The dilemma of an anti-abortion Democrat:
Jr, David R Carlin
WE'VE LET THE NATIONAL PARTY IGNORE OUR OPPOSITION The dilemma of an anti-abortion Democrat DAVID R. CARLIN, JR. THE STORY goes that Hegel, whose doctrine was anything but orthodox Christianity,...
...and taking an anti-choice stand on abortion is a sure-fire way of provoking that hostility...
...It's one thing to disagree, say, with Walter Mondale's neo-protectionist utterances regarding imports of steel and automobiles...
...Abortion is not simply one more issue...
...But sufficient for the day is the evil thereof...
...Abortion is not simply one more objectionable feature in American life...
...so we don't like the prospect of getting into either a public or a private brawl with them...
...But it's quite something else to say, "What's a little homicide among friends...
...This tardy realization is a tribute no doubt to the dullness of my imagination...
...In other words, a few abortions might be allowable, but anything remotely resembling abortion-on-demand would be condemned...
...Lest my argument sound too much like an appeal to duty only - and duty, while infinitely admirable, has never been an especially pleasant goddess - let me sweeten the cup with an appeal to Democratic self-interest as well...
...In fact, can it not be said that in a sense we are more at fault than they are...
...Third, on the view just given, abortions in certain cases would be justifiable early in the pregnancy, given sufficiently grave reasons...
...While we remember that we are against abortion, we can't forget that we are mainstream Democrats as well...
...For those of us who are politicians, not members of the purist or lunatic fringe, the thing to do is to get behind the party and candidate whose views most closely coincide with ours, always realizing we'll never get everything we want...
...There are reasons for this lukewarmness...
...The trouble is, of course, that we have no place else to go...
...Most of us simply do not have the stomach for that...
...Rather I think there is some probability that the person exists from the moment of conception, a probability that becomes greater the longer the pregnancy lasts, until finally it reaches a point of virtual certainty...
...It is attributable also to the fact that my political life is lived not at the national but at the state and local level, where anti-abortion Democrats are a good deal more plentiful than they are in Washington...
...Even if abortion were to be outlawed, the prohibition would be largely unenforceable...
...Second, probable homicide is almost as wrong as certain homicide, and the greater the probability the more its wrong-ness approaches the wrongness of certain homicide...
...Despite being, like Avis, number two in our party, we haven't tried harder...
...This is the "Forty million liberal Democrats can't be wrong" argument...
...Right...
...It is clear also that candidates from the "moderate" sector of the party, Glenn and Hollings, though they hope to win the nomination without a great deal of support from the liberals, have no chance of winning either the nomination or the ensuing election if they provoke the active hostility of the liberals...
...So is the fight worth the candle...
...Clearly this is not what happens...
...Well, I was born a Democrat, I've always been a Democrat, and I intend to die a Democrat...
...Strictly speaking, this was no surprise...
...Politics is the art of the possible...
...Wrong...
...Yet there are moments in the national life when the soul of the nation is at stake...
...The police would be reluctant to arrest, prosecutors reluctant to indict, juries reluctant to convict...
...But we, who realize the pro-choice position is wrong, continue to support its supporters...
...Clearly we cannot turn Republican...
...But we do...
...On the contrary, it's the pro-choice people in the Democratic party who are full of passionate intensity, while we, if we don't quite lack all conviction, seem not to have a great deal of it...
...and the later the date in the pregnancy the more grave the reason would have to be...
...One of the fundamental principles of politics in a democracy is not to be too insistent on fundamental principles...
...1) Right-wing opponents of abortion like Phyllis Schlafly and Rev...
...There are other pressures, to be sure, tending to separate them from their customary political loyalties, especially pressures resulting from upward mobility and geographic change...
...Jerry Falwell and their followers have given anti-abortionism such a bad name among reasonable people that we're reluctant to join forces, or even to be perceived as joining forces, with them...
...At a minimum we ought to organize either a caucus within the Democratic party or a special-interest group (if I may be forgiven for using that expression) on the periphery of the party...
...The pro-abortion stance of the national Democratic party coupled with the anti-abortion stance of the Republican party helps the Republicans in at least two ways, In the short run, their anti-abortionism serves as a kind of moral fig leaf for the Reagan administration's belligerence abroad, its indifference to problems of social justice both at home and abroad, and its general attitude that betokens anything but a "pro-life'' orientation toward the world...
...But we could always sit on our hands, contrary to our nature as political animals though that may be...
...6) Now that the abortion cat has been out of the bag for more than a decade, it seems improbable to us that it can ever be captured again...
...But while we can at moments imagine ourselves going to the wall for anti-abortionism, hardly any of us can picture ourselves as champions of chastity...
...At home we just don't get the feeling that we belong to America's pro-abortion party...
...Abortion makes the present such a moment in the life of the United States...
...thus liberals Mondale, Cranston, Hart, and McGovern could hardly be expected to be anything but pro-choice...
...But add to these the fact that they have no place to go except to the Republicans with their anti-abortion sentiments, and we lose these families sooner than we had to or in many cases when we didn't have to lose them at all...
...Abortion is a case in point today...
...It is nothing less than a great horror - both in itself and as a sign of the deterioration of moral intelligence in our society...
...In the longer run, traditional Democratic families - especially those whose religion is Catholic, evangelical Protestant, and Orthodox Jewish - are being lost to the party on the abortion issue...
...That is, I'm not convinced that personhood begins at the moment of conception, though I'd agree that is the single most likely moment of its commencement...
...7) Since abortion is part and parcel of a very liberal sex ethic (or in some cases a non-ethic), the opponent of abortion logically ought to be an opponent of this ethic as well...
...Pragmatism, not salvation, is the name of the political game...
...4) Since we belong to a party which has traditionally been hospitable to an exceptionally wide range of views and interests and social groups, we shy away from single-issue politics, no matter how important that single issue may be...
...From time to time we may speak or write against abortion...
...I'll be asked...
...At least it is not if it is what we say it is, namely, something in the area of homicide or probable homicide...
...So I wasn't surprised to hear that my party is the party of abortion in America...
...But we're such good sports about losing, not insisting that there be any "linkage" between abortion and anything else, that the leadership of the national party may be forgiven when it treats our lukewarm opposition to abortion as though it were tantamount to no opposition at all...
...and finally to conclude, as I see the balance tip in his favor, "What's a little neo-protectionism among friends...
...If we hold public office, we may occasionally get a chance to cast a vote, largely symbolic, against it...
...BUT WITH ALL these qualifications, abortion is still a horrendous thing...
...There must be no single-issue fanaticism about us...
...Fourth, I deplore the fevered anti-abortion rhetoric that speaks of persons who advocate, tolerate, or participate in abortion as "killers" or "murderers...
...To deserve those ignominious titles one would have to engage in abortion while at the same time believing the act to be unjustifiable homicide...
...So what are we to do...
...But sometimes that loyalty is not easy to maintain - and not, as in Hegel's case, because I've fallen into heresy, but because the leaders in my party have sometimes gone chasing after strange new gods...
...The seventh candidate, Reu-bin Askew, was not present...
...whatever alliances we are able to work out with conservatives on the abortion question, there must be no generalized cozying up to them...
...2) Pro-choice Democrats are in agreement with us on a wide range of non-abortion issues...
...Besides, they are commonly (or so at least I find) likable people - much more so than the right-wing anti-abortionists, whose hostility to abortion, one suspects, is often motivated by something less amiable than the love of life they've written across their banners...
...However fine the pro-choice people may be in their intentions, however little their subjective guilt may be, abortion remains either homicide or probable homicide...
...So I repeat my question: How can we support a national party and its presidential candidate when they are supporting abortion...
...So what's the problem...
...The liberal wing of the Democratic party has long been emphatically pro-choice...
...Life is largely a matter of making the best of bad situations, and the best option in 1984 is to support the Democratic party and its pro-choice candidate for president, meanwhile leaving to heaven the hopes of the anti-abortion cause...
...Vietnam was a case in point in the years when Lyndon Johnson was president and almost all the Democrats in Congress were supporting the war, albeit with rather long faces...
...Abortion is a great national disgrace, and inasmuch as we anti-abortion Democrats have remained relatively inactive in our opposition to it we are not totally undeserving of blame for what has happened...
...Our respect for them sometimes gives us moments of doubt in which we wonder if we may not be mistaken in our anti-abortion conclusion...
...Back on October 2, 1983, six Democratic presidential candidates - Walter Mondale, John Glenn, Alan Cranston, Gary Hart, Ernest Hollings, and George McGovern-addressed the annual convention of the National Organization for Women and assured NOW members that they endorsed the constitutional right to have an abortion...
...the most that will be accomplished is the removal of what is in effect the moral sanction the courts have given abortion...
...no promises must be made that eventual repeal of abortion-on-demand will result in any striking decline in the number of abortions performed in the United States...
...Americans with strong anti-abortion convictions are disposed to overlook many of the administration's moral shortcomings when they realize that only the Republicans, not the national Democrats, echo their anti-abortion convictions...
...Anyone who insists that his political leaders and associates must agree with him on 100 percent of the issues is more a fanatic than a politician...
...And the question that occurs to me is this: How can we continue to support a national party, how can we support its candidate for president, when that party and that candidate adopt a pro-choice position - that is, leaving euphemisms aside, a pro-abortion position...
...3) We think we detect more than a hint of fanaticism among both the militant anti-abortionists and the militant pro-abortionists, and we're unwilling to join the fray and thus contribute to the intensification of political passions...
...This is especially true in my state, rather conservative and heavily Catholic, where anti-abortion Democrat politicians are the rule, not the exception...
...5) We are acquainted with many very reasonable and well-intentioned people who have no difficulty in accepting the pro-choice position...
...And those who do couldn't turn for this Republican president and his followers...
...THE STORY goes that Hegel, whose doctrine was anything but orthodox Christianity, was once challenged as to how he reconciled his teaching with the tenets of the Lutheran church...
...If it is perverse to seek personal salvation in politics, it is equally perverse to forget that the nation one serves has an abiding need for a kind of political salvation...
...I have scant sympathy with the person who views political activity as a sacred mission, a kind of ersatz religion...
...If it's religion he wants, let him go to church...
...At least they have the excuse of invincible ignorance (some of them very invincible indeed): they believe their pro-choice position is right, no matter how mistaken that belief may be...
...But not just any old group or caucus will do...
...The truth of the matter is, I'm afraid, that the great majority of anti-abortion Democrats (and I include myself in this reproach) haven't done nearly as much as we could have in support of our announced position...
...In such circumstances even the most pragmatic of anti-abortion Democrats must recognize the need for something of a moratorium on politics as usual...
...I had always known that, yet somehow that knowledge hadn't really come home to me until I read the newspaper report of the NOW convention...
...Having gone this far and having begun, I fear, to sound a little like Phyllis Schlafly and her right-wing friends, with their tendency to speak of the pro-choice party as supporting the "right to kill babies," let me tone down my remarks by offering a few qualifications...
...the case against abortion must be made publicly in dry, sober, intellectual terms, not in purple rhetoric, and not even when the pro-choice forces provoke us by lapsing into their coat-hanger rhetoric...
...THESE REASONS explain our lukewarmness, but they don't justify it...
...then to put that in the balance against all the things I agree with him on...
...If you're anti-abortion and that party and its presidential candidate are pro-abortion - well, that's too bad...
...I was born a Lutheran," muttered Hegel, not always the most agreeable of conversationalists, "and I intend to die a Lutheran...
...If abortion really is the killing of a person, then it must weigh very heavily in the balance, so heavily that it is difficult to imagine what collection of agreements with Mondale or any other pro-choice Democrat could outweigh it...
...First, I don't believe the typical abortion to be homicide so much as I believe it to be probable homicide...
Vol. 110 • November 1983 • No. 20
