You Will Regret Both
In public policy, there is no such thing as inaction. Inaction itself is a policy. The refusal to make policy is itself policy. In that sense, all policy problems are what William James would call a "forced option." If you're lost in the woods, you can stay where you are and hope somebody finds you, or you can keep moving and hope to find your way out, but you can't do both, and you can't do neither.
James pointed out that we often face these forced options without access to enough information to clearly justify one action over another. Policy is no different. Rarely do policy makers have all the information they would like to have. Sometimes, this is simply a matter of not gathering enough facts, but other times, the problem itself is just vague. There may be certain important questions that are simply unknowable, that simply are not empirical questions.
And that is what abortion is. It's a forced option (it can either be legal or illegal, but it cannot be both, and cannot be neither), and it is one that involves extremely thorny and largely non-empirical questions, and what's more, the outcomes of either policy are tremendously weighty. If abortion is illegal, women will die trying to get them illegally, and those who are deterred by the illegality will be forced into being incubators for an organism they don't want. On the other hand, if abortion is legal, fetuses will be killed. If one believes that a fetus is a human being, then one can say that if abortion is legal, human beings will be killed.
There are so many uncertainties involved in this issue that neither side should feel very comfortable about the correctness of their respective positions. These uncertainties include such central issues as what constitutes life and when does it begin, and how one weights the relative importance of personal liberty against life itself.
Look at how weighty these uncertainties are. I do not believe that anybody can provide an open and shut case for how to define "human life." Maybe we should consider a fetus to be living human, and maybe we shouldn't. But, look at how important of a question this is. If a fetus is a human life, we are saying that it is ok, as a matter of public policy, to allow somewhere around 1 million people to be killed every year. If a fetus is somehow less than a normal human life, then no big whoop.
Unfortunately, even if one recognizes and acknowledges the unanswerability of these questions (it's my blog, i can make up words if I want to), that in no way eliminates the policy problem. Like it or not, one side has to win, and one side has to lose.
To quote Kierkegaard in Either/Or, "marry or do not marry; you will regret both."
posted by Joe @ 3:12 PM
5 Comments:
Why should one ever feel regret for allowing people to excercise their free will?
Because we don't let people use their free will to harm innocent people. That's called "the law."
Yes, but what about the large amount of policy that seeks to regulate individual behavior that does not prevent one person infringing the rights on another. There is a sound argument to be made that abortion and recreational drug use fits into this category.
Well, that's exactly my point. You are begging the question. Whether or not abortion infringes on the rights of the fetus (i.e., whether or not the fetus has rights) is at the core of this debate, and that is a question that cannot be answered by "evidence." Which is why the whole issue is so contentious.
There is a considerable gap between laws that protect one from compromising the rights of another and laws that seek to impose morality. Abortion, prostitution and drug laws are controversial because they are largely the latter. Does government have any business intervening in such matters? Should we feel regret or in anyway complicit for other's actions if it doesn't?
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