Dennis Miller on Abortion

One school of thought is that what I think is wrong should not be criminalized, as there is always the possibility that the act isn't really wrong after all. Another is abortion is clearly wrong, but laws that criminalize it would do more harm than good.

There are, in fact, many reasons Mr. Miller might espouse the "wrong but permissible" viewpoint. Some of these reasons are clearly hypothetical, but they seem appropriate in a discussion of the views of many Americans. They are listed in order of length, and are only off the top of my head.

1) Victimless crimes (you noted these).

2) Humility. Miller might feel the law lacks the authority to condemn abortion, on the grounds of moral or medical uncertainty, regardless of his personal belief.

3) Cost of enforcement. If the price of making abortion illegal was an invasive criminal investigation of every miscarriage, few might support such a law. Alternatively, he might feel that the expanded scope of government required by such a law was prohibitive.

4) Alternative Philosophy. Miller might hypothetically believe that killing children is acceptable - in cases of crippling birth defects, for example – even outside of the womb. The modern philosophy on infanticide is not a historical universal. While these views may be repulsive, they are not extinct.

With deepest respect,
Richard Daly.

(my first post)

Another possibility is that he thinks abortion is wrong for some reason other than concern over fetal right-to-life. I could see moral disapproval of abortion-as-birth-control, for example, based purely on the grounds that it involves treating a serious and significant part of one's own life with cavalier irresponsibility.

You are right, though, that a lot of people use "I think it's wrong but wouldn't make it illegal" as a dodge to avoid the implications of taking their own moral viewpoint seriously.

I think some of the above commenters miss an important point. Miller tells us why he says "wrong but permissible":

I think abortion's wrong, but it's none of my business to tell somebody what's wrong.

Not, "the government isn't the arena in which to assert that it's wrong." Not, "regulations couldn't be effectively instituted." But, "it's none of my business to tell somebody what's wrong."

JK: Exactly, and that was how I tried to target my response to his position, although maybe I wasn't clear enough. If it's the government's place to tell us not to kill each other for other reasons, then -- if one accepts that an unborn baby is a person -- it's the government's place to get involved there, too. Of course by "the government" we really mean "us", since we're a democracy.

I recognize that many people believe as Mr. Miller does: thinking an unborn baby is a person, but still not wanting to get involved. So I attacked that position by explaining how it's inconsistant with the way that we view other types of killing.

TO: Justin Katz

Quite right. Mr. Williams addressed the issue to the wider population, however.

I have become the victim of a savage cross-post. Nothing to do but smile.

The government hasn't accepted that a fetus is a person though, right? That is where we need to start.

Another thing I ponder...I agree that abortion should be prevented (or be considered a crime) because that is in line with my values, which, of course, I believe to be good. What happens though, when our government wants to pass laws that don't agree with my values. How would I feel then?

RD: I appreciate your thoughts, and I think your numbers (3) and (4) present the most intellectually honest objections to anti-abortion laws. Of course, neither objection would garner support from the majority of the American people, and so the pro-abortion lobby resorts to smoke and mirrors to maintain their lucrative industry.

Heather: You're right, which is part of my point. The law doesn't recognize unborn babies as people, but most born-people do recognize that the unborn are people of some sort, i.e., most people wouldn't support abortion laws that allowed abortion up to the very second of birth (as advocated by Gen. Clark). I believe that the reasoning is very strong for my position, that if an unborn baby is a person at 9 months, he or she is also a person at 0.1 months, or what-have-you. I also think most people could be convinced of this and made to see the fundamental similarity between laws against killing, whether the victim is born or not.

I want to eliminate the problem as abortion as a "special case" of killing, and recast it as it truly is: just plain old killing. Then it could be governed by the (reasonable, in my opinion) laws we already have on the book for killing.

(My first post here also.)

I agree that Mr. Daly's (3) and (4) are the most intellectually defensible. Actually (4) is by far the most serious; (3) is only marginally persuasive; (1) and (2) are intellectual piffle.

My problem with accepting (3), the difficulties of enforcement, as a justification for abortion's legality is that the law works in many ways and serves many purposes. Direct prosecution and intrusive criminal investigation are only part of the picture. And of course, in the case of abortion, it's applied ahistorically ... where abortion was illegal pre-Roe, it was never prosecuted as murder and most commonly treated in the manner of vice crimes such as prostitution.

For example, if abortion were illegal, one side effect of that would be that abortion clinics could not operate as legal businesses, with the ability to advertise, etc.; another would be that doctors would not be training in it; another would be that it would not be covered by private or government health plans; another would be the loss of the expectation of availability. There would also be changes in the construction of abortion in the public eye -- an increase in danger and taboo, and a decline in social acceptability.

The number of abortions would decline precipitously without a single person being prosecuted. In general, vice laws do *work* -- the only serious questions being what is the vice and its damage, how widely is it viewed as socially acceptable, and what are the costs. (Contrary to urban legend and pop histories, Prohibition actually *did* work, in the sense that it reduced alcohol consumption significantly, simply because of all the ways illegality made it difficult.)

VM: Welcome, and thanks for the comment. If you have more information on how significantly Prohibition reduced alcohol consumption, I'd love to hear it, because presumably the War on Drugs has similar effects. Many argue that the WoD is useless, but I believe it actually does reduce consumption, and if there is hard evidence that Prohibition worked (in that sense) I'm very interested.

Michael:

Well, a lot of guesswork is involved for any number of reasons. First of all, figures for any illegal activity are necessarily unreliable. There were also great gaps in the availability of alcohol between urban areas, especially in the Midwest and Northeast (where the evidence is good that Prohibition did fail to restrain alcohol consumption), and more rural areas, especially in the South and West (where Prohibition was obviously effective and remained in place in some ways after 1933). Anyway, these figures are for U.S. per-capita consumption of alcohol in gallons (http://www.drugtext.org/library/articles/craig102.htm)

1860 2.1
1870 1.9
1880 1.9
1890 2.1
1900 2.1
1905 2.3
1910 2.6
1915 2.4
1920 --
1925 1.4
1930 1.5
1935 1.5
1940 1.6
1945 2.0
1950 2.0
1955 1.9
1960 2.0
1965 2.2
1970 2.5
1975 2.7

As I say, these figures are obviously imperfect at precisely the point they're most needed. So, it's a bit more reliable to measure alcohol consumption through proxy figures, such as the death rate from cirrhosis and mental-home commitments for alcoholism. They tend to suggest Prohibition was at least somewhat successful.

For example, the average death rate from cirrhosis of the liver was 7.3 per 100,000 in the years 1920-1933; the average rate for the rest of the 20th century was 11.5. According to a Mark Moore New York Times op-ed column "Actually, Prohibition Was a Success," in 1989, cirrhosis death rates for men went from 29.5 per 100,000 in 1911, to 10.7 per 100,000 in 1929. Admissions to state mental hospitals for alcohol psychosis also fell from 10.1 per 100,000 in 1919 to 4.7 per 100,000 in 1928. There are problems with figures this crude, but they tend to cut both ways -- i.e. the time lag that often happens between alcohol consumption and cirrhosis on the one hand, but the effects of the Temperance movement that resulted in Prohibition in the years prior to Constitutional prohibition and the lingering effect of formed habitual behavior in the years after (more on that anon).

There's two other issues to consider after all these numbers. The first is a weakness of all social science, in that, mimicking natural science and mathematics, it seeks to isolate variables. The problem is that laws and human conduct simply never occur in a vacuum or a scientist's germ-free lab. To cite a point relevant to this case and to which I've already alluded above, the people who argue against Prohibition's effect on alcohol consumption point out that the cirrhosis death rate dropped faster during the 1910s, before Prohibition, than in the 1920s. And that the repeal of Prohibition didn't noticeably increase cirrhosis rates in the late 1930s. The numbers plainly support that (if you read Moore carefully with that in mind, you can see the residue). So the social scientist is satisfied. The problem is that in the real world, the country that passed Prohibition had to first become a country that *would* pass Prohibition (and that also meant passing mini-prohibitions in states and counties). Or to use the pro-life movement's formulation, we seek a culture where every unborn child is welcomed into life *and* protected in law. Changes in culture and the habits of the heart are logically distinct from the law, but not practically. We express our notions of good through the law, and the law reinforces those notions of good. Or to use Aristotle's formulation, we becomes virtuous by doing the virtuous things and vicious by doing the vicious things.

Secondly, and this might sound a little a priori and anti-intellectual, there's a certain level at which I simply refuse to listen to something so counterintuitive as "Prohibition didn't reduce alcohol consumption" (as opposed to "Prohibition had excessive countervailing costs"). I mean if making something illegal doesn't raise its cost (in the broadest possible sense), if raising the cost of something doesn't decrease its sales, and if being less a part of unthinking visible routine doesn't make a thing less popular -- if these things aren't true, ceteris paribus (and keep in mind what a stiff demand that is of history and the social "sciences"), then every thing we think about man is false and we've learned nothing about him in the history of civilization.

VM: Wow, thanks for all the info. I'd like to post your comment on the site, if that's ok with you. Or, if you'd rather post it on your own site I'll link to it.

Michael:

Thanks. Go ahead and post to your site, if you like.

In regard to question: The government hasn't accepted that a fetus is a person though, right?

A Judge in New Jersey said (paraphrased) in a case where the father objected to an abortion of his child (paraphrased) "The fetus is a person without rights, and is therefore legally executed by the choice of the mother"

Ron: No it hasn't, although there's progress.