TRUE BELIEVERS :

Abortion: A moral quagmire (Wendy McElroy, June 17, 2002, Enter Stage Right)

Abortion. The word alone causes civil conversation to flee the room. This is largely because the pro-choice and pro-life positions are being defined by their extremes, by those who scream accusations in lieu of arguments.

More reasonable voices and concerns, on both sides of the fence, are given short shrift.

For example, pro-life extremists seem unwilling to draw distinctions between some abortions and others, such as those resulting from rape or incest with an underage child. They would make no exception in the recent real-life case of a woman who discovered in her fifth month that her baby would be born dead due to severe disabilities.

On the other hand, pro-choice extremists within feminism insist on holding inconsistent positions. The pregnant woman has an unquestionable right to abort, they claim. Yet if the biological father has no say whatsoever over the woman's choice, is it reasonable to impose legal obligations upon him for child support? Can absolute legal obligation adhere without some sort of corresponding legal rights?

The only hope for progress in the abortion dialogue lies in the great excluded middle, in the voices of average people who see something wrong with a young girl forced to bear the baby of a rapist.

This is a very good essay from the invaluable Enter Stage Right. To the degree that pro-lifers are absolutists and cast all their arguments in the form of fire-and-brimstone moral judgments upon those who disagree with them they make it less likely that they'll ever achieve their goal, of saving lives. There's a visceral satisfaction in such purity, but if it leads to more dead then one has to ask if the proud feelings of the believer were really worth the lives lost. Many of those who were brought into the political process by concern over abortion were newcomers, so some political immaturity was to be expected, but their moral immaturity is less justifiable. There's nothing wrong with a political accommodation that advances your cause, even if it doesn't achieve everything you want. Politics is the quintessential arena in which you have to remember not to let the best be the enemy of the better.

On abortion this means that compromising in those areas that Ms McElroy mentions, like rape, incest and life of the mother, where support for abortion is strongest even among those who are generally opposed, can serve as a way to limit abortion in other areas, later term, sex selection, for birth control purposes, where opposition is the strongest. And the reality is that the situations that Ms McElroy expresses concern over are almost completely insignificant as regards the overall numbers of abortions. By giving some on these hot button issues, pro-lifers might be able to win legislative victories that would reach the far more common types of abortion.

If you can gain so much by giving up so little, yet find yourself unable to do so, aren't you in danger of becoming precisely the kind of unreasoning fanatic you're caricatured as?

Rather than engage in holier than thou absolutism, pro-lifers could become the kinds of democratic heroes, the free men, that Eric Hoffer tallked about in The True Believer :

Free men are aware of the imperfection inherent in human affairs, and they are willing to fight and die for that which is not perfect. They know that basic human problems can have no final solutions, that our freedom, justice, equality, etc. are far from absolute, and that the good life is compounded of half measures, compromises, lesser evils, and gropings toward the perfect. The rejection of approximations and the insistence on absolutes are the manifestation of a nihilism that loathes freedom, tolerance, and equity.

Of all people, it is we who should be aware that it is an imperfect world.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 19, 2002 5:31 PM