The problem with telling privileged people to shut up and listen to marginalized people

This blog post makes the case that it doesn’t work to have a rule for privileged people of “Shut up and listen to marginalized people,” which actually prevents marginalized people from being listened to. Excerpt:

The formal social justice rules say something like this:

• You should listen to marginalized people.
• When a marginalized person calls you out, don’t argue.
• Believe them, apologize, and don’t do it again.
• When you see others doing what you were called out for doing, call them out.

Those rules . . . don’t actually work. It is impossible to follow them literally, in part because:

• Marginalized people are not a monolith.
• Marginalized people have the same range of opinions as privileged people.
• When two marginalized people tell you logically incompatible things, it is impossible to act on both sets of instructions.
• For instance, some women believe that abortion is a human right foundational human right for women. Some women believe that abortion is murder and an attack on women and girls.
• “Listen to women” doesn’t tell you who to believe, what policy to support, or how to talk about abortion.
• For instance, some women believe that religious rules about clothing liberate women from sexual objectification, other women believe that religious rules about clothing sexually objectify women. . . .
• When “listen to marginalized people” means “adopt a particular position”, marginalized people are treated as rhetorical props rather than real people. . . .

Since the rule is literally impossible to follow, no one is actually succeeding at following it. What usually ends up happening when people try is that:

• One opinion gets lifted up as “the position of marginalized people”
• Agreeing with that opinion is called “listen[ing] to marginalized people”
• Disagreeing with that opinion is called “talking over marginalized people”
• Marginalized people who disagree with that opinion are called out by privileged people for “talking over marginalized people”.
• This results in a lot of fights over who is the true voice of the marginalized people.
• We need an approach that is more conducive to real listening and learning. . . .

The rule also lacks intersectionality:

• No one experiences every form of oppression or every form of privilege.
• Call-outs often involve people who are marginalized in different ways. . . .
• For instance, black men have male privilege and white women have white privilege.
• If a white woman calls a black man out for sexism and he responds by calling her out for racism (or vice versa), “listened to marginalized people” isn’t a very helpful rule because they’re both marginalized.
• These conversations tend to degenerate into an argument about which form of marginalization is most significant.
• This prevents people involved from actually listening to each other.
• In conflicts like this, it’s often the case that both sides have a legitimate point. (In ways that are often not immediately obvious.)
• We need to be able to work through these conflicts without expecting simplistic rules to resolve them in advance.

Abortion and rape

A piece in Reason magazine points out:

[A]lthough Romney was "always personally opposed to abortion," he was "effectively pro-choice" when he ran for governor of Massachusetts, promising he would not seek to restrict abortion rights. Later he had a "change of heart," but even today he believes, consistent with his Mormon faith, that "abortion should be permitted in cases of rape, incest, or when the mother’s life is threatened."

While that last exception can be justified on grounds of self-defense (albeit against a nonculpable "aggressor"), the other two cannot, and Romney has never clarified why rape or incest justifies taking an innocent life. Likewise the Mormon church, which cites the biblical injunction against murder in condemning abortion but nevertheless does not take as hard a line as the Roman Catholic Church.

"For many people," Romney said in a 2007 presidential debate, abortion "is considered an act of murder." Evidently he is not one of those people.

I agree that it doesn't seem to make sense for those who are opposed to abortion rights to support a rape exception. If abortion is infanticide, why does that fact no longer matter when there has been a rape? After all, no one supports infanticide of a baby (who has been born) when the conception resulted from rape!

The apparent discrepancy would seem to be resolved if you assume that what really motivates pro-lifers is disapproval of promiscuity and hedonism.

I question whether anyone is genuinely, whole-heartedly in favor of criminalizing abortion in the sense that they would like to see vigorous prosecutions of anyone who performs or receives an abortion, or aids someone else in doing so (e.g., paying for someone else to get an abortion). The consequences would be wildly unacceptable.

Stating one's opposition to a legal right to abortion can be a way of saying there's something about modern culture that one finds objectionable; it isn't a realistic policy solution. The fact that abortion remains generally legal actually works to the opponents' political benefit. As Nietzsche said (in Human, All Too Human, #531), "Whoever lives for the sake of combating an enemy has an interest in the enemy's staying alive."

How an abortion would have been better for a mother and daughter

Lynn Beisner writes this in the Guardian (via):

I make even my most ardent pro-choice friends and colleagues very uncomfortable when I explain why my mother should have aborted me. . . .

An abortion would have absolutely been better for my mother. . . . She would have been better prepared when she had children. If nothing else, getting an abortion would have saved her from plunging into poverty. She likely would have stayed in the same socioeconomic strata as her parents and grandparents who were professors. I wish she had aborted me because I love her and want what is best for her.

Abortion would have been a better option for me. If you believe what reproductive scientists tell us, that I was nothing more than a conglomeration of cells, then there was nothing lost. I could have experienced no consciousness or pain. But even if you discount science and believe I had consciousness and could experience pain at six gestational weeks, I would chose the brief pain or fear of an abortion over the decades of suffering I endured. . . .

[My mother] abused me, beating me viciously and often. We lived in bone-crushing poverty, and our little family became a magnet for predatory men and organisations. . . .

The world would not be a darker or poorer place without me. Actually, in terms of contributions to the world, I am a net loss. Everything that I have done – including parenting, teaching, researching, and being a loving partner – could have been done as well, if not better by other people. Any positive contributions that I have made are completely offset by what it has cost society to help me overcome the disadvantages and injuries of my childhood to become a functional and contributing member of society.

A commenter named Afroblanco makes an important point on Metafilter (where I also posted this link):

One of the most disingenuous arguments of the anti-choice movement is "my mother would have aborted me, but I'm glad that I'm alive." A lot of women have abortions because they'd like to have children someday, but they're not ready yet. And since most American families have 3 kids or fewer, it's safe to say that once a woman reaches her "limit", she's not going to have more. So, if your mother only wanted 2 children and had an abortion before you or your sibling were born, then shouldn't you be glad she had that abortion? I'd imagine a lot of people . . . would be in this boat.

Abortion, same-sex marriage, and gun control

Here are some interesting poll results on American adults' views on those three social issues:

• Abortion — There's no significant gender gap on whether it should be legal. Only 4% more women than men think it should always or usually be legal (55% and 51% respectively). There's essentially no difference based on age. There's a huge education gap: 61% of college graduates generally support legal abortion, whereas the figure is just 46% for those with only high school or less (and 57% for Americans who have been to college but haven't graduated).

• Same-sex marriage — Support for it is rising dramatically. Just two presidential elections ago, in 2004, twice as many Americans opposed it as supported it. Now, slightly more Americans are for it than are against it. In 2004, more than three times as many people "strongly" opposed it (36%) than "strongly" supported it (11%). Now, the number's the same — 22% feel "strongly" each way.

• Gun control — Opposition to strict gun control laws is skyrocketing among blacks and whites. Blacks have always been much more likely than whites to support gun control. But the percentage of blacks who say gun rights are more important than gun control (35%) is now as high as the percentage of whites who said so 20 years ago (37%). A majority of whites take that view now (57%).

(This is from a Pew Research Center poll where they called landlines and cell phones, and then weighted the results based on how much people actually use landlines vs. cell phones.)

Rick Santorum on rape and abortion

In a TV interview, Santorum defends his support of laws against abortion even in the case of rape. He says:

Well, you can make the argument that if she doesn’t have this baby, if she kills her child, that that, too, could ruin her life. . . . I believe and I think the right approach is to accept this horribly created — in the sense of rape — but nevertheless a gift in a very broken way, the gift of human life, and accept what God has given to you. . . . I can’t think of anything more horrible. But, nevertheless, we have to make the best out of a bad situation.

I can think of something more horrible than a woman getting pregnant as a result of rape: a woman getting pregnant as a result of rape and then being forced by the government to give birth.

What do affirmative action, abortion, and the death penalty have in common, aside from being controversial issues?

My mom, Ann Althouse, writes this after attending a debate about the University of Wisconsin's use of affirmative action:

The students at a university are always the students who were admitted. They feel hurt or outraged if they think the message is that they shouldn't be here. They're here, in the room, and the individuals who did not get in are not here to cry out with corresponding outrage.

It reminds me of debates about abortion. Those who were aborted are never present in the room to express their perspective on the issue. . . .

The difficult thing — and the true moral challenge — is to visualize those who are affected who are not in the room to express pain when you hurt them.

Back in 2008, I wrote:

[W]e tend to care about the harm that's done to specific, knowable people, while we give short shrift to the harm done to "statistical" people -- people about whom we can't say "We know their names," but only "We can calculate that this number of people probably would have done this in an alternate world."

I then quoted from a study by Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule called "Is Capital Punishment Morally Required?" (that link goes to an abstract with a link to a free PDF):

Those subject to capital punishment are real human beings, with their own backgrounds and narratives. Some of them have been subject to multiple forms of unfairness, in the legal process and elsewhere. At least some were wrongly convicted. By contrast, those whose lives are or might be saved by virtue of capital punishment are mere “statistical people.” They are both nameless and faceless, and their deaths are far less likely to be considered in moral deliberations. It is for this reason, perhaps, that the advocates of capital punishment often focus on the heinousness of the (salient) offender, while the abolitionists focus on his or her humanity. We suspect that the discussion would take a different form if the victims of a regime lacking capital punishment were salient too, and the example of police behavior in hostage situations supports the suspicion. . . . But it does raise the possibility that moral intuitions, for many people, are a product of the salience of one set of deaths and the invisibility or speculative nature of another.

Are you thinking enough about the people you can't see or hear? Oh, and this isn't just about "people." Don't forget animals.

Anyone who likes to analyze the world in terms of "privilege" should be especially alert to this problem, since it's a "privilege" to be able to easily ignore someone else's hardship.

UPDATE: More thoughts, from Althouse and Instapundit.

Geraldine Ferraro is dead at 75.

Geraldine Ferraro — who was a prosecutor in Queens, then a House Representative, then a United Nations Ambassador, yet will go down in history for her unsuccessful run as the first woman on a major-party presidential ticket — died today at 75.

Perhaps Ferraro's strongest moment was in the 1984 vice-presidential debate between Ferraro and then-Vice President (future-President) George H.W. Bush, when she rebuked Bush for patronizingly purporting to "teach" or "help" her with foreign policy (Ferraro's and Bush's verb choices, respectively):




Here's video of the full debate. To see that exchange in context, watch Ferraro's initial comments on foreign policy starting at 46:30, Bush's rebuttal at 49:00, and Ferraro's response from about 50:00 to 51:00. (Transcript.)

The New York Times obituary (the second link above) notes that this was the first time "a major candidate for national office talked about abortion with the phrase 'If I were pregnant.'" (You can see this in the video, the first time she speaks.) The Times says:

The abortion issue, magnified because she was Roman Catholic and a woman, plagued her campaign. Though she opposed the procedure personally, she said, others had the right to choose for themselves. Abortion opponents hounded her at almost every stop with an intensity seldom experienced by male politicians.

More from the Times:

Everywhere people were adjusting — or manifestly not adjusting — to a woman on a national ticket. Mississippi’s agriculture secretary called Ms. Ferraro “young lady” and asked if she could bake blueberry muffins. When a Roman Catholic bishop gave a news conference in Pennsylvania, he repeatedly referred to the Republican vice-presidential nominee as “Mr. Bush” and to the Democratic one as “Geraldine.” . . .

“I am the first to admit that were I not a woman, I would not have been the vice-presidential nominee,” she wrote. But she insisted that her presence on the ticket had translated into votes that the ticket might otherwise have not received.

In any event, she said, the political realities of 1984 had made it all but impossible for the Democrats to win, no matter the candidates or their gender. “Throwing Ronald Reagan out of office at the height of his popularity, with inflation and interest rates down, the economy moving and the country at peace, would have required God on the ticket,” Ms. Ferraro wrote, “and She was not available!”

Baby dies 15 minutes after she's born due to Nebraska's anti-abortion law.

"[A] mom whose fetus was being slowly crushed by her uterus was denied an abortion in Nebraska. The reason? Nebraska law says no abortions after 20 weeks" (except under the most extreme exceptions such as to save the life of the mother, which didn't apply here).

In a cruel irony, the law was "supposed to protect the fetus from pain." Do you think the pro-life movement is going to be disturbed by the perverse consequences of its laws and use this experience to more intelligently tailor its legislation in the future? Somehow, I doubt it.

The mother says:

"The outcome of my pregnancy, that choice was made by God. I feel like how to handle the end of my pregnancy, that choice should have been mine, and it wasn't because of a law."

Conservatives make powerful arguments about how the government should avoid over-regulating people's behavior. Thomas Sowell, for instance, has often argued that individuals, who are intimately familiar with the mundane details of their situations, are more capable of figuring out the best course of action than remote lawmakers or intellectuals, who know little about the pros and cons that these decisions will actually entail but who want to move the pieces of society around like a puzzle to form a vision they find pleasant. I wish more conservatives would think more clearly about how their own argument applies to abortion.

Penelope Trunk's Twitter post about miscarriage and abortion

Penelope Trunk said this on Twitter:

I'm in a board meeting. Having a miscarriage. Thank goodness, because there's a fucked-up 3-week hoop-jump to have an abortion in Wisconsin.

The mainstream media has swarmed around that three-sentence comment about what's going on in one woman's life. Penelope Trunk is one of the more successful bloggers, but she's hardly a household name — so why has this caused a national furor?

Ann Althouse (my mom) says the tweet sets back the cause of abortion rights by undermining the perception that pregnant women are on a "serious search for meaning."

Maybe the real-world net result of this tweet will be bad for abortion rights, but I wish it weren't. People should be allowed to post something to Twitter that doesn't include, within the maximum 140 characters, an obligatory qualification about how they realize that abortion is a very serious and somber thing.

And women should be allowed to write honestly about abortions and miscarriages.

Is the problem that she's glad she ended up having a miscarriage rather than doing what she had been planning to do and get an abortion? Well, if that's surprising to people, then that itself is a serious problem that her Twitter post might go some way toward rectifying. Many, many people would prefer a miscarriage to an abortion.

Maybe you think she should have somehow drenched her statement in emotion. And maybe that would have been more effective. But it can often be more subtly effective to take an issue that's usually considered too taboo or tragic to speak about honestingly and -- speak about it honestly. (And let's also remember that this is a Twitter post we're talking about; it shouldn't be held to the same standards as a magazine article.)

Being told just the plain facts can be a more powerful reading experience. It puts more responsibility on you as the reader to do some of the thinking and evaluating instead of having everything prejudged by the author. Even if this doesn't happen to be your favorite kind of writing, it's not immoral for someone to use that style when writing about miscarriages or abortions.

Trunk has also written a blunt blog post about getting two abortions, and another one about being sexually abused. Like the Twitter post, these blog posts don't broadcast their own emotional or moral significance.

But I'm glad I've had the chance to read stark descriptions of distinctly female experiences that I, as a man, haven't had to endure. We'd be a little worse off if people like Trunk felt the need to censor themselves.

"Under no ... circumstances will I give the government control over my body."

That's what Michele Bachmann, Republican Representative of Minnesota, said this week. She's asking her supporters to call members of Congress and tell them the same thing.

Got that? Under no circumstances.

If that's the new Republican position on whether the government can control what women do with their bodies, that's fine with me!

Abortion rights and quality of life

The other day, I blogged Richard Posner's blog post about his views on the state of conservatism. Since then, he followed up to respond to the hundreds of comments his post received. He said the comments suggest that "global warming, abortion, and guns, in approximately that order, arouse particular emotions among many passionate self-described conservatives."

He added: "About abortion, my personal position is the same as [Gary] Becker's" (referring to the other half of the Becker-Posner blog). So, what is Becker's position on abortion? He says:

[T]here is an obvious conflict between the rights of women to control their bodies and their motherhood, and the rights of fetuses that might be far enough along in their development to be considered human beings. This is a very prominent example of the general difficulty of determining where to draw the line when the rights of children conflict with the rights of their parents. I do not claim to have a definitive resolution of this conflict in the case of abortion, or in some other parent-child conflicts. But I come down on the side of women's rights to make decisions about their body, except in very late term abortions where fetuses can survive outside a woman's body, and therefore can be considered real children.

Abortions often allow women to have children at later dates when they are better prepared emotionally and in other ways to have children. In effect, abortions in these cases would allow women to substitute children who would be born later, and would be better taken care of, for the fetuses that are aborted now. That seems to me to be a tradeoff worth making. Moreover, laws banning abortion would be difficult to enforce against wealthy women since they would be able to get abortions illegally under reasonably good conditions, including by going abroad. Poor women who want abortions would suffer the most from enforcement of an anti-abortion law, as they are the ones who mainly suffer from laws against the use of drugs and many other types of laws.

"Bissage," a commenter on my mom's blog, said this on Mother's Day:

Maybe later today I’ll see a young mother out with her children and I’ll smile as I approach her and then I’ll say, "Your children are very beautiful. Thank you for not aborting them."

I responded:

Wait, how do you know the random mother you see on the street didn't have an abortion before having her child? If so, then the child wouldn't exist if not for that abortion. So, in that case, you'd need to thank her for getting an abortion.

Bissage's comment — conjuring up lovely, happy children who stroll along with their mother and brighten the day of a passerby — also reminded me of an experience my girlfriend Danielle and I had last weekend.

We were walking down Lark Street and passed by someone holding up an enormous sign with a gruesome image supposedly showing an aborted fetus, blown up to the size of an adult. (I say "supposedly" because propaganda photographs in this age of Photoshop generally shouldn't be trusted. Oh, I'm sure aborted fetuses look repulsive -- I'm sure many medical procedures look repulsive. But the photo on the sign may have been artificially bloodied up or who-knows-what.)

We talked about how much we resent the fact that this protester is trying to undermine society's most minimal standards of civility. But we have to accept his freedom of speech.

Just a few minutes later, walking down a different street, we saw a woman and a very young child -- probably just 3 or 4 years old — sitting on a bench. No one else seemed to be nearby, and we were far enough away that the woman might not have seen us for a while. I saw the child drop what looked like a plastic cup, and I saw his mother angrily scolding him. I didn't see what came next because I had instinctively glanced away from the unpleasant scene, but Danielle was still watching. Afterwards, she told me she saw the mother hit the child as punishment for dropping the cup.

Although only Danielle saw that particular moment, both of us saw the mother's contemptuous manner of interacting with her child. It was unmistakable just from that fleeting public incident seen from a distance; who knows how much worse it gets in private, lived up close, day after day? What are the ultimate consequences of this, not just to the boy but to society?

We were convinced that the mother didn't want her child. You can moralize all you want about how pregnant women should give up for adoption any children they don't want, but nothing you or I can say will change the reality of what's happening in that family.

Then we talked about the abortion protester, and how much he glosses over when he waves his fetus sign.

The abortion issue doesn't get any more stark than this.

A Catholic archbishop has excommunicated people who helped a 9-year-old girl in Brazil get an abortion. (Via Reproductive Rights Prof Blog.)

She got pregnant by being raped.

The people who were excommunicated are the girl's mother (for authorizing the abortion) and the doctors who performed it. The Vatican has defended the excommunications.

More details: (1) She was pregnant with twins. (2) The doctors performed the abortion because they were concerned that a 9-year-old, 80-pound girl wouldn't survive the pregnancy.

UPDATE: The adults who helped her get the abortion were excommunicated from the Catholic Church by a regional archbishop, and that decision was approved by the Vatican. But the archbishop specifically refrained from excommunicating the rapist — the girl's stepfather. The archbishop tells us that the rape of the 9-year-old girl was not as bad as the abortion.