Thread by @asymmetricinfo

Ever think: "I love Twitter, except for one thing: not enough screaming about abortion"?

Folks, I'm here to help. We're going to tweet storm my latest column: washingtonpost.com/opinions/what-…

The column is about the messy middle of the abortion debate, better called "The Muddle".

About a quarter of folks support abortion under all circumstances, up to the moment of birth, for any reason. Another roughly 15-20% want it banned under absolutely all circumstances. The rest are in between; their views tend to be summed up by "Safe, legal, and rare".

The extremes have reasonably consistent and logical views. Not entirely consistent or logical: none of my pregnant pro-choice friends have ever made it through nine months calling it "the fetus", and none of my pro-life friends would support murder terms for women who abort.

Nor do I think that my pro-choice friends would endorse the logical implication of "It's a baby when I want it and a fetus when I don't", which is that women are some sort of demigods who can make people wink in and out of existence by an act of will.

That's because reproduction is about the least fair and reasonable thing we do; it is not well suited to abstract philosophic debate. Still, the extremes are reasonably consistent. The Muddle is not.

The Muddle tends to rely on case-by-case "I know it when I see it" analysis, and a lot of trust--trust in their allies not to support the most stringent versions of the cause, trust in women and doctors not to abort without due care for the potential life they are extinguishing.

The Muddle, however, generates no activism, so parties are being pulled to the poles. Which in turn gives politicians ample opportunity to get on the wrong side of the Muddle, when they state the clear, consistent, and unpleasant views of the purists a little too clearly.

Republicans had several examples of this a few years back, until they started getting serious about training politicians to answer abortion questions. Now Democrats are getting a taste of what it's like.

They are giving the activists what they want: effectively no restrictions on abortion up until birth. The Muddle doesn't like this, but might well look away, except that Republicans managed to make a VA delegate and the VA governor state what they were doing clearly.

Now, as to the pushback I got:

1) No one would ever abort a viable late-term fetus!

I actually answered this in the column: if no one would ever do it, then why is it necessary to relax the law to make this legal?

2) We didn't make it legal! We just tried to make it legal to abort if the mother's life was at stake!

This is a very widespread opinion.But false. NY and the recently tabled bill in VA actually made it legal to do very late term abortions for the life *or health* of the mother.

And who could object to that? Well, health is a pretty elastic term. Hemorrhoids are very common in pregnancy, and they're indisputably a health issue, but can I justify aborting an 8-month pregnancy because of them? No. Add in "mental health" and it gets even more elastic.

And I'm afraid most of the Muddle feels the same way. Most of the Muddle doesn't support post-1st-trimester abortion, and certainly not post-viability abortion, for any but the most serious, life-threatening conditions.

We get uneasy when you make laws that make it possible to have other sorts of abortions, because no, we do not grant absolute trust to women and doctors to never do something abhorrent.

3) How can you call yourself a libertarian? This is between a woman and her doctor!

Well, see, I'm afraid that those of us in the Muddle feel that by the third trimester, there's another person involved. And that person has rights too.

4) Another response is some version of a very common thought experiment, first proposed in 1971, in which you wake up in the hospital to find that you have been attached to a talented violinist with kidney disease, who needs to stay attached to you for nine months or he will die.

(Funny aside: a lot of people were mad at me because I used a thought experiment in the column. They confused a thought experiment with a straw man; the two are not the same thing at all. I just want to point out to them that thought experiments can be used in ways you like!)

Personally, I've never found the violinist experiment very compelling, in part because, while I might not legally mandate that you should stay hooked up, I would think you were a horrible person if you looked at the guy in the other bed and said "sorry, dude, I'm outta here."

And no one who deploys the violinist trope wants to end up at "Fine, it should be legal, and also, anyone who does it is a moral monster."

NB: Not arguing they are moral monsters.

But to keep this (reasonably) short, I'll just say: this experiment, to the extent it works, is much more compelling with eight months to go then with three or one month to go. And that's where the Muddle gets off the bus.

I actually do want to circle back to the claim that this is all straw men, because no one would ever abort a late term pregnancy if the fetus was viable. So first of all, this is false; we know that women did in Kermit Gosnell's clinic.

But I'll also ask again: if literally no one would ever do this, why was it necessary to change the law? VA already allowed abortion of non-viable pregnancies.

6) Laws against abortion don't prevent abortions; they just make them dangerous.

This is nonsense. We know that legalizing abortions increased abortions, because pregnancies went up but births went down. Levitt did this work years ago. It's time for this false "fact" to die.

7) Some version of accusing me of being an anti-abortion hardliner. Sorry, but I'm a wanly pro-choice Muddler: safe, legal and rare, and not after the first trimester unless the woman's life is in danger, or she risks grave health damage--not mental health damage.

8) Some version of "You just want to control women's bodies". I don't. But I am willing to exert some control when another person's body gets involved, which is to say, when the fetus is close to fully developed.

9) Some version of "If you think abortion is wrong, don't have one."

Try this on: "If you think slavery is wrong, don't own slaves." (We actually did try this one for decades. It didn't work. Also, it was morally monstrous.)

This is just ... totally non-responsive. If you think a fetus is a person, saying "If you don't like killing people, you don't have to" sounds idiotic, because it is idiotic.

We can argue about when a fetus becomes a person--purist Piers say "conception", purist PCers say "birth", Muddlers say "in between". But you can't resolve that argument by assuming what you want to prove, which is that the fetus has no moral weight.

I'll close by saying this: we argue so stupidly about abortion because abortion is hard, maybe the hardest problem there is. There are two legitimate and important interests at stake, and no clean way to reconcile them.

It is comforting to tell yourself that the other side just hates the thing you care about: female autonomy, or babies. But neither is true. Your opponents are just weighing one of the two interests more highly than you do.

You can't change that weight by accusing them of being baby killers, or trying to control women, or by screaming louder, or flashing more grisly pictures.

You definitely won't change that weight by repeating your slogans LOUDER and SLOOOOWWWEERR, as if you were an American tourist asking for the bathroom in a Mexican gas station.

And you definitely can't convince the Muddle that way, because we find it very, very off-putting to be treated like this. And since we're the actual majority of the country, that's something to think about as you agitate for your preferred laws.

I'm not saying you'll get what you want if you try to treat the other side seriously, rather than beating the snot out of a cartoonish straw man you've erected. But you probably wouldn't get laryngitis so often, and you certainly wouldn't be any worse off than your are now.

And with that, I'll remind you to read the column, which contains all new and completely different material not found in this tweet storm. Have a lovely weekend.

washingtonpost.com/opinions/what-…