An ethical challenge to prochoice advocates
Callahan, Daniel
AN ETHICAL CHALLENGE TO PROCHOICE ADVOCATES ABORTION & THE PLURALISTIC PROPOSITION DANIEL CALLAHAN At the heart of much moral debate in America lies a simple and popular conviction: the law...
...Poor black women, mainly young, are proportionately the largest group to choose abortion...
...See: Mary Ann Glendon, Abortion and Divorce in American Law: American Failures, European Challenges, Harvard University Press, 1987...
...We all favor the right to free speech, but we are not unconcerned-nor do we withhold our public condemnation-when that right is used to insult or demean those of other races...
...It has come to overshadow the writings and work of other feminists, no less intent on preserving women's freedom of choice, but also on setting that freedom in a context of the common good of men and women, children, and families...
...The prochoice movement would, in its future work, stress the need for serious choice, the moral character of that choice, and be receptive to public debate about standards for the making of private choice...
...That stance has an important practical implication for the future of the prochoice movement: its inability or unwillingness to come to grips with the moral issue threatens its political credibility...
...I could not have been more naive, more hopelessly optimistic in thinking that such reflection would be acceptable...
...To be sure, the private moral wrestling would and could be a source of anguish and pain, but that is true of all critical moral choices, hardly unique to abortion...
...A flat rejection of that possibility suggests a desire to maximize abortion rather than to increase choice...
...Should we be surprised at that...
...It assumes that it has solved a moral problem for everyone that has, in actuality, never found any single and enduring historical solution...
...The strongest supporters of legal abortion over the years have been young males...
...it has been steadily supportive of Roe v. Wade...
...If the prolife movement exclusively stresses the rights of the fetus, then the prochoice movement must exclusively stress the rights of women...
...Taken together, these scientific developments have brought the fetus more squarely before the public eye...
...A viable prochoice stance for the future must come to grips with those hazards in far more effective ways than it has done in the past...
...Is it not the nature of personal morality, many seem to think, that it is so unique and idiosyncratic to the individual, so subject to private, self-determined moral standards, that nothing meaningful can be said about it, and certainly not enough for public debate...
...Yet if silence or uneasiness is the predominant response to the moral problem, there are others in the prochoice movement-a small but seemingly growing minority-for whom even the idea of discussion of the moral choice is repugnant (see: Jason DeParle, "Beyond the Legal Right: Why Liberals and Feminists Don't Like to Talk About the Morality of Abortion," the Washington Monthly, April 1989, pp...
...There are, moreover, some 1.6 million abortions a year, with no diminution in sight...
...Why has this happened...
...A restriction on late abortions, already made more difficult by the Webster decision, would meet widespread approval...
...The same data indicate that that is not necessarily the exclu sive reason, but it is remarkably difficult to find much prochoice probing into the reality of coerced abortions...
...Even contemplating this possibility poses a hard dilemma for the prochoice leadership...
...The most important scientific developments have been threefold...
...It is as if, in face of the prolife movement, some feminist leaders have decided to be as single-minded and unmeasured as their opponents...
...Abortion is often a cheap solution to deeply social problems, and all the more seductive if it is dressed up in the language of choice, pretending that poor women really have meaningful choices...
...The first step is to be willing to talk about them, having the nerve to put aside worries about the political hazards of doing so...
...Yet in the long run, if the prochoice position is to prevail, it will have to run such risks...
...If, for some people, to have choice is itself the beginning and end of morality, for most people it is just the beginning...
...3) accepting the necessity for some compromise in the law as a way of taking seriously the objections of the prolife position...
...One question, above all, troubles me...
...Despite the harsh things I have to say about elements of the prochoice position, I think in the end it is the only one that is viable in our society...
...2) accepting the need for active public debate about individual moral choices and the likelihood that some will be judged more negatively than others...
...More importantly, it seems increasingly clear that, with some compromise, an accommodation might be developed that would have a good chance of both enduring and allowing for the great majority of present abortions...
...The most plausible reason is that most people are trying to find a suitable balance between the traditions of choice and those of respect for life...
...Could it be that a strong notion of pluralism requires a weak notion of personal morality, or that a strong notion of personal morality requires a weak notion of pluralism...
...It has grassroots support among many who are otherwise politically liberal...
...A prochoice movement unwilling or unable to do that will be forever in jeopardy, hiding from itself but not from others its underlying moral insecurity...
...If the prolife movement says that every abortion choice is wrong, whatever the reason, then the prochoice leadership implies that every choice is right, whatever the choice...
...some 60 percent of the public falls in a zone of ambivalence and nuance (see: Dionne, ibid., and also Gallup Poll Monthly, April 1,1990, p. 41...
...Why am I interested in these questions...
...On the one hand, there would be a sharp restriction of late abortions, parental notification for teenagers, federally supported abortions only for medical or clear health reasons, mandatory counseling and waiting periods, and serious efforts to reduce the number of abortions, especially repeat abortions...
...From a movement that in the 1950s and 1960s was measured, careful, open to larger concerns, it now runs the risk of becoming narrow and ideologically rigid...
...There is a great deal of sociological literature on why women have abortions, and many interesting journalistic accounts of women's experience in making abortion decisions...
...I want to show how that has happened in at least some strands of the prochoice movement and why it reduces the moral strength of that position...
...It would encompass two major ingredients...
...They constantly influence and reflect each other...
...Can we entertain a meaningful and substantive notion of personal morality in a pluralistic society...
...It does not end until a supportable, justifiable choice has been made, one that can be judged right or wrong by the individual herself based on some reasonably serious, not patently self-interested way of thinking about ethics...
...A number of prominent feminists-including Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, it might be recalled-came to reject a pure choice ideology in the case of surrogate motherhood (during the debate over the Baby M case...
...Serious ethical reflection goes beyond those matters...
...4. Given freedom of choice, women will make free choices...
...They either want to declare that abortion is not, in its substance, a moral question at all (only the woman's right to choose an abortion is taken to be a moral issue...
...When asked a general question about the right of women to have an abortion, a majority favors such a right...
...The prochoice movement has fallen into a different trap...
...The state of public opinion provides one reason for thinking about this possibility...
...28-44...
...It can support the choice side more readily than the morality side...
...The most striking ideological development has been the emergence into leadership positions in the prochoice movement of some feminists who have scanted many of the original arguments for abortion reform...
...A number of women might in the future be denied abortions, for economic or other reasons, that are now available...
...It does not know what else to do with them...
...The first I have already discussed at length, that of the fear of, and reluctance to, even discuss openly what might count as an unjustifiable moral choice...
...Planned Parenthood, in a series of advertisements after the decision, said that there could be "no middle ground...
...The prolife movement did not create that trend, but has effectively capitalized upon it by tying it into its moral focus on the fetus...
...As a theoretical issue, the pluralistic proposition surely encompasses that possibility...
...There is the lowering age of fetal viability, now down to twenty-four weeks, a result of the great improvements in neonatology (though perhaps, for the time being, stalled at that level...
...or that, in any case, to concede that it is a serious moral choice and to have a public discussion about that choice is politically hazardous, the opening wedge of a discussion that could easily lead once again to a restriction of a woman's right to an abortion...
...That men have long coerced women into abortion when it suits their purposes is well-known but rarely mentioned...
...I do not claim that this characterization is true of all prochoice leaders, far from it, only that it is strongly present, and growing, and in a way that was not the case two decades ago...
...Those figures suggest, though do not prove, a primary and grow ing dependence for many upon abortion as the first line of defense against unwanted pregnancy, not a back-up method (and rem iniscent of the pattern that developed in Eastern Europe in the aftermath of abortion liberalization in the 1960s and 1970s...
...The prochoice movement has tried to make do with a thin, near-to-vanishing idea of personal morality...
...It has had to do that because, if looked at too closely, the actual complexity of the abortion situation raises disturbing questions about both the political realities and issues of personal morality...
...The choice of becoming a surrogate mother, they argued, is not necessarily a good choice or beneficial to women, however much it may have the virtue of being a choice that a woman can legally make...
...In this case, that would at the least require some sensitive reflection of the values encompassed in that moral tradition that presses for a respect for life...
...That would require the meeting of at least four conditions: (1) recognizing that the prochoice position represents only one important moral tradition in our culture, and must exist in tension with and appreciation of the no less important tradition embodied in the prolife movement, that of a respect for life...
...That kind of stance is a mistake...
...See: David C. Reardon, Aborted Women: Silent No More, Loyola University Press, 1987...
...It stressed the common benefits of abortion reform, particularly to children and the society, and it drew heavily on the pluralistic proposition, which bears on a wide range of personal choices for men and women, not simply the abortion choice for women...
...Why is it, then, that there is now a whole genre of literature and reports of women who regret their abortions, who felt coerced by others or their social circumstances into having an abortion they would not otherwise have chosen...
...But that is a hard position to sustain, even for the single-minded, when the choice is to abort a female fetus simply because it is female...
...that, while an abortion decision is and must be difficult morally and psychologically, a woman should have a right to make such a decision...
...Faye D. Ginsburg's important recent book, Contested Lives (University of California Press, 1989), underscores that point...
...If legal abortion has given women more choice, it has also given men more choice as well...
...At the least, that is a difficult question, not so perspicuously self-evident as prolife advocates would have us believe...
...The idea that we can draw a sharp line between the public and the private sphere, between public and private choices, is a great myth...
...There will, it is true, be practical problems here...
...The cost of failing to take seriously the personal moral issues is to court self-deception, and to be drawn to employ arguments of expediency and evasion...
...Dionne, Jr., "Polls Find Ambivalence on Abortion Persists in U.S.," the New York Times, August 3, 1989, p. 418...
...It no less means that women will and should have a difficult and highly troubling debate with themselves about their own abortions and will, if the public discussion has been full and rich, have to struggle with the conflicting moral views...
...A parental notification requirement for minors seeking abortion would win widespread support as well (even if, as I believe, it would have some unhappy, damaging results...
...There are good choices, and there are bad choices...
...The morality of the choice is thereby trivialized...
...It may even overturn the Roe v. Wade decision, but that is thought less likely...
...I offer a partial list of those assertions, counterpoised against what I take to be the more complex truth of the matter...
...It is surely about those rights, but it is also about the welfare of families and children, about the obligations of males toward women and toward the children they procreate, and about the family and the place of childbearing within it...
...But the importance of running that risk is that by doing so the prochoice movement will put itself in a far more secure long-term position...
...Why is it, then, that many women feel coerced economically into having an abortion...
...Even if it comes to a different conclusion about the moral status of the fetus-as it doubtless will-the prochoice side should show itself no less probing about the importance of that question than the prolife side...
...4) agreeing on the need to make every effort to change those economic and social circumstances that lead women to make coerced abortion choices, and on the need for meaningful counseling of women who are considering abortion...
...or to have an abortion to please (or spite) a husband or boy friend...
...If one believes in real choice-in abortion or any other serious matter that requires reflection and psychological freedom-then the proposal in many states that there be a mandatory waiting period of a few days seems a reasonable accommodation for the prochoice movement to make...
...Why has this shift taken place...
...This question is important for the abortion debate, but no less important for many other ethical debates that come down to deciding between private choice and government intervention...
...More generally, the pluralism proposition can not itself well endure unless it finds a stronger place for a consideration of private moral choices...
...At stake here as well is the future of the pluralistic proposition...
...One of them is to reject altogether the contention that abortion represents a moral choice of any consequence, and some take that route...
...and they have become in many respects a mirror-image of them...
...At the least it would be to concede implicitly that the fetus has enough moral status to force a judgment that not all reasons for its destruction are morally defensible...
...Nothing has so baffled me over the years as the faintly patronizing, paternalistic way in which, in the name of choice, it has been thought necessary to protect women from serious moral struggle...
...1. Abortion and the traditions of morality...
...It has a still more deleterious effect: it is a basic threat to moral honesty and integrity...
...Yet we might speculate on a more subtle additional possibility: that of the actual difficulty of managing the pluralistic proposition in the face of insistent moral issues that cannot be successfully denatured by exclusive reduction to choice...
...I have already suggested one set of reasons for moving in that direction: the high price paid in credibility for evasion of problems of real moral concern to probably a majority of prochoice supporters (and surely of great concern to those who are not certain just where they stand...
...One reason for the intensity and intractability of the abortion debate is that it pits two important moral traditions against each other, that of respect for choice, and that of respect for life...
...Not all private reasons are accepted as equally valid, and a large proportion of people report themselves uncertain about their own views, not just those of others...
...Yet every survey for nearly twenty years shows women them selves divided on the issue, marginally but consistently more opposed to fully permissive abortion than men...
...Many of those arguments are still, of course, part of the movement...
...Before I develop that thesis, however, a caution is in order...
...the prospect of a Supreme Court gutting or reversal of Roe v. Wade...
...Much less is heard about the social harm of unwanted pregnancies, much less about the terrible or tragic choice posed by an abortion, much less about the moral nature of the choice, and practically nothing about the need to reduce the number of abortions, now running at a rate of 1.6 million a year...
...I conclude that only the second alternative noted above is tenable, to admit the moral seriousness of the abortion choice...
...Anguish and ambivalence can result from trying to decide what one really wants to do, fear of the procedure itself, worry about the reaction of others...
...That serves neither its own long-term interests nor those of the pluralistic proposition...
...There are, in fact, varied ways of formulating that position and it makes a difference which one chooses...
...Molly Yard, president of NOW, said after the Webster decision that the Court has begun "a war against women...
...and it would be no less appropriate to have some public discussion about the standards and criteria appropriate for such choices, much as we might about other moral matters not subject to law but of common interest and importance...
...A pluralism that tries to buy social peace at the expense of moral probity, or considers public issues of far greater importance than private moral issues, can not long endure...
...Is it possible in the case of abortion to combine legal freedom and seriousness about the moral questions...
...While this movement has often been stereotyped by its opponents as nothing but religious conservatism, that is hardly accurate...
...It is no less insensitive to the all-too-common tendency to define out of the human community those lives that are threatening or burdensome...
...Or is it the case that the pluralistic proposition-in practice if not necessarily in theoretical formulation-encourages a thin and minimalist, relativistic idea of personal morality...
...To say all that is not to imply that the prochoice position is free of problems...
...A strong pluralism is one that just as actively debates the nature and content of private choice as it does that of public, legal, and political choice...
...Why is there, as public opinion polls suggest, a broad agreement on the general right of women to make an abortion choice, yet considerable disagreement on morally acceptable reasons for abortion...
...The most obvious reasons are the growing pressures and successes of the prolife movement, forcing a more defensive, intransigent position...
...I am searching for two things simultaneously: a permanent and secure place in American law for the right of women to make their own choice, and a far richer, more sensitive notion of the nature of that choice than is now commonly the case...
...There would be, on the other hand, a significant improvement in maternal and child benefits, improved counseling, and more effective family planning and contraceptive education and services...
...Only a willingness to make room for an ongoing-and no doubt never-ending-debate about the morality of individual abortion choices can preserve the status of abortion as a serious moral issue...
...It is hazardous...
...The prolife position speaks eloquently and meaningfully about the value of nascent, defenseless life...
...I am only saying that compromises of this sort are most likely to find a middle ground that will be acceptable to public opinion, to be sustainable by the legislatures and courts, and yet also to be most likely to insure that women will still be left with a wide range of choice in the future...
...it is too crude...
...Is it possible, simultaneously and with equal seriousness, to hold that abortion should (a) be left to the individual and private choice of women, and (b) that each such decision should be understood as a genuine moral choice, one that can be good or bad, right or wrong...
...For if women can have abortions, then there is no compelling leverage for women to use in demanding that men take responsibility for the children they procreate...
...If abortion provides for some women a meaningful alternative to the bearing of a child they can not afford and will be unable properly to care for, it also has the ironic effect of taking pressure off the government and society to give them decent help to allow them to choose instead to have a child...
...Once women had the choice, it would then become important for them in their private lives to give thought to what could count as a morally justifiable choice...
...I will call this the pluralistic proposition...
...AN ETHICAL CHALLENGE TO PROCHOICE ADVOCATES ABORTION & THE PLURALISTIC PROPOSITION DANIEL CALLAHAN At the heart of much moral debate in America lies a simple and popular conviction: the law should leave to the individual conscience choice about those acts that are private, do not command a moral consensus, and are not harmful to others...
...Counseling will, however, have little meaning unless there is an enormous improvement in the services and social benefits available to women...
...The second obstacle is the absence of serious counseling on abortion, particularly in the clinics that do such a larger number of abortions...
...A large number of hospitals have, for some years, established an informal cut-off point of twenty weeks, so a restriction of this kind would not have a major impact...
...Yet some 40 percent of all abortions are now repeat abortions, a figure that has steadily grown over the years...
...It is a morally serious position, one compatible with a wide range of other values that seek to protect and preserve life...
...It is prone morally to confuse being unwanted with being valueless, a blurring of categories that puts the value of all human life at risk...
...and the impact of the media, with its predilection for polarized positions, encouraging one-dimensionality on both sides of the debate...
...Some of them will come over...
...The other alternative is to concede the validity of the moral worries, the importance of the moral substance of choice, and thereby open the door to a public moral discussion of abortion itself...
...Let me begin that task by looking, first, at the history of arguments used by the prochoice movement, that movement which achieved its greatest victory in the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which is now in jeopardy...
...It will be beset from within by those who give thought to their private choices and who wonder about the meaning and impact of those choices in their lives and the lives of others...
...and then, secondly, at the developments in the arguments since that time...
...Those realities reveal a disturbingly obvious point: not all opponents of abortion are men, not all arguments against abortion are antiwoman, and not each and every abortion choice is equally justifiable, either because of the social circumstances or setting of the choice, or because of the actual content of the choice...
...The prochoice movement can show itself to be one of nuance and responsibility, of choice and moral seriousness, of women's right to self-determination and their demonstrated and undoubted capacity to put that commitment in the larger context of a common social good...
...The only plausible way to resist that outcome is to make clear that abortion should never be an alternative to full and decent social policy, and that the presence of permissive abortion laws provides no excuse not to put into place needed policy reforms...
...An immediate response of the prochoice leadership to Webster was hostility to the decision and to any and all compromise...
...But its willingness to engage in such probing, and to run that risk, will itself have a powerful appeal to many prolife adherents who are themselves ambivalent about denying all choice to women...
...2. Abortion should not be promoted as a primary means of birth control, but as.a back-up to a contraceptive failure...
...The "prolife" side, by contrast, has held that the decisive harm abortion does to the fetus and its right to life removes it from the private realm and makes it a matter of legitimate government regulation...
...It has also of late gained the support of many women who are feminists...
...The most obvious political change has been the emergence of a strong, well-organized, and well-financed prolife movement...
...35-42...
...The prochoice movement is unable effectively to respond to these findings, partly because of its own ideology (which wants no such distinctions) and partly because of deficiencies in the pluralistic proposition on which it relies to make its general case...
...I have not changed my view on the legal issue in any significant way...
...The abortion debate of the past three decades has, in great part, been about this proposition...
...The latter simply goes underground, eating away corrosively at the commitment to legal freedom...
...A prochoice position that opposes any political compromise fails to understand that, for most people their own moral judgment is already a compromise...
...The polls would suggest that abortion is as much a war among women as against women (with class and education a significant element of that war...
...A prochoice position that would make the value of early human life depend solely upon private choice and the individual exercise of power-the view that a woman confers value on a fetus by her decision to accept it-fails to understand the importance of communal safeguards against capricious power over life and death...
...If the prochoice movement presents itself as principally a movement about the rights of women, it is likely to lose in the long run...
...A strong commitment to legal freedom and choice combined with a weak commitment to substantive moral examination and ethical choice is an unsatisfactory combination...
...Yet there is remarkably little written about how women ought to make such private decisions, that is, thoughtful writing on the appropriate moral uses of free choice for those who have the legal right to do so...
...To admit that complexity would be to admit the importance of some portions of the prolife argument, a highly distressing prospect...
...But that view is hardly likely to be persuasive to most prochoice supporters, who know better...
...There is the growing medical interest in fetal health and development, a trend that has nothing directly to do with the abortion issue, but reflecting research and public health concerns...
...Good counseling programs are never easy to organize...
...That kind of probing will probably lead to a loss of some people from its side, perhaps many...
...The tacit answer to this question is clear enough...
...It allows women little occasion for considered and assisted reflection, and inadequate help in implementing a range of different choices...
...If we opt for private choice, what is this likely to mean to the idea of personal morality and what are its possible social implications...
...But then the present situation is hardly adequate either...
...that the number of unwanted pregnancies, thought to be large, should be reduced and only wanted children should be born-the welfare of children was as much at stake as that of women...
...The consequence of these deficiencies is that, when pressed on the personal moral issues, the prochoice leadership usually reacts with anger, confusion, or denial...
...There are three major obstacles to taking choice seriously...
...Note an interesting parallel...
...The Webster decision already assures that there will be such ground, like it or not...
...That standard-central to every major ethical system and tradition-applies to the moral life generally, whether it be a matter of abortion or any other grave matter...
...No number of abortions seems to be too many...
...What might an abortion policy in the future Look like with that aim in mind and in light of the accommodations I have suggested...
...While it may be an accident that resources for the poor have diminished in parallel with the increased access to abortion, exactly that has happened...
...Data reported by the Alan Guttmacher Institute indicate that some 30 percent of women have an abortion because someone else, not the woman, wants it (see: Rachel Benson Gold, Abortion and Women's Health, The Alan Guttmacher Institute, 1990, p. 20...
...The only crucial difference is its supporters agree that, however the debate about that content goes, it will and should in the end leave choice to the individual...
...3. Compromise and accommodation...
...The United States lags far beyond every other industrialized nation in the provision of protections, choices, and benefits for pregnant women and mothers...
...I offer a hypothesis...
...It will and should be troubled when it recognizes that many so-called private choices are shaped, even determined, by social circumstances and mores...
...The prolife movement has effectively capitalized on this uncertainty, appealing to the moral uneasiness of many and bringing to the surface qualms and doubts shunted aside by the prochoice movement...
...Public opinion polls over the years have persistently displayed two distinctive features...
...I would be considerably less reassured about going in this direction, I should stress, unless good counseling services were in place...
...Better to declare the whole topic of the morality of abortion off limits...
...Those are not thought to be, nor are they, contradictory positions...
...The Supreme Court, in its 1989 Webster decision, gave to the states the right to set some conditions on abortion, and it will probably allow even further restrictions in the future...
...I take it to be a good rule of ethical thinking that an important moral choice is one that can give a principled defense of itself and that is not, under most circumstances, simply a self-interested defense of personal preference (called ethical egoism in the philosophical literature...
...More generally, the prolife movement has found its greatest strength in its focus on precisely that issue that the prochoice movement has found most discomforting and awkward: the moral status of the fetus...
...It would impose upon the unwilling a position that does not command their moral agreement and would force them to act against their conscience...
...They now have a potent new weapon in the old business of manipulating and abandoning women...
...The same kind of thinking applied to the abortion debate would represent a genuine upheaval-asking not just whether it is good for women to have choice, but to ask also what constitutes a good choice...
...For most of its leaders, it is simply set aside altogether, left to the opaque sphere of personal morality, itself a subject of uncertainty and discomfort...
...I do not want here to examine directly the struggle between those two positions, the general structure of which is by now all too familiar, painfully so, from the endless public debate...
...They see in abortion a resort to violence similar to that used for centuries by men against women: the use of power by the strong against the weak, both the physical power of violence and the cultural power to define the unwanted out of the human community altogether (see: Sidney Callahan, "Abortion and the Sexual Agenda," Commonweal, April 25, 1986, pp...
...Once they start taking the moral choice seriously, some people are likely to change their position on abortion in general...
...One way or another, then, the prochoice movement has not been able to tolerate the fullness of the pluralistic proposition...
...1. Abortion restrictions represent a war of men against women, with men intent upon keeping women in reproductive thralldom...
...Most abortions are not carried out for strictly medical or health reasons, but for private and personal reasons...
...It has not so far planted solid roots and it has out of anxiety and muddle put to one side moral questions that are as urgent as they are real...
...The majority of Americans, the public opinion polls indicate, are greatly troubled about the moral reasons for abortion in different circumstances (see: E.J...
...Those who call themselves "pro-choice" argue that the abortion choice is private and personal to women and should thus be left to them without the interference of the law...
...Consider two possible alternatives here...
...Though there is room for change and compromise, it would be a great loss to have the substance of Roe v. Wade overturned, that of leaving early abortions in the private hands of women and their physicians...
...If the prolife movement says that abortion is oppressive and murderous, the prochoice movement must then say it is liberating and morally unimportant...
...A continuing limitation on the use of federal facilities, while also troublesome, is doubtless likely in the future...
...I hope that the prochoice movement would now be willing to run that greatest of all risks, but the only one that seems to me credible for the common good: the willingness to entertain a robust, thick, and probing conception of personal morality, one just as strong in its way as the pluralism and toleration at the level of law and politics is in its way...
...The pro-choice movement has in fact never known quite what to do with the moral issue...
...It should not, moreover, be assumed that, just because there is psychological anguish or ambivalence about abortion, there is moral seriousness present...
...But is it wholly an accident that our country com bines the world's most liberal abortion laws with the poorest social support and systems for women, mothers and children...
...How can it make sense to favor the right to choice, but to be morally indifferent about the use of that right...
...For all of its faults, it is the position I embrace...
...It confuses moral fervor and noble intentions with ethical justification...
...To make its advocacy case, the prochoice movement has partially relied on a set of beliefs and assertions that are either false or highly misleading...
...Reversing my own earlier convictions, I concluded that the universality of a resort to abortion even if illegal and dangerous, the inherently uncertain moral status of the fetus (at least the relatively early fetus), and the value in a pluralistic society of keeping the law out of controverted and delicate moral issues whenever possible, made the "prochoice" position morally and politically compelling...
...An unwillingness to come to grips with that standard not only puts the prochoice movement in jeopardy as a political force...
...that women should have available a backup to ineffective contraception, though the latter should always remain the primary method of birth control...
...The abortion issue is broader, deeper, and more complex than that...
...5. It does not matter what choice women make as long as they have the freedom to make their own choice...
...It is as if there is an embarrassed, sheepish silence on what would seem a matter of obvious concern for those committed to choice...
...At best it is uneasy about the moral issue, at worst dismissive and hostile toward it...
...That would require seriously considering at least some prolife arguments and perspectives, and would of course lay the basis for a moral rejection of some abortions, perhaps many...
...They have shifted the emphasis almost entirely to a woman's right to an abortion, whatever her reasons and whatever the consequences...
...In the long run, a nuanced position that makes some distinctions among and between reasons for abortion is likely to be taken more seriously than one which wants, once and for all, to resolve the tension...
...or that women should not have to struggle and suffer over the choice even if it is...
...The great weakness of the prolife movement is that it has not been willing to trust individuals with free and private moral choice...
...While this set of arguments looked strongly to the freedom and welfare of women, it was not exclusively a feminist argument by any means...
...Where it fails in the eyes of many of us, however, is in moving from its premise of respect for life to its conclusion that embryonic or fetal life merits the same protection as life after birth...
...they are not necessarily the same...
...It is hard, then, to see how a strong case can be made for the use of federal or federally-supported facilities in the face of widespread public opposition, and in the light of the definition of abortion as a private matter, outside the scope of government intervention...
...232-238...
...This is even more true of the poor than the affluent...
...It has been able to press its case effectively in legislatures and with the general public (even though public opinion has remained remarkably stable and stationary on abortion for nearly two decades...
...There can be no serious choice apart from those conditions...
...or to conceive fetuses for experimental purposes or commercial profit.I cite that list of arguments to show that "choice" covers a multitude of realities, not all of them quite so tidy as some mainline prochoice ideology would have it...
...They rarely explore with women their own thinking, the implications for their lives of their choice, or the possibility that they are being influenced or coerced into abortions they would not otherwise want...
...Of course to concede even the moral possibility that some abortion choices could be reprehensible, to admit that some choices can be morally wrong, would be to agree that choice itself is not the end of the moral matter...
...I do not claim that such compromises will be without pain...
...Over twenty years ago I published a book on abortion, Abortion: Law, Choice and Morality (Macmillan, 1970...
...That was a little-noted revolution in feminist thinking, though it was foreshadowed by those feminists who have condemned pornography and prostitution even in cases where women freely choose to take part...
...While Roe v. Wade is tolerable for a majority if asked a yes or no question, it does not capture well the shadings of their actual feelings and evaluation...
...and that, while abortion should be legally available and financially affordable, everything possible should be done to change those economic and domestic circumstances that force women into unwanted pregnancies...
...What accommodations might be reasonable...
...There is the widespread use of the sonogram, allowing a woman to see her fetus in utero (see: Daniel Callahan, "How Technology is Reframing the Abortion Debate," Hastings Center Report, February 1986, pp...
...In practice that kind of openness will mean accepting the likehood that some reasons for abortion will be judged reasonable and acceptable, and others unreasonable and unacceptable...
...I also argued, no less strongly, that even though the choice should be the woman's, and that it should be a private choice, it was still a serious moral choice...
...In that respect, the public has never been unambiguously prochoice or prolife...
...At the same time, when questioned more precisely, a majority also wants morally to distinguish among abortion choices...
...It requires thinking carefully about the moral status of the fetus, and about the best way to live a life and to shape a set of moral values and ideals...
...I want instead to look at the subject of abortion as a case study of the problems and paradoxes of the pluralistic proposition, particularly as it has manifested itself in the logic and politics of the prochoice position...
...It has been unwilling to trust the moral issues to public debate...
...3. Abortion will diminish the dependence of women upon men, giving them full control over their reproduction...
...During the 1950s and into the late 1960s, the movement to legalize abortion rested on a number of contentions: that a vast number of illegal abortions was doing great harm to the health of women, killing and maiming them...
...2. Moral choice and moral judgment...
...The goal that I proposed seemed, then, perfectly compatible with what I understand the pluralistic proposition to be: leave the choice to women but understand the choice to be a grave one, worthy of public no less than private reflection...
...or to have repeat abortions because of a casual attitude toward the use of contraceptives...
...To admit that much in the case of particular abortion choices, however, would be to show the hazards of the pluralistic proposition in its actual political usage...
...But there have been a number of developments since the early 1970s, some political, some scientific, and some ideological...
...Such a move will surely be risky...
...4. Taking choice seriously...
...A prolife position that would resolutely put to one side the value of free choice in grappling with, and acting upon, that question must fail to make a fully persuasive case...
Vol. 117 • November 1990 • No. 20
