Abortion

Date:   8/13/2005 5:25:29 AM ( 19 y ago)

9th~ I'm starting to revere life in such a way that killing in the womb does not seem an option. But I do know that both the lives of the mother and the child can be miserably ruined by a "welfare system existence". Is this actually a position of the elitest right...Has it and was it always a class consideration? No more teenage girls having babies they can't take care of financially...So who benefits by that ...Taxpayers or women ... who? And is there any question that our culture has become so split that there is no welcome for a being that comes to us trusting, helpless in love, and finances?

Perhaps a more open culture? The letter A's being sewed on our jumpers is long outdated...Or is it?

My question, is our culture so vicious that it cannot love it's own if it is at a cost...There are many changes to come....But in this area some very clever "One" has kept the eyes on availability not the cultural question begging to be addressed.


I digress (could it be the little libation earlier..!) my daughter who is in the thick of the age group that bespeaks and beholds these issues is fervently pro-choice, but with what frame of reference? That her choice wil be removed politically? I'd like to see the centerist polled as the author suggests...With a question on love and existence of the human spirit>>.



Pro-Choice but Anti-Naral

By JOHN TIERNEY
Published: August 13, 2005
My position on abortion has been, as politicians put it, evolving. I was once pro-choice and a contributor to Naral. Now I'm pro-choice but anti-Naral.



Forum: John Tierney's Columns
The group has a genius for alienating potential allies, as demonstrated by the television commercial it introduced this week and then hastily withdrew after a barrage of criticism. The ad, which featured footage of a bombed abortion clinic and a victim in a wheelchair, accused Judge John Roberts Jr. of siding with clinic bombers and having an ideology that would "excuse" their attacks.

What Mr. Roberts actually did, on behalf of the administration of the first President George Bush, was to write a brief supporting the right of people to protest at abortion clinics, not bomb them. His argument was not only reasonable, but also exposed a fundamental problem in the way Naral Pro-Choice America has framed the abortion issue.

The case involved a law forbidding conspiracies against a "class of persons," which was enacted during Reconstruction to protect blacks from the Ku Klux Klan. Mr. Roberts argued (and the Supreme Court agreed) that the law didn't apply to the protesters at abortion clinics because they weren't discriminating against all women, just the women seeking abortions.

If that argument sounds reactionary, it's only because Naral and other groups have worked so long to make abortion a civil rights issue, presenting it as women's fight for freedom against an oppressive patriarchy. The tactic makes for displays of solidarity like the March for Women's Lives, an occasion for denouncing male anti-abortion politicians and waving signs with that perennial slogan "If men got pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament."

It's true that pregnancy is a uniquely female burden and that most pro-life politicians are men - but then, so are most pro-choice politicians. There's no gender gap in opinion on the issue. Polls have long shown that men are no more hostile than women are to abortion rights. In a New York Times/CBS News Poll earlier this year, men were slightly less inclined than women to say that abortion should be outlawed.

Treating the issue as a civil rights crusade may be good for mobilizing some women, but this strategy alienates the public because it ducks the central issue. If you believe that life begins at conception, then protecting women's rights means protecting the rights of females in the womb, too.

The abortion debate, unlike the civil rights debate, can't be resolved by appealing to any widely held moral or legal principles. In Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court discovered a right in the Constitution for pregnant women to be left alone by the government. But that just ducked the question - what about the fetus's right to be left alone? - and angered huge numbers of Americans.

There's probably no group more eager to be left alone by the government than members of the Libertarian Party, but even they don't buy this new right. They have bitter debates on abortion, with some calling the fetus part of the woman's body, and others insisting it's like a stowaway on a ship who must be kept alive. (A few hard-core believers in property rights say that even a stowaway can be tossed overboard, but they're not in danger of being elected to anything.)

I wish the pro-choice movement would appeal to centrists of both sexes instead of playing to its activist base. The best way to keep abortion legal is to rely not on the Supreme Court but on the public, because three-quarters of Americans do not want to outlaw abortion.

Many of these people have moral objections and resent the Supreme Court's presumption in its Roe v. Wade decision, but they're also pragmatic enough to realize that a ban couldn't be enforced and would create a new set of problems. If Roe v. Wade were overturned and abortion policy left up to the states, these pragmatists would start to matter more than the ideologues on the left and right who now dominate the debate.

Legislators in some red states might keep their promises to outlaw abortion, but I think most would look at the polls and discover their position had suddenly evolved. The debate over abortion would ebb as the issue was settled democratically.

Instead of feeling obligated to fight over every vacancy on the Supreme Court, women would have a more secure right to abortion. They wouldn't have to worry about every brief and memo the nominee ever wrote - and they wouldn't suffer through an invidious commercial that only hurt their own cause.

E-mail: tierney@nytimes.com



 

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