While some members of the pro-life movement are still picketing abortion clinics and shouting “Murderer!,” a quieter group of activists is seeking to change the tenor of the debate. They hope that a more compassionate, less judgmental approach can help break the 23-year stalemate that has existed since Roe v. Wade. Ethicist David Reardon, author of a new book, “Making Abortion Rare,” calls it a “kinder, gentler” movement and hopes to win converts among the “middle majority” of Americans who aren’t comfortable with abortion, but don’t want to ban it completely. Some neo-pro-lifers even argue that the movement should stop trying to outlaw abortion and focus on changing public opinion, much as shifting attitudes have helped cut cigarette sales. As Noemie Emery wrote in the conservative Weekly Standard recently: “One baby saved by persuasion and given to people who love it is one more than has been saved by the human life amendment,” which the pro-life movement has been vainly pushing for decades.
A few activists on the abortion-rights side are arguing for a radical shift in rhetoric as well. In a controversial New Republic article last October entitled “Our Bodies, Our Souls,” the feminist Naomi Wolf criticized some in the pro-choice movement for refusing to acknowledge that abortion involves a real death or that some women have lasting moral qualms. Wolf says she has met “strong, pro-choice women” who privately confessed that they light a candle every year on the birthday of the baby they didn’t have. She also finds it increasingly difficult, in these days of “Mozart for your belly, framed sonogram photos [and] home fetal-heartbeat stethoscopes” to accept the pro-choice language that calls unwanted babies mere “uterine material.”
To date, though, mainstream pro-choice groups have been reluctant to give that kind of ground. Charlotte Taft, who ran a Dallas abortion clinic for 17 years, says she saw women who were afraid that God would never forgive them for having an abortion, but believed they had no other choice. She helped them work through their feelings, and their options, and some chose not to abort. But Taft’s approach – and her willingness to call abortion “a form of killing”– got her into trouble with some pro-choice leaders. Planned Parenthood stopped referring women to her clinic, and Taft herself resigned last year. Planned Parenthood wasn’t pleased with Wolf’s article, either. Interim copresident Jane Johnson wrote in a letter to the editor: “As if abortion-rights advocates didn’t have enough to worry about, what with murderous fanatics, far-right lawmakers and an insufficient number of providers, along comes “pro-choice’ Naomi Wolf advising the movement to “mourn the evil that is abortion’.”
Reardon thinks he can win hearts and minds to the pro-life side by spreading the message that “abortion hurts women.” Though he concedes he has no firm numbers, he contends that a “substantial minority” suffer depression and remorse after abortions, particularly those who undergo them to satisfy boyfriends, husbands or parents. Reardon thinks the abortion rate would drop dramatically if liability laws were strengthened so that women could sue doctors more easily for physical injuries–and for lingering psychological trauma as well. His “pro-woman” stance, how-ever, does not extend to condoning abortion–even in cases of rape or incest. He believes that abortion will “further traumatize” those women, and that allowing any exceptions undermines the “moral argument” against abortion in general.
Given that tough bottom line, the new pro-life pitch sounds like more of a shift in public relations than philosophy. Planned Parenthood’s spokeswoman, Susan Lamontagne, sighs that the kinder, gentler approach “rears its head regularly in different ways [but] the agenda behind it is nothing more than to end the ability of women to make decisions with-out government interference.” Meanwhile, some mainstream pro-life leaders insist that they have always had compassion for women–“and all human beings.” Many, including presidential hopeful Pat Buchanan, vow they will never abandon the fight to overturn Roe. Still, the willingness of some activists to soften their war of words–even a little–represents more movement than either side has seen in years.
