gracchusdixit

Though it has been alluded to many times in these pages, the question of abortion has never been engaged directly.  That is because no other question is so tangled and troublesome, so difficult to think about in a clear and consistent way.  That may also be why American attitudes toward abortion have never settled, definitively, in one place.  Although most Americans support abortion under certain circumstances, few support it unconditionally.  Public opinion has been conflicted in this way for decades, leaving many people to wish that the subject would simply go away.

Well, it won’t go away—because it is now abundantly clear that the Republican Party is controlled by those who oppose abortion absolutely, unreservedly, under all circumstances.  In many states, Republican governors and legislatures are well on their way toward banning it.  If Republicans win the next national election, what their minions have already done in Texas and Tennessee, in Mississippi and Missouri, will be imposed upon all Americans, either by legislation or by executive fiat.

It is possible, of course, that the Supreme Court might then reaffirm its 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, which established a conditional right to abortion on 14th Amendment grounds.  Given the conservative bent of today’s Court, however, such an outcome is by no means certain.  Women everywhere would then find themselves living again in the dark back alleys of the 1950s and 1960s—or worse.

The time has come, therefore, to stop skirting this contentious issue, and I do not intend to indulge in the familiar euphemisms that cloud, confuse, and sanitize the debate.  The debate isn’t about being “pro-life” or “pro-choice,” and it isn’t primarily about “women’s health”.  The debate is about abortion, plain and simple.

On both sides, inconsistencies abound.

Those who call themselves “pro-life,” despite all their sermonizing rhetoric, show scant concern for the sanctity of life in general.  Their concern ends with protecting the unborn.  If such people cared even a jot about the lives of women and mothers, they would espouse sex education, contraception, robust healthcare and universal childcare—and they would do so as zealously as they oppose abortion.  But they don’t support any of those things.  On the contrary, they in most cases vehemently oppose them.

More damningly, many “pro-lifers” are perfectly content to support the death penalty, despite overwhelming evidence that capital punishment is arbitrary, ineffectual and racist.  They excuse their muddled moral calculus by trying to distinguish between “innocent lives” and “guilty” ones, as if any of us had the right, or the wisdom, to judge the difference.

On the other hand, many of those who call themselves “pro-choice” insist on discussing abortion as if it were an anodyne medical decision without moral implications.  There is no doubt, of course, that abortion and health are intertwined, that pregnancy and childbirth can be dangerous, or that rape and incest inflict physical and psychological harm on their victims.  There is likewise no doubt that organizations which provide abortion services, like Planned Parenthood, do a great deal more.  But that is not the main consideration animating “pro-choice” advocates.  Their main purpose is to uphold the right of women to terminate pregnancies they either didn’t intend or don’t want.  To pretend otherwise may be rhetorically convenient, but it weakens the argument.

More consequentially, we have for decades wasted time and energy on tangents that distract our attention from the central conflict in this debate—because the conflict itself is so uncomfortable.

The call for “exceptions” for rape or incest is one of those distractions.  As loathsome as such crimes are, they have nothing to do with the fundamental question.  If a woman shouldn’t be forced to bear the child of an abusive rapist or relative, why should she be forced to bear the child of an abusive, absent or abandoned husband?  If she shouldn’t be compelled to live with the consequences of a crime, why should she be compelled to suffer the consequences of a tragic but altogether human mistake?  There are no convincing logical, legal, or moral justifications for such distinctions.

The battle over Roe v. Wade is another distraction.  In that ruling, the Supreme Court saddled us with a compromise that has never satisfied anyone. It declared abortion to be a personal decision protected by an implicit “right to privacy” under the 14th Amendment.  It simultaneously declared the state to have a legitimate interest in protecting life.  Before Roe v. Wade, the state’s interest began with birth.  After Roe v. Wade,  it began with “viability,” i.e., the moment when an unborn child has the “potential to survive” outside the womb, even if that potential must be assisted artificially.

Those who oppose abortion, evangelicals in particular, have never been satisfied by either facet of the Court’s compromise, and they never will be.  For them, life begins the moment a sperm meets an egg, and all other rights must be subordinated to what they believe to be the “sanctity of conception”.    To justify this belief, they invoke Biblical writ and, when that doesn’t work, every bit of pseudo-science they can lay their hands on.

Those who support abortion have never been satisfied by the Court’s Solomonic compromise, either.  For them, the decision whether to give birth is indivisibly private, and any limitation makes a mockery of the “right to privacy” which the Court enshrined.  For the Court to have invoked “viability” as a limiting factor is not only unacceptable, it is deceptive in both medical and practical terms.  What “viability” may have meant in 1973 is undoubtedly different today and in all likelihood will be different in the future.   To accept this limitation would mean that the “right to privacy” isn’t a right at all but, rather, an endlessly negotiable commodity.

What the Supreme Court failed to recognize in 1973, and what most Americans fail to recognize today, is that the fight over abortion isn’t a fight over two rights that can be calibrated, compromised, or balanced.  It is a fight over two conflicting rights—and upholding the one means sacrificing the other.

Nearly 70 years ago, the British philosopher, Isaiah Berlin, stated the problem more succinctly than anyone before or since:

The world that we encounter in ordinary experience is one in which we are faced with choices between ends equally ultimate, and claims equally absolute, the realization of some of which must inevitably involve the sacrifice of others. 

Until we understand that a choice between “ends equally ultimate, and claims equally absolute” requires sacrifice, until we are once and for all prepared to make the sacrifice this choice requires, the debate over abortion will never end.  Either that, or the rights of women will be sacrificed to those who believe that women have no rights.

To give them their due, those who oppose abortion know where they stand.  Those who support abortion should stand no less firmly against them.  Sometimes, there is no middle ground.  This is one of those times.