Preliminary Thoughts on Roe v. Wade Project
I have started project on Roe v. Wade and its recent overturn, which will involve me studying both cases and analyzing them legally. As a pro-choice individual, I have recruited a pro-life individual in this undertaking. We attempt to stick to the straight, legal facts and only read the primary sources, to minimize the influence of others’ opinions. We hope learn something that we did not know before.
I am about halfway through the Roe opinion as I write this, which is a bit out-of-order, but so far it’s only been a preface of the case and the history of abortion before they write out their conclusions. Since the goal of the project is to see if our views evolve, I wanted to get down my original thoughts while I still have them. I will attempt to make this concise, but I suspect it will still be lengthy and will refer to other issues when relevant.
My Background
I am a thirty-year-old man. My pro-life partner is a twenty-one-year-old woman. For most of my life, I have been a secular Democrat. Both my parents were liberals/Democrats. They gave me a generally Christian upbringing, but we never attended church together, so it was largely secular. It was Christian in so far as my questions about how and why the world is what it is involved “God” and “Jesus” at times. My history classes through my childhood were also key, teaching me the importance of individual liberty and our democratic republic, to include principles such as the separation of church and state and the emancipation of women in the West. This set a very general stage, but the details of my political beliefs I formed on my own, as reactions to the events of my time, namely the War in Iraq and the Great Recession, which occurred in my adolescence and into young adulthood.
I resolved to pursue a career in politics when I was fourteen over my outrage about the war in 2005. I joined the Teen Democrats in my high school the next year as a freshman. I was the president of our chapter in 2008 when the recession hit and Obama was elected. I started my political science major in 2010 and trained as an Army cadet in its ROTC program and maintained some involvement in UNC’s Young Democrats. When I was nineteen, I stopped believing in God and formally became an atheist.
I left ROTC in my senior year and finished my degree. In the years following, I ran for office twice and did several other things, as a volunteer and a paid worker, before finally giving of on politics altogether. I no longer vote, as I grew disillusioned with the Democrats, but my issues with the Republican Party have not abated. I intend to update my party affiliation to unaffiliated in the near future.
Abortion from First Principles
I was about fourteen when I figured out my thoughts on abortion. I begin to think about why murder is wrong and why some lifeforms seem to have more value than others. I compared human beings to plants and animals, and I noticed we tend to put more moral value on the animals that are more like us, not just in shape but in character. A person is what is murdered, and personality is the proof of the person. I realized that a person is not so much an object as it is a process, of thoughts and information. Even a sufficiently advanced machine could be a person. Realizing that for much of the pregnancy, a fetus did not have this conscious aspect, it seemed to me to have no claims to rights, at least not over the woman bearing it. I have developed on this idea since then, but I’ve never had this fundamental assumption seriously addressed by the pro-life advocates, so I have been pro-choice on the topic of abortion ever since.
Abortion in the Civic Scape
While our support for or opposition to abortion should be based on first principles, for other it does not exist in a vacuum. It has a role in the greater, American narrative over the last half-century, one that is worth examining.
The fact that the Supreme Court decided the issue shows both then and now shows both how individuals can be at the mercy of their home state and that federal statute or amendments to the Constitution are nearly impossible to pass in our political climate. Three-fourths of the states must get on board to pass an amendment (but they may avoid being constrained by time). The Senate’s structure, meanwhile, inflates the votes of rural states by a significant magnitude, giving them the opportunity to dig in their heels and only allow legislation that they like.
This is made worse by our winner-take-all system of voting, which inevitably led to a highly polarized system of two parties, where the primaries are usually decided by the most extreme and inflexible voters. In the Republican Party, this largely draws on their evangelical, Christian voting base. Believing they are doing God’s work, there is no working with this crowd on anything, and they are a hell of a coalition to control the Senate on almost any issue.
Non-evangelicals in the Republican Party seem to downplay just how decisive and impactful this voting bloc is, as if they are in a state of denial from the embarrassing alliance. The result is that it goes on, unchallenged in the American right, and so where the federal government cannot act, the states do what they want, liberals are left to sue for relief.
States’ rights, as a concept, have been used to justify a long list of mean-spirited laws, restrictions on abortion being one of them. Given the inherent connection to religious motives, they spit in the face of separation of church and state, which is an essential trait of the American way. That isn’t to say that they don’t genuinely believe they are protecting babies from murder, but mixed into that is a boorish incuriosity about their faith and red-faced disgust for “immoral” women.
They seem eager to rescue a fetus that lacks the capability of thought, but once it is born and more obviously stands as a living being, they are quick to abandon it to life of poverty and hardship, resenting welfare and taxation to support it with a strange bitterness. Careful and patient examination might lead them to conclude that opposing welfare for mothers creates direct incentives for them to seek abortions, but incurious evangelicals are not about to ponder this. Like petty tyrants, they are quick to blame and slow to hold themselves accountable for mistakes.
So much of conservative policy seems to be explained by their ability to get red in the face over something, and not after carefully and patiently examining the issue. This fundamental character flaw of your average conservative (which I have encountered in my own life several times) is ultimately what keeps me away from the Republican Party. States with conservative majorities, historically, have been the most repressive. In fact, the American left has rarely been the villain in our history. In Europe, you have real villains from that side, but for some reason it never quite materialized here.
Forward-Looking Questions
As I research this, it’s worth wondering what I will learn on abortion as a legal matter, as a matter from first principles, and its role in the civic scape. What might I also learn about the Constitution, the role of the federal government, and the continued relevance of states’ rights in the current day?