Abortion Politics Are All New

A merica’s elected officials, lobby groups, and political observers think they understand abortion politics. It is the social issue that has been with us for most of our lives, the one that doesn’t change. The one that has warped judicial politics for five decades.

Most of these people are familiar with the basic philosophical and moral thrust of argument about abortion. They remember the debates about the pro-life movement’s use of gruesome imagery and the role of religion in anti-abortion activism. They know the general polling that shows American majorities favoring the Roe decision and the polling that shows majorities favoring restrictions on abortions that Roe forbids. They remember the slogans: My Body, My Choice. A Child, Not a Choice. Get Your Rosaries Off My Ovaries. Choose Life. They think they know the terrain of the issue: rape, incest, and health exemptions.

In fact, I think we know almost nothing. This overfamiliarity is itself fooling people. Post-Roe abortion politics are going to look very different.

In reality, abortion politics have been utterly obscured by the fact of the Roe decision itself. National politicians have only rarely debated the issue of abortion with their opponents present.

Many conservative politicians have never really discussed it openly, simply referring to the judicial fight against the Roe decision in the hopes of returning the issue to democratic politics at all. For fear of saying something insensitive or bizarre, Republicans have avoided the issue altogether, or retreat into sentimentalisms. That was until Donald Trump, in a highly watched debate with Hillary Clinton, described with evident disgust what a late-term abortion is, throwing the other side on the defensive.

Many progressives have just been able to promise to defend a woman’s right to choose but have never had to answer a hostile question from an opponent on sex-selective abortion, or on the creepy privatized form of eugenics that Americans practice, nearly eliminating children who suffer certain disabilities before they are born.

The social world is different from how it was in the 1970s. Religious adherence and attendance at religious services are in utter free fall in the United States of America, and yet polling on abortion has hardly budged at all, whereas polling on all other features of the sexual revolution has moved more or less constantly and uniformly in a progressive direction. Why? We don’t know, but the beginning of actual democratic deliberation may help us find out.

When Roe was decided, conventional opinion was influenced by The Population Bomb and other Malthusian fears of overpopulation. Now, we are faced with the reality of a population implosion, of a society that is not just getting older but less dynamic, and less future-oriented as a result. The world of Roe is one where technology and medicine were in very high regard, as liberating forces. Chemical birth control was more likely seen as an unmixed blessing. Nearly 75 percent of infants were fed on formula then.

Now, a culture-wide romance with nature and the organic, led initially by the Left, is changing how many women think of chemical birth control, breastfeeding, and (subtly) abortion as well. Class politics seem to be driving a stigmatization of surgical abortion within the elite. And a certain skittishness about abortion has led to a subtle redefinition of terms. The talk is of “emergency contraception,” not abortifacients.

Progressives want to update their tried-and-true political vocabulary.

And the new gender-identity politics also means that progressives want to discuss abortion in ways that may alienate the traditional audience for pro-choice politics.

We don’t even know yet whether the Supreme Court will indeed overturn Roe v. Wade. But we live in a very different world from that which existed in 1973. The culture is shaped by different taboos, different fears, different aspirations and regrets. None of this is going to play out predictably.