KEITH C. BURRIS ON HOW TO TALK ABOUT ABORTION
Joe Biden has flipped and then flopped on the abortion issue. How is it that a man who once voted for the Hyde Amendment (prohibiting government funding of abortion except to save the life of the mother) now favors government funding of abortion?
Mr. Biden was reportedly also in opposition, within the Obama administration, to mandating that employers with a religious objection pay for abortions.
Joe Biden is not the first to punt, to stumble, to change his mind on the abortion question.
Ronald Reagan did, though in the other direction. And Barack Obama said that the question of when human life becomes fully human, the point upon which the abortion debate was thought to turn for so many years, was “above my pay grade.”
Maybe Joe Biden just wants to be president. The Democratic Party is now uniformly pro-abortion rights. Indeed, it is very nearly uniformly absolutist on abortion. That is: Abortion, at any stage of pregnancy, is the absolute right of every woman. And this right trumps the rights of the incubating child as well as the rights of the father.
If Mr. Biden has made the political calculation that one must embrace this alleged right to be the Democratic nominee for president, he is correct.
If he has changed his position based on this calculation when his inner voice tells him otherwise, he is corrupt.
But maybe Mr. Biden also has profoundly conflicted, even confused, ideas on abortion, like most Americans.
Polling shows that only 35% of Americans consider themselves “pro-life,” though a majority want some restrictions on abortion. At the same time, a slim majority supports Roe v. Wade. And most Americans accept that abortion is
legal, and likely to remain so.
“Legal, safe and rare,” is what Bill Clinton said abortion should be. And that’s where many of us are.
That is, abortion should be legal, because in some cases — not just rape and incest, but, for example, the pregnancy of a 13-year-old child — it might be the lesser evil.
It does not follow, however, that because something is legal, it is a right, much less an inviolate or near-absolute right, like the freedom to speak or worship.
And it surely does not follow that because something is legal, it should be subsidized by the government.
Or that, if abortion is an extension of an implied privacy right, this private decision should be supported by public subsidy.
Moreover, a lesser evil is still an evil. Abortion is the ending of a life and it should trouble us, as it clearly does most people, at least as much as cruelty to animals or the destruction of a forest or a lake.
Both science and culture have evolved and pretty much laid the “when does life (or personhood), begin?” debate aside.
From the moment an expectant couple sees an ultrasound, they speak of “the baby.”
Premature babies can be kept alive from a very early stage now — babies the size of a human hand. And we all root for them to live.
If the high rate of mortality among premature babies of the poor is tragic, then certainly abortion is tragic.
This is, in fact, how most people involved in an abortion feel about it. It is a tragic choice. No one is truly “pro-abortion.”
It probably will not happen, but what if the Biden flip-flop got the country talking in a freshly honest way about an issue that we really ought to talk about — directly and honestly. Abortion is a life-or-death issue that politics and public policy touch upon. It is worth our time and thought — like war, gun control, and the death penalty.
And we should converse, not posture and yell past each other. Consider a recent exchange between ex-governor and former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley and TV host Whoopi Goldberg. (Google the videos online. They are worth your while.)
Ms. Haley frames the issue as one of basic decency and human rights; Ms. Goldberg as an unquestioned absolute: An abortion is a woman’s call alone, presumably because the woman should be able to control her own body.
But Ms. Haley wins the exchange because she is arguing, logically and dispassionately, and sees that there is more than one set of rights involved.
There are three lives involved in an abortion: The woman who is pregnant, the embryo that will grow to become a baby, and the man who impregnated the mother. Mother, baby and father — all have rights.
The most fundamental right is to life itself. The secondary right is to liberty. And the third, third in rank, is to the pursuit of happiness.
I like George Will’s argument against the abortions of Down syndrome babies: I have a Down syndrome son and he has brought incalculable happiness to me and to all who have known him. The world would be a better place with more people with Down syndrome — a place with more gentle, loving people, otherwise cast as superfluous.
But the baby’s life matters more than the happiness of his father or mother.
How about we acknowledge the complexity and agony of this issue, which the average American, like Mr. Biden, long ago intuited?
And how about we discuss it without ideological blinders, acknowledging that there is not a moral or social consensus on the issue and that in a pluralistic society, and a federated system, there is not going to be one remedy or even one set of laws.
The pluralistic answer to a complicated question is this: It really is complicated. But the right to life should trump all other rights. And the liberty and happiness of the father matters, too.