who sincerely care about charitable giving don’t realise that their principles commit them to moderate forms of effective altruism — yet this shouldn’t lead us to think they’re badly motivated!) One historically contingent reason that abortion dominates the pro-life moment is that IVF is newer, so, as you’d expect, more rhetorical and political infrastructure has formed around abortion.
I’m sure it’s also true that sexism (both hostile and benevolent) plays some role is explaining some pro-life beliefs for some pro-life people. But I think it’s clear that there are enough independently motivated explanations for why the pro-life movement in America isn’t as vocally anti-IVF as they are anti-abortion (even though, as you note, lots of pro-lifers are vociferously anti-IVF), that it undercuts your inference to the claim that civil rights for foetuses isn’t the #1 driver of pro-life politics.
Antiabortion activists are willing to see people suffer and die in order to prevent access to abortion care and miscarriage management, period. Where’s this pro-life part you are talking about? Also, no one should be forced to do anything because of someone else’s so-called beliefs. It’s not that difficult to understand.
Of course they’re driven by that belief. But as this article points out, those believers are willing to ignore equal care for life when it’s the mother in question and support and accept violent outcomes to that mother simply to get their beliefs enacted as law.
I'd also note that the commenter had misunderstood the issue. It's not about what individual "pro-life" proponents believe. It's what ideology best explains the politics and policies of the anti-abortion movement. Inventing the sacred fetus has indeed convinced a lot of people they care about something that is a recent and highly contingent cultural construct
I don’t think I have misunderstood the issue — I’m claiming both that individual pro-lifers (in general) are pro-life because they believe abortion is a human rights violation, and I’m also claiming that sanctity of life ideology — interpreted along Catholic lines — is the ideology that mainly explains pro-life belief, politics, activism, etc. (More modestly, I’m claiming that “pro-lifers are inconsistent” arguments from IVF, maternal deaths, etc., don’t show these claims to be untrue.)
As I've argued extensively before, Catholic ideology in this respect was a very niche position until astroturf political campaigns tried to use it to impugn “career women” in the early 1970s in the US. If you don’t want to read Down Girl, then at least read Reva Siegel for the relevant history.
Hi all, I am closing this comment thread and leaving it for paid subscribers only now. The kind of bloodless, abstract philosophizing about the lives of women and other pregnant people evident in these comments has always struck me as a deeply unethical manifestation of contemporary ethics in the analytic tradition. It is, to be fair, what my discipline often encourages in students. But I won't indulge it further on my posts. People's lives are on the line and that has to be discussed with a certain basic sensitivity.
Thank you Kate for advocating for your space and your community, and for stating your boundaries.
Several years ago I watched a video in which you self-corrected about something small, and explained to the interviewer that you like to show your students that making an error and then correcting it is absolutely fine and not catastrophic (apologies if I am misrepresenting this exchange - this is how I remember it). I have used this example many times since to explain to friends who are nervous about pronouns, for example, that it is fine to make a mistake - just amend the error and apologise with grace. I can see that it is a relief to them when I explain this.
So in this context, when you state your limits about how you want a sensitive topic to be discussed on your posts, I want to thank you again for the strong example you set and the standards you embody.
The Texas legislator who voted for a complete abortion ban should be executed if a mother dies giving birth without her consent.
My visceral, response is that women's suffering and lives are incidental to the prolife position--part of our general cultural/social indifference to women. The Pelicot case comes to mind. Women are seen as containers, providers, free laborers and as such not deserving of the same universal rights and laws that apply to white cis men. I wonder if these cases of women being denied life saving medical procedures could be seen as medical manslaughter by lawmakers. It seems like voluntary manslaughter because there is intent--treating a woman as inconsequential is malicious. I would also like to know how all of you are coping with the burden this bystander trauma.
Not well. It has never been more apparent in my lifetime in this country that women's lives are essentially disposable and our suffering is essentially invisible. Even among supposed allies, our needs (like basic emergency medical care, for example) somehow always seem to be secondary to other "more important" political issues. Like the cost of eggs. It takes a lot of inner strength to maintain a sense of self-worth in such a hostile/indifferent world.
21 years ago, on a vacation in Florida, I suffered a miscarriage (my third) at 11 weeks, and was able to go to the emergency room and receive appropriate care. It is sickening and horrifying to me to know that today women in Florida (and so many other states) are being denied that care. The point you make about the fetishization and prioritization of the fertilized egg only when it is in the mother’s body, as a means of extorting emotional and reproductive labor from that body, is so brilliant and revelatory (like all your work)— it has helped me to understand a cruelty I honestly couldn’t make sense of. Thank you for these wonderful sub stack essays. They are a bright and guiding light in these dark times.
I am so sorry for your loss, and grateful you were able to receive appropriate care. These are terrifying times. Sending all the solidarity ❤️
I’m pro-choice, but having actually talked to pro-lifers and read their arguments, I find articles of this tenor baffling. Can’t we just admit that people in the pro-life movement are — by and large — motivated by the belief unborn human organisms have a right to life and that abortion should be stopped because it violates that right? If I believed that, I hope I’d have the decency to fight for the ending of abortion! (Cf. https://open.substack.com/pub/wollenblog/p/are-pro-lifers-driven-by-a-subconscious?r=2248ub&utm_medium=ios).
Did you even read the article and note that women with a dying fetus are themselves dying? The whole point is that this can't be about life anymore
I did read the article — here’s why (for now!) I don’t find that argument convincing.
The standard pro-life view is “about life” in the sense that it opposes the direct and intentional killing of human persons. In this sense of “about life”, the fact that pro-lifers support laws that result in women dying from pregnancy-induced medical complications doesn’t show that they’re contradicting themselves, IMO. WRT women who die from pregnancy-induced medical complications who wouldn’t have died had it not been for pro-life laws, pro-lifers will say — I think consistently — that such laws are still permissible under the Doctrine of Double Effect. These tragic deaths, they’ll say, are the foreseen but not intended consequence of pro-life laws. Suppose, by analogy, that infanticide were widely practiced and that many women inculpably believed that infanticide is permissible. (Assume it’s not permissible.) Suppose, also, that a psychic connection existed between mothers and newborn babies, such that — in a tragically large number of cases (the % that matches maternal mortality rates in Texas) — the babies accidentally kill their mothers by sneezing in the wrong sort of way. In a case like that, the pro-lifers I know would endorse the following claim: it’s permissible to ban infanticide even though, as a counterfactual consequence, many women will be caused to die by their babies. Under DDE, the state hasn’t murdered these women.
Now: perhaps we disagree with this type of claim! I don’t think it’s beyond dispute — DDE is controversial; but I also don’t think pro-lifers are shown to be inconsistent by the fact that they want to impose laws which will, as a foreseen but unintended consequence, result in women dying.
The DDE is standardly invoked to show that a hysterectomy would be permissible in cases where it is needed to save the life of the mother and has the foreseen but unintended side effect of causing fetal death. So the principle, which is indeed controversial, could well be argued to favor offering to empty the patients' uterus to save her life in the kinds of cases under consideration.
In the actual cases we're considering, fetal death is inevitable in mere hours, at most days. So not following this standard of care has the monstrous consequence of foreseeably saving nobody and possibly killing the mother. These lawmakers do not care about HER life. That's my point
Yes, exactly.
Thanks, Kate, for making these arguments and for continuing to write with such precision and clarity about such difficult subject matter. Also, just to say, I don't know how you deal with guys like this presumably *all the time* and still manage to keep yourself sane and contribute so much important work to the world. You are carrying a much heavier burden than I realized!
“In the actual cases we're considering, fetal death is inevitable in mere hours, at most days. So not following this standard of care has the monstrous consequence of foreseeably saving nobody and possibly killing the mother.”
The pro-lifers I know endorse the principle that direct and intentional killing in an intrinsically impermissible act, even when the victim only has a few hours left to live. I agree with you that that sort of view is wild, but I don’t think it’s that much more wild that the standard bullets that most mainstream normative theories have to bite — and when, e.g., Kantians bite the bullet in the Nazi at the door case, I don’t think one can reliably infer that they don’t care about human life.
"The pro-lifers I know endorse the principle that direct and intentional killing [is] an intrinsically impermissible act, even when the victim only has a few hours left to live."
These supposedly "pro-life" philosophical distinctions have no meaning to the pregnant person who is killed as a direct result of (the supposedly unintended consequence of) giving a cluster of cells more dignity, respect, and right to life than she, apparently, is thought to deserve. Furthermore, there is no legitimate difference between directly and intentionally killing her and forcing her to die an entirely preventable death—*forcing her to bleed out or die of sepsis is a direct and intentional act.* Notice how you and "the pro-lifers [you] know" never seem to frame HER as a victim of state-sanctioned murder.
You'll make some smug philosophical argument about why I'm wrong and you're right because you have the privilege of being free from such callous indifference to the taking of your own life. In the real world. For keeps. You'll never walk into a hospital with massive blood loss and then be sent back out to the parking lot to wait. You'll never be sent home with sepsis until some supposedly "pro-life" law says that you're near enough to death that you're finally allowed to be treated (and who cares how many organs you lose in the process). They'll just take care of you. Because *your* life is valued.
And if it really was "about life" as you say, then where are all of these so-called "pro-lifers" when it comes to safeguarding the lives of children *after* they are born? Where are they when it comes to getting assault weapons off the streets, for example, now that firearms are the #1 killer of children in the US? Where are they when the same republican politicians who enact abortion bans describe federal funding to help feed the actual children of people living in poverty as "unnecessary big government programs"?
They're pretty glaringly unconcerned about life whenever that life is not directly connected to a woman's womb.
(Also, WRT to the comment about mansplaining — if these messages were private I would’ve just said “because of DDE” and known you’d have made the inference; but I take it that some people might read these comments without a philosophy background, so I thought I should say what the principle is.)
In Medical Ethics, for the Doctrine of Double Effect to apply, the intended outcome of the action has to be reasonably expected to be possible. There is not a single instance in the medical literature of a miscarriage at 17 weeks gestation resulting in a living child. Thus, the "intended" outcome of a living person is not possible, if the history of medicine is to be a guide. And thus the Doctrine of Double Effect does not apply. I'm not sure what your motivations are in making this argument, but your facts are wrong.
I also find the claim that abortion to save the mother’s life (even if foetuses are people) hours away from the foetus’s certain death is highly implausible — I take this to be one of those times where pro-lifers are privileging intuitions about principles over intuitions about cases. Like you, I agree that they shouldn’t do that in this case, but only the most hardened particularist would never privilege intuitions about principles over intuitions about cases — so I don’t think the move is 100% illicit. When my consequentialist friends do this wrt their views, I think they’re reasoning badly, but I don’t infer, e.g., that they don’t care about the hypothetical plus-sized man in the bridge case
Also go read the graf about not caring about destroying fertilized eggs and embryos if they're not in a woman
I wrote about this type of inconsistency argument a few days ago — I think there are a range of reasons (which aren’t as hoc, since we can see them operate) which jointly explain why some pro-lifers aren’t as vocally opposed to IVF as they are to abortion:
“Finally, with respect to IVF, there are a slurry of reasons why pro-lifers are increasingly lax about IVF: (1) many pro-lifers are in the MAGA cult, and Trump calls himself the “father of IVF”; (2) many pro-lifers have been taken in by simplistic arguments that IVF is ‘pro-life’ because it’s about making babies, combined with heart-breaking stories of infertility; (3) many pro-lifers think that IVF can be reformed so that embryos don’t get discarded in the process, so they don’t oppose IVF as such; (4) not all pro-lifers — at the grassroots, anyway — are wedded to idea that personhood starts at conception. Some just think that abortion is murder very early on, but not as early as fertilization; (5) some pro-lifers see a difference between intentionally killing an embryo, and allowing embryos to die as a foreseen but unintended consequence of IVF — this might not be a plausible view, but some people have it nonetheless.”
In retrospect, here are a few other reasons I would’ve added:
(6) Some pro-lifers are less vocal about IVF for PR reasons — they want to pick their battles, and while banning abortion isn’t a winning position politically, banning IVF *really* isn’t a winning position. (As for why it’s not a winning issue politically, I’d kick the explanation back to some of the other reasons I’ve suggested.)
(7) Sometimes, movements don’t collectively realise the entailments of their views for historically contingent reasons. (E.g., many people who sincerely care about charitable giving don’t realise that their principles commit them to moderate forms of effective altruism — yet this shouldn’t lead us to think they’re badly motivated!) One historically contingent reason that abortion dominates the pro-life moment is that IVF is newer, so, as you’d expect, more rhetorical and political infrastructure has formed around abortion.
I’m sure it’s also true that sexism (both hostile and benevolent) plays some role is explaining some pro-life beliefs for some pro-life people. But I think it’s clear that there are enough independently motivated explanations for why the pro-life movement in America isn’t as vocally anti-IVF as they are anti-abortion (even though, as you note, lots of pro-lifers are vociferously anti-IVF), that it undercuts your inference to the claim that civil rights for foetuses isn’t the #1 driver of pro-life politics.
Antiabortion activists are willing to see people suffer and die in order to prevent access to abortion care and miscarriage management, period. Where’s this pro-life part you are talking about? Also, no one should be forced to do anything because of someone else’s so-called beliefs. It’s not that difficult to understand.
This. Thank you
Of course they’re driven by that belief. But as this article points out, those believers are willing to ignore equal care for life when it’s the mother in question and support and accept violent outcomes to that mother simply to get their beliefs enacted as law.
I'd also note that the commenter had misunderstood the issue. It's not about what individual "pro-life" proponents believe. It's what ideology best explains the politics and policies of the anti-abortion movement. Inventing the sacred fetus has indeed convinced a lot of people they care about something that is a recent and highly contingent cultural construct
I don’t think I have misunderstood the issue — I’m claiming both that individual pro-lifers (in general) are pro-life because they believe abortion is a human rights violation, and I’m also claiming that sanctity of life ideology — interpreted along Catholic lines — is the ideology that mainly explains pro-life belief, politics, activism, etc. (More modestly, I’m claiming that “pro-lifers are inconsistent” arguments from IVF, maternal deaths, etc., don’t show these claims to be untrue.)
As I've argued extensively before, Catholic ideology in this respect was a very niche position until astroturf political campaigns tried to use it to impugn “career women” in the early 1970s in the US. If you don’t want to read Down Girl, then at least read Reva Siegel for the relevant history.
See my reply to Professor Manne :)
After reading your response I am fairly confident you are either a bot or a human without empathy.