Has the pro-life movement failed? How?
Michael Brendan Dougherty, writing at The American Conservative:
The ease with which pro-lifers adopt Obama’s words shouldn’t surprise anyone. While the movement is a conservative social movement, dedicated to protecting the family from internal breakdown, it is also a liberal political movement, making the case for equal treatment under the law. This emphasis on egalitarianism draws from the same progressive traditions informing Obama’s rhetoric. [...]
And as a conservative social force, restoring the habits of the “culture of life,” the pro-life movement is failing. While teenage illegitimacy is down, overall illegitimacy is climbing quickly. Taboos against premarital sex have long vanished. The sexual revolution is advancing to redefine the family in law. Medical scientists largely ignore the movement’s moral objections to embryo research. [...]
The internal divisions of the pro-life movement between conservative and liberal approaches can be difficult to untangle. The strident American Life League, which champions Burton’s strategy, is generally considered ultra-conservative, even as it makes “nondiscrimination” and “equality” its primary goals. Meanwhile, the more moderate-seeming incrementalists advocate a conservative, law-and-order approach to the issue, arguing for parental-consent laws and gradually building legal consensus for other restrictions on abortion.
Rod Dreher asks:
I keep hearing from friends who go to the March for Life regularly that the faces are overwhelmingly young, which sounds like very good news. And yet, nothing substantive seems to change legislatively or legally re: abortion. Why not? In what sense can the pro-life movement be said to be succeeding, given that, as Dougherty points out, we’ve had eight Supreme Court justices appointed by putatively pro-life GOP presidents since Roe v. Wade was decided, and yet, Roe still stands.
Patrick J. Deneen comments:
I have never felt drawn to the movement as it has been constituted, mostly because I have thought that much of the movement approached this issue without the necessary depth of understanding about the relationship of the pro-choice supporter of abortion and the larger culture of choice that is at the heart of modern liberal philosophy. By hitching their star to the Republican Party, and approaching the issue as a legal rather than a deeper philosophical theological and thus cultural crisis, the prospects for success were always likely to fail to the extent that there was an unwillingness to confront the broader “culture of choice” that is the hallmark of modern civilization. Indeed, by acquiescing to a broader “culture of choice” that is fostered especially by a market economy understood to be unfettered and driven by the free and unrestrained choices of individuals, it can be argued that the pro-life movement was actually aiding and abetting the very culture from which a pro-choice abortion regime arose. [...]
Are we prepared to consider the possibility that abortion is not itself an isolated evil, but a deeper symptom – pernicious and malevolent, yes – of a deeper philosophical, theological and cultural crisis?