Raw numbers

Human Life Review, Fall 1999 by Ponnuru, Ramesh

One irritating feature of the abortion debate is how the abortion-rights side tries to monopolize it. Not content just to make their argument, they make ours as well-and invariably badly. Take their attempt to define implantation rather than conception as the beginning of pregnancy. They have no intention of regarding implantation as any serious constraint on themselves: they are willing to destroy embryos both before and afterward. No, their argument is that we anti-abortionists shouldn't oppose abortion before implantation, and presumably wouldn't if we were intelligent enough to understand our position better. Unless, that is, our position is merely sectarian and thus not amenable to rational analysis at all. It's hard to know which part of this gambit is more objectionable, the bad faith or the condescension.

Ronald Dworkin performs a similar maneuver: anti-abortionists can't really believe the premises they say they believe, because that would entail conclusions that are unacceptable even to them (such as the conclusion that women who procure abortions must be jailed); so Dworkin is free to reconstruct their argument and then knock it down.

Christopher Caldwell, thankfully, is no Ronald Dworkin. Where Dworkin errs in treating anti-abortionists' reasoning as opaque, Caldwell makes the opposite mistake of treating the public's reasoning about abortion as transparent. Caldwell argues, for instance, that the public's support in polls for a health exception to a ban on partial-birth abortions "must be a cover for something else," since such abortions are rarely (actually never) medically necessary. Does the public know this? I doubt it. Not only has there been a propaganda campaign, assisted by the President of the United States, to suggest that it is necessary in many cases, but most poll respondents will simply assume that such cases exist when they are presented the option of approving a health exception.

Caldwell imputes greater depth and consistency to the public's convictions than is actually there. For the central political fact about public thinking about abortion is that the public hates to think about abortion. Which is not to say the public is wholly indifferent; the aversion itself indicates distaste, at least. Caldwell writes that "a pro-life regime is not really something Americans want-it's just something they feel they ought to want." But he doesn't ask why they feel they ought to want it, or whether that moral sentiment is something that could be built on.

Caldwell argues that anti-abortion politicians, to be successful, must rew assure the public that they are no more serious about opposing abortion than it is. As I have argued elsewhere ("Not Dead Yet: The pro-life movement is winning," National Review, May 17, 1999), it's more likely that the public just wants to be reassured that its political leaders are not crusading, singleissue types.

Where Caldwell does score a point is in highlighting the sheer number of women who have had abortions. Let's take a brief detour through the numbers. The statistics are spotty-reporting requirements vary, and are often lax. But assume there have been about 35 million abortions since Roe v. Wade. A Statistical Abstract makes it possible to calculate how many American women have spent how many child-bearing years since Roe; it won't alter the numbers much to assume none of them have died. Accept, finally, the Alan Guttmacher Institute's estimate that 48 percent of abortions are repeats, and the calculation results in AGI's figure, cited by Caldwell, that 43 percent of women will have an abortion by age 45.

But this number doesn't account for repeat repeat abortions. The Centers for Disease Control has a 36-state estimate from 1995-1 have no idea how these states compare to the others-in which 10.7 percent of abortion patients had had two previous abortions and 6.7 percent had had 3 or more. Plugging those in yields a number closer to 33 percent of women having an abortion by age 45. The number would,be a little lower if the abortion rate of the last ten years were used rather than the post-Roe average.

After any amount of fiddling, however, it's still a dauntingly big number. Not every woman who's had an abortion becomes a supporter of NARAL, of course. Reactions vary: some women repent; the latent guilt of others drives them to defend abortion more passionately; still others think about it rarely. Almost nobody, I trust, looks back on her abortion with enthusiasm. But for all the caveats, it cannot be denied that the sheer number of women who have had abortions represents a sizable constituency (of both sexes) in its favor.

In Commentary, Caldwell has written that "[a]bortion has been the linchpin of the American Way for decades now. It underwrites not just the sexual hedonism that has become an unenumerated right in the social contract but also the mobility and personal autonomy on which the whole labor market rests. " Thus, "abortion cannot be banned without shaking society to its foundations. " To put the matter differently: abortion has become, to some extent, a bourgeois virtue.