The Impossibility of Common Ground
Over at the always enjoyable Bloggingheads, Sarah Posner of Religion Dispatches and Michael B. Dougherty of The American Conservative discuss and amiably debate the Pope’s statement on condoms, the political leanings of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in America, Christians who worship America instead of God, the promotion of contraception as a solution to sexually transmitted diseases, and the possibility of common ground in the abortion debate.
On the last point, I find myself in agreement with Michael Dougherty that common ground just isn’t possible, though for slightly different reasons than he gives. On the one hand, the pro-choice side wants the government to guarantee a legal right to an abortion. It wants to make sure that the law isn’t used to coerce a woman to maintain a pregnancy against her will. On the other hand, the pro-life side wants the the government to give the same legal protections to the unborn as it does to the rest of us. It wants to make sure that the law protects nascent human life. These two uses of the law are mutually exclusive. The law cannot protect unborn human life without prohibiting abortion. It cannot guarantee a right to an abortion without denying legal protection to the unborn. There’s no place to call common ground.
At most, the two sides can reach a compromise. The law can be used to protect unborn life and guarantee a right to an abortion, but each to only some extent. This compromise, however, isn’t common ground. Both sides remain standing apart, usually far apart, and each contesting where the line should be drawn, if it should be drawn at all.
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Common ground doesn’t necessarily imply compromise; we already have common ground with most balanced pro-choice proponents: that abortion is a tragedy and should be avoided if at all possible.
I would wager that if the majority of pro-life efforts were spent trying to fight abortion by providing a support mechanism for women in a difficult situation, rather than simply seeking legislative protection of the unborn, you’d probably find there to be far more active and productive dialogue between sides of the debate.
Not to imply that legislation shouldn’t happen. All I’m saying is that there is precedent for both sides to be unified in lowering the number of actual abortions, rather than wasting energy trying to fight over theoretical principles.
Sure. Though that doesn’t mean there are not ways of reducing abortion that elements of both sides could accept and find benefical.
Aside from that I have long wondered that with all of our other technological advances from smart phones to space travel, it would not be possible some day to solve the abortion debate by development of an artifical womb. A fetus could be extracted from a woman without being destroyed or harmed.
My guess is, however, that both sides secretly fear this. Pro-choice advocates, I believe, in their hearts know that most women who abort do so by imagining they never were pregnant after their abortion. The idea of their child living somewhere without them would be too much a trama.
And pro-lifers, I am sure, know damn well their conservative political allies have no willingness to have society take over the costs of raising and caring for huge numbers of children. If the price of stopping abortion was a tax increase, the whole conservative coalition goes down in flames.
There is no common ground only if you view abortion through the frame of the law. Laws are are part of it, but they are not the whole picture. Outside of this there is common ground. Someone who is supports abortion rights may still view abortion as a tragedy, or may regard it as over utilized, or may be concerned about issues of coercion (inter-personal or economic). Clearly, we do not agree with such a person on a fundamental level, but there are commonalities—common ground—which can be fruitful. Such a person might support a parental consent or parental notification bill, or be willing to provide more public support for women who want to keep their babies instead of having an abortion. These provide an opportunity for breaking down some of the “us vs. them” polarization and leave room for people to move towards our position.
In organizing as part of anti-death penalty work, I learned a way of viewing our goal that I found immensely useful and applicable in other settings, such as this one. People do not stand at opposite poles: generally, they lie on a spectrum with lots of shades of gray. Rank them from 1 to 5: 1 being totally with us, 5 being totally against us. Our goal is not to convert all the 5′s to 1′s: it is not going to happen. Rather, our goal is to move people one step closer: converting 5′s to 4′s, 4′s to 3′s, etc. It is in doing this that we need to find the common ground (such as I described above) and work to make our position clearer and more intellectually and emotionally compelling.
I am the last person to say that we should reduce the abortion debate to a debate about the law, and, yes, common ground can be found in social efforts to reduce the number of abortions, but in so far as the pro-choice and pro-life movements are political movements, and at their core they are, common ground cannot be reached.
Kyle,
Is it accurate to characterize the pro-life movement as a political movement at its core? I agree that this is a central concern, but it is not the only central concern. At the last pro-life gathering I went to, there were a lot of people there who were interested in supporting crisis pregnancy centers, promoting adoption, etc. This is not to say that they were not also interested in the legal/political aspects, but their big investment of time and energy is elsewhere. Among the break-out sessions, only one was on politics and the law, and it was not the most well attended.
I think so, yes, though not all its efforts relate directly to the political sphere. It seems to me that the pro-life movement exists and operates as a response to legalized abortion. Of course, there’s only so much headway it can make when the majority of the country believes abortion should be a legal option at least in some circumstances, so pro-lifers wisely direct their efforts toward non-political goals (and other issues) when the way is currently shut to political gains. I doubt, however, that we would see an organized pro-life movement if abortion were illegal and the citizenry supported its illegality. If abortion wasn’t a political issue, we wouldn’t see a pro-life movement, at least not as in its current manifestation.
I know it has been stated before that the pro-life movement may be seen only as a pro-birth movement. Prior to the legalization of abortion there was no pro-life movement and women were feeling trapped in bad marriages with children being the burden of these marriages. The social support simply was not there to help these women.
Feeling powerless and helpless can lead to desperate solutions. It can also lead to a lot of rage against those who are the source of these feelings. Women have been waging a war against this internal and external sense of being less than, just as any oppressed population has done.
Tragically, in fighting for self-worth and claiming ownership of their bodies it seems that their potential children are still seen as a burden and this burden can only be endured when certain conditions have been met in order to bring them into this world.
In my opinion, as long as women are influenced to succeed and gain self-worth through the system created by males there will always be fear associated with being pregnant and potential for being isolated and powerless.
The common groung is the woman’s suffering and starting from there.