Abortion and the Law
Light Workday
Last Wednesday we had a heavy workload, with an important reading and an assignment due. The next three classes we're going to have three of the most important readings of the semester. So today we're getting a light day for a break. There is no new reading, other than the text on this page, but there is still a lecture with lecture questions and our final course video.
Abortion in the Law
You don't have to look far to find abortion in the news. The last fifty years of United States politics have witnessed a constant battle over the legality and availability of abortion, and so far from being any different, in 2022 we are expecting the Supreme Court of the United States to overturn the main constitutional precedent governing abortion law in the United States for the last fifty years, Roe vs. Wade. Here is a sampling of three major news articles at the time that I am posting this before the semester starts (if you do a search on any day of the year, you will almost always find this much or more current news about abortion):
Morality and the Law
Popular discussions of abortion tend to take for granted that if abortion is wrong, then it should be illegal, and if it is illegal, it should be a criminal offense. During the 2016presidential campaign, we got a particularly clear and well-publicized example of the assumption that these issues must go together:
Two other much-discussed policy issues where the question of how morality relates to the law, and specifically to what should be a criminal offense, concern the status of marijuana, and the status of prostitution. Many people believe that using marijuana or encouraging others to use it is deeply problematic, but that it should not be illegal, because that creates even worse problems. Others believe that marijuana should be illegal, but not a criminal offense - so you can't be punished for using marijuana. There are many people with similar views about prostitution - that though it is morally problematic, it is even worse to punish prostitutes, most of whom are trapped into their position and exploited by others.
Abortion and Criminal Law
If abortion is on a par with murder, then we would expect, as Donald Trump says in this interview (above), that a woman who gets an abortion should be punished. Indeed, we should expect that even driving a woman to get an abortion should be punishable by a decade or more behind bars - that is being an accessory to murder. But few people in contemporary American politics say that women should be punished for getting an abortion, let alone that those who drive them to the clinic should go to prison. Indeed, you can tell that even Trump is uncomfortable saying this, and knows how troubling it sounds, and that he is probably just trying to prove his bona fides for pro-life voters who may know that he had a long prior record of claiming to be pro-choice. The more common view is that abortion should be illegal, but not a criminal offense. On this view, abortion providers should be punished or at least put out of business, but not women who get an abortion.
Our challenge for this class is to start to think about why we might want to open up logical space between the idea that abortion is illegal and the idea that it should be punished, and why we might think that even though some things are wrong, they shouldn't be illegal. We've had a few hard readings in a row and we are about to have some that are just as hard, and assignment #3 is due for this evening, so this class is a break. To prepare for class, you should brainstorm why someone might think that though something is wrong, it shouldn't be illegal, or why they might think that though something should be illegal, it should not be punished as a crime. Try to think about these questions in the context of abortion, and then try to think about them from the perspective of the examples of marijuana and of prostitution, in case different examples help you see different ideas.