www.slate.com/id/2137775
Center for American Progress to debate the movement's future. One of the panelists reported that the latest annual tally of abortions in this country was 1295 million.
article I brought to the meeting, indicated that our abortion rate exceeds that of every Western European nation. "Raise your hand if you think that number is too high," the conference moderator told the 50 people in the room. The two hand-raisers used to work for pro-choice groups but no longer do. This is the predicament facing the abortion-rights movement. It's led by three kinds of people: Those who see no problem, those who are afraid to speak up, and those who think it's futile. I'm betting that the denial, fear, and futility will give way.
Although I'm pro-choice, I can't claim to be part of the movement. I haven't earned it, and as a professional critic, I can't make such a commitment. So I came, I made my case, and then I shut up and listened. It was like preaching to the choir, except that my preaching was Sunni, and the choir was Shiite. The silence about whether there are too many abortions was partly a nuance problem. Some attendees worried that saying yes would signal approval of restrictions rather than voluntary reductions. The hard-nosed political people in the room probably wanted to slap their foreheads at this hairsplitting.
If you can't connect with these voters, you're in trouble. I'm not a woman, obviously, so I hesitate to say this--but is it really true, as some folks at this meeting argued, that abortion is fundamental to how today's women construct their lives?
Planned Parenthood v Casey, that this generation of women has grown up with the implicit assumption that they can get an abortion legally if they need one. But I find it hard to believe that many women would call this part of how they construct their lives. You construct your life around things you expect, plan, or hope for. You might construct your life around your menstrual cycle or your boyfriend's maintenance of the condom supply. Isn't that the thing you don't construct your life around, because you don't want to think about it? And shouldn't a movement that aims to reflect the way women construct their lives deal with it in that context, as a fallback? My other problem at gatherings like this one is that I'm not a lefty. So, I listened with dismay as some speakers dismissed the abortion debate as a byproduct of racism and misogyny. Pro-lifers don't really care about morality, said one participant: They just "want white women to have more white babies."
National Right to Life Committee have been lunching at Jack Abramoff's restaurant. If you accept that the rightness or wrongness of abortion depends to some extent on circumstance, or that as a general rule, the woman in question is more entitled to weigh the moral factors than Rick Santorum is, that makes you a bit of a relativist. But it was clear at Friday's meeting that many pro-choice activists go further. They argue that abortion is good because it's what a woman wants, and that the goodness or badness of abortion depends entirely on her choice. They insist all choices must be "respected" and "free from stigma." If everything has to be respected, what's the value of respect? If every exercise of liberty has to be free from stigma, how secure is liberty? I have no patience for diplomacy, or, as I prefer to call it, evasion. Right away, I got in trouble for calling abortion "bad." I like such words because they're blunt: They express a nearly universal gut reaction and make it clear which direction you'd like to go. The absolute relativists in the room found these words unacceptable, since they "stigmatize" and "pass judgment" on women and doctors. Liberals treat judgment the way conservatives treat sex: forbid it, except when you're doing it. But I was amazed at the group's reaction to the word "responsibility," which was the subject of the next panel. "Responsibility is to me a code word that has a lot of racial and class ... "I don't like the word 'responsibility,' " said another. "I don't want to talk about responsibility unless we're talking about the government taking responsibility," said a third. Hoping to bring the discussion back to earth, the moderator suggested, "Is there a way for us to reclaim the idea of responsibility?" The answer was a chorus of rejection, punctuated by a "No way!" Fortunately, repression, even when practiced by the left, doesn't work. Again and again, participants who decried stigma, judgment, and overt advocacy of fewer abortions went on to concede that some women find abortion "sad" or that pro-choice policies on birth control and sex education reduce the abortion rate. Advocates who work with post-abortion women were the most explicit. Another called for more stories of women who, while regretting their own abortions, wouldn't deprive others of the choice. Slowly, as though coming to terms with buried sexuality, the abortion-rights leadership is groping for a way to think and talk more frankly about the morality of ending unborn life.
And in part, it's a matter of reflection by some who fought those fights but see how times have changed. Abortion no longer symbolizes freedom and women's rights as it did in the 1960s and 1970s, one old-timer observed; the movement must ask how abortion fits into its mission, not the other way around. Another veteran warned her colleagues that fetal life has become "the elephant on the kitchen table": If you can't acknowledge it, people will tune you out. In the struggle for self-correction, such candor and wisdom will help.
READ MESSAGES Notes From The Fray Editor: The Fray is at its finest in response to Saletan's latest - replete with thoughtful replies, rooted in a wide range of perspectives, and challenging almost every aspect of Saletan's argument.
I do not construct my life around my ability to have an abortion. I DO construct my life around whether or not I want to be a parent nine months from the moment.
Of course I don't want to think about getting an abortion. That's time out of my schedule, money out of my pocket and probably a great deal of emotional anguish. But an abortion is a back up plan *in case* I am pregnant and the things I dearly want in life -- a husband, for one thing, a home, financial security, a fulfilling career I can come back to -- are not in place at that time.
y life isn't constructed around my ability to obtain an abortion. It's constructed around my career, finding my future lover, spending time with my friends, doing my hobbies, planning my vacations, helping my family, and a big part of that planning depends on when I choose to create a family.
Maybe he can attest to the over abundance of male pragmatism in the pro-life movement. It seems to me that their whittling away at the edges of abortion rights is a very pragmatic approach. Therein lies a key difference between the two movements as far as I'm concerned. But they're not women and are content to leave it up to women to protect the right. Not only is the pro-life movement deeply rooted in the male dominate hierarchies of religious institutions, but pro-life thinking men, generally speaking, believe they are fighting for justice and the life of innocents. The women in the pro-life movement aren't threatened by their male allies. The battle over abortion is nothing short of boys and girls vs. They don't have the numbers because their male counterparts are more than content to sit on the sidelines.
I have a friend who had a late-term abortion when she discovered her fetus had Downs. I had zero problem with that until they named the baby and had a memorial service for it. Now, I never said anything to her and I remain committed to the idea that it was her right to make that choice and that never having faced that dilemma I wasn't in a position to disapprove. But if she considered it a human baby enough to name it and have a memorial service, it bugged me that she could then kill it because it wasn't perfect. So, I'm not welcome in the pro-choice crowd or the anti-choice crowd. I'm just representative of the majority of Americans who are told they have to choose sides based...
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