The Kansas abortion vote shows that the road ahead is long and perilous. We must resist the temptation to take shortcuts.
The Kansas abortion vote shows that the road ahead is long and perilous. We must resist the temptation to take shortcuts.
H ow do we live with evil? That is one of the questions raised by the outcome of Tuesday’s Kansas abortion vote.
Kansas’s supreme court, like the federal one, read a right to abortion into a constitution that didn’t really say anything about the question, in an act of illegitimate judicial lawmaking. But an effort by Kansas voters to correct that via the ballot box has failed, at least for now. The vote wasn’t even particularly close, something that may surprise you if you don’t know much about the politics of Kansas, which is traditionally a very Republican state but not an especially conservative one.
The parallels between the politics of abortion in our time and the politics of slavery in the 19th century often are overstated, but the earlier controversy does provide an example of how the politics of moral absolutes plays out in the realm of democracy, which is based not on absolutes but on tradeoffs and compromises.
Slavery was an absolute evil, and there were abolitionists in the Republican Party, but the Republican Party was not, corporately, an abolitionist enterprise: It was founded as a conservative anti-slavery (and, though the issue has faded from memory, anti-polygamy) party, one whose program was not immediately and forcibly ending slavery but containing it within the borders of the existing slave states, assuming that the “peculiar institution” eventually would die out of its own accord, an economic vestige in a world that already was passing it by.
Abraham Lincoln himself spelled out the Republican position in his first inaugural address, making as plain and direct a case for “states’ rights” as one could ask for:
Apprehension seems to exist among the people of the Southern States that by the accession of a Republican Administration their property and their peace and personal security are to be endangered. There has never been any reasonable cause for such apprehension. Indeed, the most ample evidence to the contrary has all the while existed and been open to their inspection. It is found in nearly all the published speeches of him who now addresses you. I do but quote from one of those speeches when I declare that—I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.
Those who nominated and elected me did so with full knowledge that I had made this and many similar declarations and had never recanted them; and more than this, they placed in the platform for my acceptance, and as a law to themselves and to me, the clear and emphatic resolution which I now read:
Resolved, That the maintenance inviolate of the rights of the States, and especially the right of each State to order and control its own domestic institutions according to its own judgment exclusively, is essential to that balance of power on which the perfection and endurance of our political fabric depend; and we denounce the lawless invasion by armed force of the soil of any State or Territory, no matter what pretext, as among the gravest of crimes.
In children’s cartoons and cable-news shows, the storyline is Good Guys vs. Bad Guys. But in the real world of democratic politics, there are competing goods and lesser evils, tradeoffs and compromises. Lincoln wanted to get rid of slavery, which he understood as fundamentally evil, oppressing the slave and corrupting the slaveholder and the slaveholding polity. But abolishing slavery was not Lincoln’s only interest: He also wanted to preserve the constitutional order as he understood it and prevent a civil war, and he had personal political interests and his party’s interests to take into consideration. It may be that Lincoln’s speech went deeper into concession than necessary: Frederick Douglass could accept Lincoln’s “I believe I have no lawful right” to interfere with slavery, but he bitterly resented the “and I have no inclination to do so” that followed.
Slavery was not the only evil in the world, and its persistence was not the only possible evil, or even the worst possible evil — it might have persisted and spread, and it might have done so in spite of a bloody war over the question. And so Lincoln concluded that the persistence of slavery was tolerable, given the likely alternatives. Douglass, the former slave, did not see things exactly the same way, and the millions then in slavery very likely would have run the moral numbers in a way that produced an answer different from Lincoln’s.
And so it will be with abortion in the post-Roe era.
Overturning Roe was not the end of the abortion fight but its proper beginning. That fight is going to play out for years in state legislatures and in state courts, and possibly in the federal legislature and federal courts. There will be setbacks, as we have just experienced in Kansas. It will be long and frustrating, and there will be two temptations that must be resisted: The first is doing violence to our constitutional order when we see a shortcut toward our moral goals, and the second, more baleful, is the temptation to hate our fellow Americans when they disagree with us about this important question.
Contrary to the Hegelian determinism of Barack Obama, it is not the case that the arc of history bends toward justice — it bends in whatever direction we bend it. And that which we bend — or break — we must bend or break deliberately, because abortion is not the only evil in the world, and its persistence is not the worst of all possible evils.