Sarah Silverman's Interesting Pro-Choice Argument
She's a bit of a potty-mouth, but she's on to something.
The Max streaming service has a new stand-up comedy special by Sarah Silverman where she offers a pretty interesting defense of the pro-choice position. Here, I quote Silverman at about 21 minutes into the show called Someone You Love:
I just believe that if what you believe is righteous, you should be able to convince other people using just only what is the truth. And, uh, fetuses are not poster-size. They’re only small. If fetuses were poster size I’d be like yeah, that’s a life, you know, but they’re not. If fetuses were poster sized those same people would probably hunt them… Look, make the poster, just make it actual size, you know? “This is life!” [Silverman pretends to carry a teeny-weeny protest sign]
The point Silverman makes is that much pro-life activism uses visual imagery that is highly suggestive. It’s a framing device: physically large things are much more likely to capture our attention and a lot of folks would dismiss things that are literally microscopic. If a cat is 20 inches long, furry, and weights ten pounds, we cuddle it. If a cat were the size of rice grain, we might step on it. There’s a reason we “save the whales,” but we don’t “save the amoebas.”
The deeper point is that the pro-life movement uses moral intuitions usually reserved for more complex and physically larger entities, and Silverman’s joke calls them out on it. Of course, you could argue that Silverman is right and amoebas and whales merit the same level of moral protections, which leads you in a pro-life direction. The fact that most people don’t apply the same moral frames for all forms of living things probably indicates that it isn’t wise to treat everything from viruses to thousand-year-old redwood trees as equivalent. Something has gotta give.
This may explain why secular societies are more permissive of abortion. Without religion, which just says “God doesn’t want you to do this,” people must rely on some other moral intuition and the “whale-amoeba” distinction is enough for most people to move in a pro-choice direction.
Bottom line: Do tiny things have tiny rights? Most people would say no.
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