In his recent column, Ross Douthat doubled down on his usual strategy (tactic?) of eliding the central, seemingly irresolvable conflict in abortion and muddying the waters with tangential issues. This time, he talked about sex-selective abortion and how it’s bad because it’s sex-selective (yes) and because it’s abortion (no). He expands on that in a blog post.
the story of sex-selective abortion creates more difficulties — both intellectually and, I would submit, emotionally — for abortion-rights supporters than it does for those of us on the pro-life side of the argument. For one thing, it presents a policy problem: If the right to abortion is a fundamental human liberty, how do you address sex selection without infringing dramatically on the right to privacy?
As far as blog warfare goes, this is a well chosen argument. As far as reality goes, it is as simple as pointing out to Ross that freedom compels us to allow lots of things that we think are bad. I support freedom of speech. I even support the right to say shitty things. I don’t support people saying shitty things. Whatever will I do? Surely this is an unresolvable dilemma that points to fundamental flaws in my ideology!
Except that it isn’t, and it doesn’t. We attempt to prevent behaviors that we want to remain legal the way that we always do, with social conditioning. It’s just as legal now for people to use the n-word as it was in 1950, but there are many, many less people using the n-word now, and thank goodness. We didn’t need to ban it to greatly reduce its use. We made it socially unpalatable to use it, and the social consequences are severe. Behavior does not spring completely from legality, and I’m glad it doesn’t. No civil society could exist if it had no lever to influence behavior other than the law.
Sex-selective abortion is bad. Abortion must remain safe and legal in a free society. Those two statements are no more contradictory than any of the myriad other “X behavior is bad/X behavior must remain legal in a free society” statements. That’s freedom, that’s democracy, those are the wages of liberty.
Update: No, I don’t think people are going to come up to me at a party and ask me what I think about them aborting a female fetus because it’s female. The social conditioning I’m talking about is building a culture that recognizes the equal value of women. That’s called feminism, and liberals have been working on it for decades. People in such a culture would surely choose to abort female fetuses because they are female far less often, without coercion.