Pro-Life Is Progressive

Yesterday, I listened to Jane Coaston’s New York Times podcast, The Argument. In this podcast episode, Coaston, who is (like me) 35 years old, was interviewing three “Gen-Z” 20-somethings about their political ideologies, identifications, and priorities.

All three of the interviewees were thoughtful, articulate, and respectful of one another, even though two of them self-characterized as progressive and the other could be fairly characterized as conservative.

Pronoun announcements aside, Coaston’s interviewees did not sound that different from my peers a decade ago. Moreover, nothing that any of them said surprised me.

There was, however, one thing that stood out: the apparent persistence of a fundamental misunderstanding, shared by both the left and the right, about the debate over abortion.

If Coaston’s podcast participants are even somewhat representative of their cohort, Gen Z apparently accepts the current way of framing this issue without questioning it. But they shouldn’t, because that framing does not make any sense.

The idea that to be against abortion is “conservative” and that to support abortion is “progressive” is completely backwards. This framing has been politically polarizing, culturally embittering, and morally confusing.

In a post-Dobbs country, it is profoundly important that a new generation finally frame the abortion debate correctly, and that we as Catholics (particularly, those of us like me, belonging to the 30% of registered Democrats that are pro-life) take a central role in that reframing.

Radical and Non-Radical Love

Towards the end of the podcast episode, the two progressives emphasized that they wanted to see a world shaped by “radical love.” By this, they meant a world in which we do things—even hard things—for one another, not just for ourselves. This kind of love is radical because it is not the rule. The rule of nature—and of most societies throughout history—is that “might makes right.”

When radical love is powered by faith and reason (as in the case of establishing equal rights for women and men of every race and religion, for example), it is what pushes society to be better tomorrow than we were today. When cheap emotion masquerades as radical love and hijacks faith while ignoring reason (as in the case of the current push toward gender ideology, for example) it is dangerous and fraudulently utopian.

The thing that inhibits radical love is, usually, a competing good: non-radical love. As in, the case for leaving well enough alone, given the practical realities of doing otherwise. For protecting the many sheep right in front of you rather than leaving them vulnerable to go after the lost one.

When non-radical love is grounded in faith and reason (as in the case for law and order that protects potential victims by punishing known victimizers, for example), it is what allows us to live safely through today so that we can see tomorrow. When heartlessness masquerades as non-radical love and relies on a faithless bastardization of reason to push a self-serving agenda (as in the case of unfettered capitalism’s sinful inequalities, for example) it is evil and tyrannically dystopian.

Conservatism, at its best, is the political manifestation of non-radical love. It conserves what has been built, to protect it from destruction.

Progressivism, at its best, is the political manifestation of radical love. It risks damaging what is, to make it better than it was.

Most of us lean toward one or the other, most of the time. All of us that are mature understand that we need both.

Pro-Life is Progressive

When the two Gen Z progressives on Coaston’s podcast endorsed “radical love,” it was not surprising that the lone conservative good-naturedly scoffed at his companions’ “utopianism.” I can’t blame him; those that talk about radical love are often really talking about deference to cheap emotion, especially when they are young.

But, earlier in the show, this young conservative had made clear that he was anti-abortion. If we really understand what that entails, then we must acknowledge that he and all of us in his camp are supposed to be exemplifying profoundly radical love.

People that support access to at least early-term abortion claim that an unwanted pregnancy can pit a woman’s physical, economic, and/or wellness interests against those of her unborn child unless she is able to access the (usually first trimester) abortion that will enable her to delay or forego motherhood. They are entirely correct.

People that support access to abortion more broadly claim that women carrying desperately wanted babies that have been diagnosed with conditions that mean they will die before or shortly after birth will be tortured by the experience of being constantly congratulated on a pregnancy that they know is doomed unless they are able to access the (often later-term) abortion that will enable them to avoid this unspeakably traumatizing experience. They, too, are entirely correct.

These two pro-choice arguments are examples not of evil, but of non-radical love. And they are compelling conservative arguments. It is natural, and it is the historical rule, to protect the interests of those that we can see, that can speak to us in a way that we can understand, that can tell their stories and voice their fears.

The pro-life counter to them both, as to all other arguments in favor of abortion, is that this tiny, submerged, voiceless, storyless creature is in fact one of us, even if we cannot emotionally recognize her or him as such. Just because someone’s presence is profoundly costly to us doesn’t mean that we may extinguish her or his life. Just because some people are likely to die and it will hurt and traumatize us to experience that death in due course, doesn’t mean that we may take their lives by force now.

The pro-life argument is one of truly radical love—at its most extreme, much too radical for most of us sinners to accept. And it is a progressive argument. It is, after all, profoundly unnatural—it requires such wild deference to the unseen—to protect someone so foreign to us, especially when that person has the potential to disrupt all that we hold dear. This is why public support for abortion goes down as gestational age increases. As the baby in utero grows to look and act more like babies we know outside the womb, the love required to protect her or him becomes less and less radical, and more and more accessible for most of us.

There are, of course, evil arguments in favor of unfettered abortion. And there are also evil ways of enforcing anti-abortion laws. But, for each side, those are the low-hanging fruit, and unproductive to focus on.

Abortion is such a confounding issue in part because people that think of themselves as conservative—like the Gen-Z pro-lifer on Coaston’s podcast—roll their eyes at the idea of radical love even though, on abortion, that’s the (progressive) side from which they are arguing. And because people that think of themselves as progressive embrace the idea of radical love without being made to face the fact that, on abortion, their love is of the decidedly non-radical (and, indeed, the conservative) variety.

Catholics and Pro-Life Persuasion

The vast majority of abortions take place before the first trimester is over; today, most of them can be effectuated with a pill. Hence, most of the abortions that were taking place before Dobbs will continue to take place, no matter what the laws say. Moreover, laws that dictate bounty-hunting or punishment for those that obtain abortions are unproductive, heartless, unenforceable, and distracting.

Persuasion is the new frontier of the abortion debate. Not persuasion about what laws to have so much. But persuasion about how to think and feel in situations involving abortion.

Pope Francis understands that to oppose abortion is to show radical love. The Catholic Church writ large understands this, too. But individual Catholics often do not, nor do their non-Catholic friends and neighbors.

The widespread inability of average people to articulate the pro-life position as a progressive argument reliant on radical love diminishes its persuasive potency and thus its long-term efficacy. To fix this widespread cultural misunderstanding, we as pro-life lay Catholics need to do two things.

First, we need to personally and politically articulate, point to, and, most importantly by far, live out the less radical but too rare love for socioeconomically disadvantaged children after they are born. So long as the “pro-life until birth” epithet is (or is perceived to be) true of many pro-life Americans, no one will believe that our argument against abortion is in good faith, no matter how self-evidently progressive that argument is.

Second, we need to acknowledge that non-radical love comes more easily to most of us, and that pro-choice Americans are arguing from a more conservative position on this issue mostly in good faith. As many of us know quite well in reference to myriad other issues, non-radical love is often a testament to security, order, and stability. It represents necessary compromises with the realities of a fallen lower world.

Yes, in the case of abortion, non-radical love is insufficient; only radical love will do.

That’s why most of us, including most of us that call ourselves pro-life, cannot embrace the totality of the pro-life position politically, even if we understand its unimpeachability morally. I am certainly no exception.

What we can do, though, is correctly frame the question and humbly reflect, in the eyes of our pro-choice interlocutors, some incomplete measure of the radical love that we are asking them to understand.