Much time is spent during abortion debates on the imputing and impugning of motives. Without it, coverage of the Texas legislative battle over late-term abortion, for example, would consist mainly of blank pages and dead air.
But political outcomes are not always reducible to the
intentions of the winner. Results are often influenced by deeper trends
that neither side of a debate can do much to change or control.
The national abortion settlement declared by Roe v. Wade
— rooting a nearly unrestricted right to abortion in the right to
privacy — has been unstable for 40 years. The reason is a tension
between the state of the law and a durable public consensus that human
life has an increasing claim on our sympathy as it develops. This view
does not reflect either pro-life or pro-choice orthodoxy. But it
predicts a more sustainable political resolution.
The media have a
slothful tendency to place Americans into rigid categories of pro-life
and pro-choice. The reality is more complicated. A 2011 Gallup poll found that 79 percent of people who describe themselves as pro-choice
support making abortion illegal in the third trimester. “One of the
clearest messages from Gallup trends,” concludes Gallup’s Lydia Saad,
“is that Americans oppose late-term abortion.” Saad adds:
“A solid majority of Americans (61 percent) believe abortion should
generally be legal in the first three months of pregnancy, while 31
percent disagree. However support drops off sharply, to 27 percent, for
second-trimester abortions, and further still, to 14 percent, for
third-trimester abortions. Gallup has found this pattern each time it
has asked this question since 1996, indicating that Americans attach
much greater value to the fetus as it approaches viability, starting in
the second trimester.”
An opinion this consistent and nearly
universal must be based on something. The late political scientist James
Q. Wilson gave the most persuasive explanation. In his 1994 essay, “On Abortion,”
he argued bluntly that “people treat as human that which appears to be
human; people treat as quasi-human that which appears quasi-human.”
Sympathy, in his view, grows with resemblance. This explains why the
miscarriage of an embryo is (generally) treated differently than the
death of a newborn. It is also the reason, according to Wilson, that we
recoil from “the thought of killing an infant that does not differ from
the newborn in any respect other than that it receives oxygen and food
via an umbilical cord instead of through its nose and mouth.”
“Life
emerges,” Wilson said, “or more accurately, the claims that developing
life exert upon us emerge, gradually but powerfully.” As a fetus becomes
more recognizably human, it invokes “attachment that is as natural as
any sentiment that ever enters the human breast.” Wilson placed the
decisive stage of development, as many Americans seem to place it, at 10
to 12 weeks of gestation.
Wilson was broadly criticized, by both
pro-life and pro-choice advocates, for attempting to turn sentiments
into principles. As a moral matter, I share that criticism. His
gradations strike me as ethically arbitrary, and even universal opinions
do not add up to moral rules. But Wilson’s theory of natural “moral
sentiments” on abortion does seem to describe the way most Americans
think about this issue. Which makes it politically predictive.
If
Wilson’s description is correct, pro-life advocates are unlikely to
secure legal limits on abortion during the first trimester — the period
in which most abortions take place. At some point, after late-term
abortions are restricted, legislative approaches will become
unproductive, and persuasion and the provision of alternatives to
abortion will become the main avenues of activism.
But because
the Supreme Court imposed a national settlement at odds with natural
sentiments, pro-choice advocates are on the defensive. Their political
challenge is to prevent the working of politics. Their real opponent is
democracy, as state after state considers late-term abortion restrictions.
We
have some models of what happens, even in very liberal societies, when
public views prevail on abortion. Across most of Western Europe,
abortion is legal during the first trimester but heavily restricted
later in pregnancy — after the 14th week in France, Germany and Spain.
These limits are not a violation of liberal principles but a recognition
that the inherent violence of late-term abortion is at odds with
liberal principles.
A Wilson-like settlement on abortion in
America would be unsatisfying to many. But it would have the virtue of
being sustained by consensus, not imposed by fiat.
Related:
When It Comes
To Abortion, Progressives Can Be Counted On To Fully Reveal Their Racism And
Ignorance
No comments:
Post a Comment