The Pro-Life Movement's Problem With Morality

Making claim to being pro-life in America is like shouting, “I’m a conservative Christian Republican!” from your rooftop. This is partly due to the fact that a considerable number of conservative Christian Republicans are pro-life. It’s hardly true, however, to say that they are the only pro-life people in America. Surprisingly enough to some, there are many different divisions within the pro-life movement, including Democrats, gays, lesbians, feminists, and environmentalists. It is not a one-party or one-group or one-religion issue.

The pro-life movement doesn’t act like it, though. Consistently, over and over throughout the last 30 years, the pro-lifers have depended solely on moral arguments to win the debate of life over choice. You can believe that abortion is morally wrong, yes, and at the appropriate moment, appealing to the emotions can be effective, but too much time is spent on arguing about why abortion is wrong morally instead of why abortion is wrong logically. We have real people of all walks of life in America – Christians, yes, but also non-Christians, atheists, Muslims, agnostics, hedonists, narcissists - and it’s foolish and ineffective for the pro-life movement to only use the morality argument to people who don’t share their morals. It’s shortsighted and it’s also absolutely pointless.

It is relatively easy to convince a person who shares your morals of a point of view – you simply appeal to whatever brand of morality that binds the two of you together. However, when you are confronted with someone that you completely disagree with on every point, to what can you turn to find common ground? There is only one place to go, one thing that we all have in common – and that is our shared instinct to protect ourselves, our humanness.

It seems that the mainstream religious pro-life movement is not so clear when it comes to reasons not to have an abortion beyond the basic arguments that it’s a sin and you’ll go straight to hell. Too much time is spent on the consequences of abortion and not enough time is spent convincing people why they shouldn’t have one in the first place.

What about the increased risk of breast cancer in women who have abortions? Why don’t we hear more about that? What about the risk of complications later in life with other pregnancies? You have to research to even find something mentioned about any of this. The pro-life movement should be front and center, shouting the statistics to the world. Instead, they use Biblical quotes and morality to argue their point.

Don’t get me wrong; morality has its place. However, the average Joe who doesn’t really know much about the pro-life movement - and doesn’t really care too much for the obnoxious neighbor who’s always preaching at him to go to church and stop drinking - may not be too open to a religious sort of editorial written by a minister concerning abortion. He’d rather listen to those easy going pro-abortion people – they appeal more to the general moral apathy that he so often feels.

Tell him that his little girl has a high chance of suffering from a serious infection or a perforated uterus due to a botched abortion, however, and he’ll take a bit more notice. Tell him that he’s likely to suffer sexual side effects from the mental trauma of his own child being aborted and he’ll take even more notice. But these aren’t topics that are typically discussed by the local right-to-life chapters.

It isn’t that the religious right is wrong. However, it boils down to one question: Do they wish to be loudly moral or quietly winning?

It is so essential that the right-to-life movement in America galvanize behind the idea the logic, not morality, will be what wins the day in this fight, because sometimes, despite the rightness of the intentions, morality has to be left out of the game. Morality doesn’t bind everyone together. The only thing that does that is humanness and the logic of protecting ourselves; and that is what has to be appealed to if we are going to make a difference in the fight to lessen and eventually eliminate abortion.

Cathryn Crawford is a student from Texas. She can be reached at feedback@washingtondispatch.com.

Another I believe very compelling argument against abortion that is that it promotes inequality of women in society. Indeed this inequality was confirmed and ACCEPTED by feminists when they contend that having a child and having an occupation are mutually exclusive (and will always remain so). By accepting that bearing a child puts women in an unequal economic/social position (relative to men who have children) feminists are part of the "patriarchial" system they supposedly oppose.

Many people (sadly, including many pro-Life people) simply ACCEPT the premise of diminshed social/educational/economic prospects for women if they are parents (relative to men who are parents) without question! Even our SC Justices accepted this as their basic premise for upholing Roe v. Wade! So in a sense, many pro-Life persons operate on the same basic premis as the SC Justice who upheld abortion!

I submit the following very enlightening article for proof of this premise:

http://www.nytimes.com/library/politics/scotus/art icles/061693ginsburg-roe.html

Judge Ginsburg's critique of Roe v. Wade is twofold. First, she said in the New York University lecture, as she has written for years, the right to abortion might have been more secure had it been grounded in the concept of women's right to equality rather than in the right to privacy. "The Roe decision might have been less of a storm center," she said, had it "homed in more precisely on the women's-equality dimension of the issue."

..... the equality argument for abortion rights -- essentially the notion that women cannot participate in society equally with men without the ability to control their reproductive lives -- was in fact part of the abortion-rights movement from its earliest years. An equality argument was among the arguments presented to the Court in Roe v. Wade.

It was the Supreme Court itself that revived the equality basis for abortion rights in its ruling in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Pennsylvania case in which the Court reaffirmed the right to abortion.

Among the reasons that Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, Anthony M. Kennedy and David H. Souter gave in their opinion for adhering to the "core" of Roe v. Wade was a sentence that could have been written by Judge Ginsburg:

"The ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives."

So there you have it! The Justices themselves have said that abortion is crucial to women being treated equally in society. And many women have bought into this deception. We COULD as a society instead demand that women who procreate are treated the same as men who procreate. But we don't choose to do so. Instead we sweep equal treatment under the rug and tell women that their ability to particpate equally is dependent on abortion. Our own SC Justice have declared it! In other words, equality for women who procreate is CONDITIONAL on them un-procreating after the fact. This is a fundemental inequality which is NEVER adressed. Men's equality in society is not conditional on their parental status. But women's is virtually decreed conditional by the US Supreme Court!

Men are not asked by society to choose between equal treatment and their child's existence. Women are.

I blame pro-Choicers for enthusiastically accepting this Faustian deal in the first place and for allowing it to continue. I especially blame pro-choice feminists who won't even consider the larger ramifications of women for continueing to take this 'deal' over demanding true equality instead. And I blame all of us (including many pro-Lifers) for continueing to uphold this double standard in so many large and small ways. Pro-Lifers are not guiltless in accepting the fundemental premise of women's inequal opportunities if they are parents.

To put it another way, can you imagine that black people would have taken a deal to end inequity and discrimination against them in exchange for the "right" to kill their children? Yet this is essentially the deal that has been offered and accepted by pro-Choicers! They ACCEPT inequality of women parents as an immutable fact!

I’m so pleased that you chose to make that point in the disarming form of a question. Your point is such a good and important one.

Arguments framed in terms of morality are great for persuading others who share our moral views and who are therefore more or less predisposed to agree with us anyway. Much of the time, though, “preaching to the choir” just doesn’t gain enough supporters to carry the day.

And the reality is that it’s next to impossible, by repetitive recitation of our moral views alone, to persuade those people who do not themselves share those views. Attempting to pummel people or trying to shame them into “agreement” is usually a complete (and very ugly) waste of time and energy. Like you say, it becomes necessary at that point to find some other common ground (like logic and reason) upon which an appeal to those particular people can be based.

Another great column, Cathryn. Keep up the good work. ;-)

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