Katha Pollitt, writing in a February issue of the Nation, expresses annoyance with pro-choicers who consider abortion “bad” and call for “zero abortions.” Stop giving the game away, she admonishes them. “The trouble with thinking in terms of zero abortions is that you make abortion so hateful you do the antichoicers’ work for them,” she writes.
Pollitt’s column exposes the growing tension between pro-abortion purists and pro-abortion pols. Under the pressures of an increasingly pro-life political culture, the gap between the two groups is widening faster than most people realize. Notice that pro-abortion purists like Pollitt no longer even pretend to speak as if representing a confident majority. Rather, they speak as an embattled minority, reduced to urging even fellow Democrats to defend a practice with diminishing popular approval.
Bill Clinton’s cynical coining of the phrase, “safe, legal, and rare,” surely represented the beginning of the end of the “pro-choice” movement that Pollitt favors. Democratic pols fell over themselves to appropriate Clinton’s formulation, treating it as a very handy, face-saving talking point. They wanted to telegraph through the use of the word “rare” that they viewed abortion with the same level of disdain as Republicans.
On the other hand, they didn’t want to alienate real pro-choicers. So they tried to explain away their defensiveness by telling pro-abortion purists that the new me-too tone would be the most effective means of preserving legal abortion.
But the repositioning was never designed to save legal abortion; it was designed to save the political careers of Democrats. The culture was slowly returning to a straightforward distaste for abortion and the Democrats were signaling through their new rhetoric that they were ready at some level to follow the culture.
Pro-abortion purists like Pollitt have grown tired of this song-and-dance and can see that the cowardice of elected Democrats is on the side of pro-lifers. In the end, given a choice between saving abortion and saving themselves politically in a culture moving away from it, these Democrats will choose the latter.
All of their changes in tone, ostensibly adopted to save legal abortion from demise, are hastening it. Pollitt correctly assesses the psychology of the debate. By conceding that abortion is bad, pro-choicers lose all footing in it and invite the American people to ask and act on the question: if it is so bad, why is it legal?
William Saletan’s position (which Pollitt singles out for criticism) of morally opposing abortion while legally supporting it isn’t sustainable logically or culturally. Pollitt asked Saletan the inconvenient question that renders his position untenable in a Slate exchange in early February: “You don’t explain why, exactly, you, a pro-choicer, find abortion so outrageous, so terribly morally offensive, so wrong.”
Democrats can’t persuasively call abortion bad merely because it is unpleasant for women (Hillary Clinton has tried to finesse it this way–as a “tragedy” for women without making any reference to the child). Ultimately, they will have to acknowledge the injustice to the child. They are traveling through various stages of concession, a path that will take them from wanting abortion “rare” to calling it “bad” to finally admitting that it is unjust and therefore subject to law.
Abortion activist Frances Kissling, chipping into the debate on Slate, reveals the hopeless wiggling and scrambling involved in sustaining something like Saletan’s position. “While I think there is more work to be done on Will’s statement that ‘It is bad to kill a fetus,’ he does a service by putting it out there so boldly,” she writes. “There are many problems with the word ‘bad’ and how it is heard. A more nuanced way of saying this is that the act of abortion is not a moral good. Things that are not moral goods are not necessarily immoral or bad. And they may, as is the case with abortion, be often justifiable and almost always have positive outcomes.”
Like Pollitt, Kate Michelman, in her recent autobiography, chastises pro-choicers for adopting such an “apologetic” tone about abortion. But even as she criticizes John Kerry and other opportunistic Democrats for highlighting the “moral complexity” of abortion to the detriment of the pro-choice movement, she can’t quite ignore the injustice to the unborn child herself, referring to the fetus as “unique” and a “potential life.” So Michelman is hedging too.
Only the pro-abortion purists, those untouched by the pressures of Democratic politics, will now defend the original ruthlessness that launched the movement. In 2004, Planned Parenthood, sensing that the debate was slipping away from them, tried to revive this unapologetic spirit and merchandised shirts with the statement “I Had An Abortion” on it, and Barbara Ehrenreich, among others, wrote a paean to abortion titled “Owning Up to Abortion.” But these attempts to return the movement to its roots have failed. The grim coherence of the old position that treated abortion as an undeniable good and point of pride has dissolved, and the pro-choice movement, as Pollitt suggests, is finished without it.
–George Neumayr is a writer living in the Washington, D.C. area.