Abortion Gridlock

Never--I repeat that, never--does the issue of abortion lurk far below the surface of American politics.

Pick a day: for instance, the day on which I write these lines, a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving, 1999. It is as I have said: the headlines tell of a tussle over abortion.

Congress and the White House have been twined around each other like Saturday-night grapplers. The issue: whether taxpayer-generated funds (are there any other kind?) should support international "family planning" programs that promote abortion. You know the context, of course: The Reagan administration had said no in the mid-80s; came the Clintonites, subsequently, saying, oh, well, yes, we have to do it, the right to an abortion being inscribed in the Constitution and probably, if you looked, on refrigerator--door magnets and bumper stickers. November found congressional Republicans trying to rectify the situation, with the Clintonites resisting fiercely. The result: a measure tailored to the specific purpose of downplaying differences and saving faces.

All this, I would add, occurred just days after another abortion story: the defeat, by Maine voters, of a proposed ban on partial-birth abortion.

I remark the above occasions not for any out-of-the-ordinary relevance they will bear when those words are published at last in Human Life Review. My purpose, rather, is just to note that we don't get away from this question. And, by the way, for wholesome and obvious reasons. The abortion question is about life and about God. More basic that that, more inescapable, you simply don't get.

What you get, surveying the abortion issue on the eve of the 2000 elections, is ruminative. You may likewise get perplexed. I know I do.

That abortion lies just below the surface of our political concerns, everyone knows. Yet this political season it figures comparatively rarely in political speeches and programs. That would seem to suit the pro-life "right" at least relatively well. Abortion rhetoric in past presidential campaigns rubbed against our sensibilities like sandpaper. The grating is gone. The notes we hear are gentler, measured: Vivaldi's "Spring" after a Penderecki whatever.

Concerning the pro-life cause, something is going on in our political life. Let us see, together, if we can figure what it is, and why.

I would begin by sharing an image. The image, from a book I have been reading--John Keegan's The First World War--is of the trenches on the Western Front, circa 1916, with armies of equivalent numbers and strength arrayed against each other: able to inflict pain and death but unable, for all that, to conquer. The Germans attack Verdun, the British launch the Somme offensive; though hundreds of thousands are killed and wounded, the lines hardly budge. I occasionally visualize the contending parties in the abortion conflict arrayed just about so; hostile, watchful, above all frustrated and immobile.

Another image comes to mind: an image more modern and civilian-like. It is of gridlock, the familiar urban condition that results when cars and trucks overload a segment of road or of city streets. Cars cannot move because the cars in front of them cannot move because the cars in front of them . . . it just goes on. In the abortion traffic jam, do not thousands sit in such a mess, wiping their brows, pounding their steering wheels?

Images are just that--pictures; incomplete and accurate only in the broadest sense. (E.g., pro-choicers, unable to change pro-life minds, still enjoy the legal right to pull off an abortion virtually anywhere they like; their frustration lies in not knowing how long that right may endure.) The images of which I speak are physical images, moreover. The struggle over abortion is intellectual; more to the point, moral; even more to the same point, spiritual. But I think we start to get somewhere, as it were, when we consider thoughtfully our present inability to get anywhere--or gridlock.

A new study by the American Enterprise Institute is helpful in this context. Everett Carll Ladd and Karlyn H. Bowman survey public opinion on abortion. The news is, there isn't much news. "Opinion on abortion," Ladd and Bowman write, "remains very much what it was in 1973 when the Roe v. Wade decision was handed down. Americans do not want to outlaw abortion, but neither do they think it should be completely unrestricted. Their views are at once complex and clear."

"Complex" seems clearly an understatement. Forty-eight percent of Americans, according to a 1999 poll, regard abortion as murder. In 1996, 48 percent declared that they were "personally against" abortion, with just 34 percent "personally for." Yet if asked whether public policy should stop this particular brand of murder, Americans reply in the negative. That would be to interfere. It would compromise the right of "choice." The right to "choose" murder? Yes, that very right. "Most Americans," Ladd and Bowman say, "are at once pro-choice and pro-life."

Moreover, that exceedingly odd state of mind has remained constant. In 1980, the America that just a few months later was to elect Ronald Reagan president affirmed by 62 percent to 19 percent that "If a woman wants to have an abortion, and her doctor agrees to it," she should have it. Eight years later, as Reagan, our most pro-life president since Roe v. Wade, was leaving office, 61 percent said abortion under such circumstances was OK, 25 percent said it wasn't. The "should" vote fell as low as 58 percent in September, 1989, but rebounded to 66 percent in February, 1995. In January, 1998, it stood at 59 percent. A consequence of the negative publicity "partial-birth" abortion has received? Possibly. And possibly not.

Nothing seems greatly to change in this great controversy. A pro-life offensive recovers some lost ground, then the defenders rally, counter-attack, recover a little of the ground—maybe more than just a little. It's back to the mud, the suffering, the tedium, the waiting, while, back at headquarters, the generals plan new moves.

Not even the anticipated onrush of Hispanic voters, who are identified in a woolly way with the Catholic Church and "family values," is likely to alter the circumstances of the struggle. A poll in March, 1999, for the Wall Street Journal (not included in the AEI study) said 70 percent of U.S. Hispanics support a woman's right to elect an abortion.

"Public opinion," even when measured diligently by poll-takers, remains a woolly and shapeless concept. It is a concept all the same to which politicians, who live and die by public opinion, pay rapt attention. You can tell the kind of attention they are paying in the 2000 election. It shapes the caution, the gingerliness, and the delicacy with which the issue is being handled, chiefly by the Republicans.

Bold prognostications about political trends, made in the heat of the political moment, usually end up embarrassing the prognosticator. Recall all those stories about "the death of liberalism" that followed the 1994 congressional elections. It seems relatively safe nonetheless to predict that abortion will not bulk large in the 2000 elections. The opponents of abortion will see to that.

The most developed consensus among Republicans holds that no Somme offensives on abortion are going to do anybody a bit of good--and in fact stand, if undertaken, to get a lot of people killed politically. Crossing No Man's Land astride a white horse has been declared "out" for this season.

A year before the election--November, 1999--George W. Bush was the front-runner, as indeed he had been since declaring his candidacy. Bush describes himself as "pro-life." What he means by "pro-life," nonetheless, is something different from what, say, Gary Bauer means. Abortion, and the need to abolish it, is a central theme of Bauer's campaign. It is a theme, but not a central one, of Bush's campaign.

Would he back a constitutional amendment to ban abortion? He would if the support were there. Is it there? Well, as the Ladd-Bowman study notes, a Yankelovich poll in May, 1996, showed only 28-percent backing for such a amendment and 64-percent opposition. When CBS and the New York Times asked the question in January, 1998, just 22 percent favored a human life amendment, 76 percent opposed it.

Elizabeth Dole, a centrist on human life questions, who opposes abortion save in cases of rape or incest and where the mother's life is at stake, got in trouble last spring when she called the human-life-amendment controversy "a divisive and irrelevant debate."

Stauncher pro-life Republicans than Dole were predictably incensed. More arrestingly, Kate Michelman of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League fricasseed Dole for trying timidly to "have it both ways."

Unnoticed in the ensuing hullabaloo was that most voters seem to want it both ways. If Michelman was indisposed to award Dole any medals for courage, she might have rummaged up one for eyesight. The lady can read polls. "What I'm doing," Dole subsequently said, "is really reflecting what I'm seeing all around the country. For me, there's no question in my mind that people want to see us move forward and accomplish some good things, not just kind of endlessly debate something that really is not going anywhere. It's not going to happen."

Pro-lifers who expect George W. Bush to charge that particular machine- gun nest are likely to be disappointed. Bush prefers to talk about the need to reduce the number of abortions. In 1999, he backed and signed Texas' new parental-consent law. He declines to say he would appoint explicitly "pro-life" justices to the U.S. Supreme Court.

What fascinates is the willingness--nay, the eagerness--of many pro-life conservatives to accept the Bush style of pro-life campaigning. They'd like America to do much, much more for human life--but America, they infer, is unwilling to do much more. The time has come, they admonish, to face facts.

Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and Ralph Reed say they are staring those facts in the eye. They are for Bush: who is not Reagan, granted. But several points (which the Christian right's Big Three don't make explicitly) arise here:

(1) Nobody also is Reagan, who (2) isn't running anyway, in addition to which (3) St. Ron himself never worked particularly hard to achieve a human-life amendment and further (4), on the appointment of pro-life judges, had a mixed record, Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy being cases in point.

O put not your trust in princes, somebody said. Ah, what about Bush, then? Can he be trusted? The Big Three believe so. Likewise Dr. Richard Land, a notable pro-lifer who heads the Southern Baptists' ethics and religious liberty commission and says: "My impression among evangelicals and Southern Baptists is that they are at this point satisfied that Gov. Bush is strongly pro-life, that he is committed to changing the hearts and minds of Americans on this issue and that he believes we cannot substantially change the law until we change hearts and minds."

Even ex-Buchananites like Mike Ferris of the Home School Legal Defense Association are falling in line with the Bush position. Ferris told the New York Times: "Some people think it's a matter of great faith just to support the things that are unrealistic; I don't read the word of God to say that. We stand for ideals. But we stand for ideals in a way that they are going to be accomplished."

Ferris, last time around, was a national co-chairman of the Buchanan campaign. He acknowledges that Buchanan is stronger on pro-life issues than Bush, at the same time, his old hero is "not going to get elected." Sorry about that, Pat.

"Pragmatism," once a dirty word in conservative Republican circles, is clearly making a comeback. Pragmatism--known occasionally as realism-- implies a commitment to what actually works as opposed to what should but doesn't. But when much is at stake should workability be the standard? Firmly, unhesitatingly I would assert: It depends.

I have covered politics and real life--not always to be confused with each other--for 35 years. Let me take a crack at this question. I invite neither dissent nor agreement. Either is fine. The priority, it seems to me, is to talk.

The pragmatists' case rests on what seems to me--how could so many polls over so many years be collectively wrong?--evidence of a moral disarray to which politics is poorly adapted. People who regard abortion as murder, yet who refuse to stay, if you will, the murderer's hand--you want to shake such people hard; maybe, as we say in the South, whop 'em up alongside the head. But there they are. Such people vote. Politicians must find some way of engaging the affections and gratitude of such people, or at least disengaging their anger and wrath. For politicians not to behave like politicians--seekers after approval--would be for lawyers not to behave like lawyers, cooks like cooks, truck drivers like truck drivers. It happens, perhaps, but not regularly.

Now and again, such are the shifts in public mood, pragmatism falls into disfavor. That happened in the '80s. The country stood in peril, and perceived itself so to stand. In this case pragmatism coincided with principle. Principle (e.g., anti-communism, free market economics) worked. It was a wonderful moment. Notice that last word: "moment." As the sun rises and sets, sets and rises, we're on to something else. We live momentarily, in a pragmatic age--one to which politicians like Bill Clinton have helped lead us and from which we labor to extricate ourselves. Yet we live in it.

What now? Unborn children are dying daily in the well-scrubbed, sanitized abortion clinics we were assured would deliver humankind from the misery of the back alley and coat hanger. And not just here: nearly everywhere. Even Catholic Ireland allows Irish women to travel to England for an action hateful to the church commonly supposed to have a death grip on the Irish conscience.

But this is just half the picture. The other half is that people don't care: not so many people at any rate that politicians, professional seekers after approval, are inspired to charge the machine-gun nests.

The minimum we have to do, I would think, is to be pragmatic about pragmatism: to make sure that the creed of workability itself works as advertised. Because it may not. Dangers, as well as opportunities, attach to the pragmatic approach.

It's better to do 50 percent than 30 percent, better 20 percent for that matter than five or even zero. So goes the half-a-loaf theory, a staple of pragmatic discourse.

George W. Bush is marketed as the pro-life cause's half loaf. Yes, of course, we'd love it, we'd adore it, we'd get down on our knees to celebrate Gary Bauer or Steve Forbes or Alan Keyes or Pat Buchanan smiting with a mighty hand those who would deliberately take human life. Dr. James Dobson could become secretary of health and human services, Pat Robertson attorney general. Except that, to quote Elizabeth Dole, it isn't going to happen in the present climate. What could happen is the resurgence of liberal Democratic morale and momentum and the election of Al Gore or Bill Bradley. Such is the pragmatic argument, the argument congenial to growing numbers of pro-life conservatives.

If we don't like the argument, why don't we confute it? Because it makes sense? It certainly does. But I want to mention something else that makes sense: something about human nature. It should put us on guard about half-loafism.

Pragmatism can mean drawing allies into your orbit so as to blow away the political bad guys. It can also mean the fast and easy way out of a predicament; the lowest-common-denominator approach to problem-solving; the relieved mopping of anxious brows by politicians tired of the hassle.

The rationale for backing Bush in 2000 is that his election would create space and opportunity for changing hearts and minds. Experience compels us to be coolly pragmatic about that rationale. Would it actually work that way?

What about an alternative scenario? To wit, Bush enters White House; pro-life "moderates," when abortion comes up at strategy sessions, make excuses, leave the room; heart-and mind-changing initiatives fall into the congressional hopper, only to disappear mysteriously or return for more pragmatic handling; abortion issue in politics sinks below horizon.

Could it happen? Those who insist it couldn't, don't know the realities of politics, where the operative consideration, much more than morality, is power.

Manifestly abortion remains legal because the voting public, glossing over the immorality of killing the unborn, likes abortion legal and available. In the face of this fact, even those of us unsympathetic to politicians as a breed should acknowledge the predicament in which they find themselves.

Do the right thing! we cry. In an ever-more-pluralistic democracy, definitions of "the right thing" vary wildly. What's a people-pleasing politician to do? Ninety-nine times out of 100 he will start his search for the "right thing" in the political territory where the footing is firmest, the terrain least slushy and carved up by rivulets and gulches. The opinion polls will lay out the proper coordinates, and it's on from there.

On abortion, hearts and minds do have to be changed. Who changes them, is the question. The idea of looking to politicians for moral leadership grows ever more tenuous in the Age of Bill Clinton, whose right to novel pursuits, whenever and wherever, and with whomever, the U.S. Senate recently affirmed. The blunting of the impeachment drive could be called a high act of pragmatism, wherein ethics (should he have done it?) gave way to practicality and accommodation (he's there, voters love him, what can you do?).

Politics, in the modern, not the Aristotelian, context, centers on pragmatism. It concerns itself less with hearts and minds than with concrete achievements. I do not mean this cynically. Honest. It is how things are. We have to acknowledge the way things are as well as the way they would be if--in Madison's famous phrase--men were angels (which, you guessed it, they bloody well aren't).

That may be the way of things in politics, but politics, luckily, is far from the whole of life. The non-political rest-of-life offers opportunities for that conversion of heart and mind to which the politicians allude without telling us exactly how they mean to proceed, or on what political grounds. The agents of moral change in Western society have never been the wielders of political power; they have been teachers. This means clergymen; it means writers; it means academics; and, of course, parents.

The collapse of the old moral dispensation in Western society, beginning early in the century but accelerating after World War II, is among the epochal events of post-Reformation history. The collapse occurred not because politicians changed laws but rather because determined interest groups-- organized or unorganized; small like the Supreme Court majority in Roe v. Wade or as large as the surging mobs at Berkeley and the psychedelic throng at Woodstock--clamored to have their way with the rest of us. And got it, after encountering only the feeblest resistance from clergymen, writers, academics, parents. The abortion controversy is of a piece with the whole, ongoing controversy over life and love in an era of unexampled freedom and latitude. What have the teachers to say on these matters? Not enough yet to enforce a consensus on the politicians.

Law, and the politics through which the process of law-making operates, reflect and often enshrine morality. But law, on its way to enactment, has to navigate and find its way through powerful moral currents. I believe that may be where we are right now--all at sea, unable to make purposeful moral statements concerning truth, thus unable to tell our politicians what we really want.

No, you don't have to like politicians to sympathize with them: which, humbly, at this unintelligible moment, I do.

Published by: