I want to set out here some thoughts on how changing attitudes to abortion can be interpreted by conservatives as either something to be accepted as resulting from political pragmatism (phronesis), or as something to be reversed as resulting from a liberal assault on traditional values.
Abortion shifted over the course of the 20th century from being a medically prohibited act which carried enormous social stigma to something which is now widely seen, up to a certain point in a pregnancy, as a woman’s right.
Judging from the way the right-to-life debate is framed today, one might be tempted to understand this change as resulting from a reduction in respect for the sanctity of life of the foetus, and hence the launch of the current culture-war to reinstate that respect. But it is not at all clear that the relaxation of abortion law resulted from an attack on the idea of foetal-sanctity in the late-mid 20th century. What there was though was a rapid dissolution of the series of prohibitions and taboos around pre-marital sex (especially directed at women), of which denial of abortion was merely one of the more stringent.
The change in attitudes to sex had many different and inter-related causes, including the invention of the pill, the mass unsupervised congregation of young adults in armed forces and universities, widening economic opportunities, feminism, a music-inspired rebellious youth culture, and also I would say a loss of authority by an “old order” whose values and practices were tainted by fascism and two cataclysmic world wars.
What might be a conservative interpretation of this process? On the one hand a conservative could pick up on the cultural value of “individualism”, which clearly became a motif of sexual liberation, and invoke a conservative, anti-liberal catechism to the effect that “individualism” has been given too much salience at the expense of, say, “the family” or “self-restraint”. The change in sexual attitudes could therefore be painted as the product of a programmatic liberal politics that was engaged on a rationalistic crusade to promote individualism without due care to the social fabric or respect for other cultural values. And similarly, the permission of abortion could be painted as an over-reaching liberal attempt to extend a politics of “individual rights” against the value of the “sanctity of life”.
The socio-historical record shows, however, a myriad of forces at work engendering these changes, forces which were not the result of agency at the political level with the intent of changing sexual attitudes, but rather developments which would appear to fall under the description of “spontaneous” or “organic” change. This points to a duality in the nature of conservative engagement under Cahoone’s thesis. On the one hand conservatives are to resist liberal progressive “dogmatism” which attempts to cut through the grain of so-called organic social processes, but on the other hand conservatives are also to be active participants in the pluralistic encounter which Cahoone is calling phronesis. Conservatives emphasise the value of what has endured, and consequently they must resist any change which seems to move too quickly or which might be portrayed as threatening certain goods, whether “the family”, “civil society”, “prosperity” or “patriotism,” and this is irrespective of whether the change originates in liberal rhetoric or in “spontaneous” cultural development.
And with sexual liberation one can clearly see themes of “excess”, “hedonism”, “licence”, “irresponsibility” and “threat to the family” which set conservative alarm bells ringing, and so as this social process develops conservatives jump into the breach to weigh in for cultural values that appear to be being threatened. And if phronesis is the process of applying practical reason, then this has to mean holding this rhetorical engagement to some kind of account. I would argue that today, at the beginning of the 21st century, the experience in the developed world has been that sexual liberation has not led to the debilitation of society that conservatives feared. Of course there have been large increases in divorce rates and in the number single parent families, but, and, surely this is the litmus test, most children are growing up well-adjusted and contemporary society is broadly prosperous, stable and at ease with itself.
So while one can sympathise with an initial conservative engagement against sexual liberation, one now looks to conservatives to make an accommodation with this development as their negative prognoses have not materialised. And more or less this is what one sees. Throughout western Europe conservative parties accept the reality of sexual liberation and no longer oppose divorce and abortion legislation, gay rights, and support for single parenthood, and this marks a significant change from where conservatives stood fifty years ago. This is phronesis in action.
But what then do we say about the strain of religious conservatism, which is particularly strong in the US, but also is present in Europe, particularly evidenced by catholic and evangelical protestant churches? This strain of conservatism wants to assert that divorce, abortion and homosexual acts, for example, are all definitive cultural “bads”. For this kind of conservative, old prohibitions on these are not to be seen merely as protections of civic goods like the “family” or “prosperity”, but as having an intrinsic status as values in themselves. Any lexicon of the “incommensurable goods” which make up the cultural whole will inevitably be contested, and it is surely part of the historical process that “goods” will drop in and out of this lexicon over time. Conservatives reject any kind of utilitarian or consequentialist calculus and want to retain purely deontological goods, but if conservatism is to embrace phronesis as a mechanism of social change, it has to accept that there will come a point at which a certain deontological norm might be rejected from the value lexicon. Not so long ago one “ought” to be a Christian, or a wife “ought” to obey her husband, and these were seen as intrinsic values in their own right, but now are no longer such.
The BBC showed last night a very moving news item about a campaign by disabled people to fight against the discriminatory abortion of disabled foetuses, centering on the pregnancy of a couple with cerebral palsy and the hostility they received for wanting to carry their child to term. Society regards it as completely normal and acceptable to terminate a physically impaired foetus, but all of the arguments made in favour of this normality ring hollow in the face of the obvious capabilities that disabled people have to enjoy fulfilling lives. Nonetheless, there is an incommensurability between love and compassion for a severely disabled child and a culture which idealises “normality” and “achievement”, and which idolises images of health and capability. There is a powerful incommensurability between a religious conservative’s respect for unborn life and the disrespect for individual freedom entailed by the kind of political intervention needed to force a woman to bring up a severely disabled child.
It is almost an axiom of conservatism that the empathy aroused by a particular case should not be allowed to sway “policy”, something conservatives demonstrate every day in their hardness towards criminals and the destitute at home and abroad. The empathy aroused by the harshness of abortion cannot be translated into making it a deontological “bad.” The balancing of “goods” which lies at the heart of conservatism cannot put an infinite weight on any one value, even on life itself. And while it seems disproportionate to weigh the life of an unborn child against the freedoms of a woman to pursue a career, or even just to enjoy an unencumbered youth, it is no less disproportionate than weighing the enjoyment of the cosmetic pleasures of a western consumer lifestyle against the legions of easily preventable deaths from poverty and disease the world-over.
And it is conservatism above all which wants to wall the garden of its privilege against the overwhelming ethical claims which are unleashed by a rhetoric of justice and proportionality.
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