T. Scott

Complexity

"This has nothing to do with concern for babies.  It has to do with power over women."  The second sentence (from a letter to the New York Times) is clearly true, the first sentence is demonstrably false – just talk to some of those passionate, committed women on the picket lines outside abortion clinics.  Their concerns may be sentimental, biologically incoherent, and often rooted in an unquestioning religious faith, but they’re genuine.  What purpose is served by blurring them to nothing but a rigid patriarchal intent?  Or does the rhetoric of power become a mechanism for erasing them from the debate altogether?

"The Republicans don't give a hoot about what happens to an unwanted baby after it is born.  They don't give any thought to a young woman's life being entirely derailed by a forced birth."  Also demonstrably untrue.  Witness the various organizations and people devoting time and resources to pregnancy centers that purport to supply pre- and post-natal care to mother and child.  These efforts are pathetic, inadequate, stupidly idealistic, and have next to no useful political backing.  But they are part of the complexity of the people who are committed to the anti-abortion cause.  Why deny it?

Kathryn Janus, the letter writer I've been quoting, ends her piece "If women don't turn out in droves to vote these people out, then we deserve what we get."  She is surely correct about that and her anger is surely a much better motivator than my musings about the worldviews of the heartsick women tramping around outside the abortion clinics harassing other women who are likely even more heartsick than they.

Why does it matter to me?  Surely any political strategist would school me on the necessity of crisp and compelling messaging.  But I'm not campaigning here.  I'm trying to understand why people believe the things that they do, particularly when those beliefs are so contrary to my own. 

That the sole intent of the anti-abortion movement is to exert control over women has been a standard rhetorical trope for decades.  Certainly the image of elderly white guy politicians piously declaring that they know best what should be done for all women in all cases exemplifies this.  And perhaps it’s only these politicians that Janus has in mind when she rails against “the Republicans” (but I hope she’s not forgetting the very many women who echo them).  Maybe she’s not thinking at all about the rank-and-file who actually make up the movement.  But if it weren’t for the muscle, the voices, and the boots on the ground provided by those who are passionately devoted to protecting the innocent babies, those politicians wouldn’t have anyone they’d feel the need to pander to.

There’s a little more traction to the claim that the anti-abortion forces don’t care what happens to the babies after they’re born.  Let's say they don't seem to care enough.  In the wake of Dobbs there was a brief flurry of articles by anti-abortion activists about the need to expand pre- and post-natal care and to do a better job of providing safe alternatives to abortion, but those people are a faint minority within the movement.  Their efforts are hamstrung by the fact that marshaling the resources required to do those things well conflicts with conservative anti-government views.  It’s one thing to use government to make abortion illegal, it’s quite another to use government funding to expand financial assistance to poor women.  So the efforts that exist are community and church based, without sufficient financial backing, and rife with manipulation and deceit.  Judge Coney Barrett’s belief that all these unwanted babies can be happily adopted may be grotesquely ignorant of the facts and those pregnancy centers may provide just a pale shadow of the support that many pregnant women actually need, but some degree of worry for the well-being of mother and child is undeniably a part of the psychological complexity of those who would still willingly force both into lives of misery and regret. 

Why do these nuances matter to me?  Is there any practical benefit?  The immediate, practical need is to motivate enough people to get to the polls in key races to insure that the Senate, at least, remains in Democratic hands after the midterms.  Lindsey Graham’s ham-fisted attempt at pandering was a welcome gift,  highlighting the dangers that a Republican majority in the Senate will bring.  Surely nit-picking about the varied motivations driving those in the anti-abortion movement is a waste of energy and effort?

But I don’t seem to be able to help it.  It’s not that I think recognizing and acknowledging these complexities will lead to some tactical advantage in the fight.  Maybe even the opposite – if  we grant that some of our antagonists are motivated by other desires than simply crushing women, does that make it harder to get the voter turnout that, at this particularly critical moment, is the thing that matters most?  We don’t need to change anybody’s minds (at least in the short run).  Poll after survey after poll after survey consistently show that the majority believes that abortion must remain available.  Protecting that right isn’t a matter of persuading the electorate; it is entirely a matter of getting people out to vote.

Nonetheless, there is something corrosive in burnishing away the complexities of the arguments of our political opponents.  It might feel like clarifying the issues, cutting away the extraneous material and getting to the heart of what’s most important. The abstraction creates a clearer target, one that’s easier to strike.  But it’s not the truth.  We demean those we disagree with when we turn them into caricatures and we weaken the force of our own arguments.  I'm not willing to go there.  I’m not trying to understand those people because I think that’ll make me feel more kindly to them.  I just want to see things as they really are.  So I cringe when I read pieces that engage in that over-simplification.  Those on the right and the far right and the fringe right have always been so good at demonizing their opponents through caricature.  How can those on my side of the fight justly revile those excesses if we fall into them ourselves?

The inescapable dilemma of the abortion question is the lack of a shared understanding of what moral and legal rights the fetus has and how those rights develop during the period of fertilization to birth.  The anti-abortion forces, in their aversion to ambiguity, have decided that those rights are fully inherent from the moment of conception.  Dilemma solved.  But there is at least as much logic and science and history in the position that those rights are not fully in place until birth (or at least, viability).  In the absence of any consensus about which of these views is “correct”, the state has to stay neutral.  It may not be the most comfortable position, but it’s the only one that obeys the principle of not privileging one particular religious or ethical point of view.  That this is completely unacceptable to those who “know” in the core of their being that the zygote is a full human being is no surprise.  They’ve simplified all the ambiguity out of their position.  It leaves them no choice but to act as they do.

Insisting that the issue is entirely one of maintaining power over women is an equivalent simplification.  It scrapes away the difficulties around handling competing rights in a secular society.  Those complexities make the pro-choice position a challenging one.  In every individual case the choice to have an abortion requires making predictions about likely futures, balancing rights and potential outcomes.  It’s serious stuff, very different from the satisfying simplicity of those who claim to be pro-life.  It’s not always a difficult decision – often the circumstances make the right choice very clear.  But whether she agonizes over it or not, the choice requires a series of judgment calls that have to be made in full consideration of the impact that the decision will have on the mother and everyone in the mother’s orbit.   Only she has the ethical standing to make those calls.  When the state interferes, it takes a side, imposing the frightening moral certainty of the abortion foe.  The ethics of our Constitution demand that we resist.  Fortunately, most Americans agree.  Now those same ethical imperatives require that they vote.  If not, as Janus writes, "then we deserve what we get!"

Carbon

She was dazzled by the carbon paper.  "I don't understand how this works!" she said, running her finger down each side.  I showed her how to put it between two clean sheets of paper in order to make a copy.  She's fascinated.  Astonished.

It's the summer between her sophomore and junior years of high school.  She had a month between commitments so I hired her to help me sort through old files.  We got into a cabinet that I haven't opened since moving it into the keep-out room 22 years ago.

There was a fat file labelled "poems in redundant drafts."  Many versions of poems I was working on in the mid-eighties.  (Why I felt compelled to keep all of the drafts is a question I don't feel qualified to answer.)  "I wrote on a typewriter," I told her.  "Typed out a poem, and then I made revisions in pen or pencil and then I typed it again."  Three or four versions in a day, according to the dates at the top of each sheet.  I used carbon paper to keep a copy of the one I mailed to the magazines.  She can't quite visualize it.  The unconnected world.

I tell her about traveling with a heavy portable (luggable) computer back in 1990.  About modems and phone lines and disk drives that had their own power supplies.  "You don't know what a floppy disc is, do you?"  She shakes her head, trying to peer through me into the distant past.  I tell her about taking the silver dip pen and a bottle of ink and a volume of Tom Jefferson's complete works into the class I was teaching about the internet and copyright.  That was in 2000 and the students were in their late teens. The kids passed the pen and bottle around and gingerly wrote their names. I held up the book, "Now imagine using that to write all of this." They were impressed, but they still had bits of memories of a pre-internet world.  But Josie was born in 2005.

Carbon paper.  Typewriters.  I didn't attempt to explain a mimeograph machine.  She'd had a similar reaction a year and a half ago when her Mom gave her a Crosley turntable and a vinyl record for Christmas.  She'd turn the record over.  "Why does it have two sides?  I don't understand how it works!"

In my study, with the amazing carbon sheet in hand she said it again, but then, "But my phone, the CDs, DVDs, I don't understand how any of it works!"  She's brilliant at using the devices in her world, of course.  But she has no comprehension of how they work.

I turned her age in 1971.   When my Dad told me about the world he lived in as a boy, thirty-five years earlier, I could understand how it worked.  We lived in the same electro-mechanical world, principles established during the industrial revolution.  Television wasn't around yet, but you could imagine it as an extension of the radio.  When it arrived, he knew how to tinker with it.  Jet engines were built from the same underlying dynamics as automobile engines.  Things got faster and more efficient from his boyhood to mine, but the technologies were fundamentally the same.  He understood how the things in my boyhood worked, and I knew the same about his.

The half century following the invention of the moveable type press is the incunabula period, European civilization being reshaped by the impact of inexpensive, uniformly replicable books, and the technological and cultural transformations they set in motion.  Our Gutenberg moment, analogous to the days those first printed books went on sale, occurred in the fall of 1994 when Netscape was released -- the first widely available graphic internet browser. 

By 1500, printed books were no longer curiosities, game attempts at emulating the handmade books of previous centuries.  They were the standard means of knowledge transmission, with dozens of printers and publishers across Europe vying to tap into the new markets.  Among the crucial innovations was the widespread adoption of the size called octavo – a book that could easily fit into a saddlebag.  New knowledge spanning the continent as fast as a rider could take it.

Our incunabula period ended when the iPhone launched, barely a dozen years after Netscape.  Now Josie carries the internet in her hip pocket.  That feels natural.  A world of carbon paper and typewriters is nearly inconceivable.   I straddle the two worlds, writing in my leather-bound journal with a good fountain pen, then shifting to my laptop to write things I can easily share.  I'm not nostalgic for the world we're leaving behind.  I feel lucky that I get to taste them both and that I can tell Josie tall tales about the ways of the world before.