What If Pro-Lifers Actually Just Believe What They’re Saying?

Earlier this week, the Danish political-science professor Michael Bang Petersen shared a study he did in 2018, ostensibly demonstrating “that support for bans on abortion are about controlling female sexuality” — “attempts,” Petersen tweeted, “to impose conservatives’ own sexual preferences . . . on the rest of society”:

Progressives consistently go to great lengths to avoid engaging on the fundamental question at the root of the abortion debate — i.e., whether or not unborn children are entitled to basic rights that enjoy the protection of the law. But this is one of the more absurd recent examples, not least because it’s shrouded in the language of impartial political science. It’s an instructive illustration of how so much of what passes for social science today is really just sophisticated confirmation bias — skirting serious political questions while amassing piles of data to conceal ideological assumptions. It is the “rationalist” conviction that, as the British political philosopher Michael Oakeshott put it, formulas and empirical studies “can take the place of moral and political education.”

Petersen begins with the premise that pro-life sentiments must be the result of suppressed sexual insecurities — that “sexual freedoms,” as he argues, “constitute a threat to people who invest heavily in long-term committed relationships, as it implies that their partner may leave them.” It’s the kind of conclusion that one could reach only via a studied unwillingness to actually engage with the moral and philosophical issues that underpin debates over abortion. Completely absent from this analysis — perhaps because the idea is incomprehensible to researchers like Petersen — is the possibility that support for abortion bans is driven by a genuine belief that unborn babies are human beings, with the same basic rights as anyone else.