Some personal thoughts on an issue that has roiled American society for 50 years.
Some personal thoughts on an issue that has roiled American society for 50 years
W hatever there is to say about abortion, has been said. Whatever there is to say about anything, has been said. There is nothing new under the sun. Not really. More and more, I appreciate biography, autobiography — life stories. The personal.
In 2006, I gave a speech at the annual fundraising dinner of a crisis-pregnancy center. There was certainly nothing I could tell these people about abortion. They knew the issue backwards and forwards. So I told them about some of my own experiences.
No, I have never had an abortion. No, I have never been pregnant. If you think this disqualifies a person from commenting — okay, then.
In any event, I will say some things, today, that I said at that dinner, those years ago.
Sometimes people will ask a pro-lifer, “Why are you guys so hot on abortion? Why is it, like, the most important thing in the world to you?” One way to respond is: “If you viewed abortion as we do, and saw that your country sanctioned it in law, you’d be hot, too. You would consider nothing more important.”
I was once talking with a pro-choice politician, a Republican conservative. I liked and admired him very much. I said, “You don’t regard abortion as murder, or tantamount to murder, do you?” And he said, forthrightly, “No, I don’t.” Fair enough. If he did — he would be a pro-lifer, for sure.
Are there pro-lifers, in the political class, who are insincere? Who don’t give a rip about abortion? Who are kind of going with the flow, or doing the politically expedient? No doubt. But there must be sincere ones too.
As I look back, I don’t believe I was ever pro-choice. Not in any committed, convinced way.
But, hang on, before I continue, I should say a word about language. About terminology.
Long ago, I resigned myself to the conventions of “pro-life” and “pro-choice.” But I don’t really like them. With every passing year, I dislike euphemisms more. If you want to call me “anti-abortion,” fine with me. I call myself that. Abortion in general is a worthy thing to be anti, I think. I’ll even accept being called “anti-choice,” in this context. Obviously, no one supports all choices, or the legality of all choices: Willie Sutton can’t rob banks, just because he wants to.
Am I equating women who have abortions with bank robbers? Look, I am thinking things through and offering some points.
In any case, I will use “pro-choice” and “pro-life” mainly for convenience.
As I was saying, I don’t believe I was ever pro-choice, even though I wasn’t an outright pro-lifer. I never believed the ’70s slogan that “a fetus in a woman’s womb has no more standing than a hamburger in her stomach.” That just didn’t seem right to me. Often, the unborn child was called “a meaningless blob of protoplasm” — that was a catchphrase, for a long time: “meaningless blob of protoplasm.”
I didn’t believe that, either.
There was a bumper sticker, seen on cars all around town: “If you don’t like abortion, don’t have one.” Okay. But was that all there was to it? A mere choice, like soup or salad?
With regard to abortion and me — funny phrase — I don’t have any epiphanies to report. But I do have a few waymarks.
During the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of college, I was a camp counselor in Elgin, Illinois. It was Camp Wa-ta-ga-mie, known by some as “Camp Want My Mommy.” I was reading the Chicago Tribune every day, and I noticed a column by someone — I can’t remember who it was, and I can’t find it, on the great, wide Internet. But the column concerned a case in the area. And this, the Internet does remember.
A baby had been born — John Francis McKay. He was born with a cleft palate, a harelip, and a heart condition. His father, Daniel, told the doctor not to do anything “heroic.” Then, when John was 25 minutes old, his father took him to a corner of the delivery room and bashed his head against the floor. Twice. That finished the baby.
And the father was charged with murder.
The Tribune columnist said something like, “Is what he did so different from abortion? If the baby had been aborted some days or weeks before, everyone would have understood and applauded. And now, a murder charge?”
After a couple of mistrials, Daniel McKay was let off.
In 2015, a student at Muskingum University, in Ohio, killed her baby, immediately after she (the baby) was born. The mother, the murderer, Emile Weaver, was sentenced to life in prison. In a piece about the case, I wrote,
Judge Fleegle told Emile that her baby had been “an inconvenience, and you took care of it.” Could not the same be said about millions and millions of abortions? To be sure, there are very hard cases, and some pregnant women make a desperate, anguished decision. But aren’t other abortions simply a matter of . . . you know, taking care of it?
And how did Emile Weaver take care of it? “With her own hands,” I wrote.
That is, she killed her baby herself. Other women — her sorority sisters, perhaps — have others do the killing, in clinics. Emile could have too. It is neater, and it is of course lawful. But is it different, really and truly?
In my final paragraph — a summing up — I wrote,
Emile did a very bad thing. A monstrous and evil thing. But is she worse — all that much worse — than her counterparts who dispose of their babies earlier and more neatly? I have a hard time buying it. And I think we are a deeply hypocritical society.
I really do.
All right, back to those formative years I was talking about . . .
In college, I followed the abortion debates closely. (I liked politics.) The pro-choice side never got very far with me. They were always saying, “A woman has a right over her own body. A woman must be sovereign over her own body.” I believed that, mainly. (We can talk about laws against suicide another time.) But I could not accept that, in aborting a child, a woman was merely exercising her sovereign right over her own body: because another body was involved, a separate one, with a life of its own. A mother had a kind of stewardship over that body, a custody, for the nine months of gestation.
And, presumably, beyond.
It further occurred to me that we don’t own our children. We don’t own them as we do teacups, bicycles, and houses. They are not chattels. This is true when they are one month old, five years old, 16 years old — always.
And it was clear that we could not do with our children whatever we wanted: We couldn’t tie them to bedposts; we couldn’t drop-kick them off cliffs; we could not abuse them. The state intervenes all the time. Parents are not allowed life-and-death powers over their children — of course.
What else? Sometime in the mid-1980s, Bernard Nathanson, a former abortion doctor, came out with his film The Silent Scream. It featured some startling images, showing what happens in an abortion. That could not help making an impression. What we see, through technology, can’t help making an impression.
In 2011, I talked with Thomas Sowell, about a range of issues. Let me quote from the subsequent piece I wrote:
Asked to comment on abortion, Sowell says, first, that the courts should have stayed out of the matter. “They were solving what was basically a non-problem. There was no serious controversy over abortion prior to Roe v. Wade.” States were addressing the issue in their various ways. Second, it is almost impossible to get “an honest discussion” about abortion. No one will say what an abortion actually is. We resort to euphemism and other methods of avoidance. Sowell says that, like many people, he had always thought of abortion in a particular way: An “unformed mass of cells” existed “somewhere in the body”; a doctor removed it, and that was that. But “once I began to learn about these ultrasounds,” it was plain that “there’s a little person in there,” which is a “different ballgame.” Sowell notes that people like to say, “A woman has a right to do whatever she wants with her own body.” But it should be obvious that there’s another body in question.
In 2019, I talked with George F. Will — who said,
Is it possible that abortion will look 70 years from now the way segregated buses look today? I think it’s possible. I don’t think we will ever go back to a regime of banning abortions. I do think, however, that the technologists who have produced the wonderful sonograms and ultrasounds that have made real the abstraction of fetal life — once you see the beating heart and the moving fingers and the lips of a ten-week-old pre-born child, the argument changes.
He further said,
Young couples, who fancy themselves pro-choice on the abortion question, are expecting a child. They get their first sonogram, and they take the picture home and put it up on their refrigerator, and they name the coming baby “Ralph” or “Susie” — it changes you, it just does. You cannot any longer speak of “fetal material,” and you no longer speak of abortion as “fetal material undergoing demise” . . .
I often quote Gene Genovese, the historian. He was married to a fellow historian, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, who founded the Women’s Studies department at Emory. This was the leading such department in the country. Betsey Fox-Genovese died in 2007. And two years later, Gene came out with a beautiful little book called “Miss Betsey: A Memoir of Marriage.”
About the issue at hand, Gene wrote, “She gagged on abortion for a simple reason: She knew, as everyone knows, that an abortion kills a baby.”
As everyone knows. It’s kind of so, isn’t it?
Pro-lifers make an analogy between abortion and slavery, and maybe they, we, make too much of it. But, when I was coming of age, I could see that a nation could tolerate something, for a period — even a very long period — and still be wrong. Majority consent, or inaction, was no proof of rightness. I could also see that a nation could classify a whole group of people as non-persons, or partial persons, or not-quite-persons.
Pro-choicers claimed that pro-lifers were “imposing morality” on their fellow citizens. That did not cut much ice with me. Righteous groups had imposed morality all the time, as in the abolition movement, as in the civil-rights movement. Most people approve of “imposing morality,” in many contexts. In our anti-murder laws, for example.
And I was completely unimpressed with the idea that life had to be “viable.” That was a buzzword for a while, and maybe still is: “viability.” I had to ask, “What’s viability?” A three-year-old can’t hop into his Camaro, drive down to the Kroger store, and return home to fix himself dinner. No, that child is dependent on his parents, or someone — as is the child in the womb. As are the sick, as are many elderly, and so on. We don’t discard people simply because they can’t fend for themselves.
The idea of “trimesters,” to me, was laughable. Totally arbitrary. Just a trick. I could never swallow the legitimacy of Roe v. Wade, a ruling that has long embarrassed even pro-choicers, attuned to the Constitution.
Back to the “trimesters” for a moment. A first-trimester baby is smaller than a second-trimester baby. Who is smaller than a third-trimester baby. A newborn is smaller than a month-old baby. Who is smaller than a two-year-old. A two-year-old is smaller than a five-year-old. Who is smaller than . . .
Does it really matter, the size of the child? In logic, does it matter? Everything that is living starts small and grows, doesn’t it?
I knew a lot of people — a lot of good people — who were pro-choice: people I admired, even loved. As I think about it, almost all of my nearest and dearest have been pro-choice. What am I to make of that? I think a lot of people have never really considered the issue — not in any sustained, probing way. I also think that people have blind spots, to all sorts of things. Maybe I do too.
Many years ago, I walked past three women of my acquaintance. One of them was pregnant, and they were oohing and aahing over the sonograms. All of them were pro-choice. I said, “Remember, that’s just a meaningless blob of protoplasm.”
They were so mad — hopping mad. I shouldn’t have said it. I was immature, rambunctious. Still, I don’t see how you can get googly over a sonogram while denying that a fetus is a human being deserving of life.
Another time, I was talking with a pro-choice friend of mine about abortion. She was a wonderful woman: humane, warm, loving. She had recently had a son, whom she adored. Because I could talk to her, I asked whether the experience of having a child affected her pro-choice position. She said no. I wondered why this was so. She said she couldn’t explain it.
Fine. A lot of things can’t be explained.
I don’t know about now — I don’t circulate much — but, when I was in my twenties, people were always asking, “Okay, Mr. Pro-Lifer, what about rape, incest, and the life of the mother? Huh? Huh?” The first thing I did was say, “Okay, I’ll give you those cases — that small percentage of all the abortions that take place. Now let’s talk about abortion, if you want.” Often, this rape/incest/life-of-the-mother business was no more than a dodge.
And yet I had to think about why I opposed abortion: If I thought that abortion was the wrongful taking of innocent human life, I could not say that the circumstances of conception were relevant. If the big concern was the child, what did it matter whether he or she was conceived in blissful circumstances — on a blanket in a sunny meadow with the birds chirping — or in the most brutal back-alley rape? The child was pure and blameless, regardless.
And yet who can fail to sympathize with the victims of evil crimes?
I remember a moving speech in Congress. It was by Jim Lightfoot, a Republican from Iowa, who explained that he did not know in what circumstances he had been conceived. He may well have suspected the worst. But he had been put up for adoption, and was grateful for life.
The 1990s saw a new slogan, concerning abortion: “safe, legal, and rare.” That was a puzzler for me. I could understand “safe” — safe for the woman doing the aborting. And I could certainly understand “legal.” But why “rare”? If abortion is not the taking of innocent life, why should it be rare? If it is no different from an appendectomy, why should it be rare? No one ever goes around saying, “There are too many appendectomies in this country. We have to cut down the rate of them.” That would be absurd.
You could not help noticing that many people were reluctant to say the word “abortion.” Pro-choice people, I mean. Pro-lifers said it freely. But the other side spoke of “the right to choose,” letting their listeners fill in the blank. They did not mean the right to choose a public school, let’s say.
It can be incredibly corrupt, the language of our abortion debates. In discussing partial-birth abortion, the Associated Press referred to a “fetus outside a woman’s body.” Normally, that’s known as a baby. One abortion doctor, testifying to Congress, spoke of rendering a woman “unpregnant.”
We enter Orwell territory.
Some people, knowing that unborn life is life nonetheless, like to talk about “meaningful life” — and when you talk that way, you open the door to a great deal of mischief. You issue a license to do practically anything. Think of the depressed, with the shadow of Dr. Kevorkian looming over them . . .
We are cautioned against slippery-slope arguments, and often these arguments are bunk — but not invariably. I think that abortion has contributed to what some call “the disposable society,” whereby you simply dump what you don’t like, or have turned against, or find inconvenient: a baby, a spouse, whatever. In one sense, abortion is a betrayal, and one betrayal makes others easier.
It’s not at all surprising that mothers carrying children with Down syndrome are pressured to abort. Some parents are rebuked for having had such children. And I know parents of three, four, or more children — normal and healthy children — who are similarly rebuked: merely for having more than their allotted 1.5 or whatever.
I’ve gone on for a while, so I should wind down. I will say a final word or two.
Whenever I think about abortion, or am challenged to think about it, I come back to one question: What is it? I’m not talking about abortion now — I’m talking about the object inside the mother’s womb. What is it? Is it a human life, a baby — even a very tiny baby? And if it’s not, what is it? What is it instead? This is the question I can’t get around. This is the question I have never been able to get around. You cannot nuance abortion, in my opinion. Ultimately, you have to face the question: What is it?
Once, I was at a conference, talking about politics, and my politics in particular. My emphasis was on freedom. During a Q&A, someone asked me (angrily) how I could reconcile my statements on individual freedom with my opposition to abortion. I could only reply, “Everything hinges on your view of the unborn child. Are we talking about human life — or are we talking about something more like an appendix? Everything flows from the answer to that question.”
The most ardent libertarians oppose abortion, if they see unborn life as human, deserving of protection. And many do.
Last week, the Washington Post published a fascinating article headed “A mother, daughter and the abortions that came between them.” The daughter has had two abortions. This pains and appalls the mother. At the end of the article, the daughter is quoted as saying, “My abortions were an act of love. An act of love to myself, an act of love to my family. And I hope that they one day see it that way.”
People come to their views of abortion however they do. I’ve told you how I came to mine, more or less. Have I made sense? I’ve given an honest account, if nothing else.