After more than a decade of strategizing how to fight the next Supreme Court justice, NARAL seems to have blown its wad prematurely (an analogy its activists can surely understand). The group’s savage ad against John Roberts – saying his views excused violence against abortion clinics – left a bad taste in the mouths of many Democrats, who are wondering if anything can stop this genial but principled nominee:
The committee’s senior Democrat, Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, said in an interview that it had been difficult to focus public attention on the nomination, in part because Judge Roberts was not perceived as ultra-conservative.
“He doesn’t come across immediately as a Janice Rogers Brown,” Mr. Leahy said, referring to an appeals court judge whose confirmation was blocked by Democrats for months. …
[Former Clinton adviser Lanny] Davis, who does not know Judge Roberts but travels in the same legal circles, is the perfect example of why the Democrats have been either unwilling or unable to come out swinging against the nominee. A committed proponent of abortion rights, Mr. Davis has not made up his mind on Judge Roberts.
“I know people who describe him as a very decent man,” Mr. Davis said. “So he starts out with a reservoir of open-mindedness among even arch-liberal Democrats like myself.”
Former Senator Bob Kerrey also detects a generational shift among Democrats – one that probably hasn’t reached the activist groups, which are slow to change:
At a time when leading Democrats like Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York are carefully calibrating their remarks on abortion, many say it would be a mistake to allow abortion to become a central issue in the Roberts confirmation. Mr. Kerrey, for one, says he sees some younger Democrats adopting Judge Roberts’s view that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided.
“They’re arguing that the Democratic Party would have been better off if, rather than this being a national debate, this being a state-by-state issue,” he said. “Roberts is not alone.”
The last major shift for abortion-rights groups was the late 1980s, when they dropped a welfare-tinged appeal for abortion in favor of a leave-us-alone, small-government strategy, which has been more successful, as Slate’s Will Saletan documents in his excellent book. But I don’t foresee any enthusiasm to go back to the pre-Roe days, when these groups had to argue state-by-state. So much easier to bypass the democratic process.
Meanwhile, New York Times columnist John Tierney is putting a sea of difference between himself and NARAL, to which he’s contributed in the past. “The group has a genius for alienating potential allies” by pushing their rhetoric beyond all facts and decency, he says, and their equation of abortion rights with civil rights is off-putting:
It’s true that pregnancy is a uniquely female burden and that most pro-life politicians are men – but then, so are most pro-choice politicians. There’s no gender gap in opinion on the issue. Polls have long shown that men are no more hostile than women are to abortion rights. In a New York Times/CBS News Poll earlier this year, men were slightly less inclined than women to say that abortion should be outlawed.
Treating the issue as a civil rights crusade may be good for mobilizing some women, but this strategy alienates the public because it ducks the central issue. If you believe that life begins at conception, then protecting women’s rights means protecting the rights of females in the womb, too.
Civil rights is a two-way street, Tierney notes – if abortion is a civil right, the logical question is what about the civil rights of a fetus? Modern embryology removes the canard that an embryo or fetus isn’t human, and the onus moves to philosophy and law, over whether humans in the womb are legal persons.
Tierney identifies what NARAL and associated groups really fear – “pragmatists”:
Many of these people have moral objections and resent the Supreme Court’s presumption in its Roe v. Wade decision, but they’re also pragmatic enough to realize that a ban couldn’t be enforced and would create a new set of problems. If Roe v. Wade were overturned and abortion policy left up to the states, these pragmatists would start to matter more than the ideologues on the left and right who now dominate the debate.
Legislators in some red states might keep their promises to outlaw abortion, but I think most would look at the polls and discover their position had suddenly evolved. The debate over abortion would ebb as the issue was settled democratically.
It should also be noted that there is a HUGE middle ground in abortion between always legal and never legal, which is rarely presented in public opinion polling on abortion. As a matter of law, abortion has never been illegal in all circumstances. The most anti-abortion state or community has always allowed abortion to save the life of a mother. Without Roe, I’m fairly certain that states themselves would have moved toward allowing abortion for a variety of medical complications but keeping it restricted for social factors, such as poverty. My preferred solution is guaranteed prenatal care and paid maternity leave for all women below a generous income threshold. Just consider it another choice for pregnant women who feel they have no other choice than abortion.
I’m a tech journalist who’s making a TV show about a college newspaper.