Life Itself
Steinfels, Margaret O'Brien
Discourage this man I here is a form of discourse in the tony parts of American TV for which Roger Rosen-blatt serves as a perfect example. It sounds serious, it appears thoughtful, and it...
...By discourage he means all of those means of persuasion, education, and material and social supports that might reduce the numbers of women who become pregnant and who choose to have abortions...
...For Life Itself signals that abortion is now a "touchable" subject for journalists and commentators like Rosenblatt who speak and write as if no one had treated the topic with the seriousness it deserved before their own arrival on the scene...
...What he is intent on exploring and exposing as the heart of the issue are the private, complicated, and ambiguous "feelings" people have about abortion...
...And at 10 percent of the book price, the magazine version was also a bargain...
...Rosenblatt sums up his quest for this elusive position in the formula "permit but discourage...
...For Rosenblatt is one of them...
...By permit, he means Roe v. Wade should be left standing, and if it is not, he favors national legislaLJFE ITSELF Abortion in the American Mind Roger Rosenblatt Random House, $20, 194 pp...
...And indeed the magazine piece was worth reading, in part because I imagined the Times' pro-choice audience also reading it and seeing several of their treasured platitudes sent up in smoke...
...Rosenblatt fails on this score...
...Why is it always a distinct relief to flip to the raucous bullies on CNN's "Crossfire" when Rosenblatt or Fleming closes the "Newshour...
...Anyone who has ever had two consistent and consecutive moral thoughts on any issue will be driven mad by this book...
...But in an odd twist of rhetorical fate prochoicers will be driven further than others...
...But precisely because people have such feelings and they are complicated, ambiguous, and slippery, especially in public debate, both proponents of prolife and prochoice views have developed serious and sustained moral arguments...
...And though the polls he cites show that support for Roe v. Wade has eroded steadily since 1972—perhaps because Americans have become better informed about what it actually does permit (specifically, second- and third-trimester abortions)— Rosenblatt never considers the possibility that changing the law itself would send a message about "discouraging" abortion...
...It sounds serious, it appears thoughtful, and it resonates with heartfelt conviction...
...His agnosticism on the moral issues implicitly concedes that prolife moral views are as good (or bad), as "We're grappling with the mysteries of life, aren't we, Doctor...
...Why is that...
...24.19 June 1992 Commonweal useful (or useless) as those of the pro-choicers...
...His insistence on the pain and regret women may feel after an abortion is a concession prochoicers have mightily resisted allowing into the public discussion...
...Margaret O'Brien Sleinfels tion—perhaps on the order of the Freedom of Choice Act now before Congress...
...In fact, it is not clear that Rosenblatt has a clue about what a moral view really is...
...Duly acknowledging "moral" positions on both sides and even insisting on their importance to each side, he himself admits only to a label, "conventional prochoice...
...This discourse is perfectly suited to the closing "essay" regularly featured on the "MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour"—a slot Rosenblatt often shares with Anne Taylor Fleming...
...Its sincerity is often dimly shadowed by banal thinking, but only a knowledgeable viewer would take exception to its well-wrought sentences and morally fraught analysis...
...Though Mary Ann Glendon's Divorce and Abortion in Western Law is duly catalogued in the bibliography, Rosenblatt seems unaware that the U.S...
...When an excerpt from Life Itself appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, I passed it by, though I was surprised that Rosenblatt would take up such a controversial subject as abortion...
...But just wait til Diane Sawyer and Sam Donaldson have a go at it...
...In fact, he seems ready to try almost anything but changing the law...
...If there is to be a middle ground, honoring the moral seriousness of the abortion issue and contributing to political civility, then such efforts must be truly clarifying and not grandly obfuscating...
...And though his formulation "permit but discourage" comes down in the wrong moral, legal, and political place, it could go some distance in shaping a middle-ground and helping to reduce the number of abortions...
...Those on the prolife side of the argument should not necessarily take comfort in the discomfort Rosenblatt brings to the prochoice side...
...has one of the most permissive abortion laws in the world, one more closely resembling China's than England's...
...Nobody's...
...Because what bothers Rosenblatt about abortion is not how or why it is right or wrong, but the divisions it has brought to our society and to the body politic...
...Now at somewhat greater length and less precision, Life Itself shows Rosenblatt true to form, earnest but anguished, and ultimately confused and confusing about what a middle-ground position might look like in our political culture...
...Several people, tending to the prolife side of the debate, recommended it to me as a solid statement of a potential middle-of-the-road, prochoice position—one that they imagined I might find helpful...
...It is impossible to debate without them— as Rosenblatt grandiloquently and unwittingly admits: "For those declared pro-choice as well as those declared prolife, for most everyone whom the issue touches, abortion is too difficult to speak of, too personal, too mysterious, nobody's business, not even ours...
Vol. 119 • June 1992 • No. 12
