Here is what I learned from taking a life.
HARD CHOICES: Abortion/Pro-Choice in Pluralistic America
How do we find common ground and build up our country together when we disagree on grave moral issues?
I am preparing for a national Braver Angels debate on
“Resolved: The rights of an adult woman take precedence over the rights of a fetus”
As I prepare for this national debate, my research shows me that I am as frustrated as everyone else. Why can’t we find a national solution? We are going round and round and seem to take more pleasure in vilifying our rivals than attempting to reach a national consensus.
I think the source of our communal frustration is the different ways we make hard moral choices.
I have been San Quentin schooled. I’ve used the circle to learn to acknowledge and respect an individual’s emotions with groups like VOEG and NVC. At AA and Restorative Justice, I’ve discovered how to make hard choices for society. I respect emotions, but I will not submit to allowing emotions to make my hard choices ever again.
Often we use competition to make choices. We compete for views, likes, and followers. Even a democratic vote is a type of competition. Prison has taught me much about competition. Humans are emotional and we like to win. I can be so caught up in winning that I fail at communicating. I do not want to ‘win’ a dispute on Abortion/a Woman’s Right to Choose. I want a fair discussion of the issues so we can make the hard choices necessary for our country. The best forum I’ve found for such a discussion is Braver Angels.
BRAVER ANGELS
As a Braver Angel San Francisco Co-chair, Bay Area Super-alliance team member, and Associate Director of the national debate committee, I take this task seriously. As a national committee, we have sent out this invitation:
The question of abortion touches on the heart of Braver Angels’ mission: How do we find common ground and build up our country together when we disagree on grave moral issues?
Our debate is an opportunity to make the case for your own beliefs to those who disagree with you and still want to find a way to live alongside each other. We ask that you come with your passion for justice and also your curiosity about how to have a better disagreement with us than you’ve had elsewhere.
We particularly hope, whether you give a speech, ask a question, or simply observe, that this debate helps you have better conversations with people who you love and disagree with.
So, we’d urge you to come to the debate with your strongest arguments, but also with this question in mind: What do I need to learn from the other side in this debate to talk to someone I know who I disagree with?
Join Braver Angels Thurs May 19 @ 8 pm EST for a debate on the topic — “Resolved: The rights of an adult woman take precedence over the rights of a fetus.”
Come join us for this free national debate, in which all participants from across the ideological spectrum will have an opportunity to speak and ask their questions. Tell us what you have experienced and what you think.
I admit that prison has made me a hard man; not cruel, but hard. I work every day to keep my passions in check. Prison is full of men who can’t control their passions.
As a nation, we create laws and institutions to give us the means of controlling these emotions/impulses. We have laws against murder not just to discourage the act, but also to stop the cycle of revenge all too common on the street. Each side feels JUSTIFIED in seeking to quench its thirst for PAYBACK.
My crime (DWI/Gross Negligent Vehicular Manslaughter) taught me more about myself than I ever wanted to know. I took a life with my crime and the old tribal commandments say “A LIFE FOR A LIFE.” But I live in California. The state judged my crime and gave me the mid-term of 7 years and 8 months.
Is it fair?
- Not to the family that lost their mother by my crime.
- Not my children that lost a father for a time equal to their young lives in length.
BUT IT IS THE LAW.
The point of courts and laws is to distance the individual from the act — to tame our passions — both revenge and mercy. It is the best way for the United States to make hard choices.
We must struggle to keep our passions in check. The psychological term for our reaction to any suffering is “identifiable victim” effect. Whether we identify with a sixteen-year-old girl who has missed two periods or a fetus sucking its thumb in the womb.
It wrenches us when we see the smiling face of Kathryn “Kate” Steinle or felons like the one that killed the San Francisco tourist. She was 32 years old when she was shot and killed while walking with her father and a friend along Pier 14 in the Embarcadero district of San Francisco. Her murderer was a 5-time deported illegal alien. We have all shared the emotional impact of these electronic-enhanced images. This sharing of social consciousness, now possible on a media-enhanced global scale, is the cause of guilt feelings and compels society to act — often in unpredictable ways.
Empathy isn’t simply sympathy; it’s a powerful pre-verbal form of communication. A form of communication that humanity has only recently learned to mitigate with reason in large group settings.
Here’s how empathic communication works:
- Empathic communication is an involuntary process if you are not actively resisting it. As a result, this form of communication is usually limited to children (it’s critical for socialization) and for intimate groups (family).
- In empathic communication, we build an internal model of the other person’s feelings based on cues (face, body, screams, etc.). We feel what the victim feels: their fear, anger, and pain. Our faces grimace in pain like the victim, and we can feel the knee on our necks (George Floyd). We connect at a deep level.
- When we empathize with victims, they are no longer strangers; we form a fictive kinship with them. They are now part of our tribe, and they are being threatened.
Any important decision — criminal justice, diversity policies, immunization programs, gun control, or immigration — will inevitably have winners and losers. Decision-makers should resist the pull of emotional empathy and identifying with EITHER SIDE OF THE ISSUE. This is counterintuitive. For example, a felon furlough program might lead to an overall drop in crime. However, it can take one news report of a furloughed prisoner assaulting someone to trigger the emotional empathic response that drives a society to shut down the program. It’s hard to feel emotional empathy for a statistical shift in crime rates.
A great book that sets out how to achieve a dis-passionate state for facing hard moral issues is Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion by Paul Bloom.
Allowing emotional moral mathematics to guide our legal, ethical, or political decisions can lead to perverse outcomes. Recent research in neuroscience and psychology shows that emotional empathy makes us biased, tribal, and often cruel. For example, empathy shuts down when you believe someone is responsible for his or her own sufferings. Look at the delay in addressing the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s as a recent example.
We face the same serious moral issue with the current debate.
Comprehensive abortion reform will require hard choices. The danger we now face is that loyalty to a compromise is seen as disloyalty to some supposedly higher interest.
Nevertheless, America has to make a decision. This is why we use institutions to make and enforce our laws. Much of what I have heard on this issue is an attempt to circumvent any dis-passionate critical thinking on the issue by appeals to emotion. This is not the way to govern a country or determine comprehensive abortion reform.
We use our institutions and laws to control emotions, both revenge, and mercy. Government institutions should allow the cooler heads to prevail to make the laws we are to follow.
I think our institutions are weakening. The Church no longer holds sway as the authority in Argentina, respect for elders and titles means less in Korea, and we here don’t trust our laws or the institutions that make and enforce them.
Because we Americans rely upon laws and lawyers, we believe that full-throated advocacy is an obligation — not a reasoned discussion. I have learned a lot about myself at the Q. I also appreciate the institutional failures to make or enforce laws in a fair or just manner. Still, that is our way in the US and we should use these institutions to resolve our disputes and achieve comprehensive abortion reform.
Perhaps the best place to start is by comparing how other nations/states currently deal with the Woman’s Right to Choose/Abortion issue.
Another perspective to consider is the technological change in how we can predict, end, or save a fetus.
Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973) is a full 50 years ago. Now we can do pregnancy tests at home for $10 or use a pill to terminate a pregnancy (aka At Home Medication Abortion) and available without a clinic visit — by mail in just a few days, according to the National Women’s Heal Network.
Technology has also improved fetal viability . is generally considered to begin at 23 or 24 weeks gestational age in the United States. According to a Stanford University study on babies born between 2013 and 2018, at 23 weeks, 55% of infants survive a preterm birth. The University of Utah states that around 60–70% of infants survive by 24 weeks gestational age. Wikipedia
This viability comes at a cost. The March of Dimes estimates that the average societal cost of each preterm birth, which includes medical care, early intervention services and lost productivity, is $65,000 and Daily NICU costs exceed $3,500 per infant.
I’m not sure how it will work out. To me, life is sacred — both that of a woman and a fetus. I know for the United States, any effective resolution of the abortion debate will have to be accomplished through our legal institutions by making laws and enforcing them fairly.
The question of abortion touches on the heart of Braver Angels’ mission: How do we find common ground and build up our country together when we disagree on grave moral issues?
BA National Debate held on May 19th, 2022
WANT TO KNOW MORE?
The way I prepare for a national debate or any tough moral issue is the same.
- I first seek to set my perspective in an open and dis-passionate manner.
A book, “Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion” by Paul Bloom details the consequences of reliance upon emotional empathy in the decision-making process instead of cognitive ‘Type-2 thinking’ rational compassion.
The Myth of the Perfect Pregnancy explains the fears of those who choose to believe that a “human being” is not present until the fertilized ovum can draw breath without the life support system provided by the mother.
- Second, I explore how others consider the issue
‘I’m Very Conflicted’: Readers Share Complex Views on Abortion
Readers share their views on the personal, legal, and political sides of the issue.
- Third, I seek to understand how we got to our current state of dispute.
The Irrational, Misguided Discourse Surrounding Supreme Court Controversies Such as Roe v. Wade
- Fourth, I seek to see how other countries/states have dealt with the issue.
US — Europe Abortion Law Comparisons, Revised A correction, and “The Dog Who Caught The Car.”
- Finally, I look to a reasoned analysis of how to resolve the issue.
The Yale Law Professor Who Is Anti-
Akhil Reed Amar is the Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University, where he’s been teaching constitutional law since the ripe old age of 26. He is the author of more than a hundred law review articles and several award-winning books. Amar’s work has been cited in more than 40 supreme court cases — more than anyone else in his generation — including in the shocking draft opinion by Justice Alito that was leaked to the press last week.
If you are curious about prison life and the real work that goes on there, read The San Quentin News or listen to Ear Hustle.
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