Beyond 'it's a baby': if pro-lifers give more thought to women's needs, they will serve children better

National Review, Dec 31, 1997 by Frederica Mathewes-Green

'This week is anti-choice week at UB," wrote Michelle Goldberg, a staffer with the student paper The Spectrum at the University of Buffalo in New York. "If you see one of them showing their disgusting videos or playing with toy fetuses, do your part and spit at them. Kick them in the head."

In my travels to college campuses -- Yale, Princeton, Bryn Mawr, Brown, Wellesley, et al. -- no pro-choicer has actually kicked me in the head, but a few have looked as if they'd like to. A few more have delivered dark imprecations in the question-and-answer period, occasionally disguised as questions. And a few more have just glowered at me threateningly, like the wicked witch before the bucket of water hit her.

But most pro-choicers I've met have been distressed, saddened, and deeply ambivalent about abortion. I recall the black woman at an Oregon college who during our question period confessed that she wasn't really in favor of abortion, even thought that it was generally a bad thing, but necessary because "If I got pregnant, nobody would adopt my baby." This is not only false -- babies of every color are adopted quickly -- it is sad, and reveals the loneliness and fear of abandonment that lie behind many abortions. "Nobody wants my baby" has echoes of "Nobody wants me."

Similarly, a woman whom I'd seen gleefully leading pro-choice chants at a rally was holding forth on her other cause, the evil of child abuse. I asked her why her concern didn't extend to unborn children. She hesitated, then replied with disarming honesty, "It's even worse than that. You see, I think I believe life begins at conception. I can't help thinking, if it's a baby after it's born, what is it a week before it's born? A month before? Where's the dividing line?"

I've found pro-choicers to be ambivalent not only about the unborn, but about the pain abortion causes women. That is why I've concluded that the usual pro-life message is ultimately ineffective. The usual message is brief and insistent: "It's a baby." Most pro-life communication pushes that message with unwavering persistence: precious-feet lapel pins, "Abortion Stops a Beating Heart" bumperstickers, billboards showing a row of babies, each third one ghosted over, with the legend, "Every third baby dies from choice."

It is the truth, of course, and it is a horrible truth; that's why most pro- choicers who are thoughtful people are troubled about abortion. It was that truth that flipped me over many years ago, back when I was a standard-issue, not-amused, hairy-legged women's libber, and eagerly pro-abortion (none of that sissy "pro-choice" stuff for me).

But then I read an article in Esquire magazine titled "What I Saw at the Abortion," in which surgeon Richard Selzer described the twitching of a poison syringe that had been plunged into a pregnant woman's abdomen. That was enough to convince me. It was indeed a baby, and abortion made it die. No way could I reconcile that with my overriding conviction that it was wrong to use violence to solve social problems. Could that be me in the mirror: vegetarian, anti-death-penalty, sprinkled with anti-war buttons, yet in favor of the killing of our own children?

The mystery is not that "It's a baby" troubles and disturbs; the mystery is that, for so many, it doesn't disturb enough. Not enough, that is, to convince them that abortion should be illegal. Polls regularly show three-quarters agreement with statements like "The fetus is a human baby and killing it is always wrong," and also show two-thirds agreement with "Society should have no say in whether a woman has an abortion." An L.A. Times poll a few years ago showed 57 per cent of respondents willing to call abortion "murder" -- a charged term that thoughtful pro-lifers avoid. (Intriguingly, a more recent CBS News poll found that those most likely to call abortion murder are between 18 and 29 years old.) But among those willing to use the term were a fourth of those who generally favored abortion and a full third of the women who admitted to having had an abortion themselves.

The problem is that "It's a baby" winds up in deadlock with "It's a woman's right." The two statements do not refute each other, and so no resolution is possible. What's more, they continue a pernicious fallacy, that deadly conflict between women and children is a normal state of affairs.

In no sane country are women and their own children assumed to be mortal enemies; any culture that so assumes is slowly committing suicide. This is true both literally and symbolically as well. When we accept as normal the ripping of a child from the mother's womb, we violate something disturbingly close to the heart of the human story. In the land where women kill their unborn children, every lesser love grows frail.

The problem with "It's a baby" is that it's answering a question no one is asking. Since the widespread arrival of ultrasonography, no one doubts that the life in the womb is a baby. The real question to ask about abortion is, "But how could we live without it?"