Abortion in the Tides of Culture

Where did the pro–life movement go? A half–dozen years ago movement activists were everywhere, drafting statements, holding press conferences, staring fixedly into the blind lens of a remote–studio TV camera. But a tide of silence has gradually come in. Abortion, which had defined "hot issue" for our time, mysteriously cooled off. Magazine cover stories have moved on to other topics; college students no longer crowd into abortion debates.

No, it’s more like we got bored. Not pro–life activists, who are as hardworking as ever, but the general public. It seemed to them like everything possible to say about abortion had already been said. In a sound–bite age, neither side was allowed to say very much; the pro–life message was condensed to "It’s a baby!" while pro–choicers insisted that "It’s a woman’s choice!" These two arguments do not engage each other, but are locked in a futile clinch, punching ineffectively. After a few dozen years, no wonder the public’s attention drifted. Ever–sensitive media forces politely took the cue and ceased giving space to the abortion issue. The debate was over.

But if the debate is over, the cause is not. Abortion remains as much a tragedy as ever, but pro–life activists now face the frustrating task of trying to rekindle heat in a fire that has gone cold. An October 2000 issue of Newsweek demonstrated the problem bluntly. A six–page spread compared the stands of candidates Bush and Gore on a series of important issues: the environment, education, foreign relations, and taxes. There was no mention of abortion.

Pro–lifers may well resent this treatment, and suspect that the all–powerful media have deliberately squelched their voices. But the development is less an initiative of the media than a response. Public interest simply shifts with time. Seasons turn, opinions change, interests wane, and issues that seemed urgent retreat to the background. Each change is subtle, but by the end of the week it may be absolute. Media professionals are as influenced by these changes as we are, and exquisitely sensitive to losing the public ear.

This kind of change is subtle, and hard to detect while it’s in process. The themes of an age are always invisible to its inhabitants, and become obvious only in retrospect. But we can get an idea of how the process works by time–traveling to observe a similar change in a previous generation. If we look at old movies, for example, we can see attitudes that filmmakers and audiences once shared that are foreign to us now. Some assumptions prevalent in a classic film of the 1930s would never play today.

Readers might presume I’m talking about positive family values that are currently passé. No, I mean the reverse: our great–grandparents embraced some values that today we readily recognize as negative and damaging. These attitudes were broadly accepted and celebrated in popular entertainment, much as reckless sexual ideas are today, yet over time they were gradually exposed, discredited, and discarded.

There is hope here. What pro–lifers have not been able to accomplish through a head–on attack may eventually take place anyway, thanks to humanity’s self–protecting tilt toward health. Sometimes positive change occurs due to an intentional campaign for moral reform, but more often it’s due to a gradual realization that certain things that looked like fun actually hurt. Sexual promiscuity, abortion, divorce, disease, and shattered families hurt a great deal, as had been obvious to our ancestors for millennia. The hope that the current situation is a bizarre blip, that sanity could return as slowly and completely as the tide, is a fully reasonable one.

One of my favorite films is It Happened One Night , a 1934 comedy that deservedly received five Oscars. It’s a delightful story with quirky characters, and a cast expertly led by Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert. But when Gable first appears on–screen, roaring drunk and telling off his boss over a pay phone, we wince. Though this is clearly meant to introduce him as a fun–loving charmer, alcoholism just isn’t funny to us. But to audiences of the thirties it was terrifically amusing to watch big stars act drunk—that is, not just sipping a little wine, but belting serious booze to the point of stumbling and bellowing. When Gable appears late in the film heartbroken and angry, his boss responds by sympathetically giving him funds to get plastered and then adds, "When you sober up, come in and talk to me." At the time, that seemed the appropriate thing to do.

It Happened One Night isn’t unusual in this regard. In the Thin Man movies, and in nearly every other "sophisticated" comedy of the thirties, drunkenness is a mark of distinction. People who disapproved of drinking were prissy and stuck–up; drunks were cool. Chronic alcoholics with hidden flasks were funny. Hangovers were funny. The pretty leading lady moaning with an ice pack on her forehead was funny. Even the terrifying hallucinations of a toxic drunk were funny. Adult pro–drunkenness culture was so entrenched that it seemed normal, appropriate, to show a baby elephant undergoing horrible d.t.’s in Disney’s 1941 Dumbo. Most children find the "Pink Elephants on Parade" sequence terrifying, but to adults of the time it was witty.

Replace "drunkenness" with "sex" in those paragraphs and you see a similar pattern. Today it is sex that the general culture finds endlessly amusing. Sex is the emblem of coolness. Anyone who opposes open–season sexuality is prissy and stuck–up; aggressive sexual athletes are cool. We likewise get a kick out of including children in the joke, seeing kids on sitcoms ask sexually loaded questions or deliver double entendres. We act like we just discovered sex, and any resistance, even in the name of taste, is hooted down. This rebellious enthusiasm is extremely difficult to counter, as temperance advocates could have told us.

What ’30s drunkenness and contemporary free sex have in common is backlash, rebellion against a prior standard. That’s why both have such an immature or adolescent tone. The free sex movement of the late sixties thought it was overthrowing the uptight, repressed sexuality of the 1950s; adults who resented Prohibition in the twenties, and celebrated its 1933 repeal, had a similar liberationist mindset.

There are ironies in the cultural parallels, though. In the previous cycle, the moralizing meddlers were progressives and feminists. Prohibition was championed by the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), an organization that also promoted women’s suffrage as well as prison and workplace reform. These early feminists perceived that male drunkenness was a persistent hardship for women, accompanied as it often was by violence, job loss, and poverty. The Eighteenth Amendment, prohibiting the manufacture and sale of alcohol, was ratified in 1919; the Nineteenth Amendment, giving women the right to vote, came a year later. But during the Roaring Twenties sneaking alcohol became glamorous and daring; my grandmother used to describe how a friend smuggled champagne to her 1924 wedding by sleeping on the bottles in his Pullman train berth. It was, we would say today, a transgressive act. It took another Amendment, the Twenty–First, ratified in 1933, to restore the supposed right to drink, and by that time headlong defiance had canonized excess.

"Drunks are cool" is one example of a bad value that was gradually replaced by something healthier. This process took a very long time. We could mark the beginning in the tipsy Roaring Twenties, and the end with the criticism Arthur received in 1981 for treating alcoholism as funny. That’s nearly sixty years. Abortion has been legal for thirty years. It’s not time to lose hope.

But note that the public attitude toward drunkenness was not changed by a revived anti–drinking moral crusade. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union did not finally develop the magic–bullet slogan that would "change hearts and minds." The WCTU in fact faded away, an organization that in the public mind was peopled by biddies and fools. Pro–life leaders likewise may never gain public admiration, never cook up that smash ad campaign that makes our cause fashionable at last.

In the meantime, of course, we can’t stop trying; we must continue to present the truth with the persistence of a tympanist in a symphony. We have to keep showing up, speaking, writing, doing the right thing, reaching at least "those who have ears to hear." But public approval or admiration may never be our reward. We may have to settle for being despised and rejected, just like Someone told us we would be—Someone who told us that persecution is, paradoxically, a blessing. Nothing is as spiritually transforming as being humbled, though it’s certainly not the blessing we want to seek.

The WCTU did not succeed; instead, the truth itself, which its adherents had perceived, succeeded. Today partygoers are not embarrassed to request a glass of water, not wine. A guest who downed a quick series of Scotch doubles, in the old manner, would be the object of frowns and whispers. Excessive drinking is cool to nobody over the age of eighteen. What once was sophisticated now looks juvenile and self–destructive. And some day, God willing, irresponsible sex and its handmaiden, abortion, will look the same to our descendants. It may only take time for that truth to shine through.

That future time will not be perfect. Our grandchildren will have different ills to combat, ills which we cannot now imagine. It’s instructive to watch old movies with open eyes, and see the myth of a "pro–family" golden age crumble. Yes, characters waited until marriage to have sex, but women were routinely slapped and physically degraded; Jimmy Cagney started that fashion in Public Enemy (1931) when he shoved a half grapefruit into girlfriend Mae Clarke’s face. In It Happened One Night, Gable threatens to break Colbert’s neck, and later tells her screen dad, "What she needs is a guy that would take a sock at her once a day, whether it’s coming to her or not." We may be shaky in our notions of what constitutes a "lady," but we have much healthier ideas about how a lady should be treated.

Likewise, you don’t have to watch many films of the era to notice that male adultery is treated lightly, as a boys–will–be–boys inevitability that women should smilingly ignore. Wives who complain are charged with destroying their marriages for the sake of foolish pride, as in The Women (1939). (The very clever script is by a woman, Claire Boothe Luce; modern–day feminists would no doubt term that an instance of "internalized oppression.") In The Philadelphia Story (1940), it’s Katherine Hepburn’s fault that her dad is flirting with a dancer; she failed to give him all the admiration a dad needs from a daughter, and the poor man was compelled to seek it elsewhere. We may have elastic notions about premarital sex, but our view of extramarital sex is comparatively judgmental.

The last time you saw abortion considered in a film or TV show, it was probably framed as the sad, noble decision of a suffering woman who was being unjustly persecuted by violent right–wing zealots. Lately, we’re not hearing much about the issue at all. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; silence is a good medium for reflection. When the topic reemerges—and it is impossible for something so painful to remain hidden—the story may well have a different twist. For the time being we must persevere with patience, and wait for the tide to turn.

Actually, I remember an episode of Touched by an Angel from a few years ago. It dealt with a married couple that was struggling with the unspoken pain of an abortion they had many years earlier. Throughout the episode, the issue comes to the forefront and is dealt with in a very responsible way. The reason we are seeing less from protesters is because protesting doesn't do anything. The way to win people over is for women to come forward and tell about their abortion experience. When women realize that there are TWO victims in each abortion, only then will the tide turn. And it IS beginning.

Operation Outcry

SafeHaven

The image of the angry pro-lifer yelling at women as they enter abortion clinics is not needed. We need to reach hearts with love and compassion.

Whoozit

"It’s a baby!" while pro–choicers insisted that "It’s a woman’s choice!" These two arguments do not engage each other, but are locked in a futile clinch, punching ineffectively.

Antonin Scalia and His Critics: The Church, the Courts, and the Death Penalty Antonin Scalia replies:

What the "pro-choice" American does not believe is that a human fetus is as fully a human life as Uncle Charlie.

Scientific and Philosophical Expertise: An Evaluation of the Arguments on Personhood -- by Dianne N. Irving, Ph.D. In this essay, biochemist Dianne Irving argues that positions which assert that early human embryos are not persons are based on inadequate philosophical principles and faulty scientific data.

The Changing Pro-Life Argument: Does the Humanity of the Unborn Matter Anymore? -- by Francis J. Beckwith, Ph.D. In this essay, Professor Beckwith introduces and refutes the famous argument from "bodily rights".

A Woman's Right Over Her Body? -- by Stephen Schwarz, Ph.D. In an excerpt from his book The Moral Question of Abortion, Dr. Schwarz addresses arguments in defense of abortion that are based on a woman's "right" to control her own body.

I Was Once a Fetus -- By Alexander Pruss. In this essay, mathematician and philosopher Dr. Alexander Pruss offers an identity based argument against abortion.

As a women's issue, like the drug dealer who hooks the addicted customer, the media and vocal apologists for abortion have hooked the many women who were duped into having abortions in the first place, by selling the "salve" and false affirmation of an incrediblty bad, very personal life choice.

So many women harbor a sense of guilt. That "choice" of convenience nags their conscience every day. They try to put it out of their minds, but the pangs of regret they feel at age 30-35-40-45, when many of them find themselves sterile, gnaws at their hearts and their deep inner selves.

What women who made this sorry choice need is the forgiveness that should reside in practiced principles of Christianity. I think the authors of "FirstThings" understand this aspect quite well. One must realize that many of these women were led astray by falsehood, by mis-representation, by death-marketeers who wrapped themselves in pseudo-health science. Unfortunately, so many have been abandonded by the community of Faith: the community that can help them make a way back to finding peace with themselves and forgiveness from the shame that they carry with them on a daily basis.

How do we change the culture and make the abortion debate finally fade from relevance even as a political issue? The community of Faith needs to practice the forgiveness it preaches, let women know they can make their mistaken choice right again, give them the healthy personal affirmation they seek and need. Similarly, an errant woman who aborted her child, who now derives self-affirmation from a community of Faith can do away with the liars who were trying to affirm her wrong decision. The purveyors of the abortion "answer" will dry up and a real social change which each of us seek will be realized.

Sure there are the obstinate, and in some cases militant supporters of abortion who are also women that have had abortions (e.g., Kate Michaelman of Planned Parenthood). They are screaming publically in their defense to supress the screaming conscience within, almost like the homosexual who likewise thinks he needs public acceptance and affirmation of his decidedly immoral behavior, which his own conscience tells him inwardly is wrong. The truth strikes very deeply, and they cannot run from it.

Governmentally, we should defund those entities supported by government money that allow the death-marketeers to flourish in our society. These funds artificially prop up the industry, which can then redeploy its funds to "advertising" their sickly, for-profit wares to women who find themselves in despirate, spiritually weakened situations and who are susceptible to such temptations and deceptions.

Someday the purveyors of abortion positions and services will be looked at like the death camp Kommandants of WWII. The national mood I suspect is already heading in that direction. However, what we wish to see enacted tomorrow let us not compromise the success of by acting in haste and with a two-edged sword that does not differentiate between the industry of deception and the sad dupes of the deception.

Welcome and forgive those who were duped. Rejoice when a Democrat sees their error and becomes a Republican. You will find your most ardent supporters within the ranks of the converted. Few are converted by those fiegning righteousness who use truth to clobber sinners over the head (as in WCTU). You'd be surprised to learn how many are already pricked in their conscience without the well-meaning "help" of some.

It is really no different for the one who finally sees the light in this abortion debate.

The best way to communicate to with these people is to let them know that if the unborn do not have rights--i.e. they're just lumps of tissue--then I guess we're all just bigger lumps of tissue and no one has rights.

Federalist No. 51

...It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part. Different interests necessarily exist in different classes of citizens. If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure. There are but two methods of providing against this evil: the one by creating a will in the community independent of the majority that is, of the society itself; the other, by comprehending in the society so many separate descriptions of citizens as will render an unjust combination of a majority of the whole very improbable, if not impracticable.... The second method will be exemplified in the federal republic of the United States. Whilst all authority in it will be derived from and dependent on the society, the society itself will be broken into so many parts, interests, and classes of citizens, that the rights of individuals, or of the minority, will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority. In a free government the security for civil rights must be the same as that for religious rights. It consists in the one case in the multiplicity of interests, and in the other in the multiplicity of sects. The degree of security in both cases will depend on the number of interests and sects; and this may be presumed to depend on the extent of country and number of people comprehended under the same government....Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been and ever will be pursued until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit. In a society under the forms of which the stronger faction can readily unite and oppress the weaker, anarchy may as truly be said to reign as in a state of nature, where the weaker individual is not secured against the violence of the stronger; and as, in the latter state, even the stronger individuals are prompted, by the uncertainty of their condition, to submit to a government which may protect the weak as well as themselves; so, in the former state, will the more powerful factions or parties be gradnally induced, by a like motive, to wish for a government which will protect all parties, the weaker as well as the more powerful.

The stronger individuals are prompted, by the uncertainty of their condition, to eliminate abortion now or face euthanasia in their future.

But there are many, many different kinds of pro-life action,

NARAL Goes 1-for-20 in Election
By David Freddoso (c) Human Events, 2002

In spite of nationwide victories for pro-life candidates, National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) President Kate Michelman issued a statement November 6 that "it would be a serious mistake for politicians to read yesterday's results as a mandate to insert themselves in women's personal choices."

Michelman is in denial. Earlier this year, NARAL picked its 20 "key" House and Senate races. In each, it supported its candidate (all of whom were Democrats) with cash and endorsements. Only one "key" NARAL candidate-Sen. Tom Harkin (D.-Iowa)-won. Ironically, that was over a pro-abortion Republican, outgoing Rep. Greg Ganske.

NARAL likely would have gone 1-for-21, but it did not change its web page to endorse Walter Mondale (D.) for Senate in Minnesota after the death of Paul Wellstone.

Statute	House Action	President's Action
Unborn Victims of Violence Act HR 503 S 480	Passed 4/26/01 Vote 252 - 172	Would Have Supported
Human Cloning Ban HR 2505 S 1899	Passed 7/31/01 Vote 265 - 162	Would Have Supported
Ban on Abortions in Military Facilities	5/20/02 Vote 215 - 162 Supporting Ban	Supported Ban
Child Custody Protection Act HR 476	Passed 4/17/02 Vote 260 - 161	Would Have Supported
Born Alive Infant Protection Act HR 2175	Passed 3/12/02 Vote 380 - 15	Signed Bill 8/05/02
Partial Birth Abortion Ban HR 4965	Passed 8/06/02 Vote 274 - 151	Is Supportive

But public approval or admiration may never be our reward. We may have to settle for being despised and rejected, just like Someone told us we would be—Someone who told us that persecution is, paradoxically, a blessing

IOW. I give up.

Fine. This attitude is what motives the Shooters to get busy. What about this?

The shooters, really and truly are looking at the least of our unborn brothers and sisters as real human beings. Just like our newly born air breathing babies that bring so much joy and hope.

"Settle for being despised" ignores the plight of the unborn. It focusses on us air breathers. Those still in the amniotic sac are just s*it out of luck.

I agree with a previous post - a very shabby essay from FT.

An October 2000 issue of Newsweek demonstrated the problem bluntly. A six–page spread compared the stands of candidates Bush and Gore on a series of important issues: the environment, education, foreign relations, and taxes. There was no mention of abortion.

Pro–lifers may well resent this treatment, and suspect that the all–powerful media have deliberately squelched their voices.

Not at the voting booth, they didn't!

[from Noemie Emery's Weekly Standard article Losers for the American Way: America turns its back on pro-choice extremists:

A BIG THING HAPPENED in the elections that you won't read about much in the papers, and the fact that you won't be reading about it is one of the reasons it did. The big story is that the pro-choice extremists took a widespread whipping, which is the one thing the press doesn't want to acknowledge, much less trumpet abroad to the troops. Nevertheless, the big-picture facts are astounding. NARAL, the nation's premier abortion-rights lobby, won 2 of its 11 targeted runs in the Senate, and went 6 for 26 in the House. As the third-worst performing political action committee in the country, NARAL took a backseat to the absolute loser, EMILY's List, the much-lauded PAC that promotes pro-choice women Democrats, which won 1 of 10 key runs in the Congress. By contrast, the National Right to Life Committee won 8 of 10 races. In three Senate states in which abortion emerged as a visible difference--New Hampshire, Colorado, and Missouri--pro-choice candidates lost to pro-lifers.

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