Why We Lose the Abortion Debate:
Patrick Tomlinson, False-Equivalency, and the Juvenile Banality of the Left’s Right-ness
On Sunday, October 22nd at 11 PM, I’m scrolling through my op-ed cluttered twitter feed, when a headline from Salon.com leaps off the screen: “The Twitter thought experiment that exposes “pro-life” hypocrisy: Comedian and sci-fi writer Patrick Tomlinson on the dangerous question that abortion foes refuse to answer.” There, in a single headline, a perfect microcosm of why the Left loses the abortion debate, over and over again.
Mr. Tomlinson’s thought experiment relies on a hypothetical situation in which one must either choose to save one five year old child from a burning clinic, or a test tube of 1,000 viable embryos. The vast majority of people will select for the five year old child and this, Tomlinson and those applauding him argue, exposes what he calls the key “false-equivalency” of pro-life proponents. He then assigns motivation to all pro-life advocates, who “are trying to manipulate you so they can control women.”
Unfortunately, the true false-equivalency at play is that of Tomlinson’s poorly contrived hypothetical, which demonstrates not only an ignorance of the Trolley Problem, but also avoids in the most maddening and pathological way, the nuance with which the human mind’s moral framework attempts to calculate, even in a split second, the value of one life relative to another. That is to say, if you’re in a burning building, and you could save a five year old child, or ten terminally ill patients in critical condition, which would you choose?
Not all life is equal, particularly when it comes to issues of survival and viability. Add to all this, that there are innate social consequences layering Tomlinson’s dilemma, and you have a question structured to generate a uniform response, but not to reveal any profound underpinning of morality within the context of the preservation of human life.
Get Karissa Miller’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
The true stand-out of this exchange, which included a round-robin of self-congratulatory reposting of the original twitter strand by Salon, Crooks and Liars, and The Daily Beast, among others, followed by a culturally charged but logically flaccid response from Ben Shapiro and his compatriot outlets on the Right, was that every reader it touched, on both sides of the abortion debate, immediately had their existing views confirmed, their passions on this wedge-issue re-inflamed, and their antipathy towards the opposing side re-affirmed.
Pro-choicers will point to Shapiro’s failure to refute what appears to be a logical dilemma and assign disagreement with their position to be due to irrationality. Ensconced securely in their right-ness, they likely miss that Shapiro never intended to do so, because he knows that a logical refutation would not be of interest to his audience. Pro-lifers reading this exchange will complain of false superiority on the part of Tomlinson, who generated a difficult to pin down false equivalency and then branded them as sexist.
It is reprehensible to frame a discussion of this issue in a trite, ill-reasoned twitter one-off, and then to amplify it across multiple audiences for click-throughs rather than honest discourse. It cedes the high ground and worsens the existing divide.
This is an argument the Left should win every time. In addition to the existing protections enshrined by Roe v. Wade, the american public is overwhelmingly in favor of a woman’s right to choose. As of July 2017, 57% of americans say that abortion should be legal, in all or most cases. This is a level of support that has remained relatively stable since 1995. Yet, we have chronically re-litigated the issue for more than twenty years, and gained no ground.
Lost in a fugue of bumper stickers and five word email subject lines, the Left has abdicated the best and most prescient pro-choice argument available to it: that the moral implications of abortion are incredibly complex, drive to the core of what makes us human, and have constituted ongoing reflection and labored decisions on the part of women and men throughout human history. That it is a private matter, that ought to be weighed gravely within the context of one’s life and decided not by the interference of a government, but by the people it effects most. That the government ought to stay out of people’s bedrooms, and family planning, and health decisions.
What could be more universally agreeable to our fellow citizens than to acknowledge that we all face over the course of our lives grave ethical decisions and to insist that as members of a democratic society we each must be allowed to exercise our judgement, recognizing that our experiences are unique?
It is not good enough to be on the right side of an issue. You must also consistently present a correspondingly correct argument and refuse to be derailed by unproductive back-and-forths. It is a mode of communication not often suited for 140 characters, but then, not many worthwhile perspectives are.
