Anti-Concessions in the Pro-Choice Movement

     You might have noticed the omission of one word of "March for Women's Lives" would place all participants on the opposite sides of the barracks. It is a cynical observation indeed that people's immediate response to "women's lives" would be completely different from their reaction to "lives". Sunday's assembly in Washington- its very name a transparent attempt at co-opting terms- is really a pro-choice rally, and, like all rallies, is voiced in adversarial rather than persuasive tones. Perhaps the eroding support for abortion-on-demand is due in part to the fact that pro-choicers's operational principle has been that good-faith efforts at persuasion are beneath them, and that demonizing pro-lifers is an acceptable substitute for taking to heart pro-life concerns. Even I got tired of reading about scissors being plunged into crania, but every boilerplate letter was a furtive puncture in the fantasy of what abortion- all abortion- isn't, and perhaps it showed badly that pro-choicers were unable to address it- even to deny it- without abandoning the soft, euphemistic language of choice. The entire urgency of the pro-choice movement is based on an "other"- a malignant political force bent on taking abortion away- and the presence of this other forces them into hardline positions, the divide thus becoming self-generating. If pro-choicers are losing a war on hearts and minds, perhaps their cause could be more urgent for being more patient.

     There is no wrong reason to have an abortion, we are told, "every reason is a valid reason." Ironically, were it not for the existence of an established pro-life movement- searching out every crack and fissure in the dam of our right to choose to send it crumbling,- perhaps these very people might be more critical of what individual reasons for abortion may be. As it stands, however, how can they pass judgment on a silly or frivolous reason for murder when they are unable to say what is a qualifiably different, good enough reason for murder? A woman could conceivably make a grim sport of all the silly and frivolous reasons for having abortions,-- she is protected to the same degree by the same right, and abortion apologists are sworn to the same silence. This active denial of any moral consequence abortion might have only serves to aggravate the pro-life discontent causing it. Worse still- the pro-lifers not yielding- it sometimes responds to the pro-life concern with mockery; in an instant pro-choice indignation turns to pro-choice insouciance, cavalier about the staggering abortion rate-- even making every abortion an incremental victory for "none of your business"... so there!

     As the pro-choice movement makes this anti-concession, they try to chide many pro-lifers into an anti-concession of their own. Abortion, all pro-lifers say, is the taking of a human life and should be treated as such, some pro-lifers making exceptions for rape-- in reality a statistically negligible reason for abortion, but it is principle with which we are dealing. The question then becomes; why is the fetus in this situation not afforded the protections of a human being, even though it still is a human being? A fair question usually cheapened by the leap of logic- dressing tenuous ulterior motives in overly certain language- that this inconsistency proves, demonstrates and shows-once-and-for-all that pro-lifers aren't really concerned about the humanity of the fetus or the mortal nature of abortion, but are "really just about" controlling women's bodies or punishing sexuality or setting back the cause of women, and happen to be rather guileless in these pursuits as well. Perhaps this overeagerness to ascribe an ulterior motive to pro-lifers- there's a handful of motives to choose from, each with an interest as intelligible as the next,- is rooted in an awareness that they are being put in the position unprecedented in conscientious society of asking a person to automatically, uncritically defer to the faceless "any" woman, her "any" reason in an issue of life and death-- an issue involving a human toll shaming any epidemic. This is not an argument most pro-choicers are ready to make, but then this is not an argument any person should be ready to make. If, however, it is not the case that pro-lifers really believe the issue is one of human life, but for some other reason, then the pro-choicer is relieved of the burden of having to do so. Thus is made necessary is the token accusation of pro-life ulterior motive surfacing in every pro-choice argument-- a refusal even to take opposing arguments at face value makes concession impossible.

     Abandoning the rape exception in practice is, obviously, not an anti-concession they want made; what is being offered to pro-lifers in bad faith is an either/or-- either an unadvancable cause or an inconsistent principle. If this choice between does in fact cause pro-lifers to desist,- it won't- it does absolutely nothing to answer the question of whether abortion- in spite of all punishments- might in fact still be murder.

     If we're not supposed to worry about whether or not what happens in this country four thousand times a day is in fact four thousand murders, what exactly is it we are supposed to be worried about? Oh-oh! There are people trying to control women's bodies in an extremely indirect way for reasons too nefarious to make apparent sense! The pro-choice movement assumes the role of the man-on-the-street, rallying the vigilant against this encroaching threat of control-for-the-sake-of-control,- drawing attention from the remarkable shrewdness with which the they have assumed a monopoly over, say, the academy and news media- and the only pro-life movement they seem to want to address is that of congresses and courts and top-down edicts foisted on a grudging people. This is the enemy pro-choicers want to have. They want to grouse about pro-lifers' grand designs of control and coercion; not meaning they are any bigger fans of non-legislative, grass-roots efforts at persuading and helping people not abort pregnancies, not because it is illegal but because it is wrong. There's not enough prison space to toss every abortive mother in jail even if we wanted to; the quantitative nature of the abortion crisis can't help but have a qualitative effect on how it is approached. And the only way to approach it is with something more powerful than brute government force; persuasion-- something that the pro-choice movement- with arguments built around telling people why they really believe that, or only say they believe this, instead of why they should believe otherwise, fanning flames and purposefully getting rises out of pro-lifers- might have forgotten how to do. The language of the abortion rights movement has been so far framed in terms of the "them" and the "us" that, forty years on, even entertaining the idea that pro-lifers might mostly be good people with justifiable concerns would not be a mere change of script but an existential crisis. A good-faith effort at persuasion addressing these justifiable concerns loses the pro-choicer an unambiguous enemy and a socially sanctioned scapegoat, and would dwell too long- to dwell at all could be seen as hesitancy- on the self-explanatory nature of the right to abortion.

     Now, thirty-one years after Roe vs. Wade, a handful of legal wins and court cases- valuable if for no reason other than to bring the issue of abortion to the foreground, to make the reality of abortion difficult to ignore,- and a sway in public opinion over the past few years has been met with calls to arms further couched in war language (Gloria Feldt newest book is predictably titled "The War on Choice.") The language suggests those inarticulable ulterior motives of sexism and repression- refusing even to identify themselves- cannot be appealed to, only battled against. The response to unborn health care and unborn victims of violence legislation has given us comparison to see how myopic those pro-choice goggles really are, and "Choice for Men" splits pro-choicers straight down the middle. There is no moral aspect to any of these that wasn't already implicit in the original right-to-life dilemma, but the pro-choicers have been instructed to trivialize this rather than dignify it, and are at the same exact loss as to how to effectively deal with a "rolling back" of abortion rights or a cooling of public support. The moral is this: what is necessary to effect a status quo isn't always enough to maintain it; pro-lifers would be similarly well advised not to pin their hopes to a fait accomplis.

     "Clinging to a rhetoric about abortion in which there is no life and no death, we entangle our beliefs in a series of self-delusions, fibs and evasions. And we risk becoming precisely what our critics charge us with being: callous, selfish and casually destructive men and women who share a cheapened view of human life." This was written almost ten years ago by feminist Naomi Wolf, who concludes that feminists must be realistic about abortion even as they accept it as a sometimes necessary evil. I think it was not "refreshing honesty" that caused her to say this, but a prescience of the current situation-- an awareness that the mortal lie weighing the pro-choice movement down would only worsen over time unless confronted. To this day, most pro-choicers still turn a blind eye to the disturbing alignment of political clout with forces that genuinely celebrate in the destruction of life. That abortion was an "evil" was her challenge to the cavalier language of the pro-choice movement, but even that abortion was a "sometimes necessary evil" challenges the idea abortion can meaningfully be put in terms only of individual choice.

     The physical location of an abortion is out of plain sight, which allows the language to be euphemistic and soft-focus; as such the abortion discussion tends to fixate onto the stances themselves, abortion's invisibility invites us to abstract, to make the issue wider rather than deeper, and what precisely is at issue is almost invariably lost. Never mind what either the concerns of pro-lifers are "not just about" as a measure of their narrowness or what your concerns are "not just about" as a measure of their breadth, how can you honestly argue for abortion rights if you refuse to consider what the abortion issue really is "just about?" That, in spite of however many ways you can rationalize it, however many ways you can dismiss the pro-lifers' concern in the matter, this unborn life is not the embodiment of a moral system or the will of a state, but a human being-- no moral ideology or overbearing state could create such a thing. America's abortion rate- what even Wolf called a "social evil", and what continues to be despite hopeful trends- can't help but buckle when severed from the collective fantasy that abortion kills anything other than a human being.