(Originally posted November 12, 2013)
Many years ago, back in grad school I’d say, I was reading about various “common ground” projects – people who considered themselves pro-life attempting to band together with people who called themselves pro-choice in a project to find “common ground.” It was the usual sort of moderate happy-talk: women who get abortions don’t really want the abortion but feel compelled due to the tragic circumstances in their lives, so if only we focus on helping them, all will be well. In addition, everyone agreed that killing abortion doctors was a bad, bad thing, and pro-lifers and pro-choicers pledged to acknowledge that the Other Side consisted not of evil people, but of people of goodwill who simply differed in their beliefs.
I think there was even a group that called itself “Common Ground” — but I can’t find anything online.
Of course, it was a difficult project to begin with — the pro-choice version of “helping women” generally consists of free and widely available contraception, along with extensive drilling at school, and free maternity care and generous maternity leave if pregnancies happen. The pro-life version combines abstinence (generally not objecting to contraception but being quite uncomfortable with normalizing premarital, and especially teen and casual, sex), encouragement of adoption and private charitable action, along with government programs on a safety-net basis.
But I have the impression that abortion-rights activists have changed direction in a way that really precludes any “common ground” project — instead of Bill Clinton’s “safe, legal, and rare” formulation, the National Abortion Federation now promotes “safe, legal, and accessible” and has this to say:
Abortion Is a Valid and Positive Reproductive Choice
Over the years, abortion has been stigmatized by those who view it as the least desirable, or a completely unacceptable, reproductive option. It is critical not to give in to the pressure to stigmatize abortion as the one invalid reproductive choice among all the options facing a pregnant woman.
We all want to reduce the number of unplanned pregnancies, but there is no reason to single out abortion among all a woman’s reproductive choices as the one choice which is somehow less valid or acceptable than childbirth, adoption, or other reproductive choices. Abortion is a valid personal decision within the continuum of health care.
Opponents of abortion often portray abortion as a negative problem that society should try to eliminate. While we work to reduce the number of unplanned pregnancies, abortion is a valid and acceptable reproductive choice. For most women who have made this choice, abortion is not the problem, but is a life-affirming solution to the problem of unplanned pregnancy.
I was thinking about this because of a feature that Slate’s Double X blog linked to, profiles in New York Magazine of 26 women who had abortions. I won’t slog through them a second time for the details, because reading these stories a single time was creepy enough, but here’s the reality: most of these abortions were of the “abortion as back-up birth control” category. Yes, a few of the stories were of the “hard case” genre, but the theme was “I don’t have to justify my abortion.” Women got abortions because they were seeing men who were jerks, who insisted they get the abortion or, even if not, were clearly not father material. Women got abortions because they’d already had their “perfect” number of children, or just didn’t want another this soon after the first. Women were in college, in grad school, finishing their Ph.D.s. Women got abortions because they just didn’t want to have a baby, and abortion is the logical way to handle this difficulty. (In a few instances, the dad was disappointed, but for the most part, the father either didn’t factor into the story at all, or was equally happy to be rid of the imposition. In one particularly creepy case, the woman was cheating on her boyfriend at the time, so he was all the more willing to “get rid of it” and she praised him for his support.) No amount of social services would make a difference in these stories.
And it feels like the gulf is growing. Once upon a time, I could reasonably view someone who’s prochoice as honestly believing that the lines between what’s illegal and what’s just morally questionable should be drawn differently than what I see, and that their “prochoiceness” was as legitimate as someone “personally opposing” putting a pet down as opposed to caring for it through its sickness. But I find the demand that casual sex is a right, and that ready access to abortion is a necessary corollary to that casual sex right, to be an insurmountable barrier to finding solutions.
Which, of course, feeds into other issues. Solving the issue of fatherless children by insisting that people only have sex with someone who’s father-material (or “mother-material), and only under circumstances in which one could reasonably parent (that is, with a somewhat open definition of what makes it possible to parent a child, not just under ideal circumstances) violates this “casual-sex right” so radically it’s practically not even an option.
But wow — I hadn’t really been intending to write much on social issues, but I’m running out of things to say about ObamaCare, and my gut reaction to this New York piece was so strong I didn’t want to leave it alone.
Lunch break over!
UPDATE on 7/3/14: there’s a piece over at the theothermccain.com blog which takes a more “benefit-of-the-doubt” approach: “After four decades of rhetoric about “choice,” and two decades of lectures about “safe sex,” younger Americans apparently assume that it is normal for sex to be sterile, and that for sex to produce its natural result (pregnancy) is something weird.” In other words, young people these days can’t help it, because they’ve been conditioned to think that sex is, in its very nature, a recreational activity only, with pregnancy as much of an unnatural “accidental” effect as a car accident is the result of driving. Do I buy it? I’m not sure. But it does explain the fact that so many people seem absolutely horrified at the Hobby Lobby ruling, and seem quite genuine rather than cynical (that is, I don’t think this is just a bunch of Dems trying to milk this for the War against Women angle).
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