Changing the Terms of the Abortion Debate

A few years ago, in the wake of the 2004 election, there was a fad for George Lakoff  (right), a UCLA researcher whose thesis is that the way we discuss issues has a profound impact on the result.

The fad was called framing. Much like the fad for folk music in the early 1960s, it seemed to propose a radical rethink on the nature of messaging.

Like folk music, the framing fad faded. One of the few bits left of it is a blog called Rockridge Nation, which Lakoff has been trying to build into a small community for elite political debate.

One subject which many Democrats feel needs re-framing is abortion. Lakoff has written
that the issue should be re-framed based on ideas like personal freedom,
intolerance for unwanted pregnancy, life as a value, and protecting
rape victims.

Among the more ardent proponents of this re-framing is Katha Pollitt of The Nation.  Yet
even her formulation of the argument appears timid, especially when
compared to efforts by the New Right in the 1960s to re-frame debates
their way. 

It was the Right, after all, that created the term
"pro-life," meaning (to this day) that those on the other side are for
"killing babies." This framing won’t respond to any of the modest attempts at re-framing proposed by either Lakoff or Pollitt, because it accepts the basic premise of the other side.

The premise is false. It must be confronted directly.

A true re-framing would be simple. Because the question, at the end of the day, is not about life.

It’s about slavery.

Those who oppose abortion are demanding that half the world, the female half, be enslaved to the male half. This is the way most of the world lives right now, and in much of that world the slavery is quite literal. Nations that have accepted Muslim "sharia" law literally make women the slaves of men. Under sharia law women lose all human rights. In some nations they are subject to mutilation as girls, to murder if they’re raped. They cannot appear in public without covering themselves, as though their very existence were shame. (The argument is it would excite men, as though men were animals, which I’m sure is found nowhere in Qu’ran.) And it is on behalf of this brutality we are now fighting in Iraq.

But prohibiting abortion, even in the U.S., is endorsing slavery. A man gets his prick in some woman, by whatever means, and that fertilized egg is then given rights which override the woman’s. It becomes in effect an extension of the man, an extension of his prick. I fucked you, you’re going to stay fucked for the rest of your life. That is the very definition of slavery. The only voice the fetus is presumed to have is that of the man in the argument — you will risk your life bearing me, at the point of a gun if necessary, and thus the product of my  sperm will remain sacred.

The very tactics of the pro-slavery forces proves the framing. Just as pro-slavery men, as early as the 1830s, attacked and killed abolitionist editors, and later settlers, so those same forces today commit acts of terrorism, against clinics, and against doctors who dare do abolitionist work, and lead women back to freedom. Abolitionists did not commit murder for their cause. They prevented murder. Only pro-slavery forces commit murder.

Many will shy from this framing because it directly confronts many religious leaders. Tough. Frankly they need to be confronted. It’s all-male hierarchies who are most anxious to enslave women in this way — Catholics, Baptists, Muslims, Mormons, Orthodox Jews. Faith in which women are allowed full participation, faiths with sexual equality, are on the anti-slavery side.

Look at some of your African-American neighbors sometime. Notice something? Albert Alex Haley wrote about it movingly in his book Roots. They’re not very black. I mean, compared to their African relatives. We know why. It’s because their female ancestors were raped by their white owners and forced to bear those owners’ children. They were bred as horses or cows were bred, only the traits these men were seeking to force into the future were there own. Are you now saying that was holy work, God’s work?

Pro-slavery men love  to claim that any fertilized egg is a human life, from the moment of conception. The view of God represented by this line of argument is an obscenity. Millions upon millions of pregnancies naturally miscarry every year, in the first two trimesters, from a variety of causes.

You mean to tell me that God kills all those babies, that they suffer from what can only be called acts of God? Of course not. We know for a fact that the mind and the heart, the organs required to process pain and to make life viable outside the womb, do not develop until the third trimester. That’s what God has to say on the matter, and all your arguments, no matter how elegant, are in the end the arguments of men.

You are interpreting the printed words of God to sustain your argument, just as Southern Baptists used them in the 1850s to sustain the argument for slavery.  Just as Catholic theologians used them to sustain the Inquisition. Just as the Dutch Reformed in South Africa used them to sustain Apartheid. Just as Muslim clerics use them today to support terrorism. I will take no more "moral arguments" on behalf of "life" from men who have been so profoundly wrong on so many issues, and who continue to stand with murderers.

The current framing infects more than the abortion debate. Today the U.S. House approved embryonic stem cell research by a vote of 253-174, not enough to override an expected Presidential veto. That veto will be made on behalf of "life," and sustained on behalf of "life."

What if we argued it were being made and sustained on behalf of slavery? That would be a true re-framing, in the direction of the literal truth.

I don’t know that liberals are ready for a re-framing of this type, on abortion or any other issue. But until they are they will continue to lose the argument for progress. Because its enemies are quite willing to call even a single cell a life, if it will make your body theirs.