Pro-life overreach
Anti-abortion forces are going to extremes
What should we make of the fact that even a staunch abortion-rights activist like actress Alyssa Milano wants to be known as “pro-life”?
“Nobody wants to get an abortion, nobody,” she said Tuesday on CNN. “We’re all pro-life.”
When Kate Michelman, then president of the National Abortion Rights Action League, said in a 1993 interview, “We think abortion is a bad thing. No woman wants to have an abortion,” the uproar was greater — and that was without Twitter.
Ms. Michelman tried hard to disavow her words, but since it was a taped interview, the best she could do was explain that by “bad thing,” she meant “a failure of policy.” Her statement was more shocking then than Ms. Milano’s is now because, at the time, public opinion leaned to the prochoice side.
Today our national consensus is in a significantly different place — thanks entirely to the difficult, patient work of America’s pro-life forces. So why are they abandoning proven strategy and risking crucial success to embrace extremism?
Opponents of abortion have waged an incremental battle for decades, struggling to re-sensitize our toxically individualistic society to the plight of the defenseless, and tirelessly regrouping after each electoral or judicial defeat.
This wise, incremental approach has reaped rewards. Regular polling over the years has shown a gradual shift in both American opinion and behavior. Though those describing themselves as “pro-choice” once dramatically outnumbered those who are “pro-life” (56% to 33% in 1995, per Gallup), that gap has narrowed significantly in the past decade, with pro-life polling better than pro-choice as often as not.
And the abortion rate has fallen dramatically, from a 1980 high of 29.3 abortions per 1,000 women to a 2015 record low of 11.8.
With hearts changed and lives saved, why abandon a successful, judicious strategy? Why forge so far out ahead of where the public consensus is?
New bills in Georgia, Missouri and other states would restrict abortions at varying points early in pregnancy — as soon as it’s detected, as soon as there’s a heartbeat, at the eight-week point, and so on. No legislation has been more divisive or squandered more public sympathy than Alabama’s new law, which would outlaw virtually all abortions and place draconian punishment on abortion providers.
This extremism doesn’t happen in a vacuum, of course. Equally extreme — and downright barbaric — are the pro-abortion measures in New York and Virginia. In late January, New York state removed restrictions from third-trimester abortions, allowing them at any point if the mother’s “health” — including her emotional health — would be adversely affected by carrying the baby to term.
Days later, while discussing legislation that would allow abortion up to the moment of birth, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam endorsed infanticide, saying that a baby delivered during an attempted abortion “would be kept comfortable … [and] would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired.”
The inhumanity of such thinking rightly appalls most Americans, but it should not have pushed pro-life advocates to equal, counterproductive extremes. If they really want to win — to win hearts and minds, to advance pro-life politicians and to save innocent lives — they wouldn’t push too hard on more ambivalent citizens.
More promising steps include Michigan’s rejection of second-trimester “dilation and evacuation” abortions which dismember the fetus; South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham’s bill to limit abortions past 20 weeks, a point by which fetuses can feel pain; and Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse’s bill to protect infants born after failed abortions.
The American public’s uneasy centrism on abortion reflects the simple fact that we are struggling to accommodate two irreconcilable rights — a woman’s right to control her own body and the right of another human being, wanted or not, to live.
Those compelled to stand for the more vulnerable should not squander years of blessed success with polarizing, over-reaching gambits.