Where to Go from Here?

William Murchison

Another election, another political impasse over abortion. You would like the dreary details? Here they are. I quote, for starters, a reliable source—the Family Research Council’s Citizen magazine:

In the House, pro-lifers gained two seats—one in Virginia and the other in Michigan. But three pro-life seats went to pro-abortion Democrats—in California, Oklahoma, and Washington. On most pro-life legislation that will come before the House, [a leading pro-life strategist] expects a pro-life majority—but not a veto-proof one—on issues ranging from taxpayer funding for abortion to a ban on partial-birth abortion.

The Senate is left with “just 44 pro-life votes—a net loss of one . . . there are plenty of votes for a partial-birth abortion ban, but still not enough for ‘sweeping’ legislation.” A larger datum is the absence of votes for conscientious judicial foes of Roe v. Wade, should the Bush administration nominate any of their number to the federal bench.

On the New York Times Op-Ed page, Gloria Feldt, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, went in for a spot of triumphalism. Feldt none-too-delicately warned that if the victorious, and pro-life, George W. Bush “truly wants to unite the nation, he will take into account that the majority of Americans support reproductive rights.” In other words, add up the votes for pro-choice Al Gore and pro-choice Ralph Nader, “and you have a decisive voter preference for reproductive freedom.” Take that!

All the news, to be sure, wasn’t bad. Maine voters beat back an attempt to legalize what is usually, and euphemistically, called “assisted suicide.” Fairly impressive for a generally liberated state, its politics muddled by too long association with Massachusetts (of which Maine in fact was originally a part).

And of course there is the big qualitative change at the top: a president who believes, as he said during the campaign, that “life is a gift from our Creator.” George W. Bush sits where formerly sat the man who supposedly wanted abortion made “rare”—yet never lifted one of those long, pencil-slim fingers to achieve that non-feminist goal.

Right away, the new pro-life president named a defeated pro-life senator, John Ashcroft, as attorney general. (Whether Ashcroft’s former senatorial colleagues would let him take the job remained an open question as these words were written.) Another plus, at the outset, was the nomination of Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson, a pro-lifer, as secretary of health and human services. Tommy Thompson, in the job previously held by Donna Shalala, bosom friend of U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton! Paradise enow.

There is at least one more datum from 2000, and it is not paradisiacal at all. It is retrospective and, I have to say, on the gloomy side. It is . . . put aside the congressional seat counts, the prospects for legislation, the prospects for regulation. It is the mildness and non-dynamism of the pro-life movement in politics, compared with the—well, let’s say the rage and indignation that pro-choice (i.e., pro-abortion) politicians always bring to the table.

Our political leaders don’t talk like their political leaders. Let’s see if we can figure out why. To do this, we have to review.

Pro-life politicians during the past campaign were intimidated almost into silence. Not total silence but the next thing, which was biting of lips whenever the unwelcome question arose: What would you do about abortion?; the quick, formulaic answer, delicately phrased so as to alienate the smallest possible number of voters; the outstretched hand to Those Who Believe Otherwise; the readiness—almost the eagerness—to see the other side’s viewpoint, and thus to be a good guy, firm but tolerant, tolerant but firm.

This is not the style of the pro-choice left. That style is confident, abrasive, strident; intolerant of disagreement, brooking no compromise. It is the style of affected decency and rectitude: no argument known—no honest argument—for restraining a woman bent on abortion. Whereas look at those on the other side—hopeful, if given half a chance, of returning pregnant women to backalley butchery; relics of a different time and place, with scowls and pursed lips, and rather more religious conviction than would seem good for any of us in an age of infinite diversity.

See the other side’s viewpoint? What viewpoint? Nothing to see, nothing to understand. Those who would restrict abortion rights are the sort who resist women’s rights in general. Why listen to them?

And if such a stance might seem closed-minded to some, there were always the media around to assure viewers and readers that in fact the question of abortion is a closed question, the lid nailed down tightly by the Roe v. Wade majority. There would be no sense, would there, in listening to thoughtful presentations by opponents of Copernicus? Would any responsible parties so much as attend an objective debate on the Jim Crow laws? These pro-lifers should wake up. Jan. 22, 1973, was 28 long years ago! Get over it!

In such tones, with such modulation, the advocates of “reproductive freedom” commonly address those who continue to challenge the justice and morality of abortion.

I am convinced the main reason the politicians try to shut down the debate on abortion is that they believe the larger society to have shut it down: which leaves no advantage in the matter for politicians. For run-of-the-mill politicians, I should say, these being the great majority in that questionable profession.

It is not in the nature of democratic—small “d”, please—politicians to lead boldly. Not if the terrain is rough and uphill. Not if the crowd isn’t interested in following.

Blowing the trumpet or banging the drum doesn’t win elections most of the time; playing first alto sax, or sometimes just third french horn, with a certain skill and clarity, is more often the winning ticket.

And thereby hangs a tale of frustration and futility—from the standpoint of Americans who look for the restoration of limits, these days almost any kind of limits, on the right to extinguish unborn life. We look to politicians, many of whom wish—though they are unlikely to say it distinctly—that we would look elsewhere, or anyway look a little less eagerly.

Down to specifics about 2000—who said what and about whom.

On abortion, the two political parties essentially ran in place—Democrats promising to protect the right to choose abortion, Republicans promising (as the Democrats characterized their promise) to undermine that sovereign right. Concerning which there was no room for surprise. Platforms, for all the stir they create before and during conventions, hardly ever are heard of later. You say in them the things your important constituencies want to hear.

More noteworthy than anything said in the party platforms was the tone of post-convention pronouncements on abortion. Democrats took the issue and danced gaily with it.

I got a clue early on. A club whose members are affluent Republican women invited me to speak about the campaign. Fine. Just one thing, though, cautioned the program chairman. Our members don’t want to hear about abortion.

I’m just to pass over the topic?

Yes. It’s really because the members are so divided on the question. It’s such a personal question. They’d rather not hear about it.

Not hear about it. Ummm-hmmmm.

They didn’t hear about it. Not from your obedient servant, who meditated for some time afterwards on the capacity, even among the intelligent, for drowning out unwelcome news. Such as the news that we have, in abortion, a calamitous problem, requiring a remedy.

Let us say I were a notorious liberal, and an influential Democratic women’s club had invited me to speak. Would the program chairman advise omission of the abortion question? What she would want me to do, au contraire, is to warn of the threat Republicans were mounting to the sacred right to choose.

A bit more than this happened during the campaign.

Take the judicial issue. Division on the U. S. Supreme Court, concerning abortion, is the breadth of a hair—5 to 4 for most purposes (excluding the overturning of Roe, for which there is less support). In June, about a month before the Republican convention, the Supreme Court struck down, 5 to 4, Nebraska’s law prohibiting partial-birth abortions. Here was an occasion to rally the troops on both sides.

Bush criticized the justices for voting to uphold a “brutal practice”; he said nothing about how, if elected president, he would work to remodel the court and make sure this sort of thing didn’t happen again.

Al Gore’s reaction was the diametrical opposite. Not a word said he about how it’s too bad we have to suck the brains out of partially born babies’ skulls in order to maintain the delicate balance of constitutional liberties. Numerous words he uttered, and uttered repeatedly, about how if the Republicans got their hands on the court—Whooo-eee, and Katy bar the door. “The next president,” said the vice president, “will nominate at least three and probably four, perhaps four, justices to the Supreme Court. One extra vote on the wrong side of those two issues would change the outcome and a woman’s right to choose would be taken away.”

Got that, ladies? To the phone banks! The fundamentalists are coming, the fundamentalists are coming!

Well, it must work, or else the ever-attuned New York Times would hardly have touted Hillary Clinton’s senatorial candidacy as a means of guarding against “Supreme Court nominees who would compromise the constitutional right to abortion.” (The Times, endorsing Mrs. Clinton, actually set aside her, shall we say, personal liabilities as minor matters compared with her ability to smite pro-lifers hip and thigh.)

Republicans, by contrast, never had much to say about the courts. Publicly. Non-publicly I heard a lot—the courts as the big reason for voting Republican. What Republicans aren’t supposed to do, nonetheless, is challenge frontally the deadly and atrocious thing the Supreme Court did in Roe—and keeps re-affirming with the Democratic party’s blessing and encouragement. Bush said he would appoint “strict constructionists” to the court. Democrats pointed out—rightly—that Bush was speaking in code. The kind of judges he would appoint would cast a fishy eye on Roe. That is, if they were true strict constructionists, reluctant to rewrite the Constitution in their own image.

In short, Republicans may oppose abortion, and hope to “do something” about it, but they’d sure better not talk loudly about those sentiments and intentions, lest they get barbecued for so doing.

What is it about abortion? Whence its magical hold on the political mind? Consider that, because political success is based on ability to reflect the popular will, democratic politicians have a healthy, sometimes too-healthy, regard for vox populi.

The way democratic politicians read the public, the public doesn’t want to do much about abortion—or even hear much about it. (Witness the Republican women I addressed.) So why do the Democrats talk about it? That is the provocative thing. Democrats project themselves as the party of the status quo on abortion—the party that talks about how we don’t need to talk about it any more. This strikes many voters, I would judge, as soothing. We can put a raucous moral topic to the side, the Democrats tell us. It’s a done deal. Forget it. Isn’t there enough else these days to worry about?

I think this is the message many self-described centrist voters hear. This would fit with those poll results describing the public’s ambiguity on abortion—fears of taking life, coupled with fears of compromising precious personal “rights,” and sometimes, no doubt, fears of having conspired, through silence, in the taking of life. The Republican politician, fearing to offend this sensitive center, shies away from confronting the problem. Quieta non movere—Sir Robert Walpole’s motto—he appropriates unto himself. If it ain’t moving, don’t kick it. Before the election, that is. Afterwards—with a sly wink to voters of similar persuasion—afterwards, let’s see what we can do . . .

But “what we can do” in those circumstances usually isn’t much: the public having gone unprepared during the election season for drastic, dramatic action on abortion. The public’s mind is elsewhere: taxes, the economy, Social Security, health care, problems that invite political, not political-moral, attention, hence don’t frighten you to death when you open the morning newspaper. Visions of flickering flames and dancing devils don’t excite—rather they repel—those of whom Auden spoke in 1939:

Faces along the bar

Cling to their average day:

The lights must never go out,

The music must always play.

While it plays, those not embarrassed or discomfited by the prevalence of abortion raise merry hell in support of the cause. These folk believe as firmly in their own proposition as do their critics. They want no tampering. It is more than that: they refuse to forgive tampering—thus showing how unlike Social Security or tax cutting is the issue of abortion. Abortion excites moral fervor not just on the pro-life right but on the pro-choice left.

If the world survives a few decades longer, the psychology of the abortion supporter is a matter likely to fill shelves of Ph.D. dissertations, because the matter is complex and arresting.

A columnist for the web site Voter.com, Margot Magowan, wrote just before the election:

Reproductive rights don’t exist in a vacuum. They have everything to do with women’s economic and political power, women’s access to education and healthcare, women’s status in society, and women’s abilities to take care of themselves and their children.

Such children as they don’t abort, one might interject. But let’s go on. This is interesting.

Choice is a political barometer, indicative of how politicians feel not only about the basic rights of women, but the role of women in society, their beliefs on sex education, health care, poverty, the economy and the part government should play in an individual’s life. A position on choice indicates whether or not your representative will fight to get your kids vaccinated and to make your contraception affordable.

To sum it up:

Pro-choice means women have the choice to graduate from college, the choice to borrow money from a bank to start a business, the choice to get a good job with a fair wage, the choice not to live in poverty and to keep their kids out of poverty. Choice means real equality; that women get to be autonomous citizens—just like men do—with the power to determine their own destinies.

Now whether or not you agree with all that, gentle reader—I myself dissent across the board (but, then, what does a man know?)—this is the kind of reasoning that blows down political redwoods, inundates low-lying fields. This is real passion. I do not defend it; I remark it for the reason that politicians remark it with inspiration, fear, or both.

On the other side of the political street, there is passion, too: the passion of homemakers and clergymen and mothers and legal scholars and pro-life pregnancy counselors who sacrifice hundreds of hours, not to mention floods of honest tears, in defense of unborn life. For one reason or another, this is the brand of passion politicians either hear less or fear less than the other variety.

The other could be called, in political terms, a personal kind of passion. Why that? To defend the personhood of a specific child yet unborn—that isn’t personal? Of course it is: profoundly, and beautifully, so. It is the passion of disinterested love. The oddity of our present moment in history is to see disinterested love of others ridden down by pushing, charging, galloping love of self: the love of “real equality,” of women’s “power to determine their own destinies.”

Which love is better? I think I know. I think you know, too, gentle reader. But the superiority of one or the other isn’t the political question; the political question is, what do I have to do, as a political candidate, to get your vote? What do you want of me? What the pro-choice bloc wants (rights, prerogatives, equality) is intensely political.

Protection for unborn life is a political aim, to be sure. But the protection is for others not even present at the big voter rally or in the room when the confirmation hearing commences. Not present? They are not even born. You see the problem, politically speaking.

When it comes to arm-twisting, those who want something for themselves are normally more effective, not to say intimidating, than those who seek the good of others.

Thus you bolster the sloppy, mushy political center, where hands cover eyes and ears, with the unperfumed passion of the equal rights lobby, and, in political terms what you get is a great cloud of witnesses. No, something better: a puissant bloc of voters, ready to put you in office on the presumption that you will honor your undertaking to defend the sacred right first proclaimed by St. Harry Blackmun.

I suppose it could end there, this political matter, but it doesn’t. Politics isn’t the be-all and end-all, the determinative element in nearly everything human.

Interestingly, that late-blooming politician, George W. Bush, seems to have it about right. When the culture wakes up and sees what is going on, it will put a stop to egregious offenses like abortion. So Bush supposes on considerable evidence. It might have been invigorating to hear him out on the campaign trail bellowing, “. . . And I pledge, if elected, to bend every effort to the extinction of this evil called abortion . . .” Less invigorating would have been to watch the inauguration of Al Gore on Jan. 20, 2001.

I think we must understand that the abortion culture—the culture of death—is unlikely to be extinguished by votes and political action: the number of votes now available for deployment, the kinds of action that seem capable of adoption in the political realm. The main incentives are on the other side. Some lady who sees college and career opportunity as tied up intimately with her abortion rights—you kind of have to watch what you say about abortion in front of her. Unless, of course, you say, lady, by golly, you’re right, and I’m with you every step of the way.

Without in the least giving up on political action (e.g., better a George Allen representing Virginia in the Senate than a Chuck Robb), pro-life folk, I think, need to adjust their expectations regarding the political process. For one thing, too many crushed political expectations at the polls can breed cynicism, discouragement, and withdrawal into quietism and despair. Things aren’t that bad. Just about half of America voted for the presidential candidate who said (however gently and non-provocatively) that he was against abortion. Some voters probably held their noses as they voted for him, but the same is likely true with many who voted for Gore. Far from every Democratic voter favors abortion, say the polls.

The second thing about expectation adjustment is that it could—should —lead directly to programs of cultural reform; programs bigger than ever attempted before, inside and outside churches; more sincere and more passionate. And—yes—humbler, perhaps, in the face of human frailty and sin. Man proposes, but God disposes, wrote Thomas à Kempis. He meant we concoct these big plans but lack the means to put them over. Faithful teaching and witness about the beauty and sacredness of human life, as created by God; human responsibility for the receipt and care of that gift; faithfulness and gratitude to the Creator—here would seem plenty both to affirm and to practice. And of course there is a corollary duty: keeping a watchful eye— maybe two eyes at a time—on those particular humans called to the vocation of making and interpreting laws.

This may be altogether too cheerful a note on which to conclude scrutiny of an election almost won by the pro-choice candidate. If so, I apologize. And, again, I don’t apologize at all.

I have just the sense that better times lie ahead: if not in the short run, then the longer term. That would be, of course, by God’s grace—altogether a more uplifting topic than the misfeasances of the many who don’t mind His saying important things, just His insisting we listen seriously.