On Friday morning a 16-year-old girl died, partly because her country’s abortion laws made it difficult to access the cancer treatment she needed.
One of the more personally frustrating rhetorical maneuvers I encounter is the one where an interlocutor says, “Well, but you’re assuming that [some quantity or other] is [sad/bad/inadequate/difficult/complicated/contextual/hard to generalize about/steeped in suffering/less-than-ideal/something other than 24-7 full-strength Happy Fun Land], but we know that [God/nature] designed [said quantity] to be good!”
This can happen in a number of ways. Your interlocutor might say, “Oh, sure, you can look for economic solutions to certain forms of suffering, but if you do so you’re assuming a logic of scarcity, and we know that God is an abundant giver.” Or s/he might say, “Sure, you can use the language of rights, but the notion of rights assumes conflict between people, whereas we place our hope in reconciliation.” Or s/he might say, “Oh, you’re looking at pregnancy and childbirth as though they are diseases, but we know that women’s bodies were designed to give birth, and babies to be cared for by mothers, and mothers to care for babies.”
I am in favor of hope. I am in favor of imagining how the world should be. But these sorts of maneuvers fail to take seriously the lived and reported experiences of people who’ve undergone suffering. If we’re going to talk about assumptions, I rather think the burden of proof is on those who would, from a position of privilege, assume that they may dismiss bad circumstances as “assumptions,” when we can in fact go out and check whether scarcity, conflict, and difficult pregnancies exist. That’s true even if all we’re doing is musing about the state of the world as we sit in our comfy chairs and suckle the end of our respective eyeglasses while going “Hmmm.” But it’s exponentially more urgent if those people then wish to make laws that are better suited for the world they wish existed, rather than the one that exists, then it’s even more important that they confront. The danger, of course, is that you might (for example) you might consign a girl to die in the name of protecting life. I assume—but please, God, I hope not wrongly—that that would bother the consciences of all well-meaning people.
