Not Dead Yet - pro-life movement

National Review, May 17, 1999 by Ramesh Ponnuru

The pro-life movement is winning.

Nobody told the losers outside the clinics, but the abortion wars are over. The Republican party is in danger of becoming "operationally pro-choice," laments pro-life journalist Fred Barnes. Jim Pinkerton, a pro-choice Republican who writes often on the baleful influence of social conservatives on his party, is positively gleeful that the GOP has finally taken his advice and become "functionally pro-choice."

Both point to the presidential primary race as evidence. George W. Bush has declared that a sweeping ban on abortions is unattainable. Elizabeth Dole says that even talking about a ban would merely extend a "dead-end debate." John McCain wants to revise the party platform to make it clear "to young women in this country who may have a disagreement with us on the issue of abortion" that "there's room for all of us in our party." John Kasich suggests that pro-life Republicans "lower the volume" on the debate over abortion. The "underlying message," according to Christopher Caldwell, is that these are pro-lifers "you can vote for without fear that your abortion rights will be curtailed." Says the columnist Charles Krauthammer, "The great abortion debate is over."

Actually, Krauthammer wrote that back in 1992. Since then, pro-lifers have added about three dozen congressmen, a dozen senators, and four governors to their ranks; they have twice passed in Congress a bill banning some abortions and come close to overriding the president's vetoes of it; they have moved the debate over abortion to ground more favorable to them; and they have converted the Jane Roe of Roe v. Wade to their cause. So are the latest obituaries for the pro-life movement any more accurate?

Krauthammer read too much into the failure of Missouri attorney general William Webster-who had argued a high-profile abortion case before the Supreme Court-to win the 1992 gubernatorial race. In fact, Webster's defeat had less to do with abortion (an issue he ran away from) than with scandal: He would be sentenced to jail within a year of the election. But Krauthammer's deeper mistake is a common assumption: that a pro-life stance must be, except in a few places, a political liability.

Almost the entire national press corps believes this. So do most Republican officials and consultants, not to mention their Democratic counterparts. As a result, many sincerely pro-life Republicans are defensive about abortion. Even Pat Buchanan has occasionally conceded the point, arguing that protecting the unborn is worth losing some votes. That abortion is a losing issue is the premise of most of the talk about whether the primaries pull the GOP's presidential nominee too far to the right to win a general election. Abortion is also frequently cited as a major cause of the "gender gap"-the tendency of women to vote more than men for Democrats.

Ralph Reed, the political consultant formerly affiliated with the Christian Coalition, points out the flaw in the dominant view that being pro-life loses votes: "There's not a scintilla of evidence to support that position." He's not exaggerating. Yes, Americans oppose a constitutional amendment and support Roe, in some polls by substantial majorities. And yes, more Americans regard themselves as "pro-choice" than "pro-life"-though that margin has been shrinking and is now statistically insignificant in some polls. But the picture changes when people are asked to describe their views in greater detail.

POLL POSITIONS

A poll released earlier this year by the Center for Gender Equity, a feminist group, found that 53 percent of American women favor prohibiting abortion either altogether or with exceptions for rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother. A lot of people were shocked by this finding. They shouldn't have been. It's consistent with polls pro-life groups have been doing for years; a Christian Coalition poll taken the same week had an identical result.

Men, contrary to conventional wisdom, have been found again and again to be somewhat more likely than women to support legal abortion (though marital status and church attendance are both better predictors than gender of attitudes toward abortion). Including men, about half the population would ban abortion with an exception for rape, incest, fetal deformity, or to save the life of the mother- which would mean a ban on 95 percent of abortions.

Another quarter of the population would ban abortions after the first trimester. Only about 10 percent agree with abortion-rights groups that abortions should be allowed at any stage of pregnancy. And while there has been some movement in these numbers over the last few years-support for abortion on demand has actually been getting slightly smaller-a restrictionist majority has existed throughout the entire period since Roe. For ten years, CBS/New York Times polls have found that about 55 percent of the population wants abortion either "illegal" or "under stricter limits than it is now" rather than "generally available." There's a reason abortion-rights groups fight so hard to keep the issue in the courts: They'd lose a lot of ground in a democratic debate.