Tuesday, March 24, 2020

Morality and COVID-19: Abortion in the Shadows of Coronavirus and its Challenge for Moral Stances



 The issue of morality tends to be overlooked in the shadow of COVID-19 as people necessarily focus on the urgent issues of preventing infection, treating the sick, and finding a cure, while protecting the social order and economic well being of society.  And yet it would be a mistake to detach issues of morality from the way that society confronts the challenge of COVID-19.  More importantly, there is a necessary moral element when, in the shadow of the COVID-19, political and other actors seek to advance objectives that are not directly related to the fight against COVID-19.  

This post focuses on the way that morality, and moral thinking, becomes a necessary element in the way that it may be necessary element of the accountability of our institutional and political leaders.   The illustrative case centers on abortion regulation in the shadow of COVID-19.




Politics consumes morality like any other factor in the production of power. Once consumed, what started out as an autonomous morality, expressed as its great principles for the guidance of a consenting community, is excreted by the body politic as a means to an ends, one achieved through the manipulation of the structures of power ostensibly designed to constrain the amoral exercise of politics, but that, in some cases serves as its catalyst. Political actors are not moral actors as political actors, though they may believe themselves moral actors within their moral communities. 

Political actors are better understood as prisoners of the logic of the institutions into which they have (freely) inserted themselves. Those institutions have no morals. And whatever morals are supposedly embedded therein are turned to the service of the institution.  It is in that engagement that such morality loses its character as morality and instead becomes an instrument for the cultivation of the power of the institution, and its reflection in the power of those political actors who can manage  (and appear to control) the institutional Weltanschauung.  That is, once consumed within political institution, morality loses its force as morality and becomes instead merely a specific expression of political power which can then be projected outward onto those who must be bound by its expression. 

These were the thoughts that intruded as I read reports of  the way that "Gov Greg Abbott has announced a move to ban most abortions in the state during the coronavirus outbreak, declaring they don't qualify as essential surgeries." (Texas governor bans most abortions during coronavirus outbreak because they 'don't qualify as essential surgeries' - as Ohio considers following suit). 
The reporting explained:

Attorney General Ken Paxton said Monday that the order issued over the weekend by Abbott barred 'any type of abortion that is not medically necessary to preserve the life or health of the mother.' Failure to comply with the order can result in penalties of up to $1,000 or 180 days of jail time, Paxton said. 'No one is exempt from the governor´s executive order on medically unnecessary surgeries and procedures, including abortion providers,' Paxton said. 'Those who violate the governor's order will be met with the full force of the law.'
The issue also has also flared in Ohio, where abortion clinics received letters Friday from Republican Attorney General Dave Yost ordering them to cease all 'non-essential' surgical abortions.  Yost wrote that the procedures violate a March 17 order issued by the state health director. However, representatives of Ohio clinics said that they were in compliance with the health director's order and planned to continue providing abortions.
Amid the moves by Ohio and Texas, a coalition of anti-abortion groups urged its allies across the nation to ask governors to ban most abortions on the grounds they were not essential. (Ibid.).

The action should be troubling for moral actors whether one embraces the position that abortion is a moral wrong, or conversely embraces the position that centers itself on the dignity of women in her relationship to conception as a moral imperative.

None of this is remarkable as politics; but it is worth considering as morals, or more specifically as the expression of morals through moral acts. These moral acts might be assessed by a simple measures—the fidelity of action to norm. And it is in that colliculus that the actions of these officials, falls short. Indeed, the morality of a politics of COVID-19, aligned with a politics of abortion (whether or not grounded in moral positions) might, as in this case, expose the temptations of immorality in crisis. The actions of the administrative and political officials of Texas and Ohio exposes the way that the morality of COVID19 responses also serves as a temptation to immorality, where temptation is understood a religious (and especially Biblical) sense. 

One need not speak here to the morality of abortion, or even to its politics.  Instead, the actions of these officials speak instead to the avoidance of both. If one can assume that the Governor's action is an immoral act to serve his version of a moral purpose, does that absolve the immorality of the path taken?  One might think not. The act is immoral as politics if only because rejects fidelity to the core ideology of political action.  It is an immoral morality because it compromises morality while appearing to advance it. A moralist cannot help but feel dirty (in the moral sense) in the face of this action—the act of turning a moral good  toward an immoral tool to advance a (contested) moral purpose.  The “feeling dirty” arises from the deception at the heart of the actions; and calls to mind the maxim of equity, that one who comes into equity must come with clean hands. The officials may praise themselves for their politics, yet that amounts to little more than a celebration of weakness, of the weakness that comes from succumbing to temptation—to the very rejection of the morals ostensibly advanced Job 1:8-12 (KJV).

It is that dirtiness, indeed, that diminishes the moral objective for which it was used. A moral actor opposed to abortion would find little solace in an administrative measure that continued to preserve abortion in a number of cases which that moralist would consider immoral. At the same time a moral actor who understands a woman's relationship to her body and conception as the central moral issue would find even less solace in an act designed to attack or challenge that moral position, but only sideways through the attrition of technicalities. That is by an act that appears to advance the normative morality of those who hold life sacred on the basis of a premise that centers the health of the woman in its moral calculus. From both perspectives the consequential immorality of the political consumption of morality becomes clear.  Its Satanic character (even understood as metaphor for a principle of inversion) becomes clearer as well—revealing in the political act the exercise of power without morals. What one has, in the end, is an expression of immorality expressed as the exercise of administrative discretion under cover of crisis. One ought to fear for their souls—even if the soul can be reduced to little more than the societally originating premise of fidelity to the organizational and moral norms of the community. 

COVID-19, then, like Satan in the Book of Job, becomes the agency through which societal (and in this case political) actors are tempted under circumstances of stress, to reject the moral order that supports their political authority.  To so reject is to reduce morality to a consumable and to acknowledge the amorality of politics—reduced to a vessel filled without reference to a moral (or in secular terms, a coherent principled) order. One does not deal here though, with a binary—black and white, moral or immoral.  Instead one deals with the interaction of morality and expediency (the immoral as the means that ought to taint even as it advances).

The cover of COVID-19 to advance a moral position on abortion is merely one of an almost endless variation of the same challenge that is posed for political actors across the full range of the moral basis for the organization and political society.  Yet it is instructive because the moral issues are fairly clear.  The immorality of COVID-19 politics becomes murkier when, in the face of the pandemic, political, religious, societal, and economic leaders (those who exercise political authority over these sectors of societal organization) begin to use the cover of COVID-19  to reshape the core premises around which society is organized. Though there is nothing immoral about such reshaping, it is the deception, the use of the cover of CVID-19 as a means of hiding what is being done, that gives the politics of COVID-19 its fundamentally immoral character.  

_________

The reporting follows. 

Texas governor bans most abortions during coronavirus outbreak because they 'don't qualify as essential surgeries' - as Ohio considers following suit

  • Gov Greg Abbott has announced his order barring 'any type of abortion that is not medically necessary to preserve the life or health of the mother'
  • Failure to comply with order can result in up to $1,000 or 180 days of jail time 
  • The issue also has also flared in Ohio, where abortion clinics received letters Friday ordering them to cease all 'non-essential' surgical abortions
  • However, representatives of Ohio clinics said that they were in compliance with the health director's order and planned to continue providing abortions 
  • Coronavirus symptoms: what are they and should you see a doctor?
Texas Gov Greg Abbott (pictured on Wednesday) has barred 'any type of abortion that is not medically necessary to preserve the life or health of a mother' amid the coronavirus outbreak
Texas Gov Greg Abbott (pictured on Wednesday) has barred 'any type of abortion that is not medically necessary to preserve the life or health of a mother' amid the coronavirus outbreak
Texas Gov Greg Abbott has announced a move to ban most abortions in the state during the coronavirus outbreak, declaring they don't qualify as essential surgeries.
Attorney General Ken Paxton said Monday that the order issued over the weekend by Abbott barred 'any type of abortion that is not medically necessary to preserve the life or health of the mother.'
Failure to comply with the order can result in penalties of up to $1,000 or 180 days of jail time, Paxton said.
'No one is exempt from the governor´s executive order on medically unnecessary surgeries and procedures, including abortion providers,' Paxton said.
'Those who violate the governor's order will be met with the full force of the law.'
The issue also has also flared in Ohio, where abortion clinics received letters Friday from Republican Attorney General Dave Yost ordering them to cease all 'non-essential' surgical abortions. 
Yost wrote that the procedures violate a March 17 order issued by the state health director.
However, representatives of Ohio clinics said that they were in compliance with the health director's order and planned to continue providing abortions.
Amid the moves by Ohio and Texas, a coalition of anti-abortion groups urged its allies across the nation to ask governors to ban most abortions on the grounds they were not essential.

Failure to comply with the order can result in penalties of up to $1,000 or 180 days of jail time, officials said. It's unclear if clinics like Planned Parenthood (file image, in Houston) will remain in operation amid the outbreak
Failure to comply with the order can result in penalties of up to $1,000 or 180 days of jail time, officials said. It's unclear if clinics like Planned Parenthood (file image, in Houston) will remain in operation amid the outbreak 
'If abortion is a "choice" then abortion is an elective procedure,' said Mark Harrington, president of the anti-abortion group Created Equal.
Abortion-rights leaders nationwide decried the tactic, saying it was an affront to women grappling with difficult decisions amid the disruptions of the pandemic.
'Abortion is time-sensitive, essential health care,' said Katherine Hancock Ragsdale, president of the National Abortion Federation. 
'Women deserve better than a craven exploitation of a health care crisis in furtherance of an anti-abortion agenda.'
In Ohio, abortion clinics planned to remain in operation.
Jennifer Branch, an attorney for the Women´s Med Center of Dayton, said the clinic had already taken steps to minimize the use of personal protective equipment - one of the issues raised in the state's order.
The CEOs of two Planned Parenthood affiliates in Ohio are said their clinics also were in compliance, having cut back on the use of equipment that is in short supply.
Cleveland-based Preterm, the busiest abortion clinic in Ohio, is not open on Mondays but said it was continuing to take appointments for later in the week.

Officials in Ohio are taking steps aimed at banning most abortions during this phase of the coronavirus outbreak. Cleveland-based Preterm (above), the busiest abortion clinic in Ohio, is not open on Mondays but said it was continuing to take appointments for later in the week
Officials in Ohio are taking steps aimed at banning most abortions during this phase of the coronavirus outbreak. Cleveland-based Preterm (above), the busiest abortion clinic in Ohio, is not open on Mondays but said it was continuing to take appointments for later in the week

Executive Director Chrisse France talks about Preterm in the procedure room in Cleveland
Executive Director Chrisse France talks about Preterm in the procedure room in Cleveland
Bethany McCorkle, a spokesman for Yost, said the orders sent to three abortion clinic operators weren't politically motivated, but rather, were due to complaints from the public. She said they were similar to orders sent to a urology practice.
In Texas, Planned Parenthood did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the order from Abbott, but it was hailed by anti-abortion activists.
'The abortion industry has been consuming and hoarding medical supplies that are in desperate need around the state including masks, gloves, and other protective gear for medical professionals,' said Texas Right to Life.
Carol Tobias, president of National Right to Life, called on abortion clinics nationwide to temporarily halt abortion services.
'Abortion clinics conducting business as usual in the presence of a life-threatening disease shows just how callous pro-abortion groups and abortionists are to protecting life at any stage,' said Tobias.
Bonyen Lee-Gilmore, director of state media campaigns for the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said Planned Parenthood clinics were intend on remaining in operation.
'While public health providers work together in our communities to care for patients whose health care can´t wait, some anti-abortion activists are exploiting the COVID-19 pandemic to push their ideological agenda,' she said. 'This is not a time to play politics.'
There were no immediate reports of other states planning to target abortion clinics with restrictions related to COVID-19, even in Republican-governed states that have been active in passing anti-abortion legislation in recent years.
In Idaho, the governor's office said the state 'has not mandated providers stop procedures of any type. Health systems are determining what procedures are considered elective internally'.
The executive director of Georgia Right to Life, Zemmie Fleck, said she has not heard of any plans by Georgia Gov Brian Kemp to curtail abortions because of the coronavirus. But she suggested such a step would be warranted.

It's unclear if Mississippi's governor will issue a similar order. Jackson Women's Health Organization clinic escorts look for abortion opponents that protest daily at Mississippi's only state licensed abortion facility on Monday
It's unclear if Mississippi's governor will issue a similar order. Jackson Women's Health Organization clinic escorts look for abortion opponents that protest daily at Mississippi's only state licensed abortion facility on Monday 
'Already we see people, even people that I know personally, whose elective surgeries have been postponed due to this pandemic,' she said in a phone interview. 'I would say the same should apply to the abortion industry as well.'
Diane Derzis, owner of the only abortion clinic in Mississippi, told The Associated Press that the clinic had not been told by the state to stop providing the procedure.
'It is our contention that we are an essential service,' Derzis said by phone from Alabama, where she lives.
A spokeswoman for Mississippi Gov Tate Reeves did not immediately respond to a question from the AP on Monday about whether he will order a halt to abortions.
Planned Parenthood Advocates of Michigan says Democratic Gov Gretchen Whitmer's order, issued Friday, to prohibit elective procedures does not extend to abortions. Whitmer supports abortion rights.
Similarly, in North Carolina, health department spokeswoman Sarah Peel said abortion clinics would not be covered by a directive asking hospitals and ambulatory surgery centers to suspend all elective and non-urgent procedures and surgeries.
These medical procedures are defined as those that would not cause harm to the patient if put off for at least four weeks, a letter to hospitals says. 
So surgical abortions are 'not something that would need to be postponed,' said Peel.
Her department is in the administration of Democratic Gov Roy Cooper, who supports abortion rights.



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