Recently I was invited to speak at a fundraiser organized by Lifespan, a right-to-life group in Michigan. I am not ordinarily a pro-life speaker, having written relatively little on the subject, but I was challenged by the topic that activist Sue Ducharme asked me to reflect on.
Here is the problem. Since the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, the pro-life movement has been laboring mightily to overturn abortion on demand. It has won some small victories: a restriction against partial birth abortion, some parental notification laws, a couple of significant court appointments.
Even so, America continues to have some of the most permissive abortion laws in the world. The pro-life movement has made some progress in its arguments, shifting the center of debate, yet it has failed to put even a dent in Roe v. Wade and successor rulings. Three and a half decades after Roe, the abortion casualty toll approaches a staggering 50 million.
"If our pro-life case is so good," Sue Ducharme asked me, "why aren't we winning?"
It doesn't make sense to argue, I told the guests at the Lifespan dinner, that many Americans remain doubtful that the unborn are human persons with rights. Even if this is true, in a case of this importance, you have to give the unborn the benefit of the doubt. If a hunter sees something move behind a branch and isn't sure whether it's animal or a human being, is it reasonable for him to go ahead and shoot?
Moreover, it seems particularly bizarre for liberal Democrats whose chief political virtue is compassion to be such champions of abortion rights. These are people who are able to produce moist eyes for just about every excluded and vulnerable group in the world. They feel the pain of the seals, they grieve over sex trafficking in Asia, and they are inconsolable over the plight of the children in Darfur. These causes produce in them genuine indignation and mobilize them to defensive action. Why then do the unborn right in their own communities inspire no similar compassionate concern?
The "pro-choice" slogan offers no explanation, because of course the legitimacy of choice obviously depends on the question of what is being chosen. Abraham Lincoln exposed this argument a century and a half ago. He argued that if Negroes are hogs, then there can be no question that people have the choice to buy and sell them. On the other hand, Lincoln contended, if Negroes are human beings, then how can one invoke choice in order to deny choice to other human beings? Lincoln's argument is that choice cannot be defended without regard to the content of choice.
Why then, in the face of its abominably bad arguments, does the pro-choice movement continue to prevail legally and politically? My answer is that abortion is the debris of the sexual revolution. We have seen a great shift in the sexual mores of Americans in the past half-century, and there is a widespread social understanding, especially acute among elites, that if there is going to be sex outside of marriage, there are going to be a considerable number of unwanted pregnancies. Abortion is viewed as a necessary clean-up solution for this social problem.
In order to have a sexual revolution, women have to have the same sexual autonomy as men. This ideology, however, is contradicted by the laws of biology. Consequently feminists like Gloria Steinem and Shulamith Firestone, who championed the sexual revolution, found it necessary to denounce pregnancy as a kind of outside invasion of the female body. The fetus became, in Firestone's phrase, an "uninvited guest." As long as the fetus occupied the mother's womb, these activists argued, the mother should be able to keep or get rid of it at her discretion.
If you're going to make an omelet, the Marxist revolutionaries used to say, you have to be ready to break some eggs. By the same token, if you're going to have a sexual revolution, you've got to be ready to clean out the debris. After thirty five years, the debris has become a mountain, and as a society we are still adding bodies to the heap.
No one in the pro-choice camp, of course, wants to admit any of this. It's not only politically embarrassing, it is also embarrassing to one's own self-image to acknowledge a willingness to sustain permissive sexual values by killing the unborn. Despite the lack of public candor, however, my analysis might help to explain why otherwise compassionate people fight so tenaciously against the most helpless and vulnerable of all living creatures, the unborn.
It is bad enough to be losing politically; it is worse not even to know why you are losing. If I am on the right track, it follows that pro-life arguments are not likely to succeed simply by stressing for the umpteenth time the humanity of the fetus. The opposition already knows all this. Rather, the pro-life movement must take into account the larger cultural context of the sexual revolution that, invisibly but surely, sustains the triumphant advocates of abortion. It is time to go back to the drawing board.
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