This is a very narrow post on a very narrow point of order.

By now you might have heard of Kevin D Williamson’s weird rant on how we should hang women who’ve had abortions. The fact that by Williamson’s lights we should have his ideal abortion policy (capital punishment) but not his ideal capital punishment policy (he says he’s torn on this) tells you that this is nothing but trolling. It doesn’t make sense. The National Review Online is a money-losing publication, not a money-making one; they rely on outbursts like this (recall his similar screed against Laverne Cox) for hits.

But this is similar to his run at Cox in that it’s tickling a certain conservative animus. The idea isn’t just to whip up the pro-choice contingency, but also to stroke the omnipresent conservative persecution complex. All Williamson needs to do is instigate an occasion for liberals to get righteously angry and then conservatives can feel righteously victimized and he can kick back with a drink while his links get littered all over social media. It’s a living, I guess. But the point is that this isn’t about a particular person’s strange ideation, but rather about the fact that it appeals on a visceral level to a certain set of people who are therefore willing to feel victimized when it’s attacked.

Conservative anti-abortion folks like Ramesh Ponnuru and his ilk are all very willing to commit themselves to thinking well of women who have abortions, and tend to become quite mealy-mouthed when pressed for penalties they would institute regarding abortion. Some conservatives on this branch of the pro-life movement will outright say they want no penalties for women who have abortions, that they would only penalize doctors who performed them, and usually then with very minor fines or license revocation.

What Williamson is willing to demonstrate here — and the sensibility he appeals to — is that you can’t really maintain both:

a) Conservative opinions about individual accountability AND

b) The position that abortion really is the destruction of human life, tantamount to murder AND

c) The position that the destruction of human life (as in murder) should be punished by the state AND

d) The position that women who have abortions should nonetheless not be penalized by the state whatsoever.

It’s possible to say, for example, that abortion is so thoroughly culturally entrenched and that social realities for poor women especially make it such a difficult option to turn down that even though (b) and (c) are true, women who have abortions aren’t really culpable in the same way that most murderers are.

Or you could maintain that women who have abortions are totally culpable (a), that abortion is definitely murder (b), but that the state shouldn’t really penalize murder all that heavily. Whatever you imagine should be the penalty for murder, though, would also have to apply to abortion.

Next, you could hold that women who have abortions are culpable (a) and that murder should be punished by the state (c) but that abortion isn’t murder because the fetus doesn’t qualify as a human life. This usually means you’re pro-choice. Alternatively on this same count you could say we don’t know if fetuses qualify as human life, and that we oppose abortion on the grounds that they very well could be. This means that while we oppose abortion and find it a moral wrong, it’s incorrect to identify it precisely with the moral evil of murder.

What is not logical is to say that, though women are totally culpable for having abortions, and though those abortions are murder, and though the state should always heavily penalize murder, women who have abortions (that is, commit murder) should be spared state penalty. The only reason a person would hold such a position would be for the sake of holding it, that is, the sake of being able to say: “yes, I am a thoroughly conservative anti-abortion advocate, but you need not fear my legislative activities, because my inconsistencies are such that they will not shake out in a coherent way.” This makes me very suspicious of this style of conservative pro-lifery. I don’t like being asked to rely on the idea that bad reasoning will continue being bad, not because bad reasoning usually becomes good, but because it often gets worse in unpredictable ways.

My concern here is heightened by certain red state legislation that does seem to adhere more to the Williamson logic than the disordered logic we’re promised by conservative anti-abortion activists. Take, for example, new laws in Tennessee that allow for the arrest and prosecution of mothers who give birth to babies harmed by drug use in utero. If fetuses are people, and people have rights, then drug use during pregnancy infringes upon those rights; what do we do with people who infringe upon the rights of others? Criminally prosecute them, of course. Women are already facing jail time under this statute, which should make you ask: if  lawmakers in Tennessee would criminalize drug use during pregnancy on grounds that it’s assault, why isn’t it homicide if the fetus dies? (After all, they evidently almost did classify fetal death related to drug or alcohol abuse as homicide under this law!) And if it’s homicide if a fetus dies due to drug use, which isn’t even intentional killing in most cases, then why not in the case of abortion? Based on the reasoning of the law, it’s very hard to say.

Our trust that conservative anti-abortion activism wouldn’t result in the incarceration of women (or worse, by Williamson’s bizarre lights) is therefore premised on the idea that they’ll continue to be schizophrenic about their reasoning, even when their passions very clearly pull them in the direction that Williamson goes. So this is why I prefer to insist on left pro-lifery, the type that recognizes abortion as a moral wrong that is in the arena of being opposed to life but isn’t necessarily murder (not all killing is murder); the type that is opposed to incarceration and critiques the penal carceral system relentlessly; the type that realizes the pressures that produce abortion and seeks to solve and reduce them. I’ll also note that this type of pro-lifery seems much more popular with woman activists who oppose abortion, while the other side seems largely dominated (at least in discourse) by men. Maybe that doesn’t mean much to you (fair enough), but it certainly gives me pause.