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Personhood, All the Way
In Chron, the website of the Houston Chronicle, there is a charming (but journalistically incompetent; see below) story about a Texas woman who took the HOV lane, apparently solo, and explained to the police officers who pulled her over to cite her that she was carrying an unborn daughter — and that is a person under Texas law, no?
No, no, quoth the po-po, and they wrote her a ticket — but advised her that she’d probably prevail if she were to fight it in court.
On the narrow technical question: No, an unborn child is not a legal person under Texas law for the purpose of HOV-lane arithmetic. The issue of abortion and legal personhood has not yet advanced to that distant horizon.
In fact, there isn’t any need to define the unborn as a person at all in order to prohibit abortion — the procedure can be prohibited per se independent of the question of legal personhood. To take a ghastly parallel case: Just as there are people who suffer from “gender dysphoria” (a strong sense that a man or woman’s true and authentic self is at odds with his or her sex), there are other kinds of body dysphorias, including something called “body integrity dysphoria,” a disorder in which a person comes to believe that his or her true and authentic self is not a member of the opposite sex but is an amputee. Because we are high-tech barbarians, genital amputations and mutilations are generally medically countenanced as therapy for gender dysphoria, but we as a society have not — yet — accepted as legitimate the practice of amputating other body parts — limbs rather than members — in the service of what I suppose we would have to call “amputee-status-affirming” care modeled on “gender-affirming” care. (Gender-affirming care is, in most cases, sex-denying care, but never mind that for now.) But there are surgeons who will amputate healthy limbs as “therapy” for body-integrity dysphoria, and the issue of permitting or prohibiting such procedures is a live one. It would, of course, be entirely unnecessary to define a healthy leg as a person to prohibit the amputation of it. Likewise, the question of abortion need not necessarily involve the issue of personhood.
Personhood is, of course, an intellectual and moral dodge when it comes to abortion. The facts of the case are clear enough in that what is put to death in an abortion is a (1) living (2) human (3) organism at a very early stage of development. That the tissue in question is living is a given — no need to kill it, otherwise; that it is human is a question that can be answered definitively by genetics; that the tissue is arranged into an organism (as opposed to a fingernail that may be trimmed or a tumor that needs to be removed) is a fact of elementary biology. The issue of personhood is intended not to illuminate or reflect these facts but to obscure or deny them — to make the question of abortion a matter of legal and ethical abstractions rather than a matter of physical facts. There is some irony in this: For centuries, the question of “ensoulment” was a subject of theological debate and inquiry, and the people who see themselves as protecting what they wrongly imagine to be liberal values in our time from “Christian fascists” have in effect reinvented a medieval Christian doctrine and repurposed it for their own brutal and antihuman ends.
Apologies — this started with a lighthearted issue, but, when the subject is abortion, it is difficult to stay lighthearted for very long.
That being written, I do hope the mother in Texas gets her HOV violation thrown out by the court. Texas law does not treat the unborn as a person under the traffic laws, though Texas is among the 38 states that treat the unborn as a person under certain homicide laws. Perhaps that should change, and that HOV-outlaw mom is on to something.
We have as a society long encouraged a certain solicitousness of pregnant women as a matter of courtesy and etiquette: standing to offer a pregnant woman your seat on a crowded train, for example, that sort of thing. Allowing pregnant women to use the HOV lane seems to me like an obvious and easy accommodation to make, an extension of existing principle. And while pregnancy, contrary to the rhetoric of some of the pro-abortion people, is not a disease, it does in many cases inflict a temporary disability; as such, it would seem entirely sensible to allow pregnant women to use parking spaces for the handicapped and to make use of other conveniences intended for the disabled. I imagine there are many other such amenities that could be offered and access to them formalized where needed.
I am not quite ready to sign off on Elizabeth Bruenig’s demand in That August Journalistic Institution that we make pregnancy and childbirth care another federal entitlement for the population at large. (The headline says “free,” but this is National Review, and we know that somebody is paying the bill.) Bruenig cites the case of a young mother who was surprised to learn that her parents’ insurance — because, of course she’s still on her parents’ insurance — didn’t cover most of her pregnancy-related medical bills, a situation she blamed on “misogyny.” College-educated middle-class women lingering on their parents’ insurance and complaining that it is misogyny when they don’t get their way in life are, for some inexplicable reason, Bruenig’s main journalistic interest. (It seems to me rather specific.) I take a dissenting view, that we have enough entitlements for well-off college-educated people and should conserve our social-welfare resources in order to provide more generous benefits for the poor, particularly on the poor who are most likely to be stuck in poverty, as tender as my feelings are toward college-educated young people enjoying parental subsidies into adulthood, married life, and parenthood. (You wouldn’t believe what an MFA in creative writing costs these days!) But maybe that is the country-club Republican in me.
Low-income people are a disproportionately fecund bunch — though this is in part a reflection of the fact that fertility and low incomes both are correlated with youth — and the ugly historical fact is Planned Parenthood and the rest of the eugenics movement were founded to counteract the effects of that conjunction by killing the children of the poor before they could become public burdens or, where possible, to prevent their ever being conceived in the first place. The correlation between low incomes and motherhood is even stronger than you might expect: About 42 percent of the births in the United States in 2020 were to mothers who were receiving Medicaid. That number is even higher in many Republican-leaning states, which tend to be younger, more rural, and home to large immigrant populations: 50.2 percent of mothers were on Medicaid in Alabama, 50.7 in Texas, 61.4 percent in Louisiana, 60.1 percent in Mississippi, etc. Culture matters: Only 22 percent of mothers in Utah were Medicaid recipients.
(Wait — isn’t the GOP the old-people party? Are red states really younger? More than you might expect: The youngest state is Utah, followed in order by Texas, Alaska, North Dakota, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Idaho, while the median age in Connecticut is a full decade older than the median age in Utah. The only solidly Democratic states with younger-than-average populations are California and — just barely — Washington.)
Low incomes correlate with many unhealthy habits and unhealthy situations as well: Some 20 percent of Medicaid mothers smoke during pregnancy. A federal study (based on 2002 data, N.B.) found that one in 20 preterm deaths and almost one in four “sudden infant death” cases were smoking-related. The grievously misnamed Affordable Care Act was supposed (among its many alleged virtues) to reduce smoking among pregnant women, but it does not seem to have had very much effect; in fact, mothers who haven’t finished high school were a little more likely to smoke in 2017 than they were in 2010, the period studied by these scholars. Between the good intention and the good outcome falls the shadow.
While I do not agree with my colleague Ramesh Ponnuru about child tax credits, I do agree with Benedick that “the world must be peopled,” and it makes some sense for our public policies to take at least some account of who is doing the peopling. For example, benefits received through Medicaid for Pregnant Women or the CHIP Perinatal program generally stop 60 days after birth, a policy that probably should be reconsidered.
But we should keep in mind the complexities involved: As it stands, many doctors will not accept new Medicaid patients, partly because of reimbursement rates but also because the program is an administrative pain in the ass of nightmarish proportions. (Doctors lose 17 cents on the dollar to billing problems with Medicaid patients, as opposed to 3 cents on the dollar with private insurance.) The grievously misnamed Affordable Care Act (I might start capitalizing that whole phrase: Grievously Misnamed Affordable Care Act) was supposed to help with that, too, but physician availability for Medicaid patients has budged only a very little bit in the right direction, with about one-third of Medicaid patients still unable to secure sought-after appointments.
As so often is the case, the most urgent problem is not the availability of resources to deploy but intractable bureaucratic dysfunction. I suspect that most Americans would be happy to support more spending on services for mothers in need — if we could be assured that $1 in spending would produce something closer to 94 cents in real benefits than to 11 cents in real benefits. Bureaucratic dysfunction imposes costs on taxpayers, but it imposes heavier costs on the people who are intended to be beneficiaries of the programs taxpayers fund. It is not only cranky libertarians who have come to the conclusion that the best way to help the poor and the needy is directly, without the involvement of the federal apparatus at all, at least to the extent that this can be avoided.
None of what’s needed to address these concerns requires getting into the abstraction of legal personhood. But irrespective of what the law says, if we start thinking of the unborn person as a person in the full and most meaningful sense — and we should do so — then this must change our attitude toward the unborn, toward pregnant women, toward new mothers, and toward mothers categorically. There remains much work to be done on the legal front when it comes to abortion, and much work to be done — on many fronts — when it comes to the interests of children. We have an unfortunate tendency to mire ourselves in sentimentality when it comes to children, but the facts of the case are not sentimental: Children are at the top of the list of those who cannot help themselves and who have the first and highest claim on our help and care. The most helpless children of all are those who have not yet been born and those who are newborns, and the best thing we can do to help these children is to help their mothers. Some of that help may take the form of federally administered entitlements and benefits, but much of it won’t.
And to the original point: Opening up the HOV lanes to pregnant women seems obvious enough. I like it on symbolic grounds even if the practical benefits are modest. It is time for a fresh attitude toward pregnancy and motherhood, which are blessings, not pathologies.
And Furthermore . . .
As mentioned, that Chron report is a mess. The author claims:
In Texas, all abortions are now illegal following the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe and pending enactment of state trigger laws on the practice. Prior to the high court’s ruling, all abortions past six weeks of pregnancy had been outlawed by the Texas Heartbeat Act. This prior measure had been modeled closely after language crafted by Christian anti-abortion group Faith2Action Ministries, which has defined the presence of a fetal heartbeat as a marker of “an unborn human individual,” according to The Texas Tribune.
That just is not true. Texas law forbids most, but not all, abortions. As in most similar laws, the Texas statute includes a narrowly tailored exception in cases in which pregnancy threatens a mother’s life or would impose “serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function.”
And it is not only Christians who believe that what is in the womb is an “unborn human individual.” That isn’t even a matter of opinion — it is a plain physical fact.
One of the basic problems in U.S. journalism is that most people who get into journalism do not get into journalism because they care a great deal about journalism, meaning fact and context — they are moral crusaders, people who want to use journalism as a tool to shape public policy and public life. There isn’t anything inherently wrong with that — National Review offers more than just the facts, ma’am — but when advocacy journalism or opinion journalism involves claims of fact, those facts need to be . . . facts. That they so often are not when it comes to the issues that are the most emotionally resonant for progressives — abortion, guns, the environment — has done more to undermine public confidence in journalism (including purportedly neutral straight-news newspaper journalism) than all of the conservative critiques of media bias put together ever have or ever will. Sustained over time, bad journalism can substantially deform our politics by deforming public opinion with fake “facts” — some Americans really do believe that Texas bans all abortions, that you can walk into a sporting-goods store and walk out with a machine gun, etc.
Bad journalism is bad news, indeed.
Words about Words
The word avocado kinda-sorta looks like it should be related to the Spanish word for lawyer, abogado, and it suggests the Latin advocatus and the Spanish advocado (past participle of advocar, a Latin American regionalism, the dictionary informs me), which are related in the usual fashion to the lawyerly English word advocate. There is, in fact, apparently a folk etymology holding that avocados are somehow someways related to lawyers, but, in fact, avocado is only a Spanish approximation of the Nahuatl word for the delicious berry. (Yes, it is a berry, technically.) It is generally assumed that the pronunciation and spelling were influenced by the word abogado, but that’s as far as it goes.
I do not speak Spanish — I’m sure someone will let me know if I have got it not quite right above.
Do you know who else didn’t speak Spanish? The Clash.
Joe Strummer (the guitar-centered stage name of John Graham Mellor) of the Clash loved the Spanish language and had the usual leftist’s romantic notions about the Spanish Civil War and various Latin American Marxist movements: The Clash called their opus magnus — a triple album — Sandinista! (Not ¡Sandinista!). And so the Clash wrote a fair bit of lyrics in Spanish — or something purporting to be Spanish. From the chorus of “Spanish Bombs”: “Yo t’quierro y finito, yo te querda, oh ma côrazon.” This is, I am informed, illiterate — not Jill-Biden-trying-to-pronounce-“bodegas”-level illiterate, but close.
From “Should I Stay or Should I Go?”
This indecision’s bugging me
Esta indecisión me molesta
If you don’t want me, set me free
Si no me quieres, líbrame
Exactly whom I’m supposed to be
Dime que tengo que ser
Don’t know which clothes even fit me?
¿Sabes qué ropan me quedan?
Come on and let me know
Me lo tienes que decir
Should I cool it or should I blow?
¿Me debo ir o quedarme?
Yo me enfrío o lo sufro
Strummer called these lyrics “Clash Spanish,” put together with a Spanish–English dictionary and more enthusiasm than grammar. The legendary singer and songwriter Joe Ely (currently eleven places ahead of me on the list of people you should know from Lubbock, Texas) sang backup on “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” and explained:
“I’m singing all the Spanish verses on that, and I even helped translate them. I translated them into Tex-Mex and Strummer kind of knew Castilian Spanish, because he grew up in Spain in his early life. And a Puerto Rican engineer (Eddie Garcia) kind of added a little flavor to it. So it’s taking the verse and then repeating it in Spanish.
I came in to the studio while they were working out the parts. They’d been working on the song for a few hours already, they had it sketched out pretty good. But I think it was Strummer’s idea, because he just immediately, when it came to that part, he immediately went, ‘You know Spanish, help me translate these things.’ My Spanish was pretty much Tex-Mex, so it was not an accurate translation. But I guess it was meant to be sort of whimsical, because we didn’t really translate verbatim.”
I’m sure that the Clash would be canceled for that now — for something between cultural appropriation and cultural insensitivity. That’s a shame — “Spanish Bombs” is a genuinely great song.
The Latin equivalent of that busted-up kind of Spanish is called “dog Latin,” a phrase at least as ancient as Thomas Jefferson’s correspondence. There is such a thing as “Spanglish,” but that isn’t quite it.
So, “Clash Spanish” it must be.
Rampant Prescriptivism
The above invites a repetition: The word advocate does not require any help from for; the for is built in: that’s the ad– part of the word — ad-vocate, to speak to or speak for or speak on behalf of. Grover Norquist advocates tax cuts — he does not advocate for tax cuts.
Also, per a reader correcting my slovenly usage a few weeks ago: different from, not different than.
Also also: Apparently means “as it appears” — it is not a synonym for obviously or allegedly. Don’t use it in either wrong way, e.g.: “Good Samaritan rescues 22 after party boat apparently hits N.J. bridge.” There isn’t a lot of ambiguity about whether a boat big enough for 22 passengers hit a bridge or didn’t. “Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 4 and Flip 4 announcement dates have apparently leaked.” No, they have obviously leaked — they’re out there on the Internet for all to see.
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Home and Away
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Recommended
I have not read it yet, but I am interested in Paul D. Miller’s The Religion of American Greatness: What’s Wrong with Christian Nationalism. I disagree with some of what he says on the subject on my friend Jonah Goldberg’s recent podcast, but it sounds like an interesting read.
In Closing
Today is the Feast Day of Macrina the Younger, a saint, a consecrated virgin, and big sister (with all that entails, I hope) to both Basil the Great and Gregory of Nyssa. Consecrated virgins are still a thing — a very interesting thing at that.
(Unconsecrated virgins carry around copies of Atlas Shrugged.)
Pancake Is Living Her Best Life
Can’t say as much for my raggedy mums, which are having a hard time coping with an unusually hot July in Texas.
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