Abortion and the Republican Party
EMERY, NOEMIE
Abortion and the Republican Party A New Approach By Noemie Emery Consider the fetus. It is life, but just barely. Live, but not viable. Human, but not fully developed. Distinct but dependent, in...
...A moderate, pro-choice Republican would be forced, at the least, to be abortion-neutral...
...Our Bodies, Our Souls," by Naomi Wolf, appeared in the Oct...
...Is it much of a journey from seeing a fetus as plaque, or as matter, to seeing women as meat...
...Day by day, babies seem to have less value in themselves . . . than they do as products, with a value dictated by a market economy...
...Packwood, this was not his "shadow life...
...But Democrats are indebted to the National Abortion Rights Action League and the National Organization for Women...
...But he has run the most abortion-friendly administration in history, aggressively pushing its accessibility, on the foreign and domestic scenes...
...Put Mrs...
...They were unmoved by the right's pleas for legal barriers...
...When Bob Packwood's diaries were printed, in all their weird splendor, even his ex-wife was stunned...
...Moral persuasion sustains legal changes...
...4 issue of The Weekly Standard), pro-choice Republicans are seldom members of the hangnail school...
...As McKenna and Wolf note, and some others have realized, the careful "choice-speak" is a deadening agent, Novocaine for the ethical sense of the nation, crafted to kill moral nerves...
...Late-term abortion is "this procedure," a "medical treatment," a "health measure," a "right...
...Nominate and defend a Joycelyn Elders...
...This is why one should be forced...
...As women exercise their right to opt out of pregnancies, men exercise theirs to opt out of families, and the responsibilities attendant on them, abandoning families, or refusing to start them: leaving aging consorts, if they can swing it, for ever-younger trophy wives...
...Abortion by choice is itself anti-woman: When women worldwide commit infanticide on the basis of gender, they overwhelmingly choose to kill girls...
...They could endorse this, which would please the center and be good for the people and country...
...Because it can work...
...That lives by a code of Me First...
...What would this do to the national Democrats...
...No, it wouldn't have the calculated and theatrical horror of the concentration camps, but a minority population would be destroyed...
...If we avidly cultivate our love for the ones we bring to term, and 'get over' our love for the ones we don't, do we not risk developing a hydroponic view of babies-and turn them into a product we can cull...
...Translated, this means that life itself has no value...
...Based on a population of 1.17 billion, that adds up to more than 1.7 million missing girls each year...
...And some of their possible friends...
...A civilized culture does not freely take life...
...Would a Colin Powell have surrounded himself with these moral giants...
...Naomi Wolf's piece drew a shriek from Planned Parenthood, which compared her to "murderous fanatics," described as "intemperate" her description of abortion as "evil," called the casual acceptance of abortion "one of humankind's greatest achievements," and claimed "every woman's decision about abortion is a moral decision," including what Wolf describes as "the repeat abortions . . . the suburban summer country-club rite-of-passage abortions, the 'I don't know what came over me, it was such good Chardonnay' abortions," and much else...
...When a pregnant woman dies, or is killed, it is referred to as a "double tragedy...
...They may abort at will, but men have to treat them with reverence: a double bind of stunning mendacity that doubles back on itself...
...Then, there is the "gay gene"-a concern of gay activists, traditional allies of feminist causes, another key bloc on the left...
...Or might he have had a decent respect for the opinions of friends...
...Wolf wants a public mood of much the same nature, but she insists the legal option be maintained...
...A civilized culture respects all its people, regardless of color or background...
...if those on both sides will permit this to happen...
...Do we wish to be a country and people that looks upon life as a disposable matter...
...One bloc thinks abortion is never wrong, and should always be legal: that the fetus itself has no inherent value...
...Both zero in on the language deployed by the ardent choice lobbies as an act of evasion and subterfuge...
...If Republicans cannot agree that abortion is murder and ought to be criminalized, they can agree that it is wrong and ought to be countered...
...Why are feminists so often embarrassed by friends' private behavior: Ted Kennedy, Bill Clinton, Gary Hart...
...In them, the "choice" group has the world that it asked for...
...Is this a fit use for the Bully Pulpit, built by Teddy Roosevelt, the Progressive Republican...
...The second message doesn't get through, as the first has been all too effective...
...Republicans should begin, right now, to move the battle from the legal to the moral venue...
...Their predator ethic was widely lamented...
...Lay out in specific terms the connection of those ethics to crimes against women...
...How does one reconcile liberty with slavery...
...Not only in China, with its one-child policy: "Throughout Asia, with its traditional preference for boys, ultrasound scanners . . . are being used to check the sex of fetuses so that females can be aborted...
...It's no use to say, "The boys just don't get it...
...Republicans know they cannot enrage the conservative movement...
...But how many of the voters the Democrats need to coax back or retain would support Planned Parenthood against Naomi Wolf...
...To pro-lifers, who find it too mild, one can say this: Yes...
...Much grief was once spent on the Spur Posse, a clutch of young jocks, of Packwoods-in-training, who liked to treat women as prey...
...By denying that death and destruction take place...
...It is "civil rights...
...Republicans think abortion is wrong, and fight over whether or not it ought to be legal...
...They would be cleft, by their center and left...
...Naomi Wolf notes, in language that reveals how far she is from a conservative, that "a free-market rhetoric about abortion can, indeed, contribute to the eerie situation we are now facing, wherein the culture seems increasingly to see babies not as creatures to which parents devote their lives, but as accoutrements to enhance parental quality of life...
...Clinton says he dislikes abortion...
...Nothing too good...
...The civil rights caucus...
...3. We intend to address abortion not as one issue only, but as a symptom and cause of a social disorder, a sign of a frayed and decaying cultural context, in which the value of life is at risk...
...Distinct but dependent, in another's body but not a part of it, its relation to the woman who carries and may want to kill it is a matter of ongoing strife...
...Where could this have come from...
...to mug and to batter and to rape...
...Some have spent vast amounts of time and money in attempts to have children...
...Naomi Wolf refers, correctly, to a "lexicon of dehumanization," a "series of delusions, fibs, and evasions" that "defines the unwanted fetus as at least valueless...
...It changes the terms of debate...
...A responsible leader of free and fair people should have no compunction about telling them that a careless disregard for human life is not the mark of a civilized people: that life is to be taken, if at all, in conditions of distress and necessity...
...One might have expected these pieces to shout past each other...
...Plead moral concerns, and new laws may follow...
...Many are reluctant backers of the lesser evil...
...His administration is staffed from abortion-rights lobbies...
...It has not made women more valued, respected, or safe in their commerce...
...16 New Republic...
...A Democrat who ticks off Planned Parenthood loses much of his backing and money...
...This "style," as she describes it, is like that of the Posse: "spending teen years at the mall with friends, living in a college dorm room, going out and getting drunk after work...
...In film, the "good" roles for women have vanished, replaced by depictions of hookers and bimbos...
...How would Patricia Ireland of NOW and Barney Frank of Massachusetts address this issue...
...And we can have another...
...This is correct, but just part of the story-and just part of the opportunity for a politician who might choose to speak in moral terms to an electorate...
...In many circumstances, as McKenna notes, the fetus is recognized as a human being...
...Some would support a pro-life amendment as a matter of principle, but fear the real-life consequences of forcing poor, ignorant, or frightened women to bear children they resent and do not want...
...But they were stunned by the voice of the left...
...What then would happen...
...It has the power to split the Republican party, and has helped bleed the Democrats white...
...One who did was a gay man, Jonathan Tolins, who wrote a play called Twilight of the Golds on the subject (the couple aborted), and then wrote an essay for Time: "Even the most liberal-minded heterosexual may stop for a moment and think, 'Well, do I want my child to be gay?' In that moment of reflection lies the danger of genocide...
...This shadow life makes a mockery of Bob's dedication to equality for women," she said to reporters...
...Abortion: A Lincolnian Position" by George McKenna, a pro-life Republican, appeared in the September issue of the Atlantic Monthly...
...Does it make a difference whether pro-choice Republicans or Democrats hold down places of power...
...By producing a document that referred to slavery in three different places without mentioning it...
...Abortion is never abortion...
...It shifts from a context of rights to one of disorder, a sign of breakdown in human connections, with a frightening ripple effect...
...As Carolyn Hax writes in the Washington Post, most abortions are not spurred by health, or by hardship...
...We want another...
...Abortion provides a refuge for men like Packwood, who seek sex without commitment," and flee the responsibilities it usually brings...
...It thinks abortion is almost always wrong and should sometimes be legal...
...A moral debate is the Democrats' nightmare...
...You are addressing the choir, not the conflicted public, which seems to desire a new kind of language, and tends to tune out the extremes...
...to beat one's wife bloody...
...Partly because of ultrasound . . . the sex ratio of newborn children in China reached 118.5 boys for every 100 girls . . . more than 12 per cent of all female fetuses were aborted, or otherwise unaccounted for...
...When does "reproductive freedom" turn into a Holocaust...
...Women taken advantage of...
...Late in September, Bob Pack-wood was pried out of the Senate, having mauled through the years a succession of women, while battling for "women's," and abortion, "rights...
...It is less than you want, but it is something...
...Put Shalala with the hangnail contingent...
...Democrats win in fights over legal obstructions...
...They can produce a platform that goes something like this: 1. The Republican party is the party that thinks abortion is wrong...
...It does not ignore or deny their real points of difference, but moves around and above them, creating a space they can share...
...The sex ratio in South Korea is about 113 boys to 100 girls...
...We plan to compile a national registry of people willing to adopt and raise children and distribute it nationwide to clinics that treat pregnant women...
...Clinton went to China to protest its policy of forced abortions, her aides were quick to clarify that her complaints were only with the "forced" component...
...It splits the country in three, and the parties in two, different factions whose limits, at first, are unclear...
...Harsh words were aimed at the extremes of "their" parties...
...often with little success...
...As for the Republican party, it brings it together...
...What does one get when one drops this sludge into the culture...
...News quotes a gay editor saying, "one can imagine a pregnant mother and father being told, 'Your baby is going to be queer, do you want it?'" One can, indeed...
...Correctly, they see it as callous, and frightening...
...Abortion mills are "reproductive health clinics," though few who are not healthy go near them, and the purpose is to stop reproduction...
...In a sense, it turns the feminists against themselves...
...A good reason for one to be held...
...This is the whole picture...
...We ask Democrats to join us in this voluntary, non-coercive effort to save and enrich human lives...
...But when it serves "women's interests," these nerves are to be quickened, and sensitized...
...Between them moves, in inherent discomfort, a third and far larger group...
...Republicans should take their cue from both of these pieces and make their stand on the ground both authors share: a stand that permits them to discourage abortion while agreeing to disagree over its ultimate legal status...
...2. We regard our disagreements as disputes about tactics, over means to one end...
...Suppose a gay gene could be found, and identified, via prenatal testing...
...With it, nothing can fail...
...A staggering burden of smut...
...Or, they could please the left, and denounce it...
...Its ideas are too ambiguous to support a cohesive lobbying effort...
...Laws- moral laws-need consensus to root in, or they are easily displaced and overturned...
...Oh, yes...
...That measures all life by its value to others...
...It plays to the chinks in the Democrats' armor...
...Another thinks abortion is always wrong, and should never be legal: that a pregnancy once begun should never be ended, regardless of hardship or circumstances...
...News & World Report, "feminist leaders have treated moral discussions of abortion . . .as a betrayal," adding "there is an obvious tactical reason . . . any such debate would split the pro-choice constituency, a large portion of which thinks abortion is wrong...
...They did...
...against it, nothing can succeed.'" Without it, a quick legal fix is counterproductive...
...Emily's List...
...Why should Republicans back this solution...
...as Prohibition was, or court-ordered busing, a disaster brought on by the left, a legalistic Pyrrhic victory that mortally wounded liberalism...
...he may, now and then, think it...
...The ethic of "choice" is not good for the world, or for women...
...What would happen to the PAC checks from left-leaning lobbies...
...When it's one's special ox which is gored...
...One gets the Spur Posse and Senator Packwood...
...Call it America...
...At best this is babble, at worst this is something more sinister: the deliberate numbing of the moral nerve...
...Another side of this that is largely unrealized is the power to splinter their base...
...Noemie Emery is a free-lance writer living in New York...
...Why are so many harassers such avid pro-choice people...
...One does not get a nurturing world that cares much for women...
...Conservatives who believe that "pro-choice" means only one far-out agenda misjudge their opponents...
...Popular music, once about romantic love and idealized women, is now about mayhem and battery...
...It moves them from a minority to a majority standing...
...Let us not slight the purely political assets of picking the moral, not the legal, pose...
...It has set them adrift, in a coarsening culture, where the value of life is at risk...
...at worst an adversary," a "mass of dependent protoplasm," "inert material," the "material that had to be removed...
...The choices being made concern life and death...
...Medically, it can be seen as, and treated as, a patient...
...even to eat and drink less...
...At the end, the two authors part aims and objectives...
...What do you think...
...Pornography-the treating of women as objects, to be used by men for their interests- leached into the mainstream, seen routinely now in films, ads, billboards, and tony fashion spreads (near editorials that staunchly back abortion rights...
...There is a legitimate advocate's role in political leadership, for addressing behavior one does not ban as illegal, but does not intend to promote...
...The practice of aborting female fetuses in India has led the authorities in Bombay to limit prenatal testing to women 35 years and older, or those with a family history of birth defects...
...Thus far, your methods have not worked very well...
...That assents to the random destruction of human potential...
...That this is, after all, not that private...
...As U.S...
...Women treated as chattel...
...Slaves were 'persons'-or sometimes 'other persons' . . . free states were required to return fugitive slaves to their masters . . . but in that clause a slave was 'a person held to the service of labor' and a master was 'the party to whom such service of labor may be due.'" How does one reconcile life with death and destruction...
...Or they can play to the center, and alienate, perhaps enrage, their one source of power, their activist, fund-raising, base...
...If Republicans cannot resolve their disputes, they can try to transcend them, and focus on what they can share...
...These divisions, in context, may not be as deep as they seem...
...To address these two problems, we tend to treat them as one...
...At the same time, nearly one couple in five is described as infertile...
...In National Review, Kate O'Beirne says it nicely: "Packwood's public and private lives can easily be reconciled by recognizing that the feminist philosophy he espouses encourages male irresponsibility toward women...
...The boys get it only too well...
...Clinton-did anyone doubt it?-firmly in the hangnail school too...
...What can we say to those pro-choice adherents who find this platform an incursion into private areas...
...Many believe in what might be called the ethic of "permit and discourage...
...More, it is something you may actually get...
...It reframes the issue to their advantage...
...For the unalloyed sway of choice-driven morals-subjective, conditional, interest-based morals-has turned all of us into things...
...What have we seen in the years since abortion was made legal...
...They find the language of "choice" and "privacy" inadequate to address an idea of this nature...
...In an article touting the abortion pill, Harper's Bazaar described a girl who "went dancing" after the "inert matter" had removed itself...
...From the pro-choice contingent, with their predator ethic, where life has no claims of its own, or claims only when feminists make them, in pursuit of their own selfish interests...
...Which brings us to Senator Bob...
...It is simply not possible to maintain a true civil culture on the values the "choice" culture spawns...
...What the girls did not get, in the midst of their outrage, was that this ethic was much like their own...
...From NOW...
...Instead, the authors appeared to agree...
...McKenna compares it to the language once used by the pro-slavery faction, the only other time in history when the right to a "right" was intensely defended, with no mention of what the right was to be for...
...It defuses a potentially lethal internal division, by giving all factions ground they can share...
...As McKenna writes, "Lincoln knew that in the final analysis, durable judicial rulings on major issues must be rooted in the soil of American opinion...
...Seduction is "rape," a comment "harassment," a long look an incursion of criminal nature, a whistle a criminal act...
...Or, one may not need them at all...
...Early in the fall, two separate sightings suggested the time might be ripe...
...They see abortion as a moral concern, to be measured in terms of sin and redemption...
...As objects...
...We are told without end to be civil and tolerant, to give time and money to many good causes, to avoid actions and language that offend other people...
...Legally, the fetus can be seen as a victim...
...Call this the hangnail school...
...At the same time, two pieces appeared on the national newsstands, addressing this dark, surly subject from two different ends of the scale...
...Imagine a united Republican party that dares to do this: Lay out in moral terms its objections to convenience ethics as subversive of culture in general...
...We suggest that women about to abort be urged to bear and place children, and be encouraged to do so...
...Exactly...
...to choose to abuse one's underage children...
...Has anyone noticed how many of these things happen to be specifically or disproportionately harmful to women...
...All of this is a good reason why the state, if it does not see fit to accord it the full status of citizen, should not dismiss it, either, as a cipher, or thing...
...But it is not the world we all deserve, and it is not the world we all want...
...This is not your end goal, but it can be a way to reach it...
...Someone can be legally charged with causing the death of the fetus, and can be tried or sued for it...
...It is "women's rights," "reproductive freedom," "women's health...
...McKenna wants, one infers, a public mood that supports and enforces some legal restrictions...
...They are done for "convenience," life minus commitment, to save a "lifestyle," not life...
...When Mrs...
...What does all this do for the party and the issue...
...They can alienate what remains of their center, and marginalize themselves as extremists...
...23 issue of The Weekly Standard...
...Dear Mrs...
...Asked to reconcile her war on tobacco with her support for abortion, Health and Human Services secretary Donna Shalala burbled, "But smoking hurts people...
...It has not made them free...
...If Republicans cannot agree that it ought to be legally punished, they can agree to delegitimize it as a cost-free and value-free option...
...Women as "things...
...They concern not only those making them, but another being, who would only months later become a citizen: a reason for, if not legal coercion, expression of moral concern...
...The "right" of women to abort, for all, and no, reasons, has been matched in lock-step with a ratcheting upward of similarly callous choices: to kill for a bike or a jacket...
...We urge abortion and adoption services to join forces to match parents and children...
...A Democrat whose ideas might be similar-Bill Clinton said he wanted fewer abortions in 1992-would be pushed in his turn to the left...
...Who gave Packwood the idea he could treat women as "chattel...
...Moderates are influenced by the tone of their parties...
...Unable to breathe, it makes presidents tremble...
...And, in a sense, it is the world they deserve...
...But what both really want is remarkably similar: a voluntary reduction of elective abortions, in a culture that cherishes life...
...As David Frum tells us (in the Dec...
...It stops Democratic opponents from playing the rights card-the sharpest dart in their quiver-and makes them play defense: Instead of opposing they must now explain to a dubious public why something ought not to be merely discouraged that most people know to be wrong...
...Many of these have been made quite unhappy...
...For years," writes John Leo in US...
...Public opinion,' he said, 'is everything...
...It turns the feminists' language of "caring" against them...
...Many believe in restrictions and limits...
...Her piece, "Gloria in False Excelsis" appeared in the Oct...
...We say it is wrong, and we plan to reduce it through aggressive, though voluntary and non-coercive, means...
...Call this the vessel school...
...They should frame an attack based on moral dissuasion, based in a war for the soul of the country, attack the hangnail school as harmful to women, and isolate their rivals on the left...
...His spokesmen are their moral kin...
...It admits of dissent, and allows it to flourish: but within a frame, that contains these divisions without ripping the party apart...
...From NARAL...
...America is hungry for it, and by embracing the platform I propose, any Republican presidential challenger can speak language that will seem bracing, human, and considerably less divisive than some pro-life discourse has been over the years...
...Democrats think it ought to be legal, and fight over whether or not it is wrong...
...Before the Clinton administration sends off another delegation to an international conference, armed with language to make "abortion rights" global, let it mull this one over: Some years ago, the New York Times ran a story from China, to the effect that the widespread use of prenatal testing had brought on a slaughter of girls...
...Urge a policy based on adoption and explain it as follows: "Since 1973, there have been about 1.5 million abortions yearly in the United States, a frightening destruction of human potential...
Vol. 1 • December 1995 • No. 15
