On Abortion: A Lincolnian Position - 95.09
      Return to the Table of Contents.   WENTY-TWO years ago abortion was made an individual right by the Supreme Court. Today it is a public institution--one of the most carefully cultivated institutions in America. It is protected by courts, subsidized by legislatures, performed in government-run hospitals and clinics, and promoted as a "fundamental right" by our State Department. As Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor observed in the 1992 Casey decision, which reaffirmed Roe v. Wade, a whole generation has grown up since 1973 in the expectation that legal abortion will be available for them if they want it.  Today our nation's most prestigious civic groups, from the League of WomenVoters to the American Civil Liberties Union, are committed to its protectionand subsidization. The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education nowrequires that abortion techniques be taught in all obstetrics-and-gynecologyresidency training programs. Influential voices in politics and the media arenow demanding the assignment of U.S. marshals to protect abortion clinicsagainst violence, and a federal law passed last year prescribes harsh criminalpenalties for even nonviolent acts of civil disobedience if they are committedby demonstrators at abortion clinics. Some private organizations thatadminister birth-control programs and provide abortions, notably PlannedParenthood, are closely tied to government bureaucracies: PlannedParenthood receives one third of its income from the federal government. Abortion today isas American as free speech, freedom of religion, or any other practiceprotected by our courts. With this difference: unlike other American rights, abortion cannot bediscussed in plain English. Its warmest supporters do not like to call it byits name.Abortion is a "reproductive health procedure" or a "termination of pregnancy."Abortion clinics are "reproductive health clinics" (more recently, "women'sclinics"), and the right to obtain an abortion is "reproductive freedom."Sometimes the word abortion is unavoidable, as in media accounts of theabortion controversy, but then it is almost invariably preceded by a line ofnicer-sounding words: "the right of a women to choose" abortion. This is stillnot enough to satisfy some in the abortion movement. In an op-ed piece thatappeared in the The New York Times shortly after a gunman killed someemployees and wounded others at two Brookline, Massachusetts, abortion clinics,a counselor at one of the clinics complained that the media kept referring toher workplace as an abortion clinic. "I hate that term," she declared. At theend of the piece she suggested that her abortion clinic ought to be called "aplace of healing and care." The Clinton Administration, the first Administration clearly committed toabortion, seems to be trying hard to promote it without mentioning it.President Bill Clinton's 1993 health-care bill would have nationalized thefunding of abortion, forcing everyone to buy a "standard package" that includedit. Yet nowhere in the bill's 1,342 pages was the word abortion ever used. Invarious interviews both Clintons acknowledged that it was their intention toinclude abortion under the category of "services for pregnant women." Anotherinitiative in which the Clinton Administration participated, the draftreportfor last year's United Nations International Conference on Population andDevelopment, used similar language. Abortion, called "pregnancy termination,"was subsumed under the general category of "reproductive health care," a termused frequently in the report. Why, in a decade when public discourse about sex has become determinedlyforthright, is abortion so hard to say? No one hesitates to say abortion inother contexts--in referring, for example, to aborting a plane's takeoff. Whynot say "abortion of a fetus"? Why substitute a spongy expression like"termination of pregnancy"? And why do abortion clinics get called"reproductive health clinics" when their manifest purpose is to stopreproduction? Why all this strange language? What is going on here?The answer, it seems to me, is unavoidable. Even defenders and promoters ofabortion sense that there is something not quite right about the procedure. "Iabhor abortions," Henry Foster, President Clinton's unconfirmed nominee forSurgeon General, has said. Clinton himself, who made no secret of his supportfor abortion during his 1992 campaign, still repeats the mantra of "safe,legal, and rare" abortion. Why "rare"? If abortion is a constitutional right,on a par with freedom of speech and freedom of religion, why does it have to be"rare"? The reason Clinton uses this language should be obvious. He knows he istalking to a national electorate that is deeply troubled about abortion.Shortly before last year's congressional elections his wife went even furtherin appealing to this audience by characterizing abortion as "wrong" (though sheadded, "I don't think it should be criminalized"). Sometimes even abortion lobbyists show a degree of uneasiness about what it isthey are lobbying for. At the end of 1993 Kate Michelman, the head of theNational Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, was interviewed by thePhiladelphia Inquirer about NARAL's new emphasis on the prevention ofteen pregnancies. The reporter quoted Michelman as saying, "We think abortionis a bad thing." Michelman complained that she had been misquoted, whereuponshe was reminded that the interview had been taped. Nevertheless, NARAL issueda statement a few days later declaring that Michelman "has never said--andwould never say--that `abortion is a bad thing.'" Michelman, who had reason toknow better, sought only to "clarify" her remark in a letter to theInquirer. "It is not abortion itself that is a bad thing," she wrote."Rather, our nation's high rate of abortion represents a failure" of our systemof sex education, contraception, and health care. But a month later Michelmanherself, testifying before a House subcommittee on energy and commerce,insisted that "the reporter absolutely quoted me incorrectly," and she latertold a Washington Post reporter, "I would never, never, never, never,never mean to say such a thing." Not until the Post reporter showed herthe transcript did Michelman finally acknowledge--somewhat evasively --that shehad said it: "I'm obviously guilty of saying something that led her to put thatcomment in there." Whatever else Michelman's bobbing and weaving reveals, it shows how nervousabortion advocates can get when the discussion approaches the question of whatabortion is. Even if we accept Michelman's amended version of herremark, which is that it is not abortion but the "high rate" of abortion thatis a bad thing, the meaning is hardly changed. If one abortion is not a badthing, why are many abortions bad? What is it about abortion that is sotroubling? The obvious answer is that abortion is troubling because it is a killingprocess. Abortion clinics may indeed be places of "healing and care," as thePlanned Parenthood counselor maintains, but their primary purpose is to killhuman fetuses. Whether those fetuses are truly "persons" will continue to bedebated by modern scholastics, but people keep blurting out fragments of whatwas long a moral consensus in this country. Once in a while even a newscaster,carefully schooled in Sprachregelungen, will slip up by reporting themurder of "a woman and her unborn baby," thus implying that something more thana single homicide has taken place. But that "something" must not be probed orexamined; the newscaster must not speak its name. Abortion has thus come tooccupy an absurd, surrealistic place in the national dialogue: It cannot beignored and it cannot be openly stated. It is the corpse at the dinner party. DOUGLAS AND THE DEMOCRATSONLY one other institution in this country has been treated so evasively, andthat is the institution that was nurtured and protected by the governmentduring the first eighty-seven years of our nation's existence: the institutionof slavery.The men who drafted the Constitution included representatives from slave states who weredetermined to protect their states' interests. Yet they were all highly vocal proponents of human liberty. How does one reconcile liberty withslavery? They did it by producing a document that referred to slavery in threedifferent places without once mentioning it. Slaves were "persons"--or,sometimes, "other persons"--in contrast to "free persons." The slave trade(which the Constitution prohibited Congress from banning until 1808) wasreferred to as "the Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of theStates now existing shall think proper to admit." Free states were required toreturn fugitive slaves to their masters in the slave states, but in that clausea slave was a "person held to Service or Labour" and a master was "the party towhom such Service or Labour may be due." At least the founders recognized the humanity of slaves by calling them"persons"; but in the next generation the status of slaves, and of blacks ingeneral, steadily declined. By the end of the 1820s slaves were reduced to aspecies of property to be bought and sold like other property. ThomasJefferson, who in 1776 had tried to insert into the Declaration of Independencea denunciation of the King for keeping open "a market where MEN should bebought & sold," now agonized only in private. Publicly all he could say onthe fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration (the last year of his life) wasthat the progress of enlightenment had vindicated the "palpable truth, that themass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favoredfew booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God,"adding vaguely, "these are grounds of hope for others." Jefferson often shied away from public controversy, but even the mostflamboyant political leaders of the early nineteenth century could becomesuddenly circumspect when the talk turned to slavery. Andrew Jackson leftoffice in 1837 blaming the South's secession threats on those northerners whoinsisted on talking about "the most delicate and exciting topics, topics uponwhich it is impossible that a large portion of the Union can ever speak withoutstrong emotion." Such talk, he said, assaulted "the feelings and rights" ofsoutherners and "their institutions." Jackson, usually a plainspoken man, wouldnot mar the occasion of his last presidential address by saying the words"abolitionist" and "slavery." When slavery was discussed during the antebellumperiod, it was usually in the language of "rights"--the property rights ofslaveholders and the sovereign rights of states. In 1850 the famous Whigsenator Daniel Webster defended his support for a tough fugitive-slave law onsuch grounds. What right, he asked, did his fellow northerners have "toendeavor to get round this Constitution, or to embarrass the free exercise ofthe rights secured by the Constitution to the persons whose slaves escape fromthem? None at all, none at all." Webster supported the Compromise of 1850, which attempted to settle thequestion of slavery in the territories acquired from Mexico by admittingCalifornia as a free state and Utah and New Mexico "with or without slavery astheir constitution may provide at the time of their admission." This lastprinciple was seized upon by Stephen A. Douglas, the "little giant" of theDemocratic Party, and made the basis of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which Douglaspushed through Congress in 1854. Nullifying the Missouri Compromise of 1820, itopened the remaining territories to slavery if the people in them voted for it.Douglas's rationale was "popular sovereignty," a logical extension of states'rights. The premise of states' rights was that any institution a state wantedto have, it should have, so long as that didn't conflict with the Constitution.Since slavery not only did not conflict with the Constitution but was protectedby it, Douglas said, it followed that each state had "a right to do as itpleases on the subject of slavery," and the same principle should apply to theterritories. Douglas's appeal was not to the fiery pro-slavery minorities inthe South, who insisted that slavery was morally right, but to the vastmajority in the North, who simply felt uncomfortable talking about the subject.He assured them that they didn't have to--that they could avoid the subjectaltogether by leaving it to the democratic process. Let the people decide: ifthey "want slavery, they shall have it; if they prohibit slavery, it shall beprohibited." But what about the rights of slaves? That, Douglas said, was oneof those issues that should be left to moralists and theologians. It did notbelong in the political or legal realm. In speaking of the right to own slaves,he said,I am now speaking of rights under the Constitution, and not of moral orreligious rights. I do not discuss the morals of the people of Missouri, butlet them settle that matter for themselves. I hold that the people of theslaveholding States are civilized men as well as ourselves, that they bearconsciences as well as we, and that they are accountable to God and theirposterity and not to us. It is for them to decide therefore the moral andreligious right of the slavery question for themselves within their own limits.Looking back today on Douglas's words, now 137 years old, one is struck by howsophisticated and "modern" they seem. He ruled out of order any debate on themorality of slavery. That was a "religious" question. It had no place in aconstitutional debate, and we had no right to judge other people in such terms.In one of his debates with Lincoln in 1858, Douglas scolded his opponent fortelling the people in the slave states that their institution violated the lawof God. "Better for him," he said, to cheers and applause, "to adopt thedoctrine of `judge not lest ye be judged.'" The same notions and even some of the same language have found their way intothe abortion debate. In Roe v. Wade, in 1973, JusticeHarry Blackmun observed that philosophers and theologians have been arguingabout abortion for centuries without reaching any firm conclusions about itsmorality. All "seemingly absolute convictions" about it are primarily theproducts of subjective factors such as one's philosophy, religious training,and "attitudes toward life and family and their values." As justices, he said,he and his colleagues were required to put aside all such subjectiveconsiderations and "resolve the issue by constitutional measurement free ofemotion and of predilection." As the abortion debate intensified, particularlyafter Catholic bishops and Christian evangelicals entered the fray in the1970s, the word "religious" was increasingly used by abortion defenders tocharacterize their opponents. They used it in exactly the same sense thatDouglas used it in the slavery debate, as a synonym for "subjective,""personal," and thus, finally, "arbitrary." In this view, religion is largely amatter of taste, and to impose one's taste upon another is not only repressivebut also irrational. This seems to be the view of the philosopher RonaldDworkin in his book Life's Dominion (1993) and in some of his subsequentwritings. What the opposition to abortion boils down to, Dworkin says, is anattempt "to impose a controversial view on an essentially religious issue onpeople who reject it." The approach has served as useful cover for Democratic politicians seeking toreconcile their religious convictions with their party's platform and ideology.The most highly publicized use of the "religious" model was the famous speechgiven by Mario Cuomo, then the governor of New York, at the University of NotreDame during the 1984 presidential campaign. Characterizing himself as an"old-fashioned" Catholic, Cuomo said that he accepted his Church's position onabortion, just as he accepted its position on birth control and divorce. But,he asked rhetorically, "must I insist you do?" By linking abortion with divorceand birth control, Cuomo put it in the category of Church doctrines that aremeant to apply only to Catholics. Everyone agrees that it would be highlypresumptuous for a Catholic politician to seek to prevent non-Catholics frompracticing birth control or getting a divorce. But the pro-life argument hasalways been that abortion is different from birth control and divorce, becauseit involves a nonconsenting party--the unborn child. At one point in his speechCuomo seemed to acknowledge that distinction. "As Catholics," he said, "my wifeand I were enjoined never to use abortion to destroy the life we created, andwe never have," and he added that "a fetus is different from an appendix or aset of tonsils." But then, as if suddenly recognizing where this line ofreasoning might lead, he said, "But not everyone in our society agrees with meand Matilda." In other words, it was just a thought--don't bother with it ifyou don't agree. De gustibus non est disputandum.Cuomo's speech received considerable press coverage, because it was perceivedas a kind of thumb in the eye of New York's Cardinal John O'Connor, who hadbeen stressing the Church's unequivocal moral condemnation of abortion. Theargument, then, was newsworthy but not at all original. New York Senator DanielPatrick Moynihan, another pro-choice Catholic, had been saying much the samething since the mid-1970s, and by the 1980s it had become the standardargument. One hears today from the Clintons, from spokespeople for the American Civil Liberties Union, and from the philosopher Ronald Dworkin,the journalist Roger Rosenblatt, and the celebrity lawyer Alan Dershowitz, and from legions ofothers that opposition to abortion is essentially religious, or private, and assuch has no place in the political realm. There is a patient philosophicalresponse to this argument, which others have spelled out at some length, but itfinds no purchase in a mass media that thrives on sound bites. There is also aprimal scream--"Murder!"--that is always welcomed by the media as evidence ofpro-life fanaticism. But is there a proper rhetorical response, aresponse suited to civil dialogue that combines reason with anger and urgency?I believe there is, and the model for it is Abraham Lincoln's response toStephen Douglas. LINCOLN AND THE REPUBLICANSLINCOLN had virtually retired from politics by 1854, having failed to obtain amuch-coveted position in the Administration of Zachary Taylor. Then came thepassage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Stephen Douglas's masterwork, whichpermitted the extension of slavery into the territories. Lincoln was horrified.In his view, slavery was like a cancer--or a "wen," as he called it. It couldbe eliminated only if it was first contained. If it ever metastasized,spreading into the new territories, it could never be stopped. He viewed theKansas-Nebraska Act as a stimulant to the growth of the cancer because itinvited slave-owning "squatters" to settle in the new territories, createelectoral majorities, and establish new slave states. One of the longest andmost passionate of Lincoln's speeches was his 1854 address on the act, whichrehearsed many of the themes that would reappear in his debates with Douglas.Douglas had boasted that the Kansas-Nebraska Act furthered democracy by leavingthe question of whether or not to adopt slavery up to the people in theterritories. Lincoln quickly homed in on the critical weakness in this"self-government" argument: "When the white man governs himself, that isself-government; but when he governs himself and also governs anotherman, that is more than self-government--that is despotism." It wouldnot be despotism, of course, if slaves were not human: "That is to say,inasmuch as you do not object to my taking my hog to Nebraska, therefore I mustnot object to you taking your slave." This, Lincoln said, "is perfectlylogical, if there is no difference between hogs and negroes." Lincoln keptreturning to the question of the humanity of slaves, the question that Douglasruled out of bounds as essentially "religious." Everywhere, Lincoln said, evenin the South, people knew that slaves were human beings. If southerners reallybelieved that slaves were not human, why did they join in banning theinternational slave trade, making it a capital offense? And if dealing in humanflesh was no different from dealing in hogs or cattle, why was the slave-dealerregarded with revulsion throughout the South?You despise him utterly. You do not recognize him as a friend, or even as anhonest man. Your children must not play with his; they may rollick freely withthe little negroes, but not with the "slave-dealers" children. If you areobliged to deal with him, you try to get through the job without so much astouching him. People's moral intuitions could not be repressed; they would surface in allkinds of unexpected ways: in winces and unguarded expressions, in laboredeuphemisms, in slips of the tongue. Lincoln was on the lookout for these, andhe forced his opponents to acknowledge their significance: "Repeal the MissouriCompromise--repeal all compromises--repeal the declaration ofindependence--repeal all past history, you still can not repeal human nature.It will still be the abundance of man's heart, that slavery extension is wrong;and out of the abundance of his heart, his mouth will continue to speak." Douglas tried to evade the force of these observations by insisting that hedidn't care what was chosen; all he cared about was the freedom tochoose. At one point Douglas even tried to put his own theological spin onthis, suggesting that God placed good and evil before man in the Garden of Edenin order to give him the right to choose. Lincoln indignantly rejected thisinterpretation. "God did not place good and evil before man, telling him tomake his choice. On the contrary, he did tell him there was one tree, of thefruit of which, he should not eat, upon pain of certain death. I shouldscarcely wish so strong a prohibition against slavery in Nebraska." Lincoln's depiction of slavery as a moral cancer became the central theme ofhis speeches during the rest of the 1850s. It was the warning he meant toconvey in his "House Divided" speech, in his seven debates with Douglas in1858, and in the series of speeches that culminated in the 1860 presidentialcampaign. In all these he continually reminded his audience that the theme ofchoice without reference to the object of choice was morally empty. Hewould readily agree that each state ought to choose the kind of laws it wantedwhen it came to the protection and regulation of its commerce. Indiana mightneed cranberry laws; Virginia might need oyster laws. But "I ask if there isany parallel between these things and this institution of slavery." Oysters andcranberries were matters of moral indifference; slavery was not.The real issue in this controversy--the one pressing upon every mind--is thesentiment on the part of one class that looks upon the institution of slaveryas a wrong, and of another class that does not look uponit as a wrong. The sentiment that contemplates the institution of slavery inthis country as a wrong is the sentiment of the Republican party. Lincoln has been portrayed as a moral compromiser, even an opportunist, and insome respects he was. Though he hoped that slavery would eventually beabolished within its existing borders, he had no intention of abolishing it.Although he said, in his "House Divided"speech of 1858, that "this governmentcannot endure, permanently half slave and half free," Lincolnmade it clear in that speech, and in subsequent speeches and writings, that hisintention was not to abolish slavery but to "arrest the further spread of it,and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is incourse of ultimate extinction. . . ." In his first inaugural address, desperateto keep the South in the Union, he even hinted that he might support aconstitutional amendment to protect slavery in the existing slave statesagainst abolition by the federal government--a kind of reverse ThirteenthAmendment. The following year he countermanded an order by one of his owngenerals that would have emancipated slaves in South Carolina, Georgia, andFlorida. In that same year he wrote the much-quoted letter to Horace Greeleystating that his "paramount object" was not to free slaves but to save theUnion, and that if he could save the Union without freeing a single slave, hewould do it. But when it came down to the commitment he had made in the 1850s,Lincoln was as stern as a New England minister. Slavery, he insisted, was anevil that must not be allowed to expand--and he would not allow it to expand.He struggled with a variety of strategies for realizing that principle, fromgradual, compensated emancipation to outright abolition, but he never for amoment swerved from the principle. A month after his election Lincoln repliedin this way to a correspondent who urged him to temper his opposition toslavery in the territories: "On the territorial question, I am inflexible. . .. You think slavery is right and ought to be extended; we think it is wrong andought to be restricted." A LINCOLNIAN POSITION ON ABORTIONI SUGGESTED that we can find in Lincoln's anti-slavery rhetoric a coherentposition that could serve as a model for pro-life politicians today. How wouldthis rhetoric sound? Perhaps the best way to answer this is to provide a sampleof what might be said by a politician devoted to a cause but no less devoted tobuilding broad support for it. With the reader's indulgence, then, I will playthat politician, making the following campaign statement:"According to the Supreme Court, the right to choose abortion is legallyprotected. That does not change the fact that abortion is morally wrong. Itviolates the very first of the inalienable rights guaranteed in the Declarationof Independence--the right to life. Even many who would protect and extend theright to choose abortion admit that abortion is wrong, and that killing 1.5million unborn children a year is, in the understated words of one, `a badthing.' Yet, illogically, they denounce all attempts to restrain it or even tospeak out against it. In this campaign I will speak out against it. Iwill say what is in all our hearts: that abortion is an evil that needs to berestricted and discouraged. If elected, I will not try to abolish aninstitution that the Supreme Court has ruled to be constitutionally protected,but I will do everything in my power to arrest its further spread and place itwhere the public can rest in the belief that it is becoming increasingly rare.I take very seriously the imperative, often expressed by abortion supporters,that abortion should be rare. Therefore, if I am elected, I will seek toend all public subsidies for abortion, for abortion advocacy, and forexperiments on aborted children. I will support all reasonable abortionrestrictions that pass muster with the Supreme Court, and I will encouragethose who provide alternatives to abortion. Above all, I mean to treat it asa wrong. I will use the forum provided by my office to speak out againstabortion and related practices, such as euthanasia, that violate or underminethe most fundamental of the rights enshrined in this nation's foundingcharter." The position on abortion I have sketched--permit, restrict, discourage--isunequivocally pro-life even as it is effectively pro-choice. It does not say "Iam personally opposed to abortion"; it says abortion is evil. Yet in its ownway it is pro-choice. First, it does not demand an immediate end to abortion.To extend Lincoln's oncological trope: it concludes that all those who opposeabortion can do right now is to contain the cancer, keep it from metastasizing.It thus acknowledges the present legal status of "choice" even as it urgesAmericans to choose life. Second, by supporting the quest for alternatives toabortion, it widens the range of choices available to women in crisispregnancies. Studies of women who have had abortions show that many did notreally make an informed "choice" but were confused and ill-informedat the time, and regretful later. If even some of those reports are true, theymake a case for re-examining the range of choices actually available towomen.Would a candidate adopting this position be obliged to support only pro-lifenominees to the Supreme Court?To answer this, let's consider Lincoln's reactionto Dred Scott v. Sanford, the 1857 Supreme Court ruling thatCongress had no right to outlaw slavery in the territories. Lincoln condemnedthe decision but did not promise to reverse it by putting differently mindedjustices on the Court. Instead his approach was to accept the ruling as itaffected the immediate parties to the suit but to deny its authority as abinding precedent for policymaking by the other branches of the federalgovernment. If he were in Congress, he said in a speech delivered in July of1858, shortly before his debates with Douglas, he would support legislationoutlawing slavery in the territories--despite the Dred Scott decision.In our analogy we need not follow Lincoln that far to see the valid core of hisposition. Yes, he was saying, the Supreme Court has the job of deciding casesarising under the Constitution and laws of the United States. But if itsdecisions are to serve as durable precedents, they must be free of obviousbias, based on accurate information, and consistent with "legal publicexpectation"and established practice, or at least with long-standing precedent.Since Dred Scott failed all these tests, Lincoln believed that it shouldbe reversed, and he intended to do what he could to get it reversed. But hewould not try to fill the Court with new, "catechized" justices (a process towhich he thought Douglas had been party regarding the Illinois state bench).Instead he would seek to persuade the Court of its error, hoping that it wouldreverse itself. Lest this seem naive, we must remember that he intended toconduct his argument before the American people. Lincoln knew that in thefinal analysis durable judicial rulings on major issues must be rooted in thesoil of American opinion. "Public sentiment," he said, "is every thing" in thiscountry.With it, nothing can fail; against it, nothing can succeed.Whoever moulds public sentiment, goes deeper than he who enacts statutes, orpronounces judicial decisions. He makes possible the inforcement of these, elseimpossible.The lesson for pro-life leaders today is that instead of trying to fill theSupreme Court with "catechized" justices, a strategy almost certain tobackfire, they should content themselves with modest, competent justices whoare free of ideological bias, and all the while keep their eyes on the realprize:"public sentiment." Dred Scott was overturned within a decade bythe Civil War, but Plessy v. Ferguson--the 1896 ruling validatingstate-imposed racial segregation--darkened the nation for fifty-eight yearsbefore it was overturned in Brown v. Board of Education. Yetduring that long night civil-rights advocates were not silent. In thousands offorums, from university classrooms and law-school journals to churches andpolitical conventions, they argued their case against American-style apartheid.In the end they not only won their legal case but also forged a new moralconsensus.It took time--time and patience. The lesson for pro-life advocates is that theyneed to take the time to lay out their case. They may hope for an immediate endto abortion, and they certainly have a First Amendment right to ask for it, buttheir emphasis, Ibelieve, should be on making it clear to others why they havereached the conclusions that they have reached. They need to reason withskeptics and listen more carefully to critics. They need to demand less andexplain more. Whatever the outcome, that would surely contribute to the processof reasonable public discourse. The "campaign statement" Ipresented above is my own modest contribution to thatprocess. It seeks common ground for a civil debate on abortion. It does not aimat a quick fix; it is based on the Lincolnian premise that nothing is possiblewithout consensus. At the same time, it suggests that some measures can betaken here and now, and with broad public support, to contain the spread ofabortion. Would either party, today, endorse such an approach? Probably not.It is easy to see why Democrats would run from it. Since 1972 pro-choicefeminists have become increasingly important players in Democratic Partycouncils. In 1976 abortion lobbies got the Democratic platform committee toinsert a plank in the party platform opposing a constitutional amendmentbanning abortion, and since then they have escalated their demands to includepublic funding of abortion and special federal protection of abortion clinics.No Democrat with serious national ambitions would ever risk offending them. Along list of Democrats who were once pro-life--Edward Kennedy, Jesse Jackson,even Al Gore and Bill Clinton--turned around in the seventies and eighties asthe lobbies tightened their grip on the party. In 1992 Robert Casey, thepro-life governor of Pennsylvania, a liberal on every issue except abortion,was not even permitted to speak at the Democratic National Convention.What is more puzzling--at first glance, anyway--is the tepid reception thepro-life position has received over the years from centrist Republican leaders.In the present, heated atmosphere of Republican presidential politics, mostRepublican candidates have been wooing pro-life voters, obviously anticipatingtheir clout in next spring's primaries. But in the day-to-day management ofparty affairs few Republican leaders have shown much enthusiasm for the cause.Among the ten items in Newt Gingrich's Contract With America there is noreference to abortion (in fact, there is no reference to any of thesocial-cultural issues that the Republicans once showcased, beyond demands fortougher child-pornography laws and "strengthening rights of parents"). TheRepublican national chairman, Haley Barbour, is at odds with pro-lifeRepublicans who accuse him of trying to scuttle the party's pro-life position.The party's leading spokespeople include vocal abortion supporters likeChristine Todd Whitman, the governor of New Jersey, and William Weld, thegovernor of Massachusetts, and its most prominent candidates in last year'selections--Mitt Romney in Massachusetts, Michael Huffington in California,George Pataki in New York--all declared themselves pro-choice. It would be hard to find any Republican seriously seeking national office todaywho would say of abortion what Lincoln said of slavery: "The Republican Partythink it wrong--we think it is a moral, a social, and a political wrong." Why?Wasn't it the Republicans who first promised to support a "human-lifeamendment" outlawing abortion? Didn't Ronald Reagan often use his bully pulpitto speak out in behalf of the unborn? Yes--but that was then. In 1980 theRepublicans set out to woo those who were later called Reagan Democrats, andone of the means was a pro-life plank, designed to counter the plank theDemocrats had put in their platform four years earlier. The wooing worked alltoo well. Many of the conservative Catholics and evangelical Protestants whostreamed into the Republican Party in 1980 were ex-New Dealers, and theyretained elements of the old faith. They may have cooled toward the welfarestate, but they were not opposed to the use of government to promote socialgoals. Their primary goal, the outlawing of abortion, would itself involve theuse of government; but even beyond that, these new "social conservatives" neverreally shared the Republicans' distrust of an activist government. Republicanleaders thus greeted them warily. These Democrats-turned-Republican were seento be useful during elections but a nuisance afterward. During the Reagan yearsthey were given considerable verbal support, which at times greatly helped thepro-life cause (as, for example, at the UN International Conference onPopulation in Mexico City in 1984, when Reagan officials helped push through afinal report stating that "abortion in no way should be promoted as a method offamily planning"), though it never got beyond lip service. During the BushAdministration even lip service faltered as Republican officials decided thattheir party's "big tent" needed to accommodate the pro-choice view. "Read mylips," Bush said, but he was talking about "no new taxes." Bush's failure tokeep his tax promise was seen as a major cause of his defeat in 1992, but inthe ashes of this defeat lay what Republican leaders took to be a new sign ofhope: they figured they could win elections on tax-and-spend issues as long asthey kept their promises; they didn't need the "social issues" people anymore.The Republicans have thus returned to where they feel most comfortable. Back inthe 1880s William Graham Sumner used to say that the purpose of government is"to protect the property of men and the honor of women." Modern Republicanswould hasten to add "the property of women" to this meager agenda, but thephilosophy is the same. It sees the common good as the sum of individualprivate satisfactions. Its touchstone is the autonomous individual celebratedby John Locke in Of Civil Government(1690): "free, equal, and independent" in the state of nature, thesolitary savage enters society only to protect what is his--or hers. Here is a philosophy radically at odds withpro-life premises. If a woman has an absolute, unqualified right to herproperty, and if her body is part of her property, it follows that she has aright to evict her tenant whenever she wants and for whatever reason shepleases. This "despotic" concept of individual ownership is Republican, notDemocratic. If Democrats are pro-choice for political reasons, Republicans arepro-choice in their hearts. Talk radio's greatest Republican cheerleader, RushLimbaugh, has also been an outspoken pro-lifer, but even Limbaugh has beensoftening that part of his message lately--and small wonder. Here is Limbaughcastigating the environmental movement: "You know why these environmentalistwackos want you to give up your car? I'll tell you the real reason. They don'twant you to have freedom of choice." There it is. Freedom of choice: thephilosophical center of modern-day Republicanism. Well, the reader asks impatiently, if Democrats are pro-choice politically andRepublicans are pro-choice philosophically, what's the point of that pro-life"campaign statement"? Who is going to adopt it? Perhaps the good folks in somelittle splinter party, but who else? I answer as follows: American partypolitics is very tricky, at times seemingly unpredictable. Who, in the earlysixties, would have dared to predict that the Democrats would become theabortion party? But there was a subtle logic at work. By 1964 it was clear thatthe Democrats were about to become the civil-rights party. The feminism of thesixties rode into the reform agenda on the back of civil rights (by the end ofthe decade "sexism" had entered most dictionaries as a counterpart to"racism"), and high on its agenda was not just the legalization but themoral legitimization of abortion. Nevertheless, it took a dozen years for thefull shift to occur. I think that within the next dozen years the shift couldbe reversed. To explain why, I must take a long look backward, to the parties'respective positions in Lincoln's time. PRO-LIFE DEMOCRATSIN the 1850s it was not the Republicans but the Democrats who were thechampions of unbridled individualism. As heirs of Andrew Jackson'sentrepreneurialism--and ultimately of Jefferson's distrust of "energeticgovernment"--the Democrats were wary not only of national action but also ofany concept of the common good that threatened individual or local autonomy. Itwas the Republicans, heirs of Whig nationalism and New Englandtranscendentalism, who succeeded--under Abraham Lincoln's tutelage--inconstructing a coherent philosophy of national reform. In The LincolnPersuasion (1993), a brilliant, posthumously published study of Lincoln'spolitical thought, the political scientist J. David Greenstone traced the rootsof that thought to the communitarian "covenant theology" of seventeenth-centuryPuritanism. Lincoln combined this theology, with its emphasis on public dutyand public purpose, with the nationalism and institutionalism of Henry Clay andother leading Whigs, arriving at a position of "political humanitarianism."Lincoln's synthesis, Greenstone noted, did not deny the importance ofindividual development, but it did assert that "the improvement of individualand society were almost inseparably joined." Combining moral commitment withpolitical realism, Lincoln arrived at a concept of the public good thatresonated deeply among northerners, especially those large segments steeped inthe culture of New England. At the time of the Civil War, then, the Democraticand Republican parties were divided not only on the slavery question but alsoon the larger philosophical question of national responsibility. The Democratsadopted a position of economic and moral laissez-faire, while the Republicansinsisted that on certain questions the nation had to do more than formulateprocedural rules; it had to make moral judgments and act on them.This philosophical alignment, persisting through the Civil War andReconstruction, was blurred during the Gilded Age. Then, over the course of thenext forty years, something surprising happened: the parties reversedpositions. Populist Democrats in the 1890s weakened their party's attachment tolaissez-faire, and after "progressive" Republicans (whose model was Lincoln)failed to take over their party in 1912, many started moving toward theDemocrats. Woodrow Wilson welcomed them--and so, twenty years later, didFranklin Roosevelt. By 1936 it was the Democrats who were sounding theLincolnian themes of national purpose and government responsibility, while theRepublicans had become the champions of the autonomous individual. Since thenboth parties have veered and tacked, sometimes partly embracing each other'sdoctrines, but today the congressional parties stand as far apart as they wereat the height of the New Deal. President Clinton may have muddied the waterswith his "me, too, but more moderately" response to Republican retrenchment,but in Congress the programmatic differences between the parties are spelledout almost daily in party-line votes reminiscent of the late 1930s. Now asthen, Republicans emphasize the role of government as a neutral rule maker thatencourages private initiative and protects its fruits. Now as then, Democratsemphasize the role of government as a moral leader that seeks to realize publicgoals unrealizable in the private sphere. If this analysis is correct, it follows that the proper philosophical home forpro-lifers right now is the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. To test this,go back to that "campaign statement" I sketched earlier and make one simplechange: substitute the word "racism" for abortion. Without much editing thestatement would be instantly recognizable as the speech of a liberal Democrat.Democrats know that racism, like abortion, cannot be abolished by governmentalfiat. But they also know that it is wrong to subsidize racist teachingspublicly or to tolerate racist speech in public institutions or to permitracist practices in large-scale "private" enterprises. Democrats also insistthat government has a duty to take the lead in condemning racism and educatingour youth about its dangers. In other words, the same formula--grudginglytolerate, restrict, discourage--that I have applied to abortion is what liberalDemocrats have been using to combat racism over the past generation. Withabortion, as with racism, we are targeting a practice that is recognized as"wrong" (Hillary Clinton) and "a bad thing" (Kate Michelman). With abortion, aswith racism, we are conceding the practical impossibility of outlawing the evilitself but pledging the government's best efforts to make it "rare" (BillClinton et al.). When it comes to philosophical coherence, therefore,nothing prevents Democrats from adopting my abortion position. Indeed, there isvery good reason to adopt it. It is, however, politically incorrect. Any liberal Democrat taking this stancewould incur the wrath of the abortion lobbies. Protests within the party wouldmount, funding would dry up, connections with the party leadership would besevered, and there might be a primary challenge. Because politicians do notcourt martyrdom, the intimidatory power of these lobbies is formidable.But no power lasts forever, and power grounded more in bullying than in reasonis particularly vulnerable in our country. Within the liberal left, from whichthe Democrats draw their intellectual sustenance, there is increasingdissatisfaction with the absolutist dogma of "abortion rights." Nat Hentoff, acolumnist in the left-liberal Village Voice, wonders why those who dwellso much on "rights" refuse to consider the bare possibility that unborn humanbeings may also have a few rights. Hentoff, who is a sort of libertarianliberal, sees a contradiction between abortion and individual rights, but thesocialist writer Christopher Hitchens may actually be more in tune with thecommunitarian bent of post-New Deal liberalism in his critique of pro-choicephilosophy. Hitchens caused an uproar among readers and staffers of TheNation in 1989 when he published an article in which he observed withapproval that more and more of his colleagues were questioning whether "a fetusis `only' a growth in, or appendage to, the female body." While supportingabortion in some cases, he insisted that society has a vital interest inrestricting it. What struck him as ironic, and totally indefensible, was thetendency of many leftists suddenly to become selfish individualists wheneverthe topic turned to abortion. It is a pity that . . . the majority of feminists and their allies have stuckto the dead ground of "Me Decade" possessive individualism, an ideology thathas more in common than it admits with the prehistoric right, which it claimsto oppose but has in fact encouraged.Hitchens's critique of the pro-choice position comes from his socialistpremises, but even some liberal critics closer to the center have adopted asimilar view. The Good Society (1991), by the sociologist Robert Bellahand his associates, reads like the campaign book of a decidedly liberalDemocratic politician, someone who might challenge Bill Clinton from the leftin 1996. The root of what is wrong in America, it says, is our "Lockeanpolitical culture," which emphasizes "the pursuit of individual affluence (theAmerican dream) in a society with a most un-Lockean economy and government."When the authors get to the topic of abortion, they again see Lockeanism as theculprit: it has turned abortion into an "absolute right." In place of this kindof extreme individualism they suggest we consider the practices of twenty otherWestern democracies.There is respect for the value of a woman's being able to choose parenthoodrather than having it forced upon her, but society also has an interest in awoman's abortion decision. It is often required that she participate incounselling; she is encouraged to consider the significance of her decision,and she must offer substantial reasons why the potential life of the fetus mustbe sacrificed and why bearing a child would do her real harm.Despite its use of the strange term "potential life" (a usage favored byJustice Blackmun) for a living fetus, Bellah's formulation expresses coherentlywhat modern liberalism points toward but usually resists at the last minute: aresponsible communitarian position on abortion. It is not the same as mycampaign statement, but it is within debating distance, and setting the twostatements side by side might bring together in civil debate reasonable peoplefrom both sides. Of course, neither position would pass muster with NARAL, NOW, the ACLU, and other pro-choice absolutists. But at some point, I think, soonerrather than later, the grip of these lobbies will have to loosen. One lesson of last year'scongressional elections is that the Democratic Party will suffer at the pollsif it is perceived by the public as the voice of entrenched minority factions.For better or worse, the Republicans articulated a philosophy in 1994, whilethe Democrats, by and large, believed that all they had to do was appeal to"their" people. The party needs to rediscover the idea of a common good, andthe abortion issue may be as suitable a place as any to start. But theDemocrats will first have to break free of the abortion lobbies. That will be aformidable challenge, though not an impossible one. As the political scientistJeffrey Berry has observed, one of the most startling features of modernAmerican politics is how quickly political alliances can shift. Nationalpolitics, Berry writes, no longer works by means of "subgovernments"--cozytwo-way relationships between particular lobbyists and politicians. Today welive in a world of "issue networks," in which many lobbies vie for attention.Something like this, I believe, is starting to happen on women's issues. One ofthe fast-growing feminist groups in the country right now is Feminists for Life (FFL), which has offices nationwide and has recentlymoved its headquarters to Washington, D.C. Founded in the 1970s by former NOW members who had beenexpelled for their pro-life views, FFL supports almost the entire agenda offeminism--except "abortion rights." Citing the pro-life stands of the foundersof American feminism, including Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton,they view themselves as reclaiming authentic feminism. Gay-rights groups,usually allied with the abortion lobbies, now include PLAGAL, the Pro-Life Alliance of Gays and Lesbians. In issue networks,Jeffrey Berry observes, alliances can be composed "of both old friends and strange bedfellows"; there are "no permanent allies and no permanent enemies." The new pragmatic alliancesof gays and straights, religious believers and secularists, feminists andtraditionalists, may soon be demanding seats at the Democratic table. It wouldnot be surprising if they were welcomed as liberators by many Democrats whohave been forced to endorse a Me Decade ideology at odds with the spirit oftheir party. PRO-CHOICE REPUBLICANSWHAT about the Republicans? Where are they headed? It is hard to say. Asalready noted, on a range of domestic issues the party seems to have embraced aphilosophy of possessive individualism that has a distinctly pro-choice ring toit, and in this respect is no longer the party of Lincoln. Lincoln'sRepublicanism, as Greenstone pointed out in The Lincoln Persuasion,combined a Whiggish sense of national responsibility with a New England ethicof moral perfection. Then as now, Republicans believed in capitalist enterpriseand fiscal prudence--but in those days they put them in the service of broaderhumanitarian goals. "Republicans," Lincoln said, "are for both the manand the dollar; but in cases of conflict, the man before thedollar." This was true for a long time in the Republican Party. TheodoreRoosevelt's notion of "stewardship" had traces of the Lincolnian synthesis ofhumanitarianism and institutional responsibility; early in this century many ofthe Progressives came from Republican backgrounds. Even in the 1950sEisenhower's brand of "modern Republicanism" faintly echoed the old traditionof active government and moral leadership. Someday, I think, it will berediscovered. It is a noble tradition.Right now, though, it is out of season. The Republicans are on a laissez-faireroll. The strategy of their leaders is to marginalize right-to-lifers, gettheir plank out of the platform, and avoid any more messy debates over socialissues. They see a golden opportunity to win more recruits by appealing toyuppies and other libertarians who hate taxes and welfare but like "abortionrights." What can be said to these shrewd Republican leaders? In shrewdness andwiliness it would be hard to match Abraham Lincoln. Let us, then, listen toLincoln as he warned against weakening his party's anti-slavery plank in orderto win the votes of "moderates." "In my judgement," he wrote to an IllinoisRepublican official in 1859, "such a step would be a serious mistake--wouldopen a gap through which more would pass out than pass in." Andso today. Many Reagan Democrats came to the Republicans in the 1980s becausetheir own party deserted them on social issues. If the Republicans do the same,many will either drift back to the Democratic Party (many of these, remember,are former New Deal Democrats, rather liberal on economic issues) or join athird party or simply drop out (many evangelicals were apolitical before Reagancame along). For every pro-choice yuppie voter the Republicans won, they mightlose two from the "religious right."In truth, however, no one can be sure about the gains and losses resulting fromone position or another on abortion, and such considerations are beside my mainpoint, which is this: It is time at last in America for the abortion issue tobe addressed with candor and clarity by politicians of both major parties.There needs to be engagement on the topic. Right now, as the philosopherAlasdair MacIntyre puts it, the arguments pro and con on this issue are"incommensurable" --they sail past each other; the two sides are talking aboutdifferent things. Part of the blame for the mindless "emotivism," as MacIntyrecalls it, can be attributed to the more extreme elements in the pro-lifemovement, who have stifled reasoned argument with their cries of "Murder!" Butmuch of it results from the squeamishness of pro-choicers, who simply refuse toface up to what abortion is. Nervousness, guilt, even anguish, are all hiddenbehind abstract, Latinate phrases. Only rarely does reality intrude. That iswhy Christopher Hitchens caused such a howl of pain when he published hisNation article on abortion. His crack about the "possessiveindividualism" of pro-choicers undoubtedly caused discomfort, but what musthave touched a raw nerve was his description of abortion itself. Aftersympathizing with the emotions of rank-and-file members of the pro-lifemovement--with their "genuine, impressive, unforced revulsion at the idea of adisposable fetus"--Hitchens added, But anyone who has ever seen a sonogram or has spent even an hour with atextbook on embryology knows that emotions are not the deciding factor. Inorder to terminate a pregnancy, you have to still a heartbeat, switch off adeveloping brain and, whatever the method, break some bones and rupture someorgans.Here, then, is the center of it all. If abortion had nothing to do with thestilling of heartbeats and brains, there would be no abortion controversy.Suppose, now, I were to define the controversy in this manner: It is a fightbetween those who are horrified by the above-mentioned acts, considering themimmoral, and those who are not horrified and do not consider them immoral."Unfair," most pro-choicers would say. "We are also horrified. Have we not saidthat we abhor abortion? Have we not called it wrong? Have we not said it shouldbe rare?" All right, then, let the debate begin: How rare should it be? How canwe make it rare? In what ways, if any, can public institutions be used todiscourage abortion? If abortion means stilled hearts and ruptured organs, howmuch of that can we decently permit? In this debate I have made my own position clear. It is a pro-life position(though it may not please all pro-lifers), and its model is Lincoln's positionon slavery from 1854 until well into the Civil War: tolerate, restrict,discourage. Like Lincoln's, its touchstone is the common good of the nation,not the sovereign self. Like Lincoln's position, it accepts the legality butnot the moral legitimacy of the institution that it seeks to contain. Itinvites argument and negotiation; it is a gambit, not a gauntlet. The one thing certain right now is that the abortion controversy is not goingto wither away, because the anguish that fuels it keeps regenerating. SomeAmericans may succeed in desensitizing themselves to what is going on, as manydid with slavery, but most Americans feel decidedly uncomfortable about thestilled heartbeats and brains of 1.5 million human fetuses every year. Thediscomfort will drive some portion of that majority to organize and protest.Some will grow old or weary, and will falter, but others will take their place.(I have seen it already: there are more and more young faces in the annual"march for life.") Pro-life protests will continue, in season and out ofseason, with political support or without it. Abortion, a tragedy in everyone'sestimation, will continue to darken our prospect until we find practicable waysof dealing with it in order to make it rare. But before we can even hope to dothat, we have to start talking with one another honestly, in honest language.Copyright © 1995 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.          |
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