Why we'll never agree about abortion in America

People living together within a milieu will eventually come to understand the world in more or less the same way -- the universality of human feelings and the basic mechanics of belief formation promote ideological homogeneity on such things as the importance of the right to self-determination, the dangers of abuse and prejudice, the reprehensibility of sadism anywhere outside of the bedroom of consenting adults, and the morality of a well-developed empathic capability. As a front-line physician my observation has been that if they live long enough, all persons happen upon a time when they awaken to the sensibility of enduring maxims, going on to hear everything with a new ear. On their deathbeds, the evolutionary biologist and the priest find that they agree on all substantive things, though they may use different language to describe them. Often we disagree only in a very technical way that amounts to nothing -- we agree that 'heaven' is the reward for a moral life, but you posit heaven at a time after death, while I imagine it here on Earth; at the level of linguistic idea construction, the differences in the way we state the belief don't amount to a change in the way we behave socially, though you may do something different with your time on Sundays. As beings who absorb data from everyday-life, we inevitably arrive at agreement on much that matters, our behavior agrees. And for our behavior to agree, so must our unconscious learning.

When reasonable people can't agree.

The wealth of our agreement makes the objects of intractable disagreement among reasonable and well-meaning people so much more interesting. What do we learn about disagreement itself when we look closely at highly polarized debates, the subjects of which nearly everyone finds that they have an opinion? Does a theory of disagreement help us resolve them?

To answer these questions, I did an experiment. A descriptive cross-sectional study, we should call it. I have, in my own way, taken the most adamant abortion rights supporters, and the most vehement pro-lifers, and put them in separate rooms, sitting down with the two cohorts over coffee and cookies to try to understand the 'structure' of their beliefs. How does one thing follow from another in these minds? What connections, if any, do their ideas have to their experiences and sense of self?

I sent the people who were undecided, or who benignly saw the merits of both sides of the debate home. I sent home the people who were not good at explaining why they believed what they believed. I sent home the pure propagandists, those who would not act on their beliefs, but who were adept in argumentation. I sent home the people who were only heated out of loyalty to someone else's conviction. Finally, the people who were lying about what they believed because they were ashamed of what others would think of them were also excluded. With those few who remained, I set about the business of learning if there was anything that could be said to differentiate the two groups on a human level, and to seek a way of predicting their feelings if they were (god help us) forced to listen to the views of the opposing side. I did not challenge them on anything. I simply encouraged them to elaborate on all of their memories, values, aspirations, and current perceptions until they had exhausted themselves; most begged passive-aggressively for someone else to speak by the end, as they had heard themselves to the point of self-discovery, coming into connection with previously unknown affect. Then I got up and left without a word, and thought about what they had said for several years and more.

Findings.

1. Both groups have more in common temperamentally and intellectually than they do with the folks in the middle.
2. Both groups were in fact well-meaning, and felt that their activism was morally necessary or otherwise important to society.
3. The actual psychological forces that helped to forge and then support their beliefs were, as a general rule, beyond the scope of their conscious awareness. In other words, their reasons for believing one way or the other were not what they said they were. Not exclusively.
4. We will never agree on abortion rights in this country because both attitudes ultimately depend on divergent, equally true and un-falsifiable concepts about the individual's relationship to 'society', emerging from genuine affect and social experience. Unlike gay marriage and trans-rights, controversy over abortion does not move because there is relatively little opportunity for cognitive dissonance, due to its relative privacy. Importantly, one side treats abortion as an entirely philosophical problem while the other is primarily oriented to the practical consequences of abortion restrictions, making communication between the two groups difficult.

The first point is fairly straightforward. It takes a certain kind of physiology to be an activist, to be fused enough with one's own ideas and emotions to be spurred into the manufacture of slogan and demonstration.

The second learning deserves a small qualification. All persons were well-meaning, in the sense that both groups, the pro-lifers and the pro-choicers, were possessed of strong convictions -- the world they described was internally consistent, non-psychotic, and could be traced back at times to values and hopes that were admirable.

The third idea will be customary to analytically-trained psychiatrists and psychologists, but requires a brief explanation for those for those who wonder about it. Essentially, it is productive to ask of any behavior, what does it accomplish for the actor? What is the payoff, particularly in the case of behaviors that one struggles to understand, or which cause distress or alienation? Within the exercise, one quickly becomes aware of the unconscious as a paradigmatic necessity. We postulate that people are, by and large, unaware of their actual motivations, and are not a reliable source of information about why they are doing what they are doing. The mind tends to disconnect from the experience of homeostatic drives and genuine affect, submerging instead into rationalizations and narratives that preserve one's sense of dignity, self-worth, or that engender the admiration of others (or produce some other desired social response). For instance, the author of this article was possibly motivated by a desire to avoid his loneliness one night, or to procrastinate on some task that makes him fearful, behaving instead in a way that would allow him to feel confident and superior by writing about a subject where he has some sophistication. Writing may allow him to act out his need to prove his efficacy. Multi-determinism is the idea that all of these feelings contribute to the formation of behavior simultaneously.

The fourth point: identity and the elaboration of belief (epistemology).

The fourth point is the actual subject of this article, the thought that formed like an air bubble in boiling water upon the surface scars of pre-existing attitudes. It rose to the surface on the path of least resistance when its growing mass made it soft enough to be displaced, becoming these words.

Human ideas emerge from belief structures that are inherently logical. In other words, Logic is not a discipline that aims exclusively to guide us about how to think and construct argument; it also describes the way ideas form. There are basic elements to our knowledge that interact according to rules to form more elaborate, compound beliefs; the system expands deterministically. It bothers the author that few people experiment with this postulate.

When one surveys thoroughly the group that considers abortion a crime against humanity, you find that the one belief that they have in common is that America was made for them, that they are the average, prototypical, or original American. In the terms of Derrida, they see themselves as the in-group. They become activists with psychologically displaceable aggression the more the group they identify with is being threatened by out-groups. Anything that undermines or threatens their sense of being the cultural establishment, the nearest authority on the way life should be within the culture, will enhance their political fervor. Often times actual minorities, particularly first-generation immigrants, will adopt the conservative politics of in-groups as a means of reducing real discrimination by the classical in-group. The idea is that if you identify as a member of the in-group, you are less likely to be discriminated against.

When one surveys the group that considers abortion restriction a meanness and a crime against human potential, science, progress, women, and morality, one belief that they all share is that they identify with one or another out-group, an underprivileged or under-represented group. The more they feel that they are being discriminated against, or held back on the basis of identity rather than merit, the more displaceable aggression they will direct to external forces of repression, unfairness, and anti-sophistication.

At the core of these dynamics is the actuality of in-group and out-group identity. But this is only part of the story. It remains to be answered how abortion becomes the nexus of displacement, the thing about which it becomes reasonable to disagree, and about which the debate never moves.

Uncertainties, sublimated, for our time.

William Gibson famously stated that technology itself was "morally neutral" until applied for good or evil. There has been conscious deliberation on the "morality of technology" at least since the inauguration of the nuclear era. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought popular awareness to the destructive potential of innovation; arguably, those acts of unbridled brutality also primed the collective consciousness for contemporary debates regarding climate change.

Contrary to the study of physics since World War I, there have been no clear, global catastrophes emerging from the study biology. However, we see that biological events such as the Covid-19 pandemic now raise the technophobic hairs of those who have them, evident in the popularity of speculation regarding the lab-origin of the virus. These 'conspiracies' have the intended effect, reminding us that as much as we want to master biology, biotechnology remains as alien and out of the realm of personal control as other unfamiliar things, with as much attendant danger as a warlike tribe in the lands to the North. On a psychological level, one is more likely to form a tendency to harbor and propagate guarded postures toward the mastery of biology when biology itself has the potential to become one more nidus of disenfranchisement.

Meanwhile, the social consequences of abortion are difficult to study in the realm of medical interventions. The effect of someone having an abortion 100 miles away from me on my life are so minuscule, and so remote, so diluted by millions of other forces, that whatever beliefs I have about whether abortion is murder and whether this particular type of murder should be privileged in laws about murder, I can have no cognitive dissonance about them. Abortion is often so private that few things will happen that might make me change my mind. There are few forces of data or experience to test my belief against, whatever my beliefs are. This, I argue, is how abortion becomes a topic of intractable debate, one where the ball never advances one way or the other. It's precisely the un-falsifiability of our intuitions about whether it is right or wrong that allows it to become a substrate for the displacement for all of our other fears, sadnessess, and anger. The only effect that your abortion has on me is psychological, challenging my paradigm of reality, igniting my fears of death, and reminding me of the threats to my sense of myself as an authority on the culture. And that threat occurs in that part of my reality where I store my poetry, and where I am cultivating my wisdom for my own children, and their children. The more under threat I feel by other events in my life, the more I rely upon that space, and the more likely I am to protest your behavior -- not because what you're doing affects me, but because I my mastery of the culture itself has been challenged.

Closing

I have tried to illustrate the psychology of intractable debate. It is stupidity. The model that emerges from this discussion is that abortion is prime territory for intractable debate because a wealth of deep-seated attitudes may coalesce into that belief, making it deeply personal; meanwhile, nothing happens to create cognitive dissonance about our attitudes on abortion. This differentiates abortion form attitudes about gay marriage, and trans-gender rights, where our social milieu and personal attachments challenge our beliefs. Importantly, attitudes on abortion have very little to do with the way in which abortion actually effects anyone.

Zyg Nota is a medical doctor practicing psychiatry in Texas