I Can Make The Pain Disappear – Fear of Tigers
A very strange post from Pema Levy at The American Prospect. The premise is that states are attempting to challenge Roe v. Wade with a lot of niggly abortion regulations, to slowly ratchet up legitimate restrictions in the hope of developing a long-term rollback of Roe. So far, there’s nothing weird about that point. It’s a very real, and very problematic feature of the contemporary reproductive rights debate.
The peculiar part is Levy’s particular beef with a bill in Minnesota that seeks to bad abortion at 20 weeks because that’s when the fetus theoretically starts to be able to feel pain. Levy: “what is perhaps so extraordinary is the assertion that physical pain is something a legislature should try to prevent.” She then goes on to say “Spinal taps are excruciating, but they also save lives, as do countless other procedures. Should we ban them? As a doctor, pain shouldn’t play into medical decisions, period. It’s important to make this point.”
This is, quite frankly, ludicrous. Doctors should have no interest in reducing pain? Tell that to millions who suffer from chronic pain who go to their doctor seeking relief. Tell that to people trying to get marijuana legalized at least as a palliative measure. Centuries of utilitarian thinking certainly matter here too. Pain matters quite a bit for making judgments of public policy.
In Levy’s world a doctor should not feel any threat to her Hippocratic Oath if asked to torture someone in a manner that won’t produce any physical harm? After all, it’s mere pain.
Quality of life matters, and it matters a lot. Legislatures absolutely should concern themselves with increasing it. And part of that is curtailing pain.
The problem with Minnesota’s legislation is not that it uses pain as a justification for public policy. It’s that it uses the theoretical pain suffered by a fetus that is not a person by any existing legal standard as a trump card to overwhelm the pain of the potential mother. And even if you decided the fetus should have legal standing as a person, you can still accept that legislatures should work to reduce pain without believing that the proper mechanism is to coercively regulate the bodies of women.
If this were a debate, I would be very tempted to grant their implicit assumption that “if you can feel pain, you are entitled to the full protection of the law” and solve *every* other problem I care about.
Very, very tempted.