Opinion: Can anything new be said about abortion?

(ABP) — The Roe v. Wade anniversary with its ritual marches of protest and defense occurs this year amidst our quadrennial election carnival. Our elections now seem to require that contending politicians seek to outdo one another in ideological extremism. This has meant that most Republican contenders have sought to one-up each other on exactly how rigid they will make America’s abortion laws.

We have been shouting about abortion in this country for nearly 40 years, but it seems like a long time since we actually talked to each other about it. Our politicians do plenty of posturing and sound biting, but we rarely have any kind of real conversation beyond that. And we never seem to say anything new.

David Gushee

Most of us would accept the claim that death is an enemy — perhaps the ultimate enemy — in human life. We do everything we can to delay and prevent death, as a visit to any hospital indicates. Human existence has always been dominated by the struggle for life amidst those forces hostile to it.

This shared effort to prevent death sits at the core of the social contract that binds us together. We band together in society and form governments to protect ourselves from forces and from people that would harm us. Governments have no greater responsibility than to create and enforce a structure of laws and defenses to protect our lives.

So protecting life is what governments do. It is also what any reasonably decent moral belief system does. Such moral paradigms encourage their adherents to live so that their actions advance human life and well-being, and forestall harm to others as well. This is most profoundly and demandingly stated in the human dignity and neighbor-love teachings of various religions and philosophies. 

A properly holistic moral vision takes seriously all significant threats to human survival, well-being and flourishing. Such threats ought to matter to all of us. And there are an awful lot of these threats, for a variety of reasons, including the tragedy and selfishness we find in the human condition.

Many thoughtful Americans seek to address threats to human survival, well-being, and flourishing in areas that concern them. Personally, I have been drawn to such issues as torture, war and environmental degradation.

I have also resisted abortion. That may seem unexpected, because the foregoing list of issues sounds “liberal,” whereas abortion sounds “conservative.” But this labeling is an accident of history. It has little to do with the intrinsic nature of the issues involved. “Conserving” a vulnerable environment could equally well be seen as a conservative cause. Our political labels are often nonsensical.

It helps to remember that even in the U.S. political setting there have been “liberals” who have resisted abortion. Jesse Jackson once opposed abortion, as did Al Gore, as does Nat Hentoff of the Village Voice. As good “liberals” they opposed abortion because they saw it as the victimization of the vulnerable.

They understood (then) that routine cultural resort to abortion is just somehow wrong.

And in the ensuing years resort to abortion has indeed become all too routine. Each year in the United States, approximately 1.2 million abortions are performed, currently amounting to just over one out of every five pregnancies. Neither our political nor our moral philosophies can find anything to celebrate in this.

To the contrary: there is some kind of social pathology here. Abortion has become a massively institutionalized response to a grave set of underlying social conditions. Recognizing this gives us the possibility of initiating a meaningful response to those factors.

Abortion is an often desperate response to the problem of being accidentally and unhappily pregnant. About half of all pregnancies in the U.S. are unintended.

The burden of this unhappy accident falls on women. While a man can attempt to evade the crisis of having conceived an unwanted child, a pregnant woman experiences that crisis within her own body. 

We need better customs and laws enforcing male sexual and paternal responsibility. But still, the brute facts direct us to the particular life circumstances of women. We need to know what is happening in so many women’s lives, and in our culture more broadly, that leads to so many unwanted pregnancies for women. We do know a few things.

We know that far too many people are having sex outside of a context in which a resulting pregnancy can be handled without resort to abortion. Our culture lacks an ethic of sexual responsibility, and women disproportionately pay the price.

We know that far too many people who have sex are not using birth control, or not using it properly. While only abstinence is 100 percent effective to prevent pregnancy, birth control is better than an unwanted pregnancy. Those who are opposed to abortion need to support access to birth control and accurate information on how to use it. They have often opposed such access.

We know that over 60 percent of pregnant women are poor or near-poor. Three-fourths of surveyed women who have abortions say their lack of financial resources contributed to their decision. Those who say they care about abortion must support rather than oppose universal access to health care and social welfare services so that no woman has to choose abortion for lack of resources.

We know from surveys that many women choose abortion because of the perceived impact of a pregnancy on their romantic and family relationships. We need safer, sturdier, healthier relationships between men and women. We need families and religious communities that support rather than ostracize pregnant women.

We know that the choice to give up a child for adoption is very difficult, and that successful domestic adoptions are hardly routine in this society. It takes enormous moral support not just to carry an initially unwanted child but then to make the wrenching decision to give it up for adoption. We need to get better at this.

What if all presidential candidates, including the current occupant of the White House, were challenged to embrace a national goal of reducing the number of abortions in this country by one-fourth (300,000 per year) during the course of their term?

Probably the Republicans would say that meeting this goal requires overturning current federal abortion law. If you win, go for it. But you will be held accountable to what actually matters the most — reducing the number of abortions by getting at the problem at its sources. Will you set that goal and do the practical things required to accomplish it?

If he were courageous enough to embrace the abortion-reduction goal in the teeth of his political base, President Obama would say that he will seek to achieve it without any change in abortion access. If you win, go for it. You also will be held accountable for reducing the actual numbers of abortions.

Let both sides compete with each other to see who is right on the best means. But let them do so on the basis of a shared goal of reducing abortion dramatically, a goal which fits with both our legal and our moral traditions.

And let us challenge ourselves, for that challenge belongs to all of us.

Not talking points, not sound bites, not symbolic victories, but real human beings, that’s what matters — mainly lonely, poor, frightened women, and the children whose lives depend on them.

 

–David Gushee is distinguished university professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University.