Abortion Politics and its Discontents

New Yorker: Abortion Politics and its Discontents

Last weekend, the House of Representatives passed a health-care-reform bill with an amendment sponsored by Michigan Democrat Bart Stupak restricting any of the new government-supported health-care options from covering abortion. Sixty-four Democrats joined Republicans in voting for the amendment. I spoke to Jon Shields, an assistant professor at Claremont McKenna College and the author of “The Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right,” about the history of the organized opposition to abortion and its evolving relationship with American politics.

How did a Congress controlled by a large Democratic majority end up passing a bill with these restrictions on abortion?

The ban on abortion funding extended the logic of the pro-choice case for abortion rights. Pro-choice advocates, after all, have long argued that we need to respect the private moral choices of American citizens. Public funding of abortion, by this logic, would not respect our moral differences because it would force pro-life citizens to subsidize the practice of abortion. A ban on funding, therefore, is consistent with what is essentially a libertarian case for abortion rights. This is partly why many Americans who are otherwise sympathetic to abortion access nonetheless believe the state should not treat abortion as a welfare right. In addition, the success of health-care reform ultimately depends on the coöperation of Democrats from districts with strong Catholic constituencies.

According to the logic of the Stupak compromise, should pacifists not be forced to pay taxes because their money funds the Defense Department?

Well, again, I wanted to underscore the claim that pro-choice laws respect individual differences, including the views of pro-life Americans. We usually don’t make this claim about the military. Instead, the military is defended as a positive, collective good that we all benefit from. Pacifists are dismissed as an irrational and small minority. If the pro-choice movement made this sort of claim—that the point of abortion rights is to advance a public good rather than respect America’s pluralism—then, yes, it would follow that we should all reject the Stupak compromise. …

… Why, in a rapidly liberalizing culture, has opposition to abortion basically stayed the same? What political steps did the pro-life movement take to shift public sentiment after Roe v. Wade? …

… The liberalism at the heart of the pro-life campaign, however, is constantly distorted by a generation of scholars who have insisted the right-to-life movement is really about the preservation of traditional gender roles or male control over female sexuality. Such interpretations tend to ignore that the right to life movement regards itself as today’s civil-rights movement. The failure to grasp this reality renders the passion and dedication of the pro-life movement almost impossible to comprehend.

I believe that many scholars of abortion have resisted this conclusion because they find it difficult to entertain the possibility that these conservatives might be agents in progressive history. In their view, conservatives are by definition reactionaries to the civil-rights movement, not its heirs. …