I’m currently in Florida, visiting my parents and feeling oh so <\/i>sorry for my housemates stuck back in the cold weather of Oregon. My apologies for my poor posting record lately.<\/p>\n
Anyhow… be sure to check out The New Republic’s<\/i> online debate between William Saletan, Kate Michelman & Gloria Feldt<\/a>. Truthfully, it’s not much of a debate… much as I admire Michelman and Feldt, both of them seem too caught up in the talking points of pro-choice politics to really engage the questions that Saletan (who is pro-choice, but who questions some choices the pro-choice movement has made) brings up.<\/p>\n Here’s Saletan’s analysis of the current pro-life strategies. The person he’s addressing is Kate Michaelman, who served for many years as the head of NARAL:<\/p>\n The first category is abortion bans, starting with the one the Senate just passed: the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act. I’ll refer to it as the PBA ban, since I agree the name is misleading. You’ve issued a fact sheet <\/a>full of quotes from pro-life activists (I know you hate that term, but I think they’re as sincere as you are) implying that this is going to be the battleground of the future. Now that they’ve banned one abortion procedure, the argument goes, they’re going to ban more and more procedures, earlier and earlier in pregnancy.<\/p>\n It’s obvious why you’d prefer this fight: You know how to win it. The last time pro-lifers made a serious bid to ban abortions, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, you marshaled a decisive constituency against them. Bans are easy to beat because they’re overt attacks on choice. All you have to do is point out to voters that this or that politician wants the government to take away your family’s right to choose, and libertarian swing voters–the people I call pro-choice conservatives–turn against that politician.<\/p>\n But that’s also why I suspect the congressional leadership won’t give you that fight. The most recent quote on your fact sheet is from 1998. Pro-life strategists have been much quieter lately about banning a lot of abortions, because they don’t want to awaken your constituency. They want to tiptoe around it, by pushing other kinds of bills.<\/p>\n Some of those bills are in the second category, which I call pro-choice conservative legislation. These are bills designed to play to the same folks you’ve mobilized against abortion bans: voters who believe the government should stay out of the family. These voters are susceptible to your libertarian argument against abortion bans. But they’re also susceptible to the other side’s libertarian argument against public funding of abortions. And since they’re more pro-family than liberal, they’re attracted to arguments for parental consent (and spousal consent, though the courts have spared you that fight). Pro-lifers have a bill ready to exploit this constituency: the Child Custody Protection Act, which would punish adults who transport minors across state lines to evade state laws requiring parental consent or notification for abortion. How are you going to defeat that bill?<\/p>\n The other bill likely to come down the congressional chute next is the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, which basically says that anyone who injures or kills a woman, and in the course of that crime injures or kills her fetus, can be punished for the latter offense as severely as for the former. This bill represents a third category, which I call pro-choice-pro-life bills. These bills are designed to lay a legal groundwork for fetal rights in contexts where the interest of the fetus coincides with the interest of the woman. The administration followed the same strategy last year when it made “unborn children” eligible for the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. Since these are situations in which the woman wants the baby, it’s hard for most pro-choice people to see why they should object.<\/p>\n You’ve described these measures as a stealth strategy to undermine abortion rights. I agree with you that the legal concept they embrace–fetal personhood–directly threatens the right to abortion, and that this is the principal objective of the strategists who promote them. But I also think your side’s refusal to grant the fetus any legal significance in its own right–a refusal manifested in the language of the alternative bills your side has offered in each instance–is a mistake. It may not be a political mistake, but it’s a moral mistake. You don’t have to take such a hard line to protect the right to abortion. Roe v. Wade acknowledged the state’s “important and legitimate interest in protecting the potentiality of human life.” So should your bills.<\/p>\n Why does it matter whether the fetus has legal significance in its own right, and not just as an appendage of the woman? In part because of the fourth legislative category: bills that move the debate about the value of unborn life out of the woman’s body. The PBA ban is a fraudulent step in this direction: It pretends to stop doctors from killing a fetus that’s already exiting the woman’s body, when in fact the fetus is inside and is artificially extracted only for the purpose of abortion. But the Born Alive Infants Protection Act, which became law last year, really does address the killing of a fully born baby. The pending bills to ban human cloning, coupled with the administration’s restrictions on stem cell research, seek to block the creation and destruction, for research purposes, of embryos that have never been in a womb. Why did NARAL initially oppose the Born Alive Infants Protection Act? Why did it oppose the restrictions on stem cell research? If no woman’s autonomy is involved in these disputes, why are you? <\/p><\/div>\n Interesting stuff, well worth reading if you follow abortion politics. Thanks to Diotima <\/a>for the link..<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’m currently in Florida, visiting my parents and feeling oh so sorry for my housemates stuck back in the cold weather of Oregon. My apologies for my poor posting record lately. Anyhow… be sure to check out The New Republic’s … Continue reading