'Till Death Do Us:

A reader submits this rather troubling report, that the US is floating plans to create a death row in Guantanamo. If it's true, I think it's a bad idea. While we usually give governments some limited latitude to kill people during war, part of that is by necessity. It's difficult to hold a fair trial on a battlefield; the robes keep catching on fire and the wigs get shot off. Once the terrorists are in custody and time is less of the essence, principled reasons for short-cuts become less convincing. I don't mean to say there's anything unconstitutional about the whole mess-- I have no idea-- but I do think it's a pretty bad idea. And it would be nice if the government, having "accomplished" its supposed "mission" (if one believes Bush over Lugar) showed at least some interest in convincing the rest of the world that it cares what they thought. It may not be true, but it would be sort of a polite lie.

All that said, I think the story misses the point a little bit. Of course killing people is bad and all of that, and the death penalty often raises consciences that might otherwise have remained blissfully blithe, but I think the Guantanamo stuff should be almost as troubling death-penalty-or-not. The tendency to villify the death penalty sometimes goes along with a tendency to trivialize wrongful imprisonment. We should avoid that. So if it's wrong to kill off the folks at Guantanamo (and they'll get a trial first), we should think about whether it's wrong to lock them up there too.

Abortion. . . :

Sara Butler's promised abortion post is out. She rightly points out that I've wasted plenty of space on this blog sniping at her sometimes circular logic, when there's little more one can expect from either side of the debate. Abortion is wrong because a fetus is a human being. Abortion is right because a woman should have the right to control her body. This is about as helpful as a libertarian and a socialist discussing the proper attitude toward government regulation (note: the libertarian is right, but nobody's convincing anybody).

And so, she says, she's giving up.

[Note also that Sara's suggested reasons for her own pro-life beliefs are not entirely persuasive. (Of course, you ninny, they're her own beliefs! She's not trying to persuade you.--eds. Geez, you've been getting peevish lately. Hear me out.) She isn't sure whether or when a fetus is a human being but this sort of feels right and she wants to err on the side of caution-- better to have protected something one didn't have to than to have killed something one shouldn't have. That's well and good as personal philosophy (and that's what it is) but makes clear what's missing as social policy. After all, caution works both ways. If women do have a right to control their own bodily functions, then it's also bad to infringe upon that liberty unless one has to. Of course, now there are costs and benefits on both sides of the scale, so the calculus gets trickier. (What are the odds a fetus is a human being before viability? What are the odds it's a human being after viability? What sense does this question make?) So I tentatively support some abortion for precisely the same reason that Sara doesn't-- humility. I don't know if a fetus is a human being, and I can't subject unwilling women to hours of misery (years sometimes-- it isn't fun to bring up a child one does not want, not for the mother nor for the child) for a creature I wasn't even sure was human. In essence we're weighing a grave harm against a maybe-human on one hand and a milder but serious harm against a definitely-human on the other hand. Which way you tilt is a function of your own predilections. (and this helps explain the appeal of the viability line).]

But this brings us to the bigger problem. We can't just give up on the argument. Well, Sara can, and I can, and so can many people individually, but we as a society have to have an answer. Either abortion is proscribable by law or it is not. Either it is proscribed by law or it is not. There's no ducking the question. Either the million fetuses killed every year should be permitted or stopped. And that's why pro-abortion and anti-abortion folks will continue protesting, writing, talking and screaming at one another-- because there's no settling this issue and there shouldn't be. Sara Butler can preach to her choir if she prefers, and my feminist friends can preach to theirs, but in the end somebody has to preach to the legislature, and indirectly, to everybody.

Should abortion be regulable by the states? Should abortion be regulable by the federal government? If abortion can be regulated by the states or the feds, what should they do about it? There's no getting around these questions for those in politics, and also no getting around the fact that in order to win political debates in a democratic society one has to convince people, often those from outside of one's flock.

So originally I was going to propose a truce to the conservative folks who I sometimes target (but sometimes applaud) on this blog. If we can't reason it out let's agree to disagree, right? Wrong. So long as we're arguing about what each other ought to be allowed to do, then there's no way we can just return to our corners. Unless Sara means that she's giving up on trying to outlaw abortion among the non-believers (not all by herself, of course, but championing political movements that do), then she hasn't really given up. She's just decided to try to convince some different folks.

So I'm not proposing a truce after all, at least not until we've worked out a way to agree to disagree. If this is all just a philosophical game (and for some of us it is), then that's easy. But if it's a political battle, then in the end something gets done, and unless a compromise is struck, somebody wins and somebody loses. The question may have to be fudged, but it has to be answered. "The stakes," as Sara says, "are too high."

Endnote: Of course, I'm not a strong-willed partisan myself, since I don't have an answer to the fundamental question, but I'm in search of one. At any rate, I think it's important that bright conservatives like Sara remember that the political question isn't just about our individual choices, but about which doctrine of choice (save the fetus or spare the mother) will rule everybody else. Ahh, democracy.

UPDATE: If you came here via after abortion, responses to Emily's concerns are here.