One reason I read the LTI Blog is because I regularly come across important information there that I’ve never noticed in any of the abortion discussions in the philosophical literature or in any political blogs not focused on abortion. (This isn’t the only reason. It’s the only blog I’ve ever found focused entirely on abortion that is pretty well-informed philosophically. Several key contributors there are well-read in the philosophical literature and are pretty good at explaining the difference between good and bad arguments.)
In a post mostly about how to argue with those who disagree in a way that doesn’t shut down discussion (which would be good for anyone to pay heed to), Jay Watts points to two documents I was unaware of. Both have to do with the common pro-choice argument that if abortion is made illegal again it will lead to lots of deaths from back-alley abortions.
The first document is an excerpt from material written by the Medical Director of Planned Parenthood in 1960, stating quite plainly that 90% of illegal abortions at the time were done by physicians in their offices in a way that was as safe for the mother as it would have been if it were legal. [The Wikipedia entry for "Unsafe Abortion" includes a key quote from this excerpt also, for those who don't want to trust the PDF. So this is out there for those who know what to look for, but I'd never been directed toward it before.]
The second is from NARAL founder Bernard Nathanson, admitting that the pro-choice arguments before Roe v. Wade about the numbers of deaths from illegal abortions were simply fabrications on the order of 10-20 times the amount that an accurate assessment could have produced.
I’ve always thought this argument was pretty ineffective anyway except for someone who is already pro-choice, for reasons Jay mentions at the end of the post. If you’re open to the possibility that the fetus has significant moral status, then the fact that killing a fetus illegally might also produce a death of the mother is irrelevant. If you’re going to legalize a particular kind of murder (or even something that, for all you know, might turn out to be murder but you’re not sure) then legalizing it just because it produces a second death when illegal turns out to justify a lot of acts that are unquestionably murder by anyone’s standards.
It’s one thing to offer an argument that should only convince those who are already on your side but is a little deceptive because it makes an emotional appeal that isn’t really all that rational on pro-life premises. It’s quite another to use deliberate deception just the get the political result you want. A lot of misrepresentation happens in politics, and that includes misrepresentations of those who hold contrary views, abortion included. That’s politics as usual. I try to resist it, and I hope I’m better than most at stopping it, but it’s not the worst kind of dishonesty, since most of the people who do it simply assume the worst of their political opposition or of those who take contrary moral stands, and they at least think what they’re saying is true, even if their standard of proof is pretty low in many cases. But simply making up numbers to argue for a policy change is much worse than politics as usual, and that’s what these two leaders of the pro-choice movement admitted that the movement had done to get abortion legalized.
Like politics as usual, this happens on both sides of the aisle. But I think we have a much more significant duty to point it out and criticize it when it’s this sort of deception, because this is a knowing twisting of the truth merely to get a certain result rather than simply assuming the worst of your opponent. We should avoid both, but it’s worth distinguishing between the two and placing an even stronger emphasis on the avoiding the second. I will sometimes point out when I think one side misstates the other’s position or ignores how an argument will fail given the assumptions of the other side. It’s a lot less common when we can be sure that they’re outright lying, though, and it’s even more rare to find someone admitting it after the fact. It’s kind of sad that this outright lie has become the basis of a fairly common pro-choice argument for retaining the status quo in abortion laws.
October 24th, 2009 | 9:51 am | #1
You might also point out that the “pro-choice” crowd continues to cite polling data that is now two decades old when they argue that theirs is the view of “the majority of the American people.” More recent data indicates a decided shift in the pro-life direction. I don’t know if you’d classify this as “politics as usual” or “deliberate deception,” but it’s definitely dishonest.
October 24th, 2009 | 12:04 pm | #2
One of the things people do is remember arguments and information that helps their case and ignore and forget information that doesn’t. So some of this comes from just not being careful enough. One reason for this is just psychological. We tend to be moved more by things that confirm our preconceived judgments. It’s similar to confirmation bias but with arguments rather than samples of information. I think it’s probably a little less innocent than confirmation bias also.
Something else that I thinks happens with things like this is that people latch onto an argument that they find convincing and then aren’t paying attention to anything else. So they pass it on to others, and it convinces them, but they never really listen to the other side, because they’re convinced the other side is either dishonest or giving fallacious arguments. After all, they’ve already made their decision as to their view, and those who went the other way must have done so on the basis of bad arguments. So any arguments coming from the other side are assumed to be bad.
The second case is also less innocent than confirmation bias, but both patterns are lesser offenses than outright lying. Some might know of those polls and deliberately ignore them, but I’m not sure the majority of those who use them are doing that.
I should say that there are also polls that are current that give different results, and it all depends on how you ask the question. The recent Gallup poll differed in results from the Pew poll at the same time, and there are reasons to think the Gallup poll that had a pro-life majority was the outlier. See here for the reasoning. But the trend in a pro-life direction is clear from both polls.
I think most people still say they’re pro-choice and would allow abortion in the first trimester or maybe even second, but the majority favors more restrictive laws than what we’ve got and thus favors pro-life legislation and moving the Supreme Court’s allowance of legislation further to the right. That is, they favor them in most cases. Then they endorse the health exceptions most pro-choicers insist on and then use to block any attempt to restrict abortion even in the final months of pregnancy. Thus Democratic pollsters can easily produce polls that seem to support the status quo.
Both sides misuse polls on this question, and I doubt it’s usually deliberate. It’s just that they only catch notice of the polls that help their argument.
October 24th, 2009 | 4:23 pm | #3
Also, I think there’s a spot on the continuum between not having the inclination to fact-check and outright lying. When media outlets refuse to fact-check, such as in the cases of Sarah Palin during the election and Rush Limbaugh more recently, I think that’s a much worse kind of negligence, because (1) they should know better and (2) they don’t seem to be fair to both sides in how inclined they are to do this kind of fact-checking (compare how resistant they were to publishing similar claims about Obama during the election and how negligent they’ve been in publishing any information about some of the public officials who have had to lose their jobs in the Obama Administration over past statements and actions).
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