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For those of you who don\u2019t follow All The Right People on twitter, former National Review<\/em> writer Kevin Williamson was hired by The Atlantic<\/em> a few short weeks ago, then fired after one article, due to the \u201cdiscovery\u201d of a podcast in which Williamson took the position that women who obtain abortions ought to be treated as murderers.\u00a0 Here\u2019s a report from The Hill<\/a> which also includes a link to the memo itself<\/a>.\u00a0 Defenders of Williamson\u2019s termination cast the decision as one of protecting women from a hostile work environment; that is, that fraction of Atlantic employees who had abortions would feel threatened by working with a man who they believe wants them dead.\u00a0 (Sorry \u2013 one of the consequences of waiting \u2019til the weekend to blog on this is that I cannot now find the relevant quotes but I\u2019ll be happy to update the post if a reader can add this in the comments.)<\/p>\n So, first of all, I hear The Atlantic is looking for a writer who has all the \u201cright\u201d credentials without having upset people too badly.\u00a0 Pick me!\u00a0 Pick me!\u00a0 I\u2019m sure I could learn the ropes of reporting soon enough.<\/p>\n But here are some other reactions.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s what Williamson said, paraphrased:\u00a0 if we (speaking among like-minded folk) believe that abortion is murder, than it is only appropriate that our criminal justice system punish it in the same way as any other murder.\u00a0 Also, in general, I\u2019m squeamish about capital punishment, but if we\u2019re going to do so, we should be honest with what we\u2019re doing, by hanging, rather than masking it with lethal injection.<\/p>\n And, again among like-minded folk, this is a worthwhile issue to wrestle with, because the notion that \u201conly the doctors should ever be punished, because women are always just innocent victims\u201d does deserve pushback.<\/p>\n Yes, among women who get abortions, there are many who do so out of a feeling of desperation.\u00a0 They don\u2019t want to do so, but feel cornered, trapped by family finances, an unsupportive or even abusive boyfriend or husband, or by parents who, far from the image of the controlling fundamentalists, make the call to Planned Parenthood the minute they find out.\u00a0 They fear losing their jobs or being unable to stay in college.\u00a0 There are reports of female college athletes being told that if they don\u2019t get abortions, they\u2019ll lose their scholarships.\u00a0 The standard \u201cparty line\u201d is that every woman who gets an abortion does so only after much self-reflection and moral anguish.<\/p>\n But there are increasing numbers of abortion advocates who proclaim no such anguish, who insist that there is, in fact, no moral dimension to the decision at all.\u00a0 What percent of the total this is, I wouldn\u2019t claim to know, but they show up in such publications as Slate quite regularly these days, making statements such as, \u201cabortion is as routine a part of healthcare as any other.\u00a0 If I get a UTI, I take antibiotics.\u00a0 If I get pregnant, I get an abortion.\u00a0 Since it\u2019s a normal part of life for contraception to fail, it\u2019s perfectly natural and normal to get abortions, and we really shouldn\u2019t even obsess over reducing the numbers of abortions except to the extent that, for any given woman, regular use of contraception is more health-promoting than occasional abortions.\u201d\u00a0 And then there are the mass of women whose actions are neither clearly those of desperation nor depraved indifference \u2014 those who fear not poverty, but loss of that upward career trajectory, for instance.<\/p>\n No, I\u2019m not going to link to these articles to prove my point.\u00a0 I don\u2019t write about any individual such article because that leaves me open to the reasonable criticism that it\u2019s just a single writer which doesn\u2019t prove anything, and, well, the end result is that I have likewise not built up a collection of them.\u00a0 Besides, I tend to think it\u2019s bad for one\u2019s mental health to spend one\u2019s time raging about the follies of the opposition.<\/p>\n But it does mean that this issue of culpability is a reasonable one to discuss.\u00a0 Does the idea of limiting criminal penalties to the doctors themselves come from some notion that women are somehow incapable of making these (im)moral decisions themselves?\u00a0 Does it assume that women so naturally have this tendency toward maternal instinct that no woman would deny this instinct except for grave reasons?\u00a0 And, strictly speaking, in terms of who performs the act of abortion, once upon a time, one might say that it was the doctor who directly suctioned or dismembered the unborn child, but in the era of so-called \u201cmedication abortion\u201d (I\u2019d rather the phrase \u201cdrug-induced\u201d or \u201cchemical-induced\u201d because \u201cmedicine\u201d ought to be reserved for that which is health-promoting), it is the woman who does the direct action, namely, swallowing the pill.<\/p>\n But is abortion murder?\u00a0 That\u2019s a matter of defining what murder means. Even in the case of a woman who aborts her baby with no hesitation, who proclaims, \u201cuntil it take its first breath, it\u2019s my property to dispose of,\u201d there is still a question of how we respond to the complete conviction of the perpetrator that what she did was perfectly appropriate.\u00a0 In a case of a criminal trial, after all, we\u2019d question the capacity of the individual to know right from wrong.\u00a0 If somehow a change of law suddenly materialized in 2018 America, could a Slate-writer pro-abortion woman be considered to have the capacity to know right from wrong?<\/p>\n Does it matter, really?\u00a0 It is not, strictly speaking, hypothetical, insofar as periodic reports from El Salvador<\/a>, for instance, describe cases of women imprisoned for abortion whose defenders say that these were actually tragic stillbirths.\u00a0 (According to Wikipedia<\/a>, in at least some instance, these women were charged with homicide under the belief that they killed the babies after birth; it\u2019s all a bit unclear.)\u00a0 \u00a0And in Ireland<\/a>, women who obtain abortions can face prison sentences of up to 14 years.\u00a0 But the consensus of the prolife community is that, so as to avoid conjuring up images of jailed women, and because abortion is currently so prevalent that people can\u2019t picture anything else, you just don\u2019t talk about it.\u00a0 It\u2019s an unwritten rule that Williamson violated.<\/p>\n So why did Williamson violate this rule?<\/p>\n In part, if you listen to the podcast<\/a>, Williamson is not seething with hate for pregnant women who seek out abortions.\u00a0 These are two men trying to work out ideas within what you\u2019d call a \u201csafe space,\u201d and, after Williamson says, yes, sure, I\u2019d be willing to have identical penalties for abortion and \u201cregular\u201d homicide, he then says, \u201cit\u2019s going to be 150 years before this happens.\u201d<\/p>\n But Williamson\u2019s perspective on abortion is not that of a theoretical moral issue.\u00a0 It\u2019s very personal.\u00a0 Back in 2015 (as shared within the last few days on Facebook), he wrote an article on the subject<\/a> in which he gave a bit of biography:<\/p>\n Today is the 42nd anniversary of the decision in Roe v. Wade. I never need reminding of which anniversary it is \u2014 it\u2019s always the same as my age. I was one of those who entered the world through a pregnancy of the sort we call \u201cunplanned,\u201d though as a Hayekian type I do not object to being the \u201cresult of human action, but not the execution of any human design.\u201d I was born about three months \u2014 call it a \u201ctrimester\u201d \u2014 before Roe.<\/p>\n In my case, the result was an adoption. Mine wasn\u2019t, as it turns out, the sort of success story you\u2019d put in a brochure; my adoptive parents were divorced only a few years later, and there was subsequently a great deal of unpleasantness in my home upon which I do not intend to dwell. Some had happier families, some far worse. Eventually, I discovered that I had certain talents, which friends encouraged and teachers helped me to develop. . . . There have been a few rough stretches and some that have been nearly perfect.<\/p>\n None of it was optional.<\/p>\n It is not as though I do not sympathize with women who feel that they are not ready for a child. I, too, have had many developments in life for which I was not ready. Adoption is, like all human institutions, imperfect. But imperfect situations can be improved upon. They are not final.<\/p>\n People like me \u2014 we \u201cunplanned,\u201d the millions of us \u2014 now live the first part of our lives outside the protection of the laws of these United States. Our lives, and very often our deaths, are instruments of the convenience of others. That was different, in my case, by a matter of a few months. It is impossible for me to know whether the woman who gave birth to me would have chosen abortion if that had been a more readily available alternative in 1972. I would not bet my life, neither the good nor the bad parts of it, on her not choosing it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This strikes me as very visceral, very personal.\u00a0 Children \u2014 embryos, fetuses, use whatever label you like \u2014 conceived under undesirable circumstances, are Williamson\u2019s people<\/strong>.\u00a0 Had Roe v. Wade been decided a year prior, Williamson would not be alive.<\/p>\n I was born to married parents, who not only were reasonably financially stable (so far as I know, anyway) but never would have considered abortion.\u00a0 From what I can tell, Williamson views himself as a survivor of abortion, not in that his own mother attempted to abort him, but that only by accident of birth was he not aborted.<\/p>\n (Yes, I know, people who are OK with abortion in general tend to believe, or at least voice the belief that, until some point, whether viability or birth, one isn\u2019t a real living human being that can be killed, but just a \u201cthing\u201d whose existence can in some manner be eliminated, so that the \u201cwhat if\u201d hypothetical is no more meaningful than a \u201cwhat if Mom and Dad simply hadn\u2019t crossed paths\u201d sort of question.\u00a0 And it irritates me to no end that these people simply have no ability to understand that, whatever one might personally believe on the subject, the pro-life community believes that unborn children are just as human and just as living and just as morally entitled to protection as everyone else.\u00a0 It\u2019s called Theory of Mind<\/a>, people!)<\/p>\nOn the sentiment itself<\/h3>\n
On Williamson\u2019s Failure to Get With the Program<\/h3>\n