Why The Saletan Smug Moralism Stratagem Will Fail

Via Atrios (who explains exactly what the results of the Saletan approach will be here), I see that Missouri Republicans voted to kill an amendment to start providing state funding for birth control. I guess Missouri pro-choicers didn’t talk enough about how evil women who get abortions are:

An attempt to resume state spending on birth control got shot down Wednesday by House members who argued it would have amounted to an endorsement of promiscuous lifestyles.

Missouri stopped providing money for family planning and certain women’s health services when Republicans gained control of both chambers of the Legislature in 2003.

[…]

The House voted 96-59 to delete the funding for contraception and infertility treatments after Rep. Susan Phillips told lawmakers that anti-abortion groups such as Missouri Right to Life were opposed to the spending.

“If you hand out contraception to single women, we’re saying promiscuity is OK as a state, and I am not in support of that,” Phillips, R-Kansas City, said in an interview.

Others, including some lawmakers who described themselves as “pro-life,” said it was illogical for anti-abortion lawmakers to deny money for contraception to low-income people who use public health clinics.

“It’s going to have the opposite effect of what the intention is, which will be more unwanted pregnancies and more abortions,” said Rep. Kate Meiners, D-Kansas City.

What–you mean many American pro-lifers oppose contraception for reasons independent of the abortion issue? My illusions are shattered.

And, of course, this is the central problem with Saletan’s preserve-abortion-through-presumptuous-moralizing strategy. It’s not just that he basically ignores the way in which American pro-life politics are not just about “fetal life” but are inextricably bound up in reactionary conceptions of gender and sexuality. It’s also that his strategy is missing a plausible causal link. To work it basically assumes that many anti-choicers will admit that they’re arguing in bad faith, and that their policy preferences aren’t really about protecting fetal life. How likely is that? And how likely is it that talking about how immoral abortion is will increase support for reproductive rights? Trying to infer political strategies from snapshots of majoritarian public opinion is very unlikely to work.

…as a useful alternative, I think that this is an excellent point:

What pro-choice advocates need to make clear in conversations with moderate pro-lifers is that advocating free access to abortion is not contingent on a belief that every woman who decides to have an abortion is doing a good thing, or is making her decision on a moral basis. It depends on the belief that, if you are willing to agree that there are good and sufficient reasons for a woman to seek an abortion in some circumstances, that there is no one in a better position to decide whether those circumstances apply than the woman involved. She may not always be right, but there is no preferable decision-maker available. Discussions of what constitute good and bad reasons for abortion can still be interesting and important moral discussions, but they can’t reasonably form a basis for restrictions on abortion that depend on the woman’s justification, unless one is prepared to propose an alternative decision-maker who decides whose reasons for abortion are sufficient and whose are insufficient on a case-by-case basis.

[my emphasis]

Exactly right. The problem with centrist moral ambivalence is that it can’t be written into law (unless you assume that committees of doctors or whatever can make better complex ethical judgments than the woman whose life is actually involved, which runs into the obvious problem that it’s silly.) So, instead, this ambivalence becomes manifested in regulations that make it harder for certain classes of women to get abortions, but do nothing to ensure that women will make choices Will Saletan will agree with.