Insistence on Consistency
One of the charges often levelled against pro-life activists is that they’re inconsistent. The basic argument is that if a pro-life activist (who tend, generally, to be conservative) also supports policies that would end a life (e.g., pre-emptive war, the death penalty, etc.), then the pro-life activist is being inconsistent, and, therefore, their stance is wrong (or, alternately, their stance is based solely in a patriarchal desire to keep women from having the freedom to murder an innocent life to decide what happens to their own bodies).
This argument is mostly ineffective, and, in fact, fundamentally flawed. The truth is, it’s absolutely possible to oppose the ending of innocent life while still believing that there are times when risking the lives of brave men for a cause or ending the life of an irredeemable criminal is acceptable. These situations aren’t analogous, really, and don’t pose a cognitive dissonance.
The people making these arguments (for lack of a better term, I’m going to call them the Consistents) are perfectly aware that their argument is a pretty weak straw man. They simply don’t care. With that in mind, I think it’s fair to turn that back on them. Please note that the rest of this post is (somewhat) tongue-in-cheek.
I have to wonder if the Consistents don’t have a bit of dissonance in their own minds. I’m going to take some liberties here. The Consistents assume that because being pro-life is a conservative opinion and because conservatives tend to be hawkish and support the death penalty, that all conservatives have all of these positions at the same time. To be fair, I’m going to do the same thing. Being pro-choice is usually a liberal stance, as is environmentalism. I’m going to assume the Consistents hold both of those positions, as well as other liberal standards.
Thanks to the efforts of environmentalists, DDT was outlawed back in the early 1970s. The primary reason given was that DDT allegedly caused egg shells to weaken, which led to a lot of baby birds (especially bald eagles) never making it past the egg stage. One of the main benefits of DDT was that it killed a lot of mosquitoes, which largely made malaria a thing of the past in most of the Western world. One of the side effects of outlawing DDT, therefore, is that a huge number of people have died from malaria, specifically in Africa.
Therefore, our Consistents believe that unborn birds are so important that a lot of people should die to protect them.
On the other hand, the Consistents believe that unborn humans are so unimportant that murdering them should be perfectly acceptable if their mothers would prefer not to be inconvenienced by them.
Seems rather… inconsistent[a], doesn’t it?
[Update: Ed points out in the comments that my history of DDT with respect to environmentalism and malaria in Africa is off. I think the point still stands (the "inconsistency" pointed out by the Consistents really isn't one), but my analogy is wrong.]
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Of course, there is a way to reconcile these two beliefs, and it dovetails nicely with the Consistents’ support of affirmative action policies (again, we’re assuming they cling to all leftist policies). Outlawing DDT internationally disproportionately affected Africans. Abortion disproportionately affects African-American babies. Affirmative action policies attempt to tell us that certain classes of people are unfit to compete in the work force without assistance from the government. Which people? Minorities in general, but the intent was to “help”, specifically, African-Americans. Are you detecting a pattern? Makes you wonder why they’re so quick to call conservatives racists, doesn’t it?
Of course, the preceding footnote is (mostly) a matter of me taking issues out of context and twisting their intent (slightly), but the Consistents (and many of their fellow leftists) seem to feel that’s fair when taking on conservatives…
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1. DDT use in Africa was largely suspended in them mid-1960s when mosquitoes became resistant and immune to the stuff.
2. The ban on spraying crops with DDT came in the U.S. more than a half-decade later.
Consequently, it’s erroneous to claim that a ban on spraying DDT in Texas in 1972 caused Africans to stop spraying DDT in 1965, and its erroneous to claim that stopping the use of DDT in Texas in 1972 caused a modest increase in malaria deaths in Africa and Asia after 1980. Anyone who can read a map and a calendar should be able to figure that out.
3. DDT was determined to ravage wild ecosystems. Spraying mosquitoes also killed all the predators of the mosquitoes, and often killed much of everything else up the food chain in the wild.
4. Predators recover more slowly than the producer species. Unless malaria could be wiped out among humans while the mosquito population was temporarily knocked down by DDT, spraying with DDT would cause a dramatic and epidemic rise in the number of mosquitoes and, consequently, malaria.
Spraying DDT causes an increase in malaria unless you improve the medical care system to diagnose and quickly and properly treat and cure humans with malaria in the period the mosquitoes are knocked down.
Therefore, the consistents are arguing to protect the lives of living people, including especially pregnant women and children under the age of 5 who are most prone to the fatal forms of malaria.
You need to find another analogy.
Oops. Should have been “the mid-1960s.”
Also, it’s useful to know that no nation ever defeated malaria relying on DDT. It takes a lot of other effort, especially improving the delivery of appropriate medical care, to make it work. In the U.S., the CDC counted malaria as defeated in 1939. That’s about seven years before DDT became available for civilian use in the U.S. There’s a moral tale there, too.
Ed,
My first response to your comments was, “Holy crap! Someone read what I wrote?!”
My second response is that you’ve got an excellent point, and I’ve edited the post itself to reflect as much. (I won’t take it down; it seems dishonest to me to make edits to hide my own ignorance.)