Policies, Justifications, and Taking It Back

I have not written much, or, well, anything about the recent Todd Akin controversy, in part because there's not much to say that isn't being said elsewhere. What he said was horrid, on a whole lot of counts, which I won't bother getting into here. The point I want to make is that he didn't just say all of this out of the blue. His notion that women rarely get pregnant as a result of rape was the justification for one of his policy positions, namely that abortion should be banned without exception, including stuff like the morning-after pill. To me, the fact that his quote was a justification for a specific policy is tremendously important in considering his "apology" for those remarks. Because the thing is, he has, of course, stuck by that policy. He still thinks abortion and the morning-after pill should be banned absolutely, with no exceptions. Presumably he still has reasons for thinking that. It's not remotely unlikely that his continued reasons for holding that policy preference are the same as the reasons he articulated and then got in trouble for. Unless he gives some alternate justification for the same policy, every time he continues to advocate his preferred policy on this issue he is implicitly re-uttering these same remarks about how women don't get pregnant much from being raped. For him to "take back" the justification without taking back the thing it's justifying just doesn't work, and I suspect has a lot to do with why this controversy seems to have staying power.

Now, as it happens he does have a parallel justification, and it's the second and much less focused-on part of the quote, about how the punishment in cases of rape resulting in pregnancy should fall on the perpetrator and not the innocent child. Honestly, I have a non-trivial degree of sympathy with that perspective as a private ethical matter, and in general think that the world would be a better place if people cared a bit less about where people's DNA came from, in these among other circumstances. However, none of that makes me think that abortion ought be criminalized, in these cases or in any other. I have a feeling that if Akin tries to make a particularly public articulation of this parallel justification, in a way that anyone hears, he's not going to find that the people who were offended by the first half of the quote get much less offended when he only uses the second half. And if he doesn't make it clear that in his own personal ideology this thing about punishment is capable of doing all the work of upholding his "no abortion (or morning-after pill) ever, no exceptions, not even rape" policy, then what I said earlier holds, and he hasn't actually taken back his full remarks, not one tiny bit.