Pro-Lifers Are Misguided, Not Evil
To protect the right to choose, give some kind words to people who prioritize unborn life.
Legal abortion in the United States is tragically necessary. It is tragic because abortion consists of the termination of a potential human life. Even those of us who are pro-choice know that each of us was an embryo, and then a fetus, before becoming a baby. But it is necessary because a woman who is unready or unwilling to raise a child, or whose health is jeopardized by pregnancy, should not be forced to give birth. In a nation that famously loves freedom (and rightly so), it is far better to incentivize childbirth in positive ways, to make the prospect of motherhood less frightening, than to punish women for trying to control their own lives.
If Democrats want to pass national legislation protecting a woman’s right to choose - as well they should - they will have to reckon with the tragedy of abortion as well as defending its necessity. Even as they stand up for reproductive freedom, they will have to avoid the temptation to dismiss pro-lifers as stupid, retrograde, or misogynistic. It will be a difficult temptation to avoid - there is perhaps no political issue on which emotions run higher on both sides - but like legal abortion itself, it is necessary.
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The day Roe vs. Wade was overturned, an article in Quillette discussed what, in ancient times, often happened when a woman could not raise a child: abandonment or outright infanticide:
“Neonaticide, the killing of infants soon after birth, might sound like a rare crime committed by the occasional deranged adult, but the reality is more disturbing. In every society, contemporary and historic, for which adequate accounts exist, infants have been killed or abandoned to die. And not just the occasional infant here or there. By some estimates, as many as 10 to 15 percent of newborns throughout history have been killed.”
Author Rob Brooks makes the very reasonable case that “drawing on evidence from centuries of history and millennia of evolution…leads to the conclusion that abortion is the most humane alternative to infanticide, adding to the case for safe, legal, accessible abortion for women who need it.”
Now that our society condemns child abandonment, and considers the killing of a child after birth beyond the pale, a pro-lifer may well consider their opposition to abortion to be progressive. If aborting fetuses while protecting children is a moral improvement over killing children, might protecting fetuses as well as children be considered a further moral improvement? Might the practice of terminating fetuses be considered conservative, or even reactionary?
If you believe that there is a moral arc to the universe, this may make sense. If you believe, for example, that the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ can and will redeem the sins of the human race, you may well see the outlawing of abortion – whether banning it anew or continuing to ban it – as progress, a step in the direction of the God’s justice prevailing on earth. And this is not the only way in which a pro-life-as-progress belief can manifest.
I have seen some pro-lifers compare abortion to slavery and to Nazism. All three, by this line of reasoning, dehumanize human beings to justify horrific violence against them. I don’t know how widely held this belief is within the pro-life movement, but I can understand why some would go in for it.
But when you try to put an opinion like that into practice in the real-world political realm, you see the comparison break down. Surely, those who make this argument are aware of the devastating wars it took to end slavery in the United States and defeat Nazism in Europe, aren’t they? Unless they are prepared endorse literal wars to rid the U.S. of abortion (and I have to believe the vast majority of pro-lifers are not truly willing to go that far), the idea that it is really as terrible an atrocity as slavery or genocide is one to reject.
That does not, however, automatically make the pro-choice side the progressive one. It is the liberal side (liberalism values freedom, and women’s freedom to control their lives is rightly valued highly in the United States) but whether progress means more or fewer abortions, or more or less moral acceptance of abortion, is not clear. As with many issues, Democrats must resist the urge to assume that they are on the right side of history.
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If Democrats push for national legislation to make abortion legal in all states, they will not win if they try to make it legal at all times and under all circumstances. Neither side of this conflict is going to completely triumph over the other. The side that shows more willingness to compromise - however painful a compromise will be - and that first makes modest concessions to the validity of the opposing belief - while sticking firmly to its own - will be better positioned to get more of what it wants.
They can start with kind words for organizations often demonized by the pro-choice side: crisis pregnancy centers. However much the left dislikes these places for their refusal to recommend or aid abortion, they deserve defense. They are doing hard work of making life easier for women about to give birth. The energy some progressives expend demonizing them – such as trying to force them to tell women about abortion even though they are morally opposed to it – would be better spent working to broaden access to abortion and contraception.
Democrats can also work with Republican Senators like Mitt Romney and Marco Rubio on efforts to cut child poverty and make motherhood a less daunting prospect. One of the rare encouraging signs on the American right in recent years has been a willingness of many conservatives to question free-market approaches to economic security, to endorse increased government spending to reduce poverty and stabilize struggling families. Republican proposals to expand the child tax credit and enact some form of paid family leave deserve a hearing on the center-left.
The current Romney and Rubio plans have their flaws. Romney would only give the most generous aid to families earning at least $10,000, and would cut the earned income tax credit. And while Rubio proposes paid leave, it would take the form of new parents receiving three months of Social Security early, rather than a new benefit as Democrats often propose. If, as expected, congressional Democrats suffer big losses in midterm elections this year, next year they and President Biden should work with Republicans to build on these proposals: increase the EITC rather than cutting it, let the poorest parents get the maximum CTC, create new paid leave without changing Social Security. (The need for more revenue to realize these goals could lead Biden to go back on his foolish promise to limit tax increases to households making over $400,000 a year.)
Such negotiations would certainly not end the abortion debate, nor should they. But they could help establish common ground between the pro-choice and pro-life sides: they both care about helping working families financially, and empowering mothers financially. This, in turn, might help people on both sides view the other not as demons, but as fellow citizens who have a different belief about how to help women in need.
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The abortion debate pits two moral goods against each other. On one side is protection of unborn life, on the other is protection of bodily autonomy. A good modern society ought to value both, and thus will not be able to give either defenders or opponents of abortion everything they want. If America’s two major parties are to act responsibly – no sure thing – they will have to choose realistic, partial achievement of their goals over unrealistic, absolutist positions.
The two goods are only mutually exclusive if they are presented as clear-cut, black-and-white, good-and-evil alternatives. If, instead, we Americans decide to strike the best workable balance between the two, we can begin to lower the temperature of further debate around abortion, even if the issue is never fully resolved to the satisfaction of either side. Some form of compromise is necessary, even though this means people compromising on some of their most deeply held beliefs.
Caitlin Flanagan’s Atlantic article from December 2019 is still the best, most nuanced, most honest discussion of abortion I have ever read. She is the rare pro-choice writer who fully wrestles with the implications of abortion – that it is a form of killing on at least one level – and yet remains pro-choice. She does not demonize pro-lifers; she merely disagrees with them. Her argument is as much practical as it is moral:
“No matter what the law says, women will continue to get abortions. How do I know? Because in the relatively recent past, women would allow strangers to brutalize them, to poke knitting needles and wire hangers into their wombs, to thread catheters through their cervices and fill them with Lysol, or scalding-hot water, or lye. Women have been willing to risk death to get an abortion. When we made abortion legal, we decided we weren’t going to let that happen anymore. We were not going to let one more woman arrive at a hospital with her organs rotting inside of her. We accepted that we might lose that growing baby, but we were not also going to lose that woman.”
For the sake of women now at risk in many states, let us hope Democrats similarly wrestle with the reality of abortion, and appreciate the value of the pro-life argument even as they do not agree with the goals of the pro-life movement.