tebow v abortion

I'm not sure if I am late to this party since I just heard about this yesterday on PTI and a couple blog notes, but it appears that there will be a Super Bowl ad putatively about abortion. Since I am by now, an acknowledged person to stick my nose into difficult and divisive issues and pen a thousand words or two, I may as well use this opportunity. So far as I can tell from the description of the advertisement itself, it is not an abortion ad, but it is being run by a organisation that has a record of being staunchly anti-choice/pro-life. To the extent that I care about this issue, that actually does not offend or matter to me. People who hold different views than I do are entitled to air those views, even to pay for them to be aired on national television with the expectation that people might be watching and might pay attention. To the extent that there should be any controversy over this issue at current, it appears to be something that should be taken up with CBS's policy of commercial advertisements not being over objectionable or controversial material, which a commercial putatively about abortions would probably be safely regarded as one or both of those things. I think what CBS appears to be doing, which I do not agree with and which deserves to be richly questioned, is appealing to the fact that the actual commercial appears more to be about the less controversial aspect of "having children" rather than "aborting fetuses", using the rather unusual moral compass that appears backwards from the usual football advertisement (the beer commercial with many scantily clad women hanging off of marginally attractive and usually stupid men). That is, rather than have an objectionable commercial about a mundane subject matter created by an unobjectionable corporate body, they have a mundane commercial about an objectionable topic created by an often objectionable corporate lobbying group. To the extent that CBS is toeing a very strange line, I agree this deserves some attention and argument.

But the actual line of argument that the commercial raises (so far as I can tell) doesn't seem like one that is actually controversial nor is it even a central component to the abortion question in this country.
Basically what it comes down is this
1) Pro-life people tend to hold that abortion is murder, that human life is precious and begins at fertilization, and that ending it voluntarily should be held as a crime (with some exceptions carved out in the event that life was created involuntarily through rape or incest or that life endangers the life of the mother herself). To the extent that this is the pro-life argument, I'm actually not that bothered because this is a pretty basic and important categorical moral thought: "that killing people is bad". I disagree on some crucial metaphysical grounds in that I don't care about vague metaphysical justifications in the absence of empirical proofs that life begins when they say it does and I therefore think women are entitled to decide when their child's life begins for themselves as prospective parents. Up until the live birth at which point it is pretty obvious that a life has begun because we ennoble such births with immediate legal rights. But since that is, so far as I am concerned, their strongly held opinion and belief, it does not bother me and should not in fact bother any one else (simply because someone who doesn't want to have abortions is not required to and can freely ignore any advice that they should or "ought to"). To the extent that it is, in practice, decidedly not the pro-life argument, given that such concerns would motivate policies that are decidedly different from those of most pro-life advocates, such as examination of effective birth control methods as a means to reduce the likelihood of abortions in the first place, it is offensive. But this is neither here nor there as far as the issue raised by a super bowl commercial. You'd have to be concerned enough to dig into the organisation that funded it and observed their politics over many years and I doubt this is something the average football fan is likely to do.
2) As I said, to the extent that is their belief it does not bother me. The reason is that the sort of pro-abortion-ist sentiments that "they" would like to paint people who support pro-choice policies as having and that maybe people like me actually hold (to the extent that if "going China" would be legal, which it wouldn't be, I would actually be roughly in favor of something like that as a stronger incentive to appropriate family planning.. I should probably refrain from re-reading Mill's staunch support for stable population controls when I have already such a high anti-social tendency toward the idea of "more people") are actually extremely rare and probably don't actually exist in our political spectrum in any meaningful way. Most people who support a woman's right to choose are actually rather unlikely to want to ever exercise it. Abortion is not an easy choice and many people, given actual choices, seem to avoid making it (this is in fact much of the political problem in this debate: that painting pro-choice people as pro-abortion ignores the fact that some of them are more like "pro-life" because they "choose life"). The ambiguity of abortion, and indeed in some cases, the certainty with which people feel that it is a moral wrong very much dictate against it being a common procedure for anything other than extreme situations. We already make it extremely difficult to receive one without some extraneous medical reason past the second trimester for example (such as the nominally healthy development of the fetus or the deterioration of the mother's health).

I think in point of fact that the idea that children and life in general is a precious commodity is a rather uncontroversial and unremarkable reason to run an advertisement (though I am not always that impressed that human life in particular is some special case development worthy of special moral treatments). Most Americans would agree with a statement like that, regardless of their political opinions on this point. What they are actually disagreeing with is in the specifics as to whether restricting the rights of women to choose in order to exercise these difficult choices themselves is a worse case morally than the actual execution of that choice in the form of an abortion. In other words, if we say that 47% of the population is "pro-choice" as opposed to 44% who are "pro-life", most of those people probably aren't in fact "pro-abortion". Indeed, many people who have abortions would very likely prefer to go on to have children at some other time or have even had children already. It is hardly "controversial" to argue those points that the commercial will attempt to make. It is in fact, so mundane and boring a point as to be almost irrelevant to the topic at hand. So we get Super Bowl ads by pro-life groups essentially diagnosing the problem as though pro-choice people want to kill off their children, which is entirely incorrect. The ethical problem isn't that pro-choice people somehow don't have an appropriate respect and reverence for human lives and cannot appreciate the power of human potential. The ethical problem is that they have enough respect and reverence for human lives to give people (women in particular) the choice of how or when to create them on their own terms and that this choice should not be made by default by the state or any agency other than the woman involved. Nor should it be the state's principle responsibility to prevent people from administering such procedures or to prevent people from paying for them, rather the only appropriate use of the state's powers might be to seek to reduce the demand for abortions rather than restricting the supply to more dangerous means.
3) All this means that the commercial itself, which probably cost a fortune, is ultimately an amusing waste of money and resources on the part of pro-life people which could probably be spent on better things. To the extent that they should be free to lobby and advocate their positions, I have no objections to them actually doing so (at least so long as they refrain from killing doctors who conduct abortions). I would have no objections to a more graphic and blatantly pro-life ad. CBS might, it's hard to tell. But I would not. As it stands, they will have to be pleased enough to air an ad that features this rather "lame" argument: "I could have killed Tim Tebow." To the extent that this matters to the debate, it is indeed a lame consideration. It does not matter because very few parents will have the opportunity to be parents to elite athletes or some other high achieving child, say the next Einstein or Hayek or something. For that matter, the inverted argument of "the next Hitler or Dahmer" is likewise pretty meaningless. Most abortions, if you think about in the abstract counter-factual sense, are of Jane or John Does. They are carpenters or nurses or plumbers or teachers. Nothing wrong with these things, but they are not star quarterbacks or infamous mass murderers. They do not "matter" in the greater scheme other than to their families and friends and the few people they reach along the way. This is not to say that they are irrelevant. They will in fact matter to someone very much, ideally. Which is pretty nice work if you can get it. But not enough to be the subject of an expensive TV commercial or the invocation of Godwin's Law in "important Internet debates". As such, it is most appropriate that the average person making the decision whether or not to carry out an abortion procedure should consider not whether they are carrying a future President or a future monster, but whether they will cherish and care for a child in such a way that it will flourish and endure in whatever endeavours we can allow it to pursue. At least, I think this is how most people, if they sat and thought out the debate would argue over it. And if the answer is an honest no, then we should prepare options as a state, options which may include abortions in addition to alternatives like adoption.

From my perspective, if we have reached a point where there are substantial numbers of women who have to have this torturous debate internally and who will arrive at a "no" answer, then we have probably made some serious social and public policy moral and categorical errors along the way. We have probably failed to disclose and maximize other options that might reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies (like birth control) or have failed to appropriately prioritize parenting such that it is easier to do for parents who have jobs and careers of their own and will not seem so inevitable to fail in that balance for some, or have failed to provide adequate medical care such that more pregnancies can be carried full term without malformations and complications and so on. These are things that the public can provide and which might reduce the likelihood of abortion demand. They can be provided much easier and may even result in a lower per capita total of abortion procedures than sitting around telling each other that "abortion is murder" and "that somewhere some woman is killing the next Heisman trophy winning quarterback." Because if the pre-Row era is any indication, abortions are not going away if we banish them legally. They are a difficult moral conundrum that is here to stay. Any sane public policy should only focus on making them reasonably accessible for people who need/want them (especially within the context of health considerations, though including broader contextual reasons and decisions made by the mother and family themselves) and also on reducing the likelihood that people will feel they need them in the first place. When more pro-life people are willing to acknowledge that the problem isn't a culture of murder and even "irresponsibility" and is instead a culture of individual rights and becomes willing to press for the availability of birth control methods more broadly instead of working to restrict access to birth control, I will take their argument much more seriously because it means they are focused on the problem as it actually is, or even as they claim it is, instead of as some culture war artifact that reduces the sexual freedoms of women generally and teenage and/or single women specifically. I hardly see how it is appropriate government policy to prevent pre-marital sexual activity. I agree it is appropriate policy to prevent murders, if I agreed that we were preventing murders by banning abortion. And I would certainly agree that it is good policy to prevent harms generally to society (which murder would certainly represent a harm specifically), and that reducing the likelihood of difficult and painful moral decisions which may cause harms and strains to the public, like abortion, can be done with very simple and still accommodating laws rather than bans or even coerced through social mores and argued position statements appealing to the passions and minds of people everywhere rather than given force of law in the first place.

Quite simply what I object to most strongly is the entire architecture surrounding pro-life politics and the intentions to use the force and compulsion of legal regimes to enforce sexual morals and traditions more so than the idea that people should, and usually would, cherish and love the children that they spawn. All of that is, to me, far more morally repugnant and divisive than a metaphysically grounded argument over when life begins which I think most people are somewhere on the other side of the argument from me anyway. I don't think in the abstract CBS is doing anything wrong by airing that very limited and mediocre argument in the form of a commercial because it's not very controversial. What it is doing is blatantly ignoring that the commercial includes some sort of subtextual heading that leads toward other far more controversial and sticky moral or metaphysical arguments over something like "which wrong is more wrong". I do believe it is fair to ask why they would do that because I find that most Americans don't like it when I can make their heads hurt from thinking about difficult subjects like that in the first place, and much less so when they are supposed to be watching a mindless football game and its associated and overpriced commercials.