Where we stand - Abortion: The Debate

National Review, Dec 22, 1989 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

THE COVER of this magazine celebrates perhaps the most famous woman in the world, and in a pose appropriate to the advent of the Christmas season. The sheer, numbing saintliness of Mother Teresa has captured the attention of men and women as cosmopolitan as the jurors who give out the Nobel Prize for Peace. That to such a person abortion should be so offensive takes us to the argument at hand, the solemnity of which is reinforced by its association with her, "the servant of the servants of the poor."

The two essays that follow-the first by our Washington correspondent, William McGurn, the second by our longtime academic associate Ernest van den Haag-do not collide on moral ground. That is so because Mr. McGurn believes that the majority of American voters are, to reduce the question to its fundamental formulation, opposed to "abortion on demand." Mr. van den Haag disagrees on that plebiscitary question. Not entirely, but he believes that the majority of the American people are in favor of abortion on demand during the first trimester of pregnancy.

There are important things that go unsaid, in our judgment, by both of our essayists. Mr. McGurn doesn't tell you what is the correct road for the Republican Party should it eventually transpire that the majority of the American people in fact do believe in abortion on demand: i.e., pretty much the kind of thing approved by Roe v. Wade in practice. And, interestingly enough, Mr. van den Haag fails to clarify the question when raised at a different moment, i.e., three months after conception: What does he think should be the position of the Republican Party if it were established that the majority of the American people were to favor (or were to come to favor) abortion right up until the ninth month?

Mr. McGurn feels that the GOP would be invigorated by taking a principled stand on the question, but does not tell us what he would favor if, instead of invigoration, what ensued were atrophy. Mr. van den Haag, meanwhile, stresses that the secularization of our culture makes it progressively more difficult to urge sanctions that are primarily religious in provenance upon those who do not accept religious insights and commandments; or who, even if they do, wish to be left free to traduce them, even as the Christian is free to decline to give food to the hungry. If the American community were, twenty years from now, to endorse infanticide, I am not sure what Mr. van den Haag would do about this, save to remind us that in order to indulge such a thing, we would need to amend the Constitution.

What we are left with, then, is the basic question: Is it possible to prescind a deeply felt moral commitment from an institutional political vehicle, and remain loyal to that political vehicle? Inevitably, glandular forces come into play. It is difficult to imagine countenancing a Republican Party that left it to individual candidates to side with or against infanticide. It is useful to adduce infanticide-as-populationcontrol as the spook of the future because it seems entirely unlikely that a movement to authorize it will germinate in the lifetime even of young Americans. But it is not so with euthanasia, which is an issue right now. A decision by the Supreme Court declaring that an individual citizen has the right to opt for the end of his lifeand, in circumstances where he cannot administer his own termination, has the right to summon professional help-would be astonishing. But, actually, no more so than Roe v. Wade. Probably less so, in fact; since it is widely suspected that euthanasia goes on all the time, probably in most states of the Union. Some moral comfort is to be taken, however, from our knowledge that it is illegal; even as many who would vote against legalizing abortion are prepared to engage in it when especially convenient, or especially urgent. Hundreds of thousands of abortions were performed in America before 1973.

It remains to stress that the issue is open whether the conservative community can prevail in its pro-life campaign. Nothing, as Mr. McGurn persuasively argues, has been transcribed on the matter of the will of the American people. And easy capitulations are at best unsatisfactory; at worst, contemptible. The argument that it is all right to be pro-choice in your political actions as long as you are yourself pro-life is a license for moral inactivity. The positions of such as Mario Cuomo, Patrick Moynihan, and Edward Kennedy remind us that the temptation to be guided by political considerations not only shapes our public declarations, but tends to calcify our consciences. There are those who would be consoled by seeing an occasional tear genuinely shed by Cuomo-MoynihanKennedy when they reflect on the 1.6 million babies that are not allowed to be born, and who would take some satisfaction in hearing some high oratory from them on the putative right to live.

So: Let us acknowledge that comity, except in outrageous extremes (a call for genocide, say), is necessary to the commonweal. But acknowledge, also, that the fight for life for the unborn is as pure as the lady who graces our cover.