NOTHING LEFT TO PROVE:

Surprise, Mom: I'm Anti-Abortion (ELIZABETH HAYT, March 30, 2003, NY Times)

FOR her high school class in persuasive speech, Afton Dahl, 16, chose to present an argument that abortion should be illegal. She graphically described the details of various abortion techniques, including facts about fetal heart development.

"The baby's heartbeat starts at around 12 to 18 days, so it's murder to kill someone with a heartbeat," Miss Dahl said recently, recalling the argument she used in class in January. "I don't believe in abortion under any circumstances, including rape. I think it would be better to overturn Roe v. Wade."

Miss Dahl, a sophomore, attends Red Wing High School in Red Wing, Minn., a small city that is the home of Red Wing shoes and a town where a majority voted for Al Gore for president. Miss Dahl's abortion views are not something she learned from her parents: her mother, Fran Dahl, 47, maintains that abortion should be a woman's choice.

"Nowadays kids don't grow up knowing or being aware of what was going on when abortion was illegal," said Ms. Dahl, a former nurse. "It's not a choice that I would have taken personally, but for the future of women I want to see the right to an abortion maintained."

This contrast between mother and teenage daughter illustrates a trend noted in polls: that teenagers and college-age Americans are more conservative about abortion rights than their counterparts were a generation ago. Many people old enough to have teenage children and who equate youth with liberal social opinions on topics like gay rights and the use of marijuana for medical purposes have been surprised at this discovery. Miss Dahl was one of numerous students in her class who chose to make speeches about abortion, and most took the anti-abortion side.

"I was shocked that there were that many students who felt strong enough and confident enough to speak about being pro-life," said Nina Verin, a parent of another student in the class (whose oral argument was about war in Iraq). "The people I associate with in town are pro-choice, so I'm troubled--where do these kids come from?"

A study of American college freshmen shows that support for abortion rights has been dropping since the early 1990's: 54 percent of 282,549 students polled at 437 schools last fall by the University of California at Los Angeles agreed that abortion should be legal. The figure was down from 67 percent a decade earlier. A New York Times/CBS News poll in January found that among people 18 to 29, the share who agree that abortion should be generally available to those who want it was 39 percent, down from 48 percent in 1993. [...]

Some parents trace their teenagers' anti-abortion views to sexuality education programs that stress abstinence as the only way to prevent pregnancy and disease, and in the process sometimes demonize abortion. Since 1996 the federal government has budgeted $50 million annually to "abstinence only till marriage" programs, which are taught in 35 percent of public schools in the country, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit group affiliated with Planned Parenthood. [...]

If today's teenagers and young adults maintain their views on abortion into older adulthood, and if succeeding waves of students are also conservative, the balance could tip somewhat in the America's long-running abortion war, some experts speculate.

It's unclear whether the shift will ever be substantial enough to change the centrist position of the majority of Americans of all ages: that abortion should be legal, but with restrictions. In Red Wing, the certainty of the youthful opinions of the students reminded their speech-class teacher, Jillynne Raymond, of an earlier generation's certainty--her own.

"Teenagers have strong opinions," Ms. Raymond, 41, said. "It's no different than the 70's when I was a teenager, but the difference is that the majority of speeches then were pro-choice. I wanted the right to an abortion as a woman. The focus then was not having the government tell me what to do with my body.

"Today," she said of her students, "the majority is pro-life."

Ms Raymond nearly gets to the unmentionable point in this whole discussion: the association of abortion in the minds of prior generations with their womanhood. Whether you accept the truth of the argument or not, feminism was premised on the notion that women had been an oppressed minority for thousands of years. The Woman's Movement therefore represented an assertion of power on their behalf. And what is the ultimate power in any society, the power so awesome that it is normally reserved only to the state itself?: the power of killing with impunity. Little surprise then that the newly empowered majority sought to demonstrate their newfound heft by demanding this final authority. And over whom would such a power be granted but over the most helpless members of society.

But now we find ourselves about a century into the process of women's liberation and the coming generations of young women have never known the "oppression" of which their mothers and grandmothers complained and feel themselves, with good cause, equal or superior to men. The idea that they need to be able to kill someone to prove themselves powerful must inevitably sound bizarre and so they look at abortion as simply a moral issue rather than an exercise in political claim-staking. Given that abortion had been the only realm in human affairs where women came down on the side of freedom over security, favored the powerful over the helpless, it was a certainty that once the artificial reason for advocating "freedom of choice" had passed, they'd tend back towards a position that the state should intervene to protect those who can't protect themselves. This trend will be greatly accelerated when it becomes more common knowledge that abortion is being used throughout the world to gender-select for male babies. The prospect that what began as an assertion of power is going to turn women into a genuine minority in the political sphere, presumably for the first time in human history, seems likely to kick out the last prop supporting the case for abortion among women.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 31, 2003 5:27 PM