TAKING ABORTION SERIOUSLY

“Very few Americans believe that all abortions all the time are all right,” the president said. “Almost all Americans believe that abortions should be illegal when the children can live without the mother’s assistance, when the children can live outside the mother’s womb.”

As an assessment of public opinion on the issue, that seems about right. It is even a judgment Mr. Clinton was prepared to act on at one point in his career. In 1985, he signed Act 268 of the Arkansas legislature, which prohibited late-term abortions (after the 25th week of pregnancy). The measure made exceptions for minors in cases of rape or incest, or when the mother’s life was endangered. Then-Governor Clinton called the bill ” appropriate.”

But why do Americans believe what Mr. Clinton suggested they believe? Why, by the same token, was the bill he signed ten years ago in Little Rock appropriate? It is the great unasked question of the abortion debate, at least as it is conducted — beneath a rigidly generalized rhetoric of rights – – in our day-to-day politics.

The answer lies in the president’s startlingly ingenuous language. He made no reference to “the unborn” that day in Ohio. He did not say “fetus,” the clinical term reluctantly preferred by his pro-choice constituency. He called them, as most non-ideologues instinctively would, the children. Late-term abortions force us, when they are considered in their particulars, to confront what is true of all abortions, at least as a matter of cold science. They are each directed against a recognizably, indisputably human being. And they each involve the deliberate interruption, deprivation — termination — of a human life.

The dictionary term for this is “killing.” It is an act, in its concrete reality, against which the moral intuition of almost all Americans rebels — whatever their ostensible, general opinions about abortion.

The Sept. 18 issue of Newsweek has a report on last summer’s FDA- sanctioned clinical trials of mifepristone, or RU-486. This “abortion pill” would, in the popular imagination at any rate, ease the nation’s abortion controversy — and conscience — by permitting a nonsurgical, vastly more ” convenient,” and private end to early-term pregnancy. The story makes painful reading. After nine days of heavy bleeding and cramps, Sarah, one of the two women the magazine’s correspondents followed, “expels the pregnancy sac” while bathing at home. She sees “the fetus swirling around the shower drain.” It “doesn’t go down.” She “scoops it up, wraps it carefully in toilet paper and flushes it away.” Sarah says this experience “really emotionally hit me.”

Becky, Newsweek’s other main subject, never leaves the clinic at which her RU-486 is administered. In a matter of hours, following similarly intense pain and bleeding, the procedure ends in a bathroom. “There is a fist-sized glob of red and white at the bottom of the toilet. Becky can see the curled- up fetus, the size and color of a cocktail shrimp. . . . Its hands are curled into tiny fists.” Becky is struck by the hands. “‘It’s sad. It’s sad,'” she says, “turning away.”

Turning away. Of course. There have been almost 30 million abortions in the United States, most of them by surgical dismemberment, since the Supreme Court’s jurisprudentially and morally unsound 1973 Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton decisions created the most liberalized abortion regime in the democratic world. We now live in a country in which, as a matter of constitutional law, there are human beings — millions each year — whose continued existence is entirely contingent on whether somebody else wants them. An unborn American child now enjoys less legal protection than an endangered bird in a national forest.

These are facts with profound implications for the meaning and future of American society. And they are facts that many Americans are not eager to understand. Asking someone closely to consider his complicity in or proximity to something like abortion — and to acknowledge that something’s essential ghastliness-is asking a very great deal indeed. The human mind quite naturally flees the burden of such guilty knowledge.

And political parties, which as a practical matter live or die on popular approval, just as naturally flee the call to promote that knowledge. Which is why national political debate over abortion among major party spokesmen, when it takes place at all, remains arid and sterile, dominated by a “rights” discourse in which the hard reality of actual abortions remains largely obscured. Such argumentation only speaks to the firmly committed on one or the other side of the question’s vast divide. It cannot appeal to, or trouble the conscience of, the rest of America, which has its ears defensively closed against the crux of the issue: that abortion is about the killing of human beings. And that killing can only be stopped, as we believe justice requires, if consciences are troubled and ears are pried open. By organized political parties and party leaders willing to risk votes in the effort.

The resolution of large, painful questions of societal morality like abortion (or racial segregation before it) demands two things that only politics can provide.

The first is a stage large enough to command and focus ongoing national attention, a stage on which a process of full-scale, start-to-finish moral education may be conducted. The second is an ability to change the law. At this point in our history, only a fool would expect much help in either task from the Democratic party, which has all but formally excommunicated such members as Pennsylvania Governor Bob Casey who dare to challenge its pro- choice catechism.

And what of the Republican party? It is better. Much better, even. Many of its state-based leaders regularly press necessary rear-guard actions and tactical thrusts against the abortion-on-demand regime — opposing government funding, for example, or proposing governmental restrictions and regulations within bounds permitted by the Supreme Court’s Casey edict. Many of the party’s federal legislators do much the same, all to the good. And, most notably, the Republican party as an institution remains committed to a platform plank on abortion whose five sentences each express an unimpeachable goal.

But there is an important sense in which Republicans continue to dodge the issue. A future Republican president might, as the platform endorses, appoint Supreme Court justices who would finally tip the constitutional balance against Roe and Doe. But that would be no guarantee against a continuance of legalized abortion in the various states. Such a guarantee can rest only on enactment of the so-called “human life amendment” to the Constitution, a separate piece of the platform puzzle. And that achievement requires something barely imaginable in today’s America: passage of such an amendment by a two-thirds vote of both Congressional bodies, and ratification of the amendment by three-fourths of the 50 state legislatures.

Voters are not yet sufficiently engaged by the pro-life movement for that to happen. And they will likely remain that way until more has been demanded by that movement of the Republican party, which should — and must — be its primary voice in organized politics. Let’s be clear about what we’re suggesting here. If threats of schism sometimes made against the Republican party by disappointed pro-life activists were ever carried out, they would almost certainly set the effort against abortion back for many years. Politics, especially anti-abortion politics, takes an investment of time and diligence and patience that cannot be underestimated. The pro-life downpayment in the Republican party should not be abandoned.

Neither should the movement allow so much of its energy and attention to be absorbed, as it now is, in the effort to maintain the Republican platform language on abortion, word for word. Party platforms do matter. The Republican platform should remain vigorously pro-life. But between now and next August, when the Republican National Convention meets to debate such questions, and nominate a president, well more than a million new abortions will be performed in the United States. And the present platform language, by itself, absent other efforts, will have done nothing to stop them.

It is cheap grace for leading Republicans, ordinarily content to remain almost entirely mute on the issue of abortion, to appear before pro-life audiences while campaigning for this or that office and wave around pledges of loyalty to what is for them, in effect, little more than a piece of paper. It’s just talk, issued with a wink at their pro-choice donors. And it fails the pro-life cause. Instead, the Republican party’s leading lights need to speak, over and over again, with the subtle, insistent force necessary to change America’s mind on abortion — for good.

There is one big reason to be hopeful about the ultimate end of the abortion catastrophe. Abortion, the act itself, produces an intuitive moral disgust — in almost everyone. That is why President Clinton, no doubt hardly knowing what he was saying, used the word “children” in Chillicothe. And why even Kate Michelman of the National Abortion Rights Action League, in an unguarded moment, can call abortion “a bad thing.”

Sometime soon, probably next month, the full House of Representatives will take up a bill to ban the use of “partial-birth abortions,” a late-term procedure in which a baby is delivered, breach but alive almost all the way out of the birth canal — only to be killed by a stab wound to the head, still inside the mother’s womb.

Who can defend such a thing? Who would want to? The legislation will probably pass the House. It may get sidetracked in the Senate. If it passes the Senate it may — may — be vetoed by the president. And even if it becomes law, it will retard the progress of abortion by only a few hundred lives each year. But they are worth it. And the debate over this legislation, for the national attention it deserves and the educative benefits it can provide, is worth it every bit as much.

The country needs initiatives like this one, in Washington and the states. It needs them pressed consistently and conscientiously, each building on the last, each inviting the next. And it needs the public debate they will provoke and concentrate for years to come. That way, and that way only, will we ensure that our laws and practices reflect the fact that abortion is wrong.

–David Tell, for the Editors