On claiming that abortion is your highest priority

It’s reasonable to think that Christians should oppose abortion. We should oppose the killing of children. And, if you assume that we have a child the moment an egg  is fertilized, then it’s reasonable to insist that, as a culture, we do everything we can to ensure that child thrives. Christians should, as Jesus said, take care of children.

So, Christians should prevent abortions.

There are two very different sets of policy arguments that result from that premise:

 we should engage, as a culture, in the practices that demonstrably reduce abortion;
we should make it really clear that we hate abortion.

Here’s my argument in this post:

If you really want to reduce abortion, it isn’t hard to figure out what to do. So, why don’t people follow that course of action?

What does it mean to be opposed to something, or committed to something? I’m committed to learning Spanish, but I haven’t actually done any of the things that would make my learning it more likely. So, am I committed to learning Spanish, or am I committed to my sense of my self as a person who is committed to it?  If a person said they really wanted to save for retirement, but never engaged in the practices that would make that an outcome, you would say they aren’t actually all that committed to saving for retirement.

I regularly have students who say that succeeding in my class is their first priority, but they can’t do the things that would enable success because they’re too busy with other things.

So, really, there is a gap between what we want to think of ourselves as having as a first priority, and what our actions make clear is a first priority.

If I say, “My first priority is learning Spanish,” but I don’t prioritize the actions that would enable me to learn Spanish, you might say that my claims about my priorities are ethical theatre. I want to be seen as someone who really, really values learning Spanish, but, really, I’m more interested in looking like someone who wants to learn Spanish than I am in actually learning Spanish.

The Christian right claims to be opposed to abortion. I claim I want to learn Spanish. What is the best way for me to learn Spanish? Do I engage in those practices?

Does the Christian right support practices that would reduce abortion?

What reduces abortion?

Easy access to effective birth control, a low unemployment rate, and education for women. That’s just really clear.

When I point this out to people who advocate banning abortion, they don’t dispute that easy access to effective birth control reduces abortion. That’s important.

Instead, they argue something along the lines of, “But birth control sullies women.” So, in fact, preventing women from having consensual but possibly “promiscuous” sex is more important than reducing abortion.

If I say that I learning Spanish is my highest priority, but I continually prioritize things over that, then my claim about Spanish being my highest priority is just ethical theater—wanting to look as someone who valued certain things, but really didn’t Jesus had something to say about those people.

So, let’s just be clear: the people who advocate banning abortion and don’t advocate the policies that would reduce abortion don’t actually prioritize reducing abortion. They prioritize their looking like they’re opposed to abortion more than they actually value reducing abortion.

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