Hillary Clinton’s speech on abortion earlier this week is making waves among serious thinkers on abortion policy, both the life and choice variety. Glenn Reynolds has speculated that the junior senator from New York might fulfill this alternate-history novel’s description of her as "the most uncompromising wartime president in the history of the United States," but the president who ended the abortion wars through careful diplomacy? I’ve been a strong (if unconventional) pro-lifer going back to high school, and I think she may be the one person in the Democratic Party that can drag it toward something reasonable on abortion, if not the return of the policy to the states from the federal judiciary. (I wish Harry Reid and the other pro-life Dems well, but they have no illusions on their influence.) Slate’s Will Saletan, the author of an excellent book on the evolution of abortion-rights rhetoric, is impressed with Clinton’s tweak of her husband’s famous "safe, legal and rare" formulation, which he calls it "safe, legal and never." But first, Saletan notes that "Clinton’s speech basically updated the pro-choice message for the age of terrorism," recalling the forced-abortion and forced-pregnancy regimes in China and Romania, respectively. Her use of faith, responsibility and family are very intentional:
This is the other
side of Clinton’s message: against the ugliness of state control, she
wants to raise the banner of morality as well as freedom. Pro-choicers
have tried this for 40 years, but they always run into a fatal
objection: Abortion is so ugly that nobody who supports it can look
moral. To earn real credibility, they’d have to admit it’s bad. They
often walk up to that line, but they always blink.Not
this time. Abortion is "a sad, even tragic choice to many, many women,"
said Clinton. Then she went further: "There is no reason why government
cannot do more to educate and inform and provide assistance so that the
choice guaranteed under our constitution either does not ever have to
be exercised or only in very rare circumstances."
That includes both more promotion of contraception with at-risk groups – Clinton noted that "Seven percent of American women who do not use contraception account for 53 percent of all unintended pregnancies" – and more promotion of abstinence for those who are in no emotional or economic position to be sexually active:
In her speech, she recalled campaigning for "teenage celibacy" a
decade ago. She emphasized "the important role that parents can play in
encouraging their children to abstain from sexual activity. … Research
shows that the primary reason that teenage girls abstain is because of
their religious and moral values. We should embrace this—and support
programs that reinforce the idea that abstinence at a young age is not
just the smart thing to do, it is the right thing to do."Abstain. Parents. Religious and moral values. The right thing. This
is the way to shake up the Democratic position on abortion—not with
tiny defensive concessions but with a big offensive to promote
responsibility and bring down the abortion rate. Bush has used a
similar strategy to commandeer the education issue. According to polls,
it has worked.
Terry Eastland also heralded Clinton’s speech in the Weekly Standard, but as the first move in a possible party turnaround on the sanctity of Roe, which I agree has badly damaged the party’s electoral fortunes:
As abortion-rights supporter Benjamin Wittes writes in the current Atlantic Monthly, Roe
had "a deep legitimacy problem." But soon the Democratic party swore
allegiance to just such a decision. That meant as well a commitment to
its disenfranchising effects, since Roe mandated policy. The
party came to shut down dissent (recall that Robert Casey, the pro-life
Pennsylvania governor, was barred from speaking at the Democratic
National Convention in 1992) even as it advanced ever more strident
defenses of Roe (no "warm words" for pro-lifers).Now, in the wake of an election in which the Democrats lost badly,
Democrats for Life aren’t the only Democrats who understand that the
party’s position on Roe helps explain the party’s ebbing
fortune since the ’70s, when it still held large majorities in both
houses. Consider that in 1977 to 1978, 125 of 292 House Democrats were
pro-life, while in the last Congress only 28 of 203 House Democrats
were. …
Eastland hopes that the party will "welcome democratic debate in which ‘the deeply held differences of
opinion’ on abortion that Clinton acknowledged in her speech could
finally be aired in ways that matter."
Clinton’s speech didn’t cover everything, though. From my quick keyword search, she never addressed the high abortion rate among some of the most sexually active Americans: college students. According to my favorite advocacy group, Feminists for Life (full disclosure: I’m a dues-paying member), one in five abortions is performed on a college woman, often because they feel they have to choose between their education and their child. FFL has done great work to pressure campuses to make themselves more accommodating to pregnant students, and had some help from mainstream feminist groups who disagree with them heatedly on abortion.
And that reveals the fundamental flaw in American discourse on abortion, in my mind: the view that children from unintended pregnancies are a threat to the lives of independent, educated, successful women. Pro-choice advocates (not necessarily individual pro-choicers) have promulgated this view for three decades, but traditional pro-life activists embrace it to some degree in their arguments against working mothers, day care and social ills resulting from parental absence. The past few years have shown an increase in new mothers taking off a few years to raise their children. But until our society does more to help pregnant women – my preferred policies would be universal prenatal care and early childhood health insurance, as well as federal guarantees for maternal leave – I believe that too many people will continue to assume that women who want to succeed in life and become pregnant unintentionally will have no other choice than abortion.
When Hillary Clinton announces a new partnership between the life and choice advocates to attack the factors that lead women to abort, while supporting both better contraception and commonsense abortion restrictions, I’ll be the first to stand and applaud.
(For more of my writing on abortion and unconventional pro-life advocacy, see this article as well as these blog posts – or check these search results for the term "abortion.")
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.