Exactly ten years ago, when Reach Out Wisconsin was just getting started, we hosted a public forum on abortion. This was our second-ever public forum. We were very nervous as the night approached. What had we been thinking, scheduling abortion as our second topic?!
I had been reading up on the issue, and I’d found a passage from Parker Palmer that I thought might help. At the beginning of the forum, I read it aloud:
Abortion is one of the many issues that generate what some people have called the “politics of rage.” And yet rage is simply one of the masks that heartbreak wears. When we share the sources of our pain with each other…we have a chance to open our hearts and connect across some of our great divides.
I wanted a better, more respectful conversation—about this and so many other issues. I wanted to help the group relax and open their hearts a bit more.
After I read Palmer’s words, we carefully coached everyone on listening compassionately to others’ personal stories related to abortion. And to our relief and surprise, the forum went well! We had done the impossible: gotten pro-lifers and pro-choicers to talk respectfully for a whole evening.
Every time there’s a new episode in our culture wars around abortion, I think back to that forum. It is possible to have real, honest, open-hearted dialogue about this topic. These conversations can be deeply healing and productive. I feel strongly that they’re what we need.
In order to make these conversations happen, though, we have to be willing to go deeper than the easy barbs and shallow arguments that tend to fly around the internet.
This week, with the news of the Texas abortion ban, I often feel frustrated. I’m upset about the law itself—I’m against six-week abortion bans, because many women don’t even know they’re pregnant at six weeks, and I agree with David French that this particular law is dangerous in the way it encourages predatory, profiteering behavior that will greatly harm poor people. (I don’t agree with French on everything, but his article makes a beautiful pro-life, Christian argument against the Texas law.)
But I’m also exasperated with the ways people are expressing their frustrations with the law. Abortion conversations are particularly emotional, and perhaps because of that, they very often depart from both compassion and logic.
I haven’t written much about logic on this blog. But it was abortion that first led me to start learning about it a couple of years ago, in June 2019. That month, the big news was 1) the horrific conditions on the border, where immigrant children were being held in cages; and 2) a series of restrictive abortion bans that had passed in several states. It was a very dark time, at least for me and my progressive friends.
Amidst my despair, though, I was fascinated by the memes I saw on Facebook. What caught my attention was a startling similarity in the messages from both sides of the political spectrum. Each side had produced memes juxtaposing the two events and calling the other side a hypocrite.
“Shut up!” says the Republican in a liberal cartoon, chastising a crying, caged child while shoving his ear to the belly of a startled pregnant woman. “I’m listening for a 6-week-old heartbeat!”
A conservative meme, meanwhile, depicts a Planned Parenthood clinic with the caption: “Separating Babies From Mothers Permanently.”
These cartoons felt toxic to me. Instead of the open-heartedness I’d felt at the Reach Out forum, they made me feel poisoned when I read them. (That was especially true of the conservative meme, which included a flippant mention of concentration camps.) I’m a sensitive person, and it’s hard for me to see people being mean-spirited to each other, even if they feel they’re doing so in the name of justice. Both memes reduced what should have been a deep, thoughtful conversation into a simplistic argument, a sound bite.
And both sides were using this same interesting technique, I thought: changing the subject, then attacking the other side. I sensed there was something wrong with this, but I couldn’t yet articulate what.
Googling debate strategies, I encountered an exhaustive list of debate tactics on the blog of John T. Reed, a real estate expert. Reed explains the difference between what he calls “intellectually-honest” and “intellectually-dishonest” debate tactics:
There are only two intellectually-honest debate tactics:
1. pointing out errors or omissions in your opponent’s facts
2. pointing out errors or omissions in your opponent’s logicThat’s it. Simple! The dishonest list is much longer.
Sticking to facts and logic is “honest,” says Reed. Everything else is a distraction and intellectually dishonest. “Dishonest” tactics include questioning the other person’s motives, questioning their intelligence or expertise, changing the subject, and much, much more. (His list of dishonest tactics has 71 items, many with subitems.)
Soon afterwards, I found my way to the logical (or formal) fallacies, the more common term for Reed’s “dishonest” debate techniques. This opened up a whole new world to me. At last, I could identify and articulate problematic arguments, including the ones I was seeing in the memes.
(There are some wonderful resources for learning about logical fallacies. One fun resource is a free online book called An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments.)
The fallacy I’d been noticing is the Appeal to Hypocrisy, otherwise known as the tu quoque fallacy.
Tu quoque (pronounced “too kwoh-kwee”) is Latin for “you too.” When Person A accuses Person B of wrongdoing, Person B protests that Person A did something wrong, too. Essentially, Person B says: “But you did it too!” Or “But you did something even worse!”
This is simply not a valid argument. It’s a red herring—an attempt to distract from the original argument. It’s also a type of ad hominem fallacy—it attacks the person making the argument rather than the argument itself. It has no bearing on whether Person B did, in fact, do something wrong.
In the 2019 border-and-abortion memes above, both sides were committing this fallacy. Rather than addressing the substantive problems with managing an influx of illegal border crossings, or the substantive problems with restricting women’s control over their own bodies, both sides were lobbing counterattacks at the other side.
Reed points out that tu quoque is a tactic debaters use when they sense they’re on shaky ground; they try to “redirect the attention of the audience” to a subject where they can look better.
Political people on TV often use the phrase “But the real question is___” or “What the American people are really interested in is___” as a preface to changing the subject.
It’s easier to cry “You did something worse!” than to delve into tough moral problems.
Tu quoque and other fallacies are rampant in this week’s discussions of abortion, too. For example, many people are taking aim at the term “pro-life,” as though you “can’t be pro-life” if you’re also x, y, or z: if you don’t support universal health care, if you’re anti-gun control, etc. Or they’re pointing out Texas’s lack of social services: if pro-lifers really care about people, then why are they so focused on “people” in the womb rather than poor people, working people, sick people, and other vulnerable groups? Or they’re making a connection between abortion bans and mask mandates, as though you must either be pro-choice or anti-choice when it comes to both.
All of these arguments are evoking other, equally important issues to talk about. But they also distract from the more substantive, legitimate concerns pro-lifers have about abortion. They gloss over the thorny moral and spiritual questions, and they do us all a disservice by implying that the only moral stance is one without any restrictions on abortion.
The truth is, most Americans fall somewhere in the middle on this issue—somewhere between wanting zero restrictions and wanting a total ban. Most of us recognize that this is a tough topic, with no easy, one-size-fits-all answers. Or at the very least, it’s an issue with legitimate moral and spiritual questions that need to be addressed.
As psychologist Drew Westen says, “[W]e are not only looking at conflicts between Americans but conflicts within Americans. Americans are ambivalent about abortion.” (It’s the same in Europe, where very few countries are as liberal as the United States on abortion. Most European countries only allow abortion without restrictions in the first trimester.)
Abortion isn’t only about women’s right to control their own bodies, or only about the rights of the unborn. It’s about both, and the real conversation is much harder. At what point in a pregnancy does a zygote or fetus become a person with rights of their own? Under what circumstances are those rights in legitimate conflict with the rights of the pregnant woman? When these rights are in conflict, who gets to decide what happens—is it always the woman, or is it sometimes the government?
That’s the conversation I’m longing to have. I know many of you are too.
In 2001, the Boston Globe published an astonishing piece of news: for the past six years, leaders from the American pro-life and pro-choice movements had been meeting for secret dialogues.
The meetings had been prompted by a 1994 shooting at an abortion clinic. They were kept secret in order to foster more open, honest conversations among participants. Their purpose was not to find common ground, but to help foster peace between pro-lifers and pro-choicers.
[T]he goals…would be to communicate openly with our opponents, away from the polarizing spotlight of media coverage; to build relationships of mutual respect and understanding; to help deescalate the rhetoric of the abortion controversy; and, of course, to reduce the risk of future shootings.
In their thoughtful article in the Globe, the participants describe their dialogue, the challenges they encountered, and what they learned. Although they concluded that their differences were “irreconcilable,” they still continued to meet. This process stretched them spiritually, because “when we face our opponent, we see her dignity and goodness.” It stretched them intellectually too:
This has been a rare opportunity to engage in sustained, candid conversations about serious moral disagreements. It has made our thinking sharper and our language more precise.
And it made them “wiser and more effective leaders,” with a better understanding of the other side.
Since that first fear-filled meeting, we have experienced a paradox. While learning to treat each other with dignity and respect, we all have become firmer in our views about abortion.
We hope this account of our experience will encourage people everywhere to consider engaging in dialogues about abortion and other protracted disputes. In this world of polarizing conflicts, we have glimpsed a new possibility: a way in which people can disagree frankly and passionately, become clearer in heart and mind about their activism, and, at the same time, contribute to a more civil and compassionate society.
I think this is what we need.
One final note, about logic.
I delved into logic in this post, using it to redirect the conversation back to the deeper issues around abortion. But although logic can be helpful, it’s only part of what’s needed to have a respectful dialogue about any topic. I don’t believe it’s what’s most important.
Not everyone is capable of impeccable logic, and fixating too much on logic can distract from meaningful conversation. Often, it’s more important to listen generously for kernels of truth, not poke logical holes in the other person’s thinking.
I think logic and compassion need to go hand-in-hand. The more we listen compassionately to each other and build trust, the less defensive we’ll feel, and the more we can have intellectually honest conversations. When people feel safer with each other, they have less reason to pivot, deflect, or distract.
That’s another reason these online conversations are so “intellectually dishonest”—they’re taking place in an unsafe space. It’s mostly only face-to-face, where we can build relationships of deep trust, that we’ll be able to have the open-hearted dialogues we need regarding abortion.
I hope more of us will seek those out.
