Emphasize Law , Not Morality

Various bloggers have reacted negatively to Amy Sullivan’s claim that her support of legal abortion can’t be labeled “pro-choice” because she believes that abortion is morally problematic. Kevin Drum defends Sullivan, arguing that it’s entirely possible for a good pro-choicer to acknowledge the moral complexity of abortion. And this is true as far as it goes; it’s certainly possible for a pro-choicer to acknowledge that people disagree about the morality of abortion and then go on to explain why bans on abortion are a bad idea no matter what your position on abortion is.

The problem that I and other people have, though, is that for the most part Sullivan and Saletan don’t actually do this. Their arguments about abortion emphasize moral agreements with anti-choicers, not legal disagreements. Sullivan claiming that she can’t be described as pro-choice implies that pro-choicers can’t disagree about the morality of abortion, and of course asserting that everyone has to acknowledge that abortion is icky is central to Saletan’s shtick. And while Obama goes on in the speech cited by Kevin to argue that everyone can agree that it’s good to lower abortion rates but that we need “family planning and education for our young people,” Sullivan has argued that such policies represent “standing up to” pro-choicers whose goal is allegedly to maximize abortion rates per se.

Good coalition-building on reproductive freedom would consist of emphasizing agreement (the stupidities and inequities of using inevitably arbitrary state coercion to force women to bring pregnancies to term, the greater effectiveness of the broad panoply of pro-choice policies in reducing abortion rates by reducing unwanted pregnancies) and de-emphasizing moral conflicts. People object to Sullivan and Saletan because they emphasize the latter rather than the former — and especially in Saletan’s case, in fact denying that abortion is morally complex but that people who don’t share his moral views are simply wrong — and argue almost exclusively on the political terrain favored by anti-choicers. Creating conflicts where no necessary ones exist — like writing yourself out of the pro-choice movement because you think there are moral problems with abortion — is coalition-fracturing. Acknowledging that many people find abortion immoral can be the start of a pro-choice argument, but it can’t be the end of one.