I am for what I am against?

Well, I’m confused about morality again. A recent email declared that Mitt Romney is “pro-abortion,” and urged people not to vote for him for that reason. OTOH, the nation’s leading abortion rights group NARAL is going after him with both barrels because he is so outspokenly anti-abortion.

Romney’s position on abortion, unfiltered by fear-mongering abortion advocates like Nancy Keenan, was released both on his campaign website and in an article for National Review.

Romney commits himself to reinstating the pro-life Mexico City Policy, ending funding for Planned Parenthood and the United Nations Population Fund, renewing the Hyde Amendment, advocating for a federal Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act and appointing strict constructionist judges to the US Supreme Court. Romney’s pledge is even stronger than previous pro-life presidents in many aspects. After the disastrous presidency of Barack Obama, it’s clear we need a president who will stand on the side of vulnerable human life. Romney’s pledge indicates he will do just that.

Some conservatives question the authenticity of Romney’s conversion from pro-abortion to pro-life but it’s clear the other side has no doubts about the type of president Romney would be.

So the objection to him as “pro-abortion” is based on his pro-abortion past.

But see, that’s where I get confused. He never said he was pro-abortion; what he said was that he would protect a woman’s established legal right to choose. His evolution on the position and whether and when he was or is sincere can of course be debated, but what interests me is the meaning of the words “pro-abortion.”

I do not consider myself pro-abortion because the procedure strikes me as an ugly and traumatic thing to do, and the older the fetus, the more immoral it becomes. I believe that where there is a human brain, there is a human being, but I do not think that a fertilized egg is a human being any more than I think an egg is a chicken or a seed is a tree. I also have a huge problem imprisoning women who would have an abortion or doctors hired by a woman to do one. That does not mean that I think abortion is good, and if my squeamishness with both the procedure and with imprisoning people who are involved in it means I am “pro-abortion,”  then I would submit that the language is losing its meaning. Activists have a way of making language lose its meaning.

Circumcision is something I don’t think about much even though it was done to me, but there are well-organized activists who are out to have the procedure banned. Perhaps I am biased or influenced by being the way I am, but I am unpersuaded by their arguments, and disinclined to ban the procedure. Whether I would have it done it to a male child if I had one, I honestly don’t know. But let’s suppose for the sake of this argument that I am squeamish about circumcision and would not want to do it. If I nonetheless would not support banning it, would that make me “pro-circumcision”? How? Since when does not wanting to make something a crime make one in favor of that conduct? There are a lot of things people do that I think are awful, but which I would not make illegal, and I cannot fathom by what logical standard I can said to be for something I am not for. Are vegetarians who think meat-eating is wrong but nonetheless don’t want to make carnivorous behavior a crime to be called “pro-meat-eating”? This seems like a very sloppy standard to apply to people.

To be against criminalization is not to be pro-crime. Criminal laws create crimes, and as we have been seeing, the more laws there are, the more crime there will be.  Prohibition of alcohol caused an immediate and dramatic increase in criminal activity, as would the criminalization of meat. I think we have far too many laws as it is, and the fewer things that are illegal, the better.

But that is a pragmatic argument and not a moral one. Whether we look at eating meat, circumcision of infants, aborting fetuses, drinking alcohol, smoking marijuana, whatever — if these are immoral acts, the immorality of them does not rise or fall according to whether a criminal sanction exists for them, any more than immorality hinges on whether any criminal sanction is applied.  Abortion, btw, is not a traditional malum in se crime under common law. It was an early crime under English law, but not in the same category as murder. Murder is not mere killing, but unjustifiable killing of a human by another human acting with malice. What is considered justification for killing varies according to to time and place. if a man kills another man he catches in bed with his wife, that is murder in some places and not in others. Not all states allow home invaders to be killed with impunity. Some would consider the shooting of a burglar to be murder, and others would not. If I don’t think people who shoot burglars should be imprisoned, does that make me “pro-murder”? Again, how?

Anyway, as I pondered my confusion over the meaning of “pro-abortion,” I revisited a five year old debate over Glenn Reynolds’ suggestion that Iranian atomic bomb-makers be killed. It seems to me that this is preemptive self defense (especially as an alternative to war with a country which vowed nuclear annihilation of their enemies) but Glenn Greenwald and others think the killing of nuke-makers constitutes “terrorism.” Which, by their standard, makes Glenn Reynolds and Barack Obama “pro-terrorist.”

I think that discussions over the morality of killing are confusing. It is inherently problematic to discuss whether and when killing is justifiable, and even more difficult to factor in morality and whether a given killing is murder. Suppose a predator drone strikes the home of an Iranian atomic scientist, and kills him, his wife and his children, along with a fetus in his wife’s womb. Suppose further that the predator launchers knew all about his personal family life, and launched the strike anyway. Murder? Terrorism?

Or war?

If I were an anti-war activist, I might ask how many innocent fetuses (assuming that the only “good” enemy is an unborn enemy) have been killed by the evil United States military over the years. Surely an estimate could be provided by an experienced statistician. But these were justifiable killings, right? Or is the killing of a fetus never justifiable?

But if we suppose that these killings were not justifiable. Let’s say because all war is wrong. Or that they were considered “war crimes“:

Because the definition of a state of “war” may be debated, the term “war crime” itself has seen different usage under different systems of international and military law. It has some degree of application outside of what some may consider to be a state of “war”, but in areas where conflicts persist enough to constitute social instability.

The legalities of war have sometimes been accused of containing favoritism toward the winners (“Victor’s justice“),^[16] as some controversies have not been ruled as war crimes. Some examples include the Allies’ destruction of civilian Axis targets during World War II, such as the firebombing of the German city of Dresden and the use of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki;^[17] the use of Agent Orange against civilian targets in the Vietnam War;^{[citation needed]} the mass killing of Biharies by Kader Siddique and Mukti Bahini^[18] before or after victory of Bangladesh Liberation War in Bangladesh between 1971 and 1972; and the Indonesian occupation of East Timor between 1976 and 1999.

OK, is that perfectly clear?

Clear or not, I still would not be willing to imprison American warriors who believed that they were defending their country. Does that make me pro-murder, pro-war, or just confused?