Abortion, again

Boston Globe has article on Democrats eyeing 'softer image on abortion'

Offering a warmer welcome for antiabortion voices would give Democrats a chance at bringing back voters who might agree with the party on economic and foreign policy issues, but balk at what they perceive is an uncompromising stance on abortion, Democrats said. Republicans, they note, finessed the matter so that the party retained its staunch antiabortion platform, but paraded Republican supporters of abortion rights such as California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani at the GOP convention this summer.

So is this about image, or about reality? Is it that Dems should follow the Republican descent into deceptive marketing of their platform? Or that Dems should, in fact, 'modulate' the position itself? It's my impression that lots of generally pro-choice voters voted for Bush because they thought abortion rights were not actually in danger ("Oh no, they wouldn't really make abortion illegal"). Oh yes, they totally would do that! But people who voted for Bush precisely because he supports a so-called 'culture of life' will not be persuaded to vote for a Dem with anything less than an entirely anti-abortion position.

What much of the debate among dems seems to be about, basically, is telling militant young women to stuff a sock in it, because when they chant "Abortion on demand, without apology," they hurt the Party. As far as I'm concerned, the Party is plenty modulated about abortion already, and telling militant young women to shut the hell up is not going to shut them up, it's just going to make them feel more threatened, and chant louder.

It deeply disturbs me that Dems are suddenly arguing about whether framing the abortion issue as "a woman's right to control her own body" is productive. For example, one of Left2Right's authors, in an extended post (followed by interminable comments) on why we should abandon Roe v. Wade:

Let me start with a woman's right to control her reproduction and her body, which is often abbreviated as the "right to choose".  In my view, this slogan has done great damage to liberals' credibility.  Opponents claim that abortion is murder, and if tacitly granted that claim, they cannot then be refuted on the grounds of a woman's right to choose murder.  The equation of abortion with murder has to be refuted first, before a woman's right to choose can be invoked.  To invoke it without having addressed the equation with murder is to appear either deaf or morally obtuse.  And that's how liberalism gets a bad name.

This is ridiculous. Even if abortion is murder, there are plenty of instances in which the state legally allows murder, so there's nothing morally obtuse about insisting that abortion should remain one of them. In fact, I'm perfectly happy saying that abortion is murder and women should be able to choose it. They should be able to do so because there are lots of ways they can get pregnant without having been 'at fault', because there is no reasonable way to decide whether or not a woman was 'at fault' in a particular pregnancy, and because pregnancy is an enormous and profound burden, and to force someone to bear such a burden unwillingly is to treat them as a slave. Thus: if women are not to be slaves, they must not be forced to bear children they don't want.

Whether Roe v. Wade was a 'good' decision on constitutional grounds and whether Dems should pursue other assurances of legality instead, I don't know. But to say that the "right to choose" is a "morally lightweight" position is not to understand or take seriously the absolute uniqueness of the burden of pregnancy.

Now it's true, I'm one of those rabid pro-choice people who won't compromise about it. People used to tell me, before I had my son, that after I'd been pregnant and had a kid, I wouldn't think about abortion the same way. That turned out to be true, but not in the way that they thought it would. I love my son beyond words, but I had a difficult pregnancy, and there were many, many times that I thought, "If I didn't really really really want this kid, if I hadn't been trying to get pregnant and wasn't so excited about being a mom, I'd go and have this parasite removed in a new york minute." Murder or no. And yes, I do think that is a perfectly moral position to take.

UPDATE 12/20/2004: Comments on Left2Right still going strong. I had to respond to someone who seemed to think I was implying I did not want my own son. summary: geez, can't a mom talk about abortion without its being assumed she doesn't want the kids she has?!

UPDATE 2 12/20/2004: Digby does the debate