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Abortion and Civil War -- 2
The Vanishing Alternative
And that was largely that. But I kept looking for like-minded folks, and finally, about a year later, I found some.
Kids they were, mostly, part of a group called The National Youth Pro-Life Coalition. Somehow I got connected up with them, and attended a couple of their conventions, where I conducted workshops on nonviolent direct action as a way of expressing opposition to abortion, growing out of my experience in the civil rights movement a decade earlier. Some of the organizers of the very first civil disobedience actions against abortion clinics I helped train and inspire; as I explain further below, that has become a mixed legacy to say the least, but it is one that cannot be denied.
Among these youthful, peace-minded anti-abortion activists were some people I still think very highly of, although in many ways we have parted company. For several years we kept in touch, as those who remained more activist than I struggled to find a way to build an alternative presence within the increasingly reactionary political context of the anti-abortion movement.
What came out of this struggle was a small and scattered but seminal network called Pro-Lifers for Survival. PS as it was called was the brain-(and even more, the heart and soul)child of Juli Loesch, an eloquent, gently militant Catholic peacenik from Erie, Pennsylvania. I was asked to be on the PS Board of Advisors. This board never actually met but, I was amazed to find, it was indeed asked for advice on a number of occasions.
Even though it never amounted to much as an organization, and finally disbanded in the 1980s, PS accumulated two very important achievements: One, it helped legitimize the idea that a person could be anti-abortion without thereby being by definition a rightwinger; and two, wonder of wonders, it, and especially the witness of Juli Loesch, more or less converted the American Catholic bishops, nudged them into explicitly linking their anti-abortion stance with an antiwar position. (I doubt the bishops would ever admit to having been influenced by such an ad hoc, theologically dubious and numerically insignificant band as PS, but I make the claim nonetheless.)
Unfortunately, while PS did leave a mark on the anti-abortion movement, the bulk of that constituency in the early 1980s was going a very different route: following the Pied Pipers of reaction into a formal coalition with the nascent Religious Right. I chronicled some of the formative events of this alliance for another "alternative" weekly paper in Washington. By the time Ronald Reagan ran for re-election in 1984, the creative work of Juli Loesch and PS, and the "seamless garment" philosophy of the Catholic bishops which was its finest flowering, had both been marginalized to the point of practical irrelevance in the face of the anti-abortion movement's effective absorption into the militant right.
This made me sad, to say the least. But it also made me think. About this time, a number of ex-PSers moved on to form another movement group, a political action committee called Justlife. Justlife set out to collect money for political candidates who back a three-part platform of opposition to militarism and legal abortion plus support for human needs programs.
I was asked to become a charter member of Justlife, thought about it carefully, and then declined. There was something about it that didn't sit right. I certainly did not object to political action, nor was connecting abortion and war a problem. And surely I was for rebuilding the human needs programs decimated in the Reagan years.
No, as I considered it, my reluctance to sign on with Justlife came down to uneasiness with its acceptance of the standard anti-abortion strategy of attacking abortion's legality, what is called in this essay the "Prohibitionist" approach, and its adoption of abolitionist rhetoric and imagery. Melding this with social democracy and disarmament did not, I felt, get to the root of the problem of dealing with abortion.
Trying to Speak Up
But after declining to sign on with Justlife, I felt an increasing need to make articulate my aversion to this strategy. In the light of my almost fifteen years of thinking and reporting on the abortion issue, the movement's approach loomed larger and larger as, it seemed to me, the crucial, fatal, tragic error of the anti-abortion struggle. What at first was another visceral response seemed more and more reasonable, both politically and historically.
But I had not sat down and actually tried to articulate it in a reasonable way. And my sense of the trajectory of the anti-abortion movement, which is explained below, made me feel that it was increasingly timely, even urgent, to make this case, as forcefully as I could. In January, 1988 I started writing.
What follows, after fourteen drafts, is the result of this effort.
ABORTION AND CIVIL WAR
Completed in 1988
The Failure of the "Pro-Life" Movement
The anti-abortion movement is a failure. Whatever else it has done, it has not stopped abortion: The number of abortions performed in the United States has steadily increased until now, fifteen years after Roe v. Wade, more than a million are being performed in the United States annually.
Furthermore, there is little hope that the movement can change this situation in the future. Indeed, while my opposition to abortion has remained firm since before 1973, I have become almost equally opposed to the anti-abortion movement. In my judgment the movement has become one of the biggest obstacles to effective action against abortion; it has become part of the problem. If there is to be any hope of turning the tide of abortion, I believe it will require that the the current movement be replaced by an entirely different social force with an entirely different approach.
The movement's failure may be good news for abortion supporters. But it could also be, paradoxically, even better news for those who are against abortion, because facing that reality could free us to look for better approaches. One such alternative will be outlined later in this article.
This conviction that the anti-abortion movement cannot succeed is based on both practical and theoretical considerations. The practical reasons come down to these:
The movement is unlikely to reverse Roe;
But even if it does, that won't stop abortion.
The slim odds of reversing Roe are not just a matter of the Supreme Court's current makeup, which will change substantially in the next few years anyway. Even a new court, I believe, will be very slow to throw out Roe, because the American public has made it clear they support the concepts of privacy on which it is based, however debatable their technical constitutional basis might be.
The depth of this sentiment was shown dramatically in the struggle over the Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork, who was seen as the movement's best chance in this decade to gain a potential majority for reversing Roe. Although the movement kept a low public profile during the marathon hearings, behind the scenes it went all out for him, mobilizing its rank and file to deluge Congress with pro-Bork calls and letters.
Even so, the Senate's rejection of Bork came in response to clear indications of considered, majority public disapproval of the philosophy he articulated in the hearings, during which the issues underlying Roe were a central focus.
In short, despite conservative complaints about liberal "lynch mobs," Bork was defeated fairly, on the merits, and after the anti-abortion movement had done all it could. The Supreme Court, which knows how to count votes, will not, in my view, be in any hurry to counter the public judgment rendered there.
But suppose I'm mistaken. Suppose the decision is eventually overturned. It certainly could happen; Bork notwithstanding, the movement has not given up. If Republicans regain the White House and fill the next Supreme Court vacancies, the prospects for reversal seem increasingly likely. But how much actual impact would reversal have?
Not much, I am convinced.
After all, reversal would not ban abortions, only return the job of regulating them to the states. While a few states might try to outlaw it completely, numerous others undoubtedly would still permit it, and some would even continue to pay for it as well.
Thus, even without Roe, abortion would still be immediately available to many Americans, and not far away for the rest. This was in fact increasingly the case in the years just prior to Roe. Besides, following the recent Canadian Supreme Court decision overturning restrictions there, abortion will soon be widely available just across our long northern border regardless of local restrictions below it.
But federalism is not the only tide running relentlessly against anti-abortion activists; there is also technology.
Both pro- and anti-abortion leaders are closely following the development of new drugs, of which one called RU 486 is the best known. RU 486 is a pill which has shown high effectiveness in inducing early abortions in tests in France, reportedly with few side effects.
The anti-abortion movement is working to prevent RU 486 from being made available in the U.S. It may succeed for awhile. But especially if more traditional abortion methods were restricted, it seems safe to predict that RU 486, if it were still illegal, would become as much a staple of the illicit drug traffic as cocaine or marijuana.
The significance of RU 486 and similar drugs, as they are perfected, goes beyond creating a new way to make abortion cheap and widely available. They do so, moreover, in a manner which strongly reinforces the autonomy of the woman involved. They "privatize" it. Doctors, clinics, all the current paraphernalia even of legal abortion will become increasingly optional, and abortion ever more a private, even solitary affair. Thus any scheme of public regulation would become more difficult to enforce.