Matt Bowman: “Should pro-lifers just care for women and stop trying to make abortion illegal?”
________________ Should the pro-life movement just care for women and stop trying to make abortion illegal? That idea is circulating among many Left-leaning Christians. The idea is flawed in several ways, first of all because the pro-life movement already cares for women through thousands of volunteer pregnancy resource centers. More fundamentally, there’s no conflict between caring for women and passing laws against abortion. Both efforts are complementary and necessary. Italian politician Rocco Buttiglione is widely acclaimed for opposing abortion. On July 17, shortly after President Obama visited the Vatican, Buttiglione gave an interview in which he supported reducing abortions but not restricting abortion by law. According to John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter, Buttiglione “won’t support efforts to make abortion illegal,” because, Buttiglione says, “to defend the child against the mother is just, but impossible.” Left-leaning Christian supporters of President Obama are adopting Buttiglione’s language. These thinkers (I shall refer to them as “economic pro-lifers”) contend that the pro-life movement should merely try to use government or private policy and funding to improve the economic situation of pregnant women. Buttiglione is planning to tour the United States and other countries to promote his ideas. Economic pro-lifers describe themselves as taking a broad view of the abortion problem, but instead they are approaching the issue far too narrowly. They present a false dichotomy, a supposedly exclusionary choice between two options, when in fact one of the options is a straw man, easily rejected in favor of their own preference. Economic pro-lifers assert a false dichotomy between “making abortion illegal” versus “reducing abortions.” Then, by asserting that they oppose “criminalizing women,” they contend that the movement should abandon efforts to make abortion illegal, and instead try to reduce it indirectly, mainly through economics. But “making abortion illegal” is not the same as “criminalizing women.” Laws can be passed to make abortion illegal in a multitude of effective ways without criminalizing women. This point must be emphasized, because the error is extremely common. There are a vast number of laws that can be passed against abortion that do not involve criminalizing women, but that actually make it illegal and help to stop it. One of the most basic of such laws would be criminalizing abortionists, not women. Clarke Forsythe of Americans United for Life has demonstrated by extensive research that when abortion was illegal before Roe v. Wade, women were not prosecuted. On the contrary, the pro-life movement treats women as second victims because that’s what they are, and because women are the best sources to help the authorities prosecute abortionists. Early American feminists recognized the need for illegality and woman-support, not just one. Sarah Norton lamented that “Child murderers practice their profession without let or hindrance.” Susan B. Anthony affirmed both when she said “We want prevention, not merely punishment.” There are a tremendous number of laws that make abortion illegal without prosecuting women. There are laws against government funding of or involvement in abortion. There are requirements of informed consent and parental involvement. There are sanitary and safety requirements on abortion facilities. There are restrictions on types and kinds of abortions. There are restrictions on makers of drugs and devices that cause abortion. Such laws don’t “defend the child against the mother” as Mr. Buttiglione suggests. On the contrary, they protect women from the inherently predatory practice of abortion. Though abortion is legal, it is definitely not safe. Women suffer physical and emotional complications, unsanitary conditions, even sexual abuse by abortion providers, who tend to be the most unsavory characters in the medical industry. Opposition to criminalizing women is simply not a sufficient reason to oppose “making abortion illegal,” because restricting abortion by law includes all these laws that are effective and that don’t criminalize women. People who refuse to recognize this fact are led to a very troubling conclusion: in rejecting “making abortion illegal” they end up tolerant of or even in favor of the opposite of all these laws. They support government funding of abortion and letting abortionists have no legal penalty. They oppose parental involvement laws, and informed consent, and even restrictions on partial birth abortion or protections for infants born alive during abortion. They even look the other way at efforts to pass laws against pro-life pregnancy resource centers so as to eliminate competition for abortionists. As a result, economic pro-lifers who oppose “making abortion illegal” end up undermining their own goal of reducing the number of abortions. In the name of common ground, they tolerate and even support a regime that allows unrestricted abortion on demand paid for by the government. And all this would be done in the name of opposing criminalization of women, which doesn’t have anything to do with the pro-life movement’s agenda, especially in America. The inapt catchphrase of criminalizing women is no accident. In April 2008, a pro-abortion media research organization called “Third Way” published a paper that recommends how the abortion debate can be reframed to undermine pro-lifers. The paper concludes that “Abortion opponents should be defined as favoring criminalization and imprisonment.” Third Way’s conclusion is not that pro-lifers actually favor criminalizing women, but that they should be described that way, to turn the general public against them. By this strategy they hope to thwart pro-life legal efforts that reduce abortion without criminalizing women, and thereby they will “preserve the right to abortion” with absolutely no restrictions. Consequently, economic pro-lifers are not just making a factual error, they are adopting the abortion movement’s latest public relations ploy. Note that Third Way recommended that instead of promoting “choice,” abortion advocates should create a rhetorical “frame” of “reducing the need for abortions.” Sound familiar? There is a notable difference in the phraseology between Third Way and the economic pro-lifers. Pro-lifers will speak of “reducing abortions,” but you will never catch abortion advocates saying it that way. They insist on saying “reducing the need for abortions.” This distinction is so significant that President Obama’s pro-abortion leader of a “common ground” meeting insisted upon it when speaking with Wendy Wright of the pro-life group Concerned Women for America. “It is not our goal to reduce the number of abortions,” the president’s representative thundered, but to “reduce the need for abortions.” You can search President Obama’s own statements in vain for an expression of “reducing abortions.” Overly optimistic and trusting pro-lifers will claim he said it that way, or that it’s what he meant, but the actual statement just isn’t there. This distinction is momentous in at least three ways. First, the abortion movement insists on affirming that there is a “need” for abortions, therefore requiring laws ensuring a “right” to secure abortion. If abortion is needed, it must be a right, and that right must trump all obstacles to the need, whether the obstacles are restrictive laws or simply a woman’s inability to pay for abortion without government funding. Second, as Robert George very eloquently pointed out in a recent debate, insistence on reducing the need and not the number of abortions leaves the door wide open for abortions to go up, not down. The Administration will be increasing abortion by pushing other policies to meet those inevitably remaining “needs” and to “preserve the right” by eliminating restrictions on abortion and paying for it with government funding. Already this year Congress is poised to change the law to fund abortions in the District of Columbia and for all federal employees, and the President is vigorously promoting abortion legalization worldwide while giving millions of dollars to international abortion organizations . Third, there is unanimity on the pro-abortion side that “reducing the need for abortions” is simply a code phrase for comprehensive sex education and contraception for children and young adults, even without parental notice. The Third Way report explicitly defines “reducing the need” as contraception and sex education. There is not one self-described “common ground” effort from the abortion side, in organizations, platforms, or legislation, that fails to make contraception and sex education its number one priority. And these efforts always include as their top priority increased government funding for Planned Parenthood, the organization that performs more than 300,000 abortions in America every year. Such deceptive efforts are opposed by pro-lifers, but are ironically proposed as “common ground,” even though they are based on pro-abortion rather than “common” ideals and they fuel pro-abortion rather than neutral “ground.” Just last week, pro-abortion congressmen introduced a “common ground” bill pursuing this precise goal, and claiming “pro-life” support but receiving instead only a handful of Left-leaning Christian endorsers. The bill is a multi-million dollar bailout for Planned Parenthood. By this sad, roundabout path, economic pro-lifers who pit “abortion reduction” against “making abortion illegal” end up supporting a regime that funds all abortions for free with tax dollars, opposes every restriction against the practice of abortion even beyond birth, funnels government money to abortionists themselves at Planned Parenthood, and demonizes all pro-life efforts by claiming they criminalize and oppose women. Therefore the economic pro-lifers risk increasing rather than reducing abortion. Their path has been written out, plain as day, in the pro-abortion script. When Mr. Buttiglione comes to the United States on his abortion reduction tour, I hope that he includes meetings with leading pro-lifers. Those meetings should feature AUL’s Clarke Forsythe, to discuss the fact that the pro-life movement is not about criminalizing women, but is about making abortion illegal in protective ways. And it should also include discussions with leaders of the networks of thousands of pro-life pregnancy resource centers such as CareNet, Heartbeat, and NIFLA, showing that the pro-life movement leads America in putting women first, and that putting women first is precisely why pro-lifers seek to make abortion illegal. |
