Gunsplaining and the Pro-Life Endgame

by Tim Kirchoff

The question of the pro-life endgame was recently brought back into public discourse by Kevin Williamson’s ouster from The Atlantic in light of tweets he made about hanging being an appropriate punishment for abortion and, to a lesser extent, by the Idaho Republican primary for Lieutenant Governor, where in a debate, one of the candidates, Bob Nonini, asserted that there ought to be criminal penalties for abortion and nodded when pressed on whether the death penalty would be an appropriate punishment.

When Donald Trump assented to the proposition that women who have abortions ought to be punished, several pro-lifers were quick to distance themselves from his comments and point out that, prior to Roe v Wade, women were seldom, if ever, jailed for procuring an abortion, and criminal penalties for abortion were only used as leverage to get women to agree to testify against abortionists.

Some such people must have contacted Bob Nonini, the candidate from the Idaho Primary mentioned above: in his clarification of his seeming assent to the proposition that the death penalty should be imposed on women who procure abortions, he said that he intended the death penalty to be part of the statute only as a deterrent and that “it is my understanding that in the history of the United States, long before Roe was foisted upon this country; no woman has ever been prosecuted for undergoing abortion. That is for practical reasons, as well as for reasons of compassion.”

If Nonini had already understood that American women were not prosecuted for abortions even when abortions were illegal, he would have made that point in the debate; he almost certainly conferred with pro-life activists before issuing this clarifying statement. Like many in the pro-life movement, he knows that abortion is murder, but is not so certain about what America’s abortion laws ought to be in light of that knowledge.

When pressed on the point as Nonini was, some may bite the bullet and agree that abortion, as murder, should carry the same penalties as murder, and are thus easily labeled by their opponents as extremists. Others are not comfortable with that final conclusion, but are unable to explain why. Their interlocutors perceive this group as either refusing to acknowledge the logical conclusion of regarding abortion as murder, or are unable to perceive it; if pro-lifers are not dangerous extremists, they are either disingenuous or dimwitted.

There are similarities between this kind of bad-faith critique of pro-lifers and the rhetorical strategy described by Adam Weinstein as “gunsplaining” in the Washington Post. I had seen this strategy in action myself: opponents of gun control would pick fights over technical terms like “assault rifle” to try to expose the ignorance of people who said that they would support a ban on assault rifles. As Weinstein explains, “[The goal of gunsplaining] is not to foster deeper understanding of these weapons, but to further a group identity of firearms owners as beset by a dumb or dishonest adversary, to flatter their insecurities and tell them they don’t need to take gun controllers seriously because you can’t reason with ignorance.”

Gunsplainers, like the critics of the pro-life movement discussed above, try to avoid engaging with people who actually know the subject well (and there are plenty such experts, both in the pro-life and anti-gun movements), unless they can use that person to paint the entire movement as extremists, as they did when retired Supreme Court Justice Stevens penned an op-ed suggesting a repeal of the 2nd Amendment. Their goal isn’t to learn from others, to inform them, or even to argue, but to humiliate others in the service of their own views. I am far more sympathetic to the (admittedly somewhat ignorant) targets of such people than I am those who wield their knowledge as a cudgel.

This latter group, for all their pretense of insight, nonetheless fails to understand their opponents on the most basic level. The desire for stronger laws against abortion or guns starts not in the head, but in the heart—with a horror at the lives lost, and anger at the fact that our legal regime—the way our laws are written and enforced—seems almost deliberately ineffective at reducing the death count. Their position begins with a desire for us to say, as a society, “Never again!”

Would it be a good thing if more people who favor greater restrictions on guns or abortion could explain what sort of legal regime would be better than the status quo? Of course! But any pedant who tries to expose the ignorance of members of the general movement on the finer details of the issue will be understandably, and I think rightly, ignored. If they refuse to acknowledge those people who can provide coherent explanations, instead talking down to the less eloquent members of the movement, they don't deserve to be heard.

Before we expect other people to open their minds to argumentation, we must often begin by opening our hearts to them.