In the last week, the US Supreme Court overturned the precedent Roe versus Wade, and somehow the shockwaves washed up in New Zealand with political insinuations and media froth on an issue that was not meant to be an issue here. (Let's just hope that there is no inspiration for such an issue to have any currency.) But at the crux of this and all the other issues are the entrenched camps with a distracting proxy war of ideas and a distinct lack of empathy.
I say proxy because it always seems like the sides just marshal the ideas or rationalisations that they're partial to and use them to dress up their respective positions. But at the heart of it is a lot of emotion. It's easy to say "Facts don't care about your feelings" but the incidental point felt is always "My facts don't care about your feelings" and the converse that another's facts won't change my feelings. And there is history, both personal and social, that sets these things up for context for the feelings that are at the heart, as if talking about where a convulsion of cells is declared a fetal heartbeat and define the be-all-and-end-all of this. The facts can fight - and I am easily lured into the quest for an answer or a fact-based rationalisation for my own intuitions and beliefs but at the end the true edges of the conflict are usually emotional.
You have the emotions of actual people for whom it has been worked into a item of moral and tribal faith, that a conceived human organism has personhood and their deliberate termination is equivalent to murder, and who would not object to the permissible homicide. I do not consider such people arguing in bad faith though there are probably some who use it cynically as a wedge issue. It is understandable that they have a passion to stop the practice, just as there was to abolish slavery, even if the "easy-fix" of banning this medical procedure has easily identified unintended consequences and obvious inequities that are not even on the agenda to be remedied in the States.
Then you have the actual body of people for whom a change of state law would potentially affect, namely fertile women. The "rationalisations" against them are the brutally simplistic: If you don't want to murder don't have sex unless you want a baby, as if it were only the woman responsible for an unintended conception and, worse, that abortion was the primary, and preferred, method of birth-control of women, that the chance of pregnancy was not a constant female anxiety in any heterosexual relationship and even worse, not potentially not consented sexual intercourse.
There is no perfect solution in these situations, and it is even more remote with the "I win/you lose" mentality and the demonisation of the other. In a civil society there is the requirement to draw a line somewhere and it will in its drawing disenfranchise some people. There is never much empathy in these clashes and not much pragmatism. If those in New Zealand who abhor abortion were understood the same as those that abhorred slavery on moral grounds, they appear more human. Not that the motivations of anti-abortionists are necessarily just a moral one, and there do seem well and truly other purity issues and the desire to suppress "fornication" and go back to that wholesome world we had before.
Part of the empathy lies in the historical and cultural legacy of the past. Women, though more equal than the past, still experience latent and implicit sexism, may have moments of terror at the deviantly sexual menace of a stranger or acquaintance. Meanwhile the conservative, Christian position is that of the once-dominant culture that has been eroded and feels a perpetual sense of loss, even if they never knew how good they had it.
In the US it's always more of a circus mirror because the evangelical instinct is to not just to ban abortion but to mandate abstinence education over sinful contraception. Unlike New Zealand, they seem to legislate on puritanical instinct rather than by select committee so the individual states seem to develop biblically inspired from-conception standards, and not understand at all the range of possible pregnancies that could occur. The number of weeks of pregnancy is not from the moment of conception but from last period so if conception occurred in the third week of a woman's cycle they are already three weeks pregnant at fertilisation. Six weeks pregnant, a standard adopted by Texas, is literally only two weeks after a missed period, and even that might have had some bleeding. Miss that and you either may have a baby or an illegal abortion.
Another example is the rending of people is the trans-rights debate. There are a range of camps from the the trans, the "woke" (basically people who accept that transpeople exist and there should be changes); the TERFs (so-called trans-exclusive radical feminists, people who feel that transpeople are a threat to biological women); the gender-conservatives (often those who try to have puberty blockers and any transition treatments illegal until someone is an adult) and maybe a swathe of people you could just say are wryly indifferent to the whole thing but could accidentally say the wrong thing to the wrong person and feel victimised for discriminating.
The proxy war of ideas is again a ridiculous mess of whether the gender dysphoria actually exists, arguments about the rate of transition regret (where someone realises they weren't transsexual after all and want to stop transitioning), testosterone levels in transgender athletes and hypothetical situations where a man should be able to walk into any female changing room saying "I identify as a woman".
The most fundamental empathy at the heart of this is someone experiencing gender dysphoria. Even in these more enlightened times, people are pretty instinctively man/woman equivalent to male/female. Once someone is openly trans, they will often be supported but between those first realisations and being confidently out must be extraordinarily difficult and emotionally straining. Also, any inclinations to show your real self in the presence of less enlightened individuals opens you up to either innocent or malicious hurt.
TERF meanwhile seems a jarring and even unfair name to a class of mainly women who want women to be women and not want transmen to be part of their category. This might seem cruel to a persecuted category but biological women have not had any kind of gender ascendancy, and without any pragmatism, it seems they could be left to make all the accommodations just like they would for the return of abortion-bans in the US. (It reminds me of how Frederick Douglass broke with the female suffragettes after the abolition of slavery as both the once subservient and the still submissive competed for the right to vote. Douglass felt the liberated and free blacks had a more pressing need for the vote because it was a matter of survival, whereas he viewed female suffrage as inevitable but a want rather than a need. The suffragettes of the time felt differently and that they should not wait.)
The gender-conservatives might just be same abortion obsessed stuck-in-the-muds although this is about empathy, I'm not going to spend any more typing on them. The wryly indifferent, however, are deserving of some expansive empathy. They probably would be sympathetic if a transperson entered their lives but has not had reason to really think this is real issue, but also with the time to adapt to this rapid change. I saw an unusual eruption of frustration last week from one because he felt he could never say anything on the topic for fear of saying the wrong thing and losing his job. (You could ask why he would need to be saying something but that is also the wrong question to ask.)
Empathy doesn't in itself solve any of these great dividing issues. But it is only with empathy that some pragmatism and middleground could be imagined. Though I don't particularly like him, the treatment of Luxon by the media was rather ridiculous: he voted against the legalisation of abortion on a conscience vote and was forced to say in a hundred different ways that there would be no review or change to that should National win the next election. He is free to have his beliefs and there should not be any sense of disqualification from running by holding conscience views contrary to the mainstream. What he did say was that he really felt for women in the horrible situation of needing one, and though he is hopefully past the possible need to even consider that decision, I would hope that he would not be a hypocritical and would have the view guide his personal conduct.
My only relevant reference point of someone who could have had an abortion are our friends, who due to their religious views, chose to continue a pregnancy with a fetus that was detected to have many issues including Downs Syndrome. Apparently they were offered the option of termination on more than one occasion which offended them. The young 'un is now three but reading the snapshots of their challenges with him would test anyone in their view. They are still strong in their faith and requesting and getting the prayers of a wide range of friends, and boy do they need them. You can only feel for them.
