I would like to weigh in on the current political trend of states banning abortion. Alabama started the trend, and we haven't seen the last of it. I've always maintained that if we want to understand a problem, we need to look at it like we would a sculpture, that is, something with three-dimensions that we have to view from many different angles to fully understand. Complex problems must be understood from several different perspectives if we ever hope to address them wisely and well.
Our current tendency in the US is to view certain hot-button topics from the political, left-right perspective. There is possibly some value to this, but it is very limiting to ONLY see problems through this lens as we often tend to do. And the political point of view is perhaps the least useful of any perspective when confronting a difficult and contentious issue such as abortion because the parties involved have no interest in reaching a common ground. And so they just end up talking past each other and lobbing ideological hand grenades back and forth.
A new discussion
This post does not talk about any of the hand grenade issues: women's bodily autonomy, the point at which a fetus becomes viable outside the womb, or any metaphysical considerations such as people's deeply held beliefs about souls. These are important issues, but they have become too politicized to admit of rational discussion among parties that disagree on them.But there are other perspectives, better, more productive ways to look at it that have nothing to do with left-right politics. One of these comes to us from the field of economics: demand-side vs. supply-side solutions.
Let us start by stating right up front that there is nothing pretty about abortion. It is like war in that regard. Both are a last resort, something we do only after every safeguard has failed. People don't want to go there if they don't have to. The only reason we ever resort to war or abortion is because it is the least bad (and sometimes only) remaining alternative. I doubt we could find a single reasonable person who would disagree that minimizing abortions should be very high on our national priority list. As far as I can tell, the thing we disagree on most vehemently is how to approach this goal. This is where the perspective of supply-side and demand-side solutions brings a lot of clarity to the discussion. A supply-side solution is one that that seeks to reduce the supply of abortions. A demand-side solution, conversely, operates on the principle of reducing the demand, or need, for abortions.
Supply-side solutions tend to have a lot of undesirable side-effects. Because they do nothing to reduce demand, they favor the emergence of black markets and have other harmful adjuncts. Prohibition, the 18th amendment to the Constitution, was an attempt to use the law to restrict access to alcohol by making it illegal to manufacture, import, transport, or sell most alcoholic beverages. When the law went into effect, a black market came immediately into existence. Organized crime sprang eagerly to the task of supplying the demand, and thus vast sums were necessarily expended on enforcement, right when tax revenues stemming from the previously regulated legal trade evaporated. Some of Prohibition's goals were met, but at a very high, totally needless cost. And those benefits disappeared immediately on the repeal of Prohibition. This is the nature of top-down, authoritarian solutions.
Demand-side solutions, on the other hand, do not suffer from any of these side-effects because demand drives supply. Consider the fate of the film industry. 2000 was a banner year for Kodak. They were riding high on the strongest sales ever recorded for camera film. Twelve years later, they were bankrupt. Why? The success of digital photography, which, in a supreme example of irony, Kodak itself invented, single-handedly destroyed the demand for film. The multi-billion dollar consumer film industry just evaporated, with stunning rapidity. Of course this was a tragedy for the wonderful old Kodak company that had done so much for the world, a victim of technological progress for which it was not prepared. Society as a whole, however, suffered no ill effects from this lightning transition to the age of digital photography -- quite the contrary. Electron-based photography is superior in virtually every way to chemistry-based photography. So the consumer film industry is now dead, and there is no chance of it ever arising again as an economic force. This is the nature of bottom-up, demand-side solutions.
In attempting to put in place a top-down, authoritarian solution for abortion, we are treading a well-known path, with plenty of historical data to point out the inevitable fate of this approach. We should instead be seeking a demand-side solution, simply because it is a far superior, far less costly way to reach the goal of reducing abortions to the absolute minimum. And since, unlike alcohol, no one likes abortion for its own sake, this is a goal that all sides can support if only we can agree on the means of arriving there. What does that road look like? To help us find it, I offer the Parable of Amabala, which points the way, a clear and obvious path.
The Parable of Amabala
Once upon a time, there was a place called Amabala. Many of the good people of Amabala held some fervent, deeply-held beliefs. They fervently believed that all houses must be constructed of wood, that householders should keep plenty of large, poorly closed cans full of gasoline within easy reach, and that they should always have a large stock of matches on hand. It was also part of their fervent, deeply-held belief system that children should be told that matches were bad, but never to be told the reasons why (which ensured that as soon as the Eye of Authority was busy elsewhere, the first thing the children would do would be to play with the matches). And most of all, they deeply and fervently believed that fire fighting, fire fighters, and fire fighting equipment were Evil. The Amabalians worked tirelessly to promote their fervent, deeply-held beliefs, and even did their best to formalize them via the laws of Amabala.
Of course this meant that Amabalians experienced a lot of unplanned fires, and had no way to put them out. As a result, the land of Amabala had many more burn patients and much higher fire insurance premiums than other neighboring lands with more sensible laws.I do not want to needlessly tax the reader's patience by spelling out the painfully obvious meaning of this parable, but lest the point be lost on those who have a hard time thinking outside their political box, let us briefly discuss the various parallels. Amabala's laws and policies are a study in perverse incentives that result in lots of instances of the exact outcome they ostensibly want to prevent. Put another way, they deplore and condemn the very plants they do their best to sow and cultivate.
The parable refers to wood, gasoline, and matches. This of course refers to treating the subject of sex as either too sacred, dirty, or sinful to talk about in detail, and educating children on that basis alone. Such attitudes, while accepted within the walls of a church, do not good public policy make. The data is very clear: nothing but bad outcomes flow from simply declaring something "naughty", "dirty", or "sinful" and doing nothing more than telling people to abstain from it. In fact, as experience consistently shows, that approach serves only to increase its glamour and allure. In the public space, and most especially in education, discussions of sex should be open, frank discussions of risks, safety, and full, specific details about preventing bad outcomes. Kids who understand the fact that sex is a perfectly normal part of the human experience and are prepared in advance for the onslaught of hormones fare much better in overall life outcomes than their peers who are not so instructed. And rather than simply threatening kids with eternal damnation, or some other disproportionate punishments for imperfect control over their indomitable reproductive drives, the pragmatic admission of the fact that young people and hormones are a highly flammable combination, and being prepared in the areas of "fire prevention" and "fire fighting", is just basic good sense.
In the parable, the people viewed the fighting of fires as evil. This of course is a direct reference to abortion. No one wants the house to burn down. No one in their right mind would get rid of fire departments, fire trucks, fire hydrants and fire fighters because bad things do sometimes happen and we need to acknowledge that fact. We do a lot to avoid having to call the fire department. We have smoke detectors and fire extinguishers. We have sprinkler systems. We have non-flammable fabrics and all kinds of regulations for preventing fires in houses and buildings. These are the things that prevent many fires from occurring or getting out of control. But despite our best efforts, fires happen and we need to deal with them. To intentionally restrict access to this resource at the legal level is criminal foolishness and is the forcible imposition of the deeply held beliefs of one sect on people who do not necessarily subscribe to that sect's beliefs.
The $64,000 question
- So, should we respect the people of Amabala?
Yes, absolutely. - Should we respect the sincerity of their beliefs?
Yes, there is no question about it. - Do we have to respect their beliefs?
No, absolutely not. There is no call to accept any ideas that lead to bad outcomes, which their beliefs demonstrably do.
Here is my take. Politics and religion are a terrible combination. They remove every scrap of common sense from any discussion. They turn people from fellow citizens with a different opinion into enemies to be destroyed at any cost. They try to impose a black and white view of right and wrong on a complex world with a lot of nuance. They don't deal well with pluralism, preferring just a few tidy boxes for categorizing people. They insist on using hard and fast notions of "right" and "wrong" as mere labels to indicate things they, and often their particular deity, like or don't like.
The reality is, most people all want the same things. We really do. In the case of things like abortion and war, we all want to minimize the need for it as much as possible. In principle, we all want prosperity and justice for as many people as possible. In principle we all want a good life for ourselves, our families, our friends and neighbors. Most people would never intentionally make a choice that they knew would bring harm to their posterity. But we all have the very human qualities that evolution gave us: tribalism, a bias toward things closer to us in time and space, seeing gods in the unknown, quickly judging others and labeling them friend or foe. These are all things we understand well, but they're so deeply embedded in our way of thinking that it's hard to overcome them.
So my advice is this:
First, realize that your worldview is not the world. You can step outside it if you know it's just a lens through which you see and interpret events. It helps to try to put yourself in the other person's shoes.
Second, realize that everybody is doing the best they can given their particular set of life experiences. There are no "evil" people. There are only people who are shaped by life, and that shape can be terribly warped in the case of mental illness, abuse, and traumatic experiences.
Last, the words "good", "evil", "right" and "wrong" are labels that often prevent us from digging deeper and understanding how and why things are the way they are. Don't use them. Get them out of your thinking. They're just lazy words. Everything -- and I mean Everything -- can be thought of more productively in terms of costs and benefits, risks and rewards.
Let's agree that minimizing the need for abortion is a common goal and, using our principles above, see if we can't do something sensible that benefits society while letting people live their idea of a good life, even if it doesn't happen to be our idea of a good life, or prevent us from living it.
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