Battles of Choice

Categories: Feminism, Reproductive Rights

The good news for women last week didn’t end with their gains in the House and Senate, or with South Dakota voters’ rejection of a draconian ban on abortion.

In Kansas, an attorney general who sought to obtain the medical records of women who’d had abortions was ousted. And in California, voters rejected a ballot initiative that would have required doctors to notify a parent or guardian before performing an abortion on a girl younger than 18.

These pro-woman victories came as something of a surprise. Voters proved more supportive of reproductive rights than many in the pro-choice community had assumed. In fact, I came out of the election season feeling a lot more positive about those unpredictable voters than I did about pro-choice activists, some of whom, I fear, may in recent months have done the cause more harm than good.

I’m thinking in particular of Ms. Magazine, whose “We Had Abortions” petition drive this fall provided a fair amount of background noise to the abortion wars.

In case you missed hearing about it, the current issue of Ms. features a list of women who came forward to publicly declare that they’d had abortions. This was meant to be a bold and brave and historic move, a way to “speak truth to power,” as the magazine put it. It was also a throwback to the feature Ms. ran in its 1972 debut issue, in which 53 prominent American women proclaimed that they had had abortions, hoping, they said then, to counteract “social stigma” and “to save lives and to spare other women the pain of socially imposed guilt.”

This was a brave thing to do back in 1972, when abortion was still illegal and, with celebrities and newsmakers signing on, it was also big news. This fall, with abortion legal but increasingly limited, the new petition got moderate press pickup, thanks in large part to pundits on the right, who dished up all the usual commentary about selfishness and amorality and trivialization and callous disregard for human life.

And here is the awful thing: a piece of me felt that the right-wingers got it right.

I say this not because I believe that women who have had abortions are selfish or amoral or callous, but rather because, with their proud petition drive, I think the editors of Ms. – among others on the far left of the pro-choice movement – are striking the wrong tone and doing the cause of reproductive freedom a real disservice.

This isn’t 1972. Abortion isn’t illegal. The blanket desire to overturn Roe v. Wade that motivated the proponents of the South Dakota ban is not shared by a majority of Americans; polls have shown this time and time again.

Most Americans’ support for abortion rights is partial and conditional – a “yes, but” kind of feeling that is typical, says David Callahan, author of the recent book, “The Moral Center,” of the way most Americans view social freedoms generally: they’re a good thing, in principle, but they’ve perhaps gone too far.

The conditions that centrist Americans place upon their support for abortion rights may to some of us seem so limiting as to empty all meaning from the notion of “choice.” Yet they don’t negate the fact that there is now, on the issue of abortion rights, a center ground, where most people in this country can talk to one another, and debate and disagree, without the central privacy protections of Roe v. Wade being entirely compromised.

I’m not sure, right now, when the emotions around abortion are so dicey, that taking a strident, casual, even callous tone on the issue is really so reasonable. I’m not sure that wearing a Planned Parenthood T-shirt that shouts “I Had an Abortion” isn’t trivializing. I don’t think that writing in to a Web site like I’mNotSorry.net, which invites women to share “their positive experiences with abortion,” and includes testimonials like “The fetus I aborted was nothing more than a clump of cells,” is the best way to cement widespread support for a beleaguered movement. Call me a bad sister (it won’t be the first time), but I’m not sure that using abortion as a vehicle for proud proclamations of female solidarity is such a salutary idea. At best, it’s sophomoric. At worst, it’s downright destructive.

Callahan argues that one of the American left’s most consistent mistakes in recent years has been to focus its political energies on battling the hard right, rather than seeking to win over the “yes, but” voters in the center. The result, he says, is that left-wing pundits and politicos have tailored their rhetoric to speak to the very people they’re least likely to reach. “We feel we need to win the argument with the hard-core traditionalists,” he recently told me. “Really, we need to communicate with the moderate voters…. We need to alleviate their concerns rather than beating back the hard core.”

The abortion rights movement is making that same error now in spades.

The petition, the T-shirts, the web testimonials, are acts of provocation. They exist basically to talk back, to get in the face of choice opponents who consider abortion to be nothing less than a sin. But making gestures to affront the sensibilities of religious conservatives doesn’t advance the pro-choice cause. After all, the people who brought us the South Dakota ban, who have gutted sexual education programs, who campaigned against allowing emergency contraception onto pharmacy shelves, aren’t going to budge an inch on reproductive rights under any circumstances. Shouting out at them – through adolescent-style in-your-face gestures – is pointless. And if the shouting contorts the face of the pro-choice movement, making it appear as monstrous as the Christian right has long depicted it to be, then it’s dangerous, too.

The religious right has been very effective, over the decades, in boxing the feminist movement in and forcing it into a reactive crouch. It has successfully made its own obsessions – with sex and sin and guilt – the stuff of an ongoing culture war. What the recent elections told us is that Americans’ true concerns are elsewhere. Given that, it’s ridiculous for feminists to keep doing battle according to the Christian right’s rules of engagement.

There is a moral center in America, and it is our only hope. So why get in its face?