Men and Abortion

Men and women both have something to offer to the abortion debate.

A man and a woman arguing about abortion.

I’m a man who likes to think about the ethics of abortion. I have been surprised by the amount of pro-choice women, however, who have criticized me for engaging with pro-life thinkers and arguments. It is not so uncommon for pro-choice women (and some men) to say something in the spirit of:

“Men don’t have a right to an opinion about abortion. They can’t get pregnant and therefore have no say on the subject.”

I like thinking about abortion, and I care about getting the subject right. It would dismay me if it were to turn out that I cannot form justified beliefs about abortion without consulting women first, or if I had “no right” to an opinion about abortion. Such a state of affairs would leave me feeling intellectually handicapped.

The quote above is not a quote taken from any one person, but a synthesis of various attitudes that are expressed by pro-choice women¹ using phrases like “no uterus, no opinion”, or the claim that because abortion laws do not directly effect the bodies of men, their moral beliefs about abortion don’t count. Allow me to explain why my voice counts just as much as any woman’s in the abortion debate.²

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One need not have experienced X, or even have the capability of experiencing X, in order to have justified moral beliefs about X. For instance, I have never been enslaved. I can still have the justified moral belief that slavery is wrong, however. I have also never been pregnant or had an abortion. I can still have justified moral beliefs about pregnancy and abortion, as can women who are incapable of bearing children.

Philosophers make a distinction between “propositional knowledge” and what Bertrand Russel called “knowledge by acquaintance”. Look at it like this: propositional knowledge is knowledge of facts. To know that the earth is a planet is to have a bit of propositional knowledge. It is to know that the proposition (the earth is a planet) is true. Not all uses of the word “know” are like this, however. Consider this sentence: (I know what it’s like to surfboard). Such a sentence is not saying that the speaker has knowledge of any propositions. It’s basically saying that the speaker has had a certain experience and remembers what that experience feels like. This is what we mean when we say things like “I know what bread tastes like”.

Propositional knowledge and experiential knowledge come apart. You need not have experienced a thing in order to have propositional knowledge about that thing. That’s why you don’t need to have been enslaved in order to understand why slavery is wrong.

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Another issue for the above position is that pro-choice women often expect men to be “allies”. They expect them to support abortion rights and speak out on behalf of women. In order for men to do this honestly, however, they must sincerely believe that abortion is permissible. This contradicts the view that men have no right to an opinion about abortion, or that they can’t form a justified belief about abortion. You can’t have it both ways: either men ought to form the opinion that abortion is permissible and be good allies, or men have no right to an opinion on abortion. Take your pick.

Of course, a pro-choice woman might respond that men can have opinions about abortion - it’s okay for men to believe that abortion is morally permissible. It seems to me that pro-choice women only say that men have no right to an opinion on abortion when men disagree with them about abortion. What they really mean to say, then, is this:

“Men have no right to an opinion about abortion, unless they agree with me and regurgitate what I and other pro-choice women say about abortion.”

Slogans like “no uterus, no opinion” are therefore nothing but pathetic attempts to rhetorically bully people into ideological submission.

Sometimes the position mentioned above is aimed at our political representatives: perhaps the point is that men should not be able to cast votes on an issue that does not directly effect their bodies. We don’t think that with regard to any other issue, however. For example - most women do not have penises. Can female political representatives not cast a vote on a bill that would ban non-medically necessary penile circumcision just because they don’t have penises? There are lots of things we should get a say in that don’t directly effect us.

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To put all that was just said aside, however, I do think this position that men have “no say” in the abortion debate to be contrary to the spirit of feminism and gender equality. The most basic reason to oppose gender roles (normative obligations that only fall on one gender or sex) is that men and women (in the sense which is relevant to the present discussion) are differentiated by their biological characteristics, but these biological differences have little to do with our normative obligations. The biological differences we observe between men and women are not so great or extreme so as to warrant the application of an entirely different set of moral principles to one gender or another. To put it simply: men and women are differentiated by their biological characteristics, and these biological differences, by and large, don’t have any connection to how we ought to behave. The fact that you have a vagina and produce ovum doesn’t have much to do with the majority of your morally relevant conduct. The notion that women ought to look or act a certain way that men ought not to, when viewed through this lens, quickly becomes absurd. That’s because the biological features specific to each sex would have to make the difference and the biological features we observe simply cannot do this.

Similarly, men and women are roughly epistemic equals. The epistemic faculties which enable the apprehension of moral facts seem to be present in both sexes to a roughly equal degree, and there is not some special set of “male epistemic principles” that only govern males. The way that women figure out that abortion is permissible is the same way that men figure out abortion is permissible. As a women, you may feel the gravity of the moral facts concerning abortion with more force than many men, as they directly concern the conduct and security of your body, but do not mistake this for a special sex-based access to the moral truth. It is all too easy to mistake the intense desire for a proposition to be true, with the actual seeming that the proposition is true.

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Men can have an opinion on abortion, it seems. Morality does not care about your sex. In discussions of abstruse moral issues, we ought to conceptualize ourselves first and foremost as rational agents in pursuit of the truth rather than partisan victory. Answering the questions is hard enough, let’s not let our differences make it any harder.

1. Men express these sentiments too, of course, but these sentiments are expressed more often by women, I have found.

2. I know that this is not the sort of thing that any professional philosopher believes - I don’t mean to attribute this view to any pro-choice philosopher or academic.