The Anti-Abortion Supermajority: Beyond The Abortion Wars

CC: Indeed it does, although it isn’t new language for him. As Franke notes, Kennedy could have gone with autonomy/liberty as the main source of justification for the decision, but he did not. This seems to follow his discomfort with autonomy/liberty as a justification for abortion. In 1992’s Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Kennedy joined Justice O’Connor in fundamentally shifting abortion jurisprudence from autonomy and freedom to permitted restrictions which don’t impose an undue burden on women. Of course, whether a particular law constitutes an undue burden depends on what level of dignity a prenatal child has. And close-watchers of SCOTUS have noticed that Kennedy has become much more open to various abortion restrictions in recent years. In a nutshell, Franke is right to be worried that dignity played such a large role for Kennedy in his gay marriage opinion. If it plays as large a role in the next major abortion case (likely next year…but almost certainly in the next two), then abortion on demand is in serious trouble.

Below: Professor Camosy poses and answers a question interviewers never ask:

CC: You guys don’t really think this mass of tissue is a person like you or me, right? Suppose a million four-year-olds were being killed every year . . . hundreds of thousands simply because they were inconvenient. You’d be rioting in the streets. Right after you got off of work, you’d immediately pick up your sign of a mutilated four-year-old and go picket the buildings where this was happening. You’d make every vote about this issue. You’d work tirelessly to support candidates who would ban the practice, to educate the public about its reality, to create structural changes that would discourage the practice. You’d participate in civil disobedience if laws forced you to participate in the killings. But you aren’t doing these things. Or, if you are, you aren’t doing them with anywhere close to the energy that you would if it were four-year-olds instead of globs of issue. Let’s face it: you don’t really think that globs of tissue are like four-year-olds. What is really going on here is a bunch of social conservatives trying to control the sexual lives of women.”

CC: Now, as my previous answers have shown, the demographics and political views of the pro-life movement mean that the final point is a silly one. But the other points are worth engaging. I work hard in the public sphere to help craft a pro-life message which resists the labels that would come from rioting in the streets and spending every day outside abortion clinics. I want to portray pro-lifers for what overwhelming majority are: mainstream, thoughtful, everyday people, not radical and frightening extremists. In my view, such labels make those we need to convince to join us less able to do so.

But, then again, the challenge present in the question above makes me think there is a place for intense righteous anger, and even rage, in the face of gross injustice and violence. It projects the authenticity of the message and movement. If this is correct, and as much as it makes me uncomfortable, we need a broad and diverse coalition welcome within the pro-life movement: one which includes the moderate who has other things going on besides resisting abortion, the prophet who angrily denounces fundamental injustice perpetrated on the most vulnerable members of the human family, and everyone in-between.

It is a tricky balance to maintain, especially because our opponents will use the rhetoric of the prophetic types against us, but in the long-run it is probably the way to go.