President Clinton, who once publicly acknowledged that “almost all Americans believe abortion should be illegal when “the children can live outside the mother’s womb,” is now quietly acting to thwart that popular will. The House of Representatives has already passed, by an overwhelming bipartisan vote, a bill to ban so-called “partial-birth abortions.” That rarely performed procedure is, quite frankly, disgusting. But for its head, a third-trimester baby is delivered alive and kicking outside the mother’s body. Surgical scissors then puncture the infant’s skull so that a vacuum tool might suction out its brain.
The Senate has referred this legislation to committee, where abortion- rights supporters hope to see it watered down into nothing. And Clinton’s staffers have issued a one-paragraph “statement of administration” policy on the question. The president is “opposed” to late-term abortions of all kinds. Except, that is, “where there is a threat to [the mother’s] health, consisent with the law.” This language is pro-choice legalese for “under any circumstances.” It’s increasingly clear that our current regime of abortion on demand is morally indefensible, and when, generations hence, historians write the story of its rollback, Naomi Wolf’s New Republic article of October 16 (“Our Bodies, Our Souls”) will be viewed as a milestone: By late 1995, even trendy, feminist intellectuals could no longer defend our current abortion regime.
One of the letters criticizing Wolf (in the November 13 New Republic), from Jane M. Johnson, “interim co-president” of Planned Parenthood, will also be cited by historians as evidence of the ever-increasing fanaticism of those diehard defenders of the current abortion-rights regime.
Ms. Johnson attacks Ms. Wolf for “her view that there are good and bad reasons for abortion,” which is “profoundly disrespectful of the moral agency of women.” For, according to Ms. Johnson, “every woman’s decision about abortion is a moral decision.”
That is, respecting the “moral agency of women” means precisely arguing the absence of any moral agency, or the possibility of any moral judgment. Such a public embrace of a principled amorality about abortion is, according to Ms. Johnson, necessary to defend the current abortion regime.
She’s probably right, and that’s why this regime is doomed.
