Pro-lifers should begin by targeting those abortions that most obviously repulse ordinary American voters.
Pro-lifers should begin by targeting those abortions that most obviously repulse ordinary American voters.
A s far as America’s political war over abortion is concerned, the overturning of Roe v. Wade is, in Winston Churchill’s phrase, not the end, nor the beginning of the end, but the end of the beginning. One of the elemental political realities that both sides will now need to face is how abortions by various methods and at various stages fare when put to the eyeball test.
Human beings are inclined by nature to make moral judgments of right and wrong, fairness and unfairness, justice and injustice. Our senses of conscience, altruism, and grievance are driven in part by our reasoning, in part by our emotions, and in part simply by our instinctive gut reactions. We should, of course, educate and elevate that sensibility by the study and application of moral philosophy, political philosophy, and moral theology. But the political reality of a democracy is that we will always be ruled in good part by the sensibilities — the common sense, if you will — of the population at large. And that means a lot will always depend on people who call things as they see them, often without a rigorous philosophical consistency.
In other words: people eyeball a thing and judge what they see and how they feel.
Abortion is one area in which this can be intensely frustrating for activists who wish to advance or defend a principle. But it is a reality with which we must contend. For years, the eyeball test has worked against pro-choicers in their defense of the indefensible Roe standard and the equally indefensible extremism of legal abortion on demand all the way to birth. Children learning about abortion are instinctively horrified by the concept. Graphic images or descriptions of surgical abortions are appalling. People becoming first-time parents — feeling the kick in the mother’s womb — are especially apt to convert to the pro-life cause, as one can easily hear in the testimony of so many converts. As modern science has advanced to show us sonograms, detect fetal heartbeats and sensitivity to pain, and make more and more premature babies viable outside the womb, the job of carrying the pro-choice cause has gotten harder. People have looked at the abortions that pro-choicers wish to permit, the lives they wish to snuff out, and the methods of killing they advocate, and they have been repelled. It looks like infanticide.
But now that we move on to the granular details, pro-lifers will face our own eyeball-test problem. There is a reason why so many societies have settled on something like 12–15 weeks (the fourth month of pregnancy) as the line past which abortions are impermissible. That line is not drawn by science, or by moral theology, or really by any reasoned argument about when life begins; it is drawn by an eyeball test. The earlier a woman is in her pregnancy, the less visibly human her unborn child appears, and the closer we get to questions about precisely where in the fertilization process a biologically and morally distinct human being is formed. The more abortions are performed by chemical pills rather than surgical butchery, the less uncomfortable they make people. There is a reason that fights over the point at which contraceptives become abortifacients, over stem-cell research, and over in-vitro fertilization have been hard for pro-lifers. There is a reason why in those fights, we often lose the support of even people who are staunchly against surgical abortions.
None of which should be taken as a call to despair. Pro-choicers will, for the foreseeable future, be defending the indefensible, and they are likely to lose a lot of those battles in the political arena. Pro-lifers have come this far by continuing to push the Sisyphean boulder up the hill every time it rolled back down. The task of educating the public’s conscience is one that every generation will need to begin anew. Nothing is ever over.
But it is a call to realism. The most urgent task at hand now is for pro-lifers to secure in the laws of as many states as possible the prohibition of abortions where the eyeball test works in our favor. Doing so will condition the public to accept the exercise of their moral judgments against the most evident horrors. Once the principle is established in practice, it can more easily be advocated in theory. The hardest cases for legislation should wait, for now: The roof of a house cannot be built until its foundation is secure.