What We Talk about When We Talk about Abortion
By: Sam Heath
Tags: Race, Equality, Abortion, Culture, Politics

What We Talk about When We Talk about Abortion

Black Lives Matter Shows the Heart of the Pro-Choice and Pro-Life Debate

Image from Sarah Silbiger at Getty Images

For years my wife tried to buy me books. Sometimes she cheated a bit and looked at my Amazon Wish List or flat out asked me what I wanted. But on the occasions when she tried to find a book I might like for Christmas or my birthday without knowing for sure I would like it, the effort failed. But I cheered on the desire.

This summer she crushed it by finding Ian McEwan’s novel Machines Like Me, a story about an alternate 1980s London where artificial intelligence has developed to the level where you can order lifelike robots — men called Adam and women called Eve. The story follows one man’s purchase of an Adam and his exploration of all the themes you might expect from an AI novel.

Image from Wikipedia Commons

I was struck by his language and ability to weave together seemingly impossible situations. He brought you, as the reader, to such a felt-closeness that nearly anything seemed possible. But I expected McEwan to lend some insight into the debate of what makes us human and separate from machines. After all, the full title of the book is Machines Like Me and People Like You.

But he did not do that. In fact, the digital waters were muddied. The book talks about the Turing test, an exercise developed by Alan Turing — Benedict Cumberbatch popularized his story in the film The Imitation Game in 2014 — where a participant evaluates text responses from a human and from a computer, without knowing which is which. If the human cannot tell the difference, the machine passes the test.

McEwan said in an interview: “If a machine seems like a human or you can’t tell the difference, then you’d jolly well better start thinking about whether it has responsibilities and rights and all the rest.”

The book does not adequately illustrate the difference between a machine and a human, yet, interestingly, it does make an adequate case for the logical conclusion of treating one as the other.

Machines Like Me uses many words to talk about what machines need to be “like me”: sentience, self-awareness, consciousness, the ability to reason. These are the best the secular world can do.

To neglect the idea of a soul is to neglect an ultimately substantive conversation about humans and machines.

Ta-Nehisi Coates concedes that his atheism frustrates certain and deep solutions to racism. He writes in We Were Eight Years in Power that

Ideas like cosmic justice, collective hope, and national redemption had no meaning for me…. No one — not our fathers, not our police, and not our gods — is coming to save us…. [M]y ambition is…to keep screaming into the waves — just as my ancestors did.

So too McEwan’s neglect of religious categories, particularly the idea of a “soul,” misses the deepest places the story could have gone. To neglect the idea of a soul is to neglect an ultimately substantive conversation about humans and machines.

There is more to humanity than sentience, and there is more to the abortion debate than the right to privacy, a woman’s choice, and whether the fetus has a heartbeat. Those are all important and need to be discussed and considered, but if you want to talk about abortion, then let’s talk about abortion holistically.

That includes a discussion of dignity.

Image from Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

My yes-or-no view of whether abortion should be legal or not gets foregrounded in the public square, unfortunately sidelining a broader discussion of care for someone’s life from cradle to grave, a discussion of why certain populations disproportionately have abortions over others, and, again, the central issue, which is dignity.

For abortion, the core of the debate is whether personhood or life are synonymous. Anything else can easily become subjective nonsense. Science agrees that life begins at conception. Like the debate on whether race is a category supported by genetics, it’s been settled.

Life begins at conception, but when does personhood begin? To ask about personhood is to ask when a being deserves to be treated with dignity, to be treated as if one has worth. The “sanctity of life” language asks when is life holy, when is a life a person? But the debate gets eclipsed by the debating, rather than the content.

Society cannot maintain the tension and contradiction of saying that women “abort fetuses” (when we don’t want them) yet “carry babies” (when we do). Personhood is not a choose-your-own-adventure, and to treat it as such is to make commercial that which is sacred. It is to overlay consumerism on top of humanity.

Whether one is pro-choice or pro-life or something in between, we can agree that a world where a woman feels abortion is the only option is not a world caring for its people as it should.

The author and farmer Wendell Berry says in Life Is a Miracle, “It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.” To ask when a person becomes a person is to ask when someone isn’t a machine. Turning off machines is not murder, after all, yet taking the life of someone who is a person is a grave deed.

McEwan writes in Machines Like Me: “There is nothing so amazing that we can’t get used to it.” Or so awful, I’d add. Abortion is awful. Like divorce, abortion is a breakdown of a process. Something did not work for an abortion to become the best or only felt option.

We can lament that.

Whether one is pro-choice or pro-life or something in between, we can agree that a world where a woman feels abortion is the only option is not a world caring for its people as it should.

We miss the depth this discussion deserves when dignity, in the form of determining when personhood begins, is not on the table.

The Black Lives Matter movement lends insight here. There is more at stake in the BLM movement than police brutality. It’s an entire conception of how a chunk of humanity has been mistaken for animals, non-humans, or lesser humans so whites can justify fiendish behavior.

For race, the core of the debate also is dignity — who has it and how much and where it comes from.

Image from Toni Sandys at Getty Images

Of Black people, James Baldwin wrote in 1965, “We are human too,” while a few years before he spoke of how Black people, despite so much opposition, work for “an unassailable and monumental dignity.” Even in our modern era, the Black Lives Matter website’s three co-founders use the word “dignity” in each of their bios. Going beyond the network, the BLM movement as a whole is a national statement that Black lives matter, have worth, have dignity.

Treating a person as something other than a person is just semantic justification for autonomy, power, or individualism.

Black people never stopped being worthy of dignity. They lost no essential quality, but they were treated as if they did not have that quality.

Just so with abortion.

A fetus lost no part of its dignity or humanity; it just was treated as a life without personhood. This difference makes all the difference, because a human life, no matter how small — to echo Horton — no matter how whipped and raped, is still a human life. Treating a person as something other than a person is just semantic justification for autonomy, power, or individualism.

Unless someone has done the hard work of knowing when that collection of cells is a person, that individual has no business in the abortion debate.

Unless someone has done the hard work of knowing when they believe individuals or institutions can, if ever, deny the recognition of dignity to people of color, that individual has no business in the movement.

Image from rost9

In Stamped from the Beginning, Ibram Kendi says, “It is one antiracist thing to say discriminators treated Black people like they were barbarians. It is yet another racist thing to say the discrimination actually transformed Black people into barbarians.”

No Black person ever lost dignity; society just ignored it.

The BLM movement is a national cry that dignity is not conferred but permanent. Like the women’s right to vote, it was not granted — it being a right that was deserved and denied — as much as finally recognized.

Photo by Tasos Katopodis on Getty Images

Machines Like Me does not discuss a soul or the Christian/Jewish idea of the image of God, the biblical quality that sets people apart from plants and animals. Without discussion of a soul, the book misses some of the most important tools to wrestle with the AI question of humanity.

Reason, sentience, and self-awareness are distractions from determining if a machine has a soul.

Heartbeats, fingernails, and fetal movement are distractions from determining if a fetus is a person.

And Black-on-Black crime, looting, and cultural Marxism are distractions from recognizing the dignity every person of color is demanding in the Black Lives Matter movement.

For abortion, our public square needs to get real and to get deep regarding the dignity of personhood and ask, Is this decided by us or determined beyond and before us?