Values

Anna Holmes in the Washington post writes about how pro-lifers are sexist:

These ideas about women have explicitly political implications as well, echoing the ideology at the core of the antiabortion movement’s recently heightened assault on women’s reproductive rights, which found expression in the near-shutdown of the government over contraception, STD testing and the specter of pregnancy termination. The message is clear: Women can’t be trusted to define, or control, their own bodies, so it’s up to men to do it for them.

Jon Chait at The New Republic responds:

I object to the automatic equation of opposition to legalized abortion with sexism. Opposition to abortion rights can reflect a desire to control women, but it can also simply reflect a belief that a fetus is a human being. That's not a belief I share, but it's a values question and I can't say that those on the other side are wrong. The notion of letting women decide whether or not to have an abortion only comes into play if you think the fetus does not have human rights, or if the question is murky.

It is to Chait's credit that he rejects the link between sexism and pro-life views, but let's consider something else. 

For Chait, you can't really say whether a fetus is human, you can only form beliefs on the matter.  A fetus exists in a factual sense, but it is up to a person whether to place the fetus in the category "human being", or in another category, and no person's interpretation is better than another's; or, if there is an objective moral reality, it is something humans aren't capable of knowing (and how can it be binding on us if we don't know it?)  If Chait is right about all this, then the question becomes which arbitrary position should have authority.

Holmes says that women themselves have the authority to "define...their own bodies".  It follows that for Holmes, a fetus becomes a part of a woman's body if she defines it as such, and on the other hand becomes an unborn baby if she chooses to define her body as not including the fetus. 

Now I would guess that neither Chait nor Holmes believes that a person has a "right to define" his or her arm, for instance, as a separate person; nor, on the other hand, to define a next door neighbor, a house, or the entire universe as part of his or her person.  In these matters, they would accept that some interpretations are superior to others. 

The difficulty around abortion comes from the fact that interpretation of the status of a fetus is complicated, not from a generalized values relativism that treats all interpretations anywhere as equally valid.  Obviously, a born person has a right to life, and parents have an obligation to provide sustenance and care.  And nothing about a baby really changes the instant a mother gives birth, except for its physical position relative to the mother.  On the other hand, development of a baby is a gradual process, and pro-choice people will argue that conception, or various other points, are morally arbitrary as well. 

When people disagree between interpretations, it may be that one interpretation is superior to another, but not obviously so, so that, because of human fallibility, some people come to mistaken conclusions.  In this case, you CAN say that "those on the other side are WRONG", because you can see the flaw in their thinking.  It may be that the interpretations are equally valid; but this itself requires an argument to prove it, a measurement by which to judge each interpretation, in the same way that the superiority of one interpretation over another requires argumentative proof.

The identical argument, by the way, applies to Constitutional interpretation.  Saying that two interpretations of a clause are equally valid requires an argument, every bit as much as saying that one interpretation is superior to another requires one.