Debate Primer: Abortion Restrictions
This week, Political Union will debate whether there should be any restrictions on abortion in the United States. The big news this week, of course, was the leak of the Supreme Court’s draft opinion in the Dobbs case on Monday. The majority opinion, a scathing ninety-something pages written by Justice Samuel Alito, indicated that the court would overturn its decisions in Roe and Casey and end a 50-year period of relevant stability over abortion abortion litigation on the federal level. You’ll have to take my word for it that the Political Union board didn’t play a role in the opinion leaking - we chose the resolution for this week’s debate on Sunday night, some 24 hours before Politico ran its story.
Another note, before we get into a few source materials: the way the resolution is worded is meant to conspicuously differ from the conversation going on about abortion at large. We are not strictly debating whether the standard set out by Roe was good or whether the court should have the ability to overturn decisions like these, though in the context of this week’s events, these topics will doubtless come up. Instead, we’ve worded the resolution in such a way that it may be more likely to split the room: should all abortion be legal in the United States, regardless of trimester, method, or pretext?
There’s more literature on this subject than I could fit into 100 primers, so I’ll keep it to just a few well known sources and contextual information about abortion policies in the US.
First, you will very likely hear someone mention the “violinist argument” at our debate on Monday night; this refers to the philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson’s essay (sorry for the gross plain text webpage) justifying abortion through a creative metaphor involving a virtuouso musician and life support. If you want just the bullet points from her argument, you can find a set of lecture notes here.
A classic argument from the other perspective comes in Don Marquis’s 1989 article “Why Abortion is Immoral.” Marquis’s contention revolves around fetuses having “futures-like-ours”; that is, the relevant factor in determining the ethics of abortion is not whether fetuses are alive during pregnancy, but that they will be.
Another semi-classic (and brief) article is Caitlin Flanagan’s 2019 in the Atlantic about the merits of the best arguments about abortion from both sides. Her article is neither explicitly pro-choice nor pro-life.
In the context of this week’s news about abortion laws, here’s a fact sheet from the (progressive) Guttmacher Institute on where state abortion laws stand. If you prefer the same thing but in map form, here’s something similar from US News.
The New York Times published a news feature this week about mail-order abortion pills, which have to a significant extent already replaced in-person abortion consultations in restrictive states, and are poised to do so even further.
Finally, also in the New York Times from this week, I recommend Ross Douthat’s column on national polarization in the years since Roe.
We hope to see you tomorrow for our debate!
"Supreme Court Of The United States (SCOTUS)" by Anthony Quintano is marked with CC BY 2.0.
