The GOP leadership's disembodied presence at yesterday's March for Life obviously grates a bit, as it always does. On the other hand, it's worth noting that the pro-life movement is arguably more popular than the Republican Party these days. So maybe pro-lifers should be thanking Mitt Romney, George W. Bush, et. al. for staying away.
« The Oscars | Main | The Future of the Parties » Don't Stand So Close To Me24 Jan 2008 10:04 am Comments (23)
Well, relatively speaking I'd imagine that the pro-life movement is more popular than the Republican party, but that's because the Republican party is really, really unpopular. Considering that 57% of people think abortion should mostly be legal seems to indicate that the pro-life movement's beliefs are fairly unpopular with most people. This is particularly true with the "Embryo are morally and legally equivalent to people" argument as well as having a "first trimester abortion is murder" argument. And considering that practically speaking embryos and first trimester abortions is what the debate is about, then I think its fair to say that the pro-life movement is the odd man out for most people. I suppose equating a clump of cells that you can only see with a microscope to a person makes us the epitome of evil. Somehow I'll manage to live with the moral stain. 
Particularly in an election year it does as much harm as good to have the pro-life cause identified with political partisanship. America’s longest continuously running civil rights campaign has grown younger & larger. Making it a one party pander fest does not necessarily help the movement.
Considering that 57% of people think abortion should mostly be legal seems to indicate that the pro-life movement's beliefs are fairly unpopular with most people. Umm, first, 57% believe it should be "mostly" legal - yes, but that is a huge qualifier. The majority of people think it should be illegal after the first trimester and support parental notification laws. and, at least 43% believe it should always be illegal. That hardly supports your arguments.
Never mind that. How about how this from TNR on how the Times almost made a much better choice for its conservative affirmative action baby? So, last fall, Sulzberger and Times editorial-page editor Andrew Rosenthal prepared a list of some 25 conservative writers. According to a person with knowledge of the search, the names included Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, The Atlantic's Ross Douthat, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations Max Boot and three Weekly Standard staffers: senior editor Christopher Caldwell, associate editor Matthew Continetti, and the magazine's editor and founder, Bill Kristol.
I forgot this element of Sam's Club Republicanism: banning abortion + banning gay marriage = higher middle class wages. (Please don't ask us to explain why.)
Ross Douthat advocating Sam's Club Republicanism on the editorial pages of the NYTimes... cognative dissonance ensues.
Joseph, The majority of Americans support substantially heavier restrictions on abortion than exist today. Only about 20-30% of Americans support the permissibve abortion regime that exists today. Interestingly, opposition to abortion is more common among women than men, among the young than the old, and among African Americans than white people. The foremost defenders of abortion in this country are old white men- the same people who defend economic oligarchy. One would think that Democrats, liberals and radicals would think twice before embracing such a cause. As a pro-life leftist (usually Democratic voter), I do have to say I'm grateful to the Republicans for staying away. The pro-life cause is bigger than one political party.
If the pro-life cause was really capturing the hearts of the American people, you'd see those politicians at that rally (as well as a lot of other tangible, nonsymbolic steps taken to make abortions more difficult to procure). Now I am not going to claim that the great and good American people are ringing with pro-choice sentiment either. Instead, public opinion is very mushy on this issue with a lot of people not particularly liking many of the perceived reasons why women get abortions while also not being comfortable with across the board or almost across the board bans. I will make this claim, though. Whatever vibrancy there is in the pro-life movement is mostly a product of its lack of success. If the American public perceived that there were serious obstacles being placed in the way of women who needed an abortion (with the concomitant media coverage of desperate women who can't get them), a lot of the mushy middle, if not all of it, would gravitate towards the pro-choice cause. And if that were to happen, pro-lifers would probably be consigned to permanent political irrelevance. So I would only caution our self-confident (and perhaps arrogant) pro-life friends to be careful what you wish for.
I occasionally, gloomily, think that Dilan is quite right.
Re: a lot of the mushy middle, if not all of it, would gravitate towards the pro-choice cause. Dilan, That's in part because they think that abolishing abortion would mean a return to the 1950s patriarchy. In fact, it wouldn't- at least not if we make sure that it doesn't. The proper comparison isn't between today, and the pre-Roe era, although not everything about that era was bad. The proper comparison is between today's society, and a progressive, humane pro-life regime of the future. One that outlaws abortion but also provides more and better contraception; sex education that stresses both birth control and also responsible behavior; a better adoption system; a government that provides social, economic and emotional support for pregnant women; government-funded prenatal and child care; cracking down on fathers who don't support their children; and all those other good things, that I would support on their own merits, but have the additional merit of dissuading women from abortion. If the American people were persuaded that this kind of society was possible, then would they prefer the society of today? Somehow I doubt it.
#1. Overturning Roe (regardless of the backlash - with the exception of a constitutional amendment confirming abortion rights) would be a tremendous moral victory for pro-lifers. Stating in fact that 35 years of precedent was wrong, and implicitly the arguments in its support. #2. I think you would get (depending on the State's) pro-life Democrats & pro-choice Republicans. Some states would get State constitutional amendments in either direction. Other states would get simple laws in either direction. Most states would do a more European style 1st or maybe 2nd trimester scheme. It would be upsetting politically on partisan grounds but it would not be a defeat morally; but rather a tremendous victory.
Re: at least 43% believe it should always be illegal. Um, that figure is more like 12% is youare referring to people whop believe that abortion should be illegal even in cases where pregnancy means both woman and fetus will die. Even the Roman Catholic Church does not object to life-saving surgeries whose unavoidable side effect is the loss of a fetus.
"embryos and first trimester abortions is what the debate is about" Joseph Well no not necessarily. The second trimester begins at the 13th or 14th week. Almost 11% of abortions occur after the 13th week. That is a minority, but adds up to over 100,000 per year. www.guttmacher.org/pubs/fb_induced_abortion.html To be sure most abortions are first trimester, but that doesn't mean it's only about that. Also not wanting tax dollars to go to involuntary experiments on human life, aka embryonic stem-cell research, can easily be a fiscal responsibility or Luddite matter as easily as anything.
> "party responsible for the pointless deaths of half a million Iraqis (and hungry for more)" The Ba'ath Party was anti-abortion? Wow. What I didn't know.
Why is it okay if the child was conceived due to rape or incest? How is that fetus any more or less a human? The whole right to life movement is more about punishment than life.
Hi Shelley, Same reason the law punishes drivers who cause deaths because they're drunk or speeding... but not drivers who cause deaths by sheer accident. It's not that a dead pedestrian is any less human if he or she suddenly runs in front of my car while I'm doing the speed limit. It's because I had no control whatsoever over the risk. A rape victim does not choose to accept the risk of getting pregnant (assuming here that "incest" is shorthand for "non-violent but underage sex within a family", ie, "rape and incest" are shorthand for "sex without valid consent"). I am assming (correct me if I'm off here) that if pro-lifers did want to ban even abortions for pregnancies from forced sex, you wouldn't be praising them for their consistency, but attacking them for their extremism? The right to life movement is not so much about punishment as about distributing fairly the benefits and burdens caused by adults' desires to enjoy orgasms. This is your cue to trot out the Katha Pollitt "Anti-choicers want to punish people for having sex!" line, to which I would reply: No, any more than I want to punish people for driving cars.
Rod, The case for making an incest exception is even stronger when you consider that, apparently, most babies born of incest will not survive anyway. so by not making an exception for incest, we would be imposing that burden on women without much expectation of a positive outcome. Incidentally, abortion was legal in limited cases in Saddam's Iraq: to preserve the life or health of the mother, or in cases of rape, incest, or fetal defect. Both women and doctors were punished for illegal abortions by up to a year's imprisonment. Abortion had been discouraged during the period of the Iran-Iraq war for natalist reasons, but permitted in limited cases after the war ended. I have no idea what the current policy of the puppet Iraqi regime is.
Hector writes: "The case for making an incest exception is even stronger when you consider that, apparently, most babies born of incest will not survive anyway." This is simply and categorically untrue. "Incidentally, abortion was legal in limited cases in Saddam's Iraq: to preserve the life or health of the mother, or in cases of rape, incest, or fetal defect. Both women and doctors were punished for illegal abortions by up to a year's imprisonment." It was also illegal in Nazi Germany. Warmongering right-wingers like to keep the supply of cannon fodder high.
Yep, I think Bush-Cheney has some sinister master plan to force liberals, secularists and feminists to bear millions more unwanted children than they otherwise would, to provide the US war machine with a supply of aggressive Christian fundamentalist soldiers and... uh.. diehard GOP voters eighteen years and nine months down the track. Why, I bet if I checked Google, I'd find that other theocratic Religious Right regimes like the Soviet Union or China also banned abortion, to produce more cannon fodder. More evidence to support MoeLJ's evidence-based stance. You can never guess far wrong if you impute diabolical brilliance and conscienceless malice to your electoral opponents.
PS: In fact, I did once hear a (leftish) journalist theorise that the Catholic Church leadership secretly want abortion to stay legal. (Shades of Prof Jack Balkin's theory about how Roe v Wade really helps the GOP electorally). Her view was that, if the bishops can denounce abortion as immoral, but it's not illegal, then conservative Catholic women will end up having more children than non- or liberal Catholic women. All else being equal, this leads to proportionately more conservative Catholic voters two decades later. Mutandis mutatis for Mormons and evangelical Prots. Cynical, but plausible. Which is why it's rather touching to see atheists and liberal religionists in sudden alarm about the grwoing resurgence of the Religious Right - while at the same time complaining that young people these days don't learn enough Darwin in schools.
Rod, That argument works both ways. The far-left governments in Venezuela and Bolivia are both anti-abortion and pro-natalist. There could be many reasons for this, starting with the fact that for all their anti-clericalism, both Chávez and Morales are fairly religious men (and fairly conservative on 'social'/'cultural' issues. But one possible reason is that the major constituency for socialist politics in Latin America is among the rural poor which tend to have 3-4 children and the major constituency for liberal capitalist politics is among the urban, Westernized upper-middle classes who tend to have 1-2. Chavez and Morales have both been known to gloat about the fact that their supporters tend to have higher birthrates, and if the demographic theory of politics holds true, the future of Latin America belongs to men whose politics are the polar opposite of yours.
First MoeLJ, then Hector... Amazing. About the only controversial thing I've comboxed here chez Douthat is abortion, and from that these folks can divine (no pun int.) my views on ANTAR drilling, the estate tax, and the killing of Arabs for fun and profit. As an empirical rather than an a priori matter, you might be surprised how I actually vote. If one views politics mainly through the prism of the two US parties and their recent (post-, say, 1979) presidential nominees, and as dominated by foreign policy, then Chavez and, say, Mike Huckabee do seem poles apart. However, on economic issues, there is less space between a "right-wing" US Baptist collectivist and "left-wing" Latin American Catholic collectivists than one might think. Both are in the opposite corner from, say, Schwarzenegger, Sullivan and Giuliani. As "The New Republic" noted a few years ago, GOP pro-choicers like Christine Todd Whitman can support the slashing of taxes and spending, but they'll still always be "moderates" to the media, while Gary Bauer - who supports the minimum wage - and Christian leaders who want more aid to Africa are always going to be the "far-right extremists". Hence, eg, Bono's utter surprise that Bush's African HIV program was more progressive than Clinton's, or the howls of outrage from the pragmatic secular conservatives because Huckabee wants to shut down GITMO as well as stop clone farming. The thing that Chavez/ Morales and the Religious Right have in common is their populism - and to lay populist politics, you need to have a population.
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Can a party responsible for the pointless deaths of half a million Iraqis (and hungry for more) really claim a label like "pro-life"?
Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | January 24, 2008 11:06 AM