"If you don't like abortion then don't get one"
This will not convince anyone who's pro-life because they believe abortion is the same as murder. To them it's like saying "if you don't like murdering people then just don't do it".
"If you're a man then just shut up about abortion"
AFAIK, just about every opinion poll that's ever asked the public about abortion has found that men are not really much more anti-abortion than women are. If there is a gender gap, it's like 5 percentage points or less. I think I've even seen one or two polls that show women to be more pro-life than men (but again, not by a big margin). So if there's not a big gender gap on abortion then I don't really see how this talking point is helpful.
Seems to me that the most likely consequence of this argument is it will discourage pro-choice men from participating in the cause & offering support.
(also, fwiw, it's cissexist; trans men exist and can get pregnant)
“Making abortion illegal will not decrease how often abortion happens; it will only drive it underground and make it less safe.”
I don't think this is a good argument. I have a few reasons why:
- Banning abortion probably will indeed decrease how often abortion happens. After all, bans tend to be fairly effective at getting people to not do things. Just as one example: there are a lot of semi-automatic firearms in the US, but not nearly as many fully automatic firearms. Why? Probably because fully automatic firearms are banned. I don't see why the same wouldn't happen with abortion.
- If you want another example that is more directly related to abortion: during the Roe era, red states developed a tactic of putting onerous and extremely contrived rules on abortion providers, with the unstated goal of getting those abortion providers to shut down. And it worked. A lot of abortion providers in red states shut down because they couldn't comply with these ridiculous and obviously contrived regulations. Statistics bear out that red states have a lower rate of abortion than blue states. If contrived targeted regulations were effective at reducing abortion, then an outright ban probably would be too.
- A lot of the time when this argument is made, it's articulated in a way that seems to concede the idea that decreasing the recurrence of abortion would be a good thing, and I'm not sure why we on the pro-choice side should concede that.
"If abortion is murder, then every time a man masturbates is genocide, and every time a woman menstruates is murder"
Most pro-life people are smart enough to know the difference between a gamete and a zygote, so this doesn't convince anyone.
"They're not pro-life, they're just pro-birth" (sometimes phrased as "pro-forced-birth")
Usually this isn't actually an argument for legal abortion, it's just a reference to the fact that conservatives generally oppose social safety nets. Which, yeah, it is shitty of them that they want to force (often poor) people to have children but don't care much about the welfare of those children once they are born... but there's no inconsistency there. It's not a hypocritical position, just a very cruel one. So we shouldn't act like this is some amazing "gotcha" moment.
"If we're gonna ban abortion then how about we force men to start paying child support as soon as the woman gets pregnant"
This is just not an effective argument. Most anti-abortion people would be just fine with this idea. They are more than happy to force their "family values" on men as well as women.
You wouldn't be able to tell from liberal/leftist conversations, but conservatives resent liberal, non-religious, sexually promiscuous men to a similar degree as they resent liberal, non-religious, sexually promiscuous women.
"They're just anti-woman/they just want to control women"
I think there's some truth to this one (conservatives definitely harbor resentment towards sexual activity & expression that they perceive as un-Christian) but ultimately I don't think this is the best argument to use. I don't think that misogyny is really what motivates them. I think they actually are convinced that a just-fertilized zygote is a fully formed person with a soul and a mind and a conscience.
"If men could get pregnant, then there would be abortion clinics on every corner"
- As stated before, trans men exist and can get pregnant
- As stated before, there is not really much of a gender gap on abortion, and it is not helpful to imply that there is.
So. What arguments should pro-choice people use?
In my opinion, the abortion issue really just comes down to two main questions:
- Is an embryo/fetus a person?
- If it is a person, does that mean it has a right to continue growing in its
mother'sbirth parent's (I guess that's the more correct term) uterus?
And our answers to those questions should be as follows:
- No, it is not a person. (At least, not until it's developed enough to survive outside the womb - I'm not sure what I think about this exactly)
- No, it does not have a right to use and benefit from another person's organs
That's really all that we need to say about it, although I have a couple of extraneous thoughts below that might also be useful:
- An embryo/fetus is not a person. It has some of the characteristics of a person, but not all of them. It cannot survive outside the womb because its organs aren't developed enough. Until about 24 weeks of gestation, it can't even feel pain because its nervous system isn't sufficiently developed. It is not sentient. It cannot perceive itself or its environment. It does not have subjective experiences. If it isn't sentient, then it has no interests to protect (which, when you think about it, is basically what "rights" are).
- an abortion is generally defined as "the termination of a pregnancy via the removal or expulsion of an embryo or fetus from the uterus". Notice here that it is NOT defined as "the destruction of the embryo/fetus" or "the death of the embryo/fetus". It is merely the "removal or expulsion". This is why miscarriages are considered by medical professionals to be a type of abortion - specifically they are a "spontaneous abortion". So, even if one considers an embryo/fetus to be a person, an abortion is not actually an act of killing that "person", it is just the act of removing that "person" from the uterus. If the embryo/fetus dies after it has been removed from the uterus, that is a separate event and it is not the doing of the (formerly) pregnant person.
Only 13% of Americans support abortion being illegal in all circumstances. You are much better off using this fact to demonstrate to libs how our entire democracy is a farce (and hopefully push them left) than you are convincing a christian fascist that they're using the wrong definition of "fetus."
Nah. Christofacists play games where they make it sound like they just haven't heard the right argument yet so as to waste your time.
They are wrong. Tell them they are wrong. Refuse to elaborate. Don't waste your mental energy.
To expand on this, it's a waste of time to try and reason with the relatively small percentage of zealots, when there is a much larger group of people who are just checked out and marginalised in the political sphere.
Reach out to the working class and talk about how this fascist shit is going to keep them poor, their neighbourhoods and communities poor. Talk about how the owner class will never have to live up to their lofty ideals, and it will be working class kids whose lives are threatened or ruined by this.
I don't get it, all those arguments are convincing, helpful, and well-articulated, pro-choice people should definitely keep using them
Also kinda pointless and misleading to frame this as a "debate" majority of people in the US already support abortion in some form, the "debate" has already been won, this isn't about opinion it's about power and who holds it
Forced birthers are not rational and can't be reasoned with. They're people who have seen the science and rejected it due to religious conditioning and control. They are cultists. Trying to reason with a pro-lifer will get you as far as the Dems trying to convince the GOP that climate change is real. They don't care, it's not about logic, it's about control and power.
scientism
there's no "science" at work here though. "science" doesn't and can't tell you what to care about; it doesn't and can't decide between competing goods or values. in this case, science doesn't and can't determine when something close to being a person becomes a person, and science doesn't tell you when it's not-unreasonable to choose the liberty of the mother (i use mother here for shorthand) over the life of the near-person.
i'm sure many or most people can't be argued out of something that they were never argued into. but decrying that the other side as not-rational, and religiously controlled is certainly a non-starter, and will get you nowhere with the small section of pro-life people who have sincere and considered positions, on the issue itself, or other broader socialist programs generally.
You're partially right, although science does tell us that the fascist worldview of control and domination will ultimately leave us extinct, it's up to us to decide what to do with that info
sure, though i'd say the climate issue presents a sharper case for your point. like, in that instance, conservadumbs are just rejecting/ignoring the facts of the matter (though they might agree that it would be bad everyone died, they disagree that that will occur). i feel like it's more slippery issue for abortion -- no one is arguing as to observable facts, but as to moral conclusions.
They’re people who have seen the science and rejected it due to religious conditioning and control
Important to point out that seeing the science absolutely does not mean understanding it
Urgh, I hate this. I know you mean well OP, but this retreat into debate-brained detachment comes across as very, for lack of a better way of phrasing it, masturbatory.
As other commenters have said, public opinion is already on the pro-choice side. At this point it’s a matter of power and who wields it. As “fun” as it is to construct a theoretically impressive argument, it doesn’t actually help. It actually feels kinda callous.
I think Malagueta articulated this feeling very well on another post, so I’ll link her comment here: https://hexbear.net/post/204198/comment/2573757
It’s more thought terminating to retreat into intellectualism and an obsession with definitions. When Mao wrote about opposing “book worship” he was talking about this shit
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-6/mswv6_11.htm
There is a certain type of privileged liberalism that prides itself on viewing the struggles of others as some kind of an intellectual curiosity they can play with through their detachment. It is inhumane, it is arrogant, and it is beneath the merits of a good socialist.
Many people in privileged and/or petite bourgeoisie comforts are socialized to behave this way because it neutralizes them. They do the work of alienating themselves from others for the capitalist class.
This is why discussions affecting a group of people must be centered on and led by those people. You wrote tomes here abstracting instead of bothering to listen to people who can get pregnant. Abortion is a sudoku puzzle for you and it is matter of forced birth and slavery for us.
To be clear, this post is not as bad as the one Malagueta was responding to. Not even close. But the overall message in her comment still applies here, I think. Just less vehemently, perhaps.
the notion that is there is a set of socialist values and policy prescriptions, which are self-evident and that don't require intellectual justification is absurd, unless you can enumerate all those values and policies and how they should be applied in every case.
and more, it's disingenuous to suggest that this sort of inquiry or practice (of intellectual discussion) is not only valueless, but actively pernicious. all of this posting, on the site, especially the affective "rah rah rah" posting which requires no serious engagement, is just as meaningless and valueless; all of it comes with the opportunity cost of doing anything else which might better be considered praxis.
there's value in argument and discussion, and i'm tired of pretending there isn't just because some members of this board are too intellectually lazy to do so. and i'm tired that this laziness is couched in the self-righteous patina of listening to lived experience. there are plenty of unborn people (who will suffer in the future at the hands of climate change) who can't share their lived experiences with us; there are likely plenty of neuroatypical people who can't share their lived experience with us; there are plenty of animals and creatures which can't share their lived experience with us. and yet, we (try to)manage to give these persons and possible persons and non-persons-but-still-living-creatures due moral consideration. while the Good Socialists may have all the proper opinions and considerations embedded in them from the womb, for many of us, this comes through argument and discussion with interested and empathic comrades.
Omg you’re so right, I’m sorry for being upset. I can be so intellectually lazy sometimes. Next time I’ll shut up so my empathic comrades can intellectually justify my human rights in peace without my stupid feelings getting in the way :)
I think this is a really good comment. But I don't think it applies to this post, which assumes* that the socialist position is pro-abortion and is looking for the most effective argument to convince anti-abortion people. Nobody here is really disagreeing about abortion as an issue; we don't need intellectual discussion to figure out whether it should be a socialist policy prescription. I think the discussion we need is "is debate with opponents of abortion useful" and not on the merits of specific arguments.
*could be a smart anti-abortion poster trying to get socialists to shit on him by arguing against abortion.
At this point it’s a matter of power and who wields it.
Tbh that supports the assertion that these are ultimately unhelpful arguments, since they inevitably do not matter in influencing policy
ok ig people dont like this but i really really agree with never conceding tactily that abortion should be rare, or stigmatized or w/e. it's so annoying. i'm so pissed off by democrats that are expected to have my support but are like "well im personally against abortion, but i believe in a woman's right to choose".
so you believe its murder but its like Ok murder? i'm supposed to be convinced by this? that you believe in these rights? alright bucko
lol wtf
You think you're going to make someone who's anti-abortion into someone who's pro-abortion with slogans or something?
random and adventurist violence is actually a bad plan and also I call fedposting
"If you don’t like abortion then don’t get one"
This will not convince anyone who’s pro-life because they believe abortion is the same as murder. To them it’s like saying “if you don’t like murdering people then just don’t do it”.
Gonna stop you right there and say that you're not thinking about this the right way. A slogan like this isn't meant to formally refute opposing arguments, it's meant to appeal to someone. Tons of Americans hold libertarian values and love to think in terms of individual choice. Presenting the issue this way allows them to square a pro-choice position with their established political identity. Rejecting these sorts of lines because they don't refute what our opponents are claiming is letting them frame the issue on their terms. Don't just think with logic brain, think with pig poop balls brain.
Few people form opinions logically or scientifically. It's much more common to take positions based on how that position makes you feel. Aesthetic framing is more important in appealing to people than sound logic. It's good to focus on how lame and prudish it is to be anti-choice and how everyone who thinks that way is a weird religious crank. You only need to bother with rigorous logic when dealing with other nerds.
Now if you do wanna deal with nerds
"A fetus isn't a person until it can survive outside the womb" is a bad answer. It accepts all the important aspects of the opponents' framing and just squabbles over where to draw an arbitrary line. It doesn't matter when or if abortion technically meets some definition of murder, because murder is just a word. The action of terminating a pregnancy is incredibly different from the action of shooting someone on the street, and the consequences of those acts are fundamentally different. If we don't catch the shooter, then they may shoot others, they may make people live in fear, or use the threat to make them comply with their demands, and it may kick off an endless feud of revenge-killings over revenge-killings. There have been times and places where the state left justice in the hands of the victim and their kin, and that was the result, and that's why it's necessary to have a state come in and say, "It's MY job to punish murderers, and if you try to take matters into your own hands, I'll punish you both." Aborting a fetus doesn't carry a risk of starting a blood feud, it doesn't cause people to live in fear, the threat of abortion cannot be used as a mechanism for control, legalizing abortion doesn't cause society to collapse. These are all relevant differences when looking at how the state should treat the two cases, so it isn't reasonable to argue against it by comparing it to something so completely different - any case against abortion has to be made in the context that abortion is it's own thing, and if they could actually do that, they wouldn't need to constantly be repeating the "abortion is murder" line.
Whole bunch of blabber, don't bother reading that. They just want to control women and that's all there is to it.
The action of terminating a pregnancy is incredibly different from the action of shooting someone on the street, and the consequences of those acts are fundamentally different. If we don’t catch the shooter, then they may shoot others, they may make people live in fear, or use the threat to make them comply with their demands, and it may kick off an endless feud of revenge-killings over revenge-killings. There have been times and places where the state left justice in the hands of the victim and their kin, and that was the result, and that’s why it’s necessary to have a state come in and say, "It’s MY job to punish murderers, and if you try to take matters into your own hands, I’ll punish you both." Aborting a fetus doesn’t carry a risk of starting a blood feud, it doesn’t cause people to live in fear, the threat of abortion cannot be used as a mechanism for control, legalizing abortion doesn’t cause society to collapse.
This is a really good point, but my one hesitation about it is that it also concedes some conservative premises about why it's necessary to have police
Appeal to castle doctrine. If I have a right to shoot a person for invading my house, and if I have a right to run over a protestor for extending my commute by a few minutes, then I definitely have a right to abort a 'person' for invading my body. End of story.
For extra effect convince the chuds that there is a gun involved in the abortion procedure.
GOOD post, OP. Good criticism of those arguments and some better ones to use.
I don't understand all these comments saying that discussion is useless, as if nobody ever changes their opinions and values.
And all these comments about building power, but how could you sustain a lasting coalition without good arguments that unifies the interests of its members?
Changing an opinion and value is tough without experiencing the event themselves or see it with their own eye. When someone set on a certain value, they’ll do everything to deny and make up some of the most mental gymnastics shite out there. There’s a reason why the country are splitting in half on so many issues. Just look at one of the consequences of post roe where 10 years kids cross state line. The first thing the conservative faction did was to deny it, then they blame immigrant then forget it one day later. Truly vile.
Yeah I agree that changing a major opinion or value usually requires a life-changing experience or change in circumstances.
I think it would mostly be a waste of time to debate a member of a pro-life organization, but some of these comments are saying that all 'pro-lifers' are equally dedicated to their values and impossible to persuade, which I think is a losing strategy.
OP is a debatebro
Debate is useless, stop doing it, it doesn't work
If you're in a situation where you're debating a christofascist about the rights of people who can get pregnant you've already lost. Better to (if confident you won't get assaulted or shot) just yell at them with outright hostility until they shut the fuck up. Otherwise, just don't engage, it's a waste of your time.
This is my argument :PIGPOOPBALLS:
In long form, there is no point in debate. It's a waste of time. I basically say - this is a woman's medical decision and we shouldn't outlaw legitimate medical procedures. Civilized countries uphold women's medical rights
@join_the_iww I would just like to say that I regret the amount of people in this thread who engage in such a hostile way towards you, merely because you want to find a good argument for an issue.
I appreciate the effort behind this. Sometimes I feel like the left will have absolutely terrible arguments for a correct position, and it really hurts perception of said position. Regardless of whether one thinks that's valid, I've seen personally that if one takes a careful and methodical argument tailored to a person, your chance of actually reaching them goes waay up.
If one can steer clear of the buzzword zone for one-on-one argument, and consistently relate the argument back to the other person's beliefs and experiences, it really disarms them and breaks down the fight aspect of the argument.
In general I think there should be a greater concerted effort for building up solid, irrefutable arguments and go for a much more targeted approach rather than a scatter shot volley of "gotchas".
note: this works primarily for boarderline chud "free thinkers" on your facebook timeline or family members who see your brown spouse as "one of the good ones". You can't evoke empathy with an anonymous statue account on twitter.
If one can steer clear of the buzzword zone for one-on-one argument, and consistently relate the argument back to the other person’s beliefs and experiences, it really disarms them and breaks down the fight aspect of the argument.
This is a large part of the reason why I've banned the words 'proletariat' and 'bourgeoisie' from my vocabulary. Those words immediately trigger a negative response in westerners, who have universally had anti-communism seared into their brains.
