After three decades of intense political debate, what more is
there to say about abortion? Even most seasoned observers assume
that anybody who cares to has taken one side or the other by now
and that any book devoted to the subject would only rehash the same
familiar arguments. To approach all such efforts with a “why
bother?” attitude would be a mistake with regard to William
Saletan’s Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion
War (University of California Press, 327 pages, $29.95).
The book’s title alone will shock the average conservative, who
likely looks at the present national environment on abortion with
despair and even some disgust: Somewhere in the vicinity of 40
million abortions have been performed in the United States over the
last thirty years. Choice that ends fetal life continues to be
exercised more than 1 million times per year, and the Roe v.
Wade legal regime that ratifies all this remains entrenched
into the foreseeable future. But Saletan, Slate’s clever
chief political correspondent, doesn’t use the words “pro-life” and
“conservative” interchangeably.
Instead, he sees abortion policy as being largely dictated by a
group he calls “pro-choice conservatives.” Saletan’s thesis is that
the rationale for legal abortion has shifted away from the feminist
ideals of protecting women’s control over their bodies and
childrearing as a means of securing their full participation in
society to more conservative grounds like limited government,
privacy and upholding middle-class family values.
You can hear what he is talking about when pro-choice arguments
veer away from the movement’s favorite slogan about “a woman’s
right to choose.” Soon it becomes “a decision to be made by a woman
and her doctor.” Before long, her clergy and family are involved.
What was once the individual choice of one woman ends up being
billed as something that is going to be decided by a virtual ethics
panel comprised of important people in her life, carefully weighing
each moral issue before coming up with a King Solomon-like verdict.
The important thing is that the government has no say, especially
those nosy politicians with their wicked pro-life ways.
Such rhetoric has always coexisted with more radical feminist
pronouncements in pro-choice polemics. But it doesn’t take much
effort to notice the incongruities between the two. Parents,
husbands and boyfriends are exactly the sorts of people feminist
pro-choices have long wanted specifically removed from undue
influence over the abortion decision. So too with clergy — get
your rosaries off my ovaries and all that. But the pro-choice
conservative position simply would like to prevent such parties
from influencing government policy; the issue isn’t a woman’s
choice per se but whether the government will be involved in
restricting abortion.
By Saletan’s account, the largely feminist activists of NARAL
first allowed themselves to be co-opted by pro-choice conservatives
during a 1986 battle over a referendum in Arkansas that would have
banned taxpayer funding of abortion. The state was Democratic but
conservative. Its governor, Bill Clinton of “safe, legal and rare”
fame, was pro-choice but opposed to taxpayer-funded abortions and
publicly in agreement with the ballot question’s “stated purpose.”
The pro-life administration of Ronald Reagan was in its sixth year
and had just named anti-Roe Antonin Scalia to the Supreme
Court and promoted Roe dissenter William Rehnquist to
chief justice. What were the pro-choices to do?
Win by swinging right, as it turned out. Initiative opponents
ran an ad asking parents to contemplate what would happen if their
14-year old daughter were raped and became pregnant as a result.
Would they like the government to step in, take decision-making
authority on what happens next away from “you (the parent), your
doctor, your preacher, your daughter” and arrogate it for itself?
Never mind that the initiative was about taxpayer funding, not
banning abortion. Note that the daughter figures last in the
hierarchy of people who ought to be making the decision in the
absence of government coercion. Note also the emphasis on rape
victims rather than women pregnant by other means seeking elective
abortions. The Arkansas initiative was narrowly defeated, but only
by suppressing the feminist pro-choice position in favor of
arguments designed to appeal to conservatives.
“So what?” you might now be tempted to ask. “The liberals won
anyway. So what does it matter?” Saletan would argue that their
victory came at the expense of the original motives of the
pro-choice feminists. As pro-choice conservatives helped propel
such Democratic candidates as Douglas Wilder and Harris Wofford to
victory while contributing to the defeat of Robert Bork’s
nomination to the Supreme Court (in his view — in my opinion, this
is his least persuasive example), they framed their pro-choice
position on increasingly conservative grounds. They supported
parental notification (and in some cases consent) laws and ended up
opposing taxpayer funding.
Pro-lifers responded by co-opting pro-choice conservatives on
these issues and jettisoning large parts of their own agenda,
beginning with opposition to abortion in cases of rape and ending
by remaining only nominally in favor of a general abortion ban.
Although Saletan is clearly less sympathetic to pro-lifers, he
notes that they too moved away from first principles in the
process. By 1992, he argues, the Democratic and Republican
presidential candidates had operationally converged on
abortion.
BEARING RIGHT CONTAINS a lot of overlooked insights into
the abortion debate and overall is remarkably dispassionate and
free of rancor. Saletan deserves points just for sticking with the
terms “pro-life” and “pro-choice”: “Every attempt at unbiased
language — for example, reserving the term anti-abortion to
describe those who would outlaw the practice, or calling them
‘anti-abortion-rights’ instead of ‘pro-right-to-life’ — adds a new
bias. The least biased solution is to let each side choose its own
name.” I unsuccessfully made this same argument as a freshman in a
college journalism course.
Nevertheless, Saletan’s focus on “pro-choice conservatives” is
an oversimplification. First, he argues that they are defined by a
hostility to government activism, yet they are the same group that
voted to continue taxpayer funding of abortion in Arkansas (a
policy this group elsewhere by definition opposes) and favors
incremental restrictions like a ban on partial-birth abortion. A
more likely explanation is that much of the electorate is deeply
conflicted about abortion. They agree with pro-lifers that it is
wrong, but are either reluctant to appear judgmental or fearful of
the consequences of banning it — for their daughters, their
sisters, other pregnant women and themselves as taxpayers. The real
swing bloc in the abortion debate is that great confused middle
that stretches from those who are pro-choice with restrictions on
the left to those who are pro-life with exceptions on the
right.
Saletan also demonstrates a certain naïveté about
the extent of pro-choice idealism. Legal abortion has always to
some extent relied on the fears of people who did not want their
daughters getting pregnant unexpectedly, their tax bills rising due
to increased welfare costs or their sexual behavior interrupted by
their partner’s pregnancy. Planned Parenthood was criticized for
eugenic tendencies before it even supported legalizing
abortion.
Finally, Bearing Right exaggerates the extent to which
abortion policy has been set democratically. Since Roe the
courts have been decisive, which may be a reason overlooked by
Saletan as to why both sides of the debate only tinker at the
margins of the issue in election campaigns.
Conservatives would do well to read Saletan’s book as an
intelligent analysis of contemporary abortion politics. But they
should define what they consider winning far more ambitiously than
he does.
