Men and Abortion: Fallacies in the Abortion Controversy (I)

Men don’t have the right to talk about abortion, do they?

Consider the following ad:

 

This is a somewhat famous image from The Pro-Choice Public Education Project (http://www.protectchoice.org/). It illustrates the argument that men should not be able to talk against abortion because they are incapable of being pregnant. This argument has been discussed in different articles. I’m going to approach it from the point of view of informal logic.

Warning

This discussion WILL hurt the pride of extreme feminists.

My first step is to reduce the argument to the form of simple propositions. Sometimes it can sound awkward, but the analysis becomes much more reliable.

	All men are people who will not get pregnant
So	All men are people who should not talk against abortion

The first flaw a logician will find in this argument is the fact that the premise is completely irrelevant to the conclusion. In order to connect the two, we’ll have to include a second premise:

	All men are people who will not get pregnant
	All people who will not get pregnant are people who should not talk against abortion
So	All men are people who should not talk against abortion

This way, we can get an argument of the form All A are B, and all B are C, so All A are C. This is, of course, a valid argument. The problem is to determine whether the argument is sound (are all premises true?).

The first premise is true. Of course, some people will disagree with this based on the case of Thomas Beatie. In that case, the argument is unsound. But that was to easy. Let’s go back in time before Thomas Beatie got pregnant. At this time, most people could agree that the first premise was true.

What about the second premise. This is harder to analyze because it includes a subjective concept. Who decides whether anybody “should talk” against abortion? Well, I found that it’s better to expand the premise in order to make it clearer. The problem is that I have found two different ways of expanding it.

Notice that this argument is using the future tense (will not). My discussion can be adapted to use the past and present tenses as well, so I don’t think this is going to be a source of fallacy.

Let’s see the first one.

All people who will not get pregnant are people who should not talk against abortion. They don’t know what it’s like to be pregnant, and therefore, any of their arguments is invalid.

This is one of my favorites. Why? Because it is a perfect illustration of the Ad Hominem Circumstantial Fallacy. The circumstances of an arguer are logically irrelevant to the validity of his or her argument against or for abortion. Arguments are valid or invalid regardless of who makes them.

All people who will not get pregnant are people who should not talk against abortion. They don’t know what it’s like to be pregnant, and therefore, they don’t have the natural (moral) right to talk against abortion.

As much as we would like to believe, natural rights are not so universal, meaning that not everybody agrees which rights are natural. Here are my observations:

1. I think it is fair (valid) to state that if men involved in a pregnancy have the natural (moral) obligation to help take care of their children then they have the natural (moral) right to talk for or against the process that interrupts the process of bringing their children to this world, i.e. abortion. Most people will agree that men involved in a pregnancy do have the moral obligation to help take care of their children (Modus Ponens).
2. I think it is also fair to state that if men have a biological participation in a pregnancy, then they should be able to talk about it. Another Modus Ponens.
3. What about men that are not involved in a pregnancy? To be intellectually honest, this is a case that I’m still thinking about. For now, let me say that the fact that a man is not involved in a pregnancy is irrelevant to whether or not he can use his reasoning abilities to discuss abortion in a logical manner.

This is all I have to say for today. Please join the discussion by submitting your comments.