A shift in abortion sentiment?

National Review, Feb 23, 1998 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

NEW YORK, JANUARY 20

Gerald Ford picked an odd moment to declaim against Republican opposition to abortion. The interview in the New York Times appeared on January 20. Abortion, he said, "is an issue that creates significant turmoil in the party and ought not to be a partisan political issue." Four days earlier a New York Times story carried the result of a public-opinion poll. That poll reported that "the American public still largely supports legalized abortion but says it should be harder to get and less readily chosen." And speaking of turmoil: "At base, the country remains irreconcilably riven over what many consider the most divisive American issue since slavery, with half the population considering abortion murder, the poll found."

Now just as there were Southerners 150 years ago who believed that slaves should be free but didn't free their own slaves, there are, the poll indicates, Americans who believe that abortion is murder but who nevertheless (one-third of them) don't believe laws against abortion should be binding. Don't shake your head--paradoxes are what happens. The abolitionist who owned slaves, the pro-lifer who says, Well, just this one time. The disjunction extends indefinitely--the libertarian who denounces Social Security and cashes his monthly check, the Christian who skips Sunday services.

Two points crystallize. One has to do of course with the advice of Gerald Ford. Most recently the Republicans passed by a proposed litmus test which would have forbidden the passing of GOP election funds to any candidate who failed to oppose partial-birth abortions. Mr. Ford applauded that decision but went further by recommending, in effect, that the Republican Party simply pull out of the abortion controversy. How do you pull out of a controversy when one-half of the American people consider the 1.2 million yearly abortions as 1.2 million acts of murder? There are devices the polemicist can try on the stump. To the questioner who says, "How can we fail to consider abortion a political question when we have laws that condone abortion? Laws are for refinement by democratic means!" the speaker can reply that we aren't talking about laws but about a constitutional right. And it's true that constitutional spelunkers came up with that human right 25 years ago, but also true that more than thirty states at this point have reduced the absolute right to abortion by modifications. A waiting period, in some cases; parental advisement; and other constraints. We have a constitutional right to bear arms, but that doesn't mean you can sport an AK-47 around town.

The other crystallization in the controversy has to do with race. The distinguished essayist Roger Rosenblatt coined the term "permit but discourage" in his book Life Itself: Abortion in the American Mind. He believes that the American people are moving against abortion, but on the moral, not the political, plane. Abortion, Mr. Rosenblatt is saying, is one of those things one disapproves of and, on the whole, doesn't do: like keeping a mistress, or having a night out on the town.

The graphs published by the New York Times pursuant to its survey show that there is definitely a movement among those who engage in abortion. But it has a racial edge Whereas 25 years ago 80 per cent of abortions in this country were undergone by white women, that figure reduces now to 60 per cent. At the same time, where 20 per cent of abortions were undergone by black women in 1973, that figure is now almost 40 per cent. So that while abortions have reduced by 25 per cent among whites, among blacks they have doubled.

Analysts will comment that 25 years ago blacks, relatively poor, could not afford abortions; or that there was ignorance about the availability of the procedure. And others might say that white Americans, better educated on the whole, can more easily master the means and the discipline to avoid unwanted pregnancies.

All very well. But we also ought to take into account a datum once before mentioned in this space, notwithstanding its ugliness. It is that some enthusiasts for abortion are motivated by the relative figures: three times the incidence of abortions among blacks as among whites. A form of relative population control not unrelated in tendency from what the late William Shockley came up with. When Dr. Shockley wasn't off winning Nobel Prizes, he labored to find some way to reduce the rate of black reproduction. What he desired to counter, he said, was "dysgenics"--"retrogressive evolution through the disproportionate reproduction of the genetically disadvantaged." He came up with the idea of bribing individual black Americans to go off to Africa. Another way is to encourage more of them to go to abortion clinics.

Is this cultural polarization what the polls are now telling us about?