The need for an active defense of abortion

The morning of the thirtieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade, I stood outside the Supreme Court, freezing cold. All around me were protestors, young and old, wearing college sweatshirts, clerical collars, costumes and crosses. They screamed at the top of their lungs, broke out into chants, marched with posters and prayed aloud. Not one was pro-choice.

Two weeks later, around the corner from the Court, the Senate Judiciary Committee considered three controversial appeals court nominees in a single hearing. The amount of work that required Republicans to deliberate for six months during the Clinton Administration was completed in a single afternoon. The Committee recommended one of the candidates despite the fact the Bush Administration refused to turn over memos he had written that could have shed light on his judicial philosophy. All across the country, no one noticed.

Abortion isn't the hot-button issue it once was in the United States. Reproductive freedom does not entail a dramatic showdown with an evil looking dictator, nor does it afford Donald Rumsfeld the opportunity to amuse Americans by bullying European nations. Abortion doesn't threaten our wallets or our profit margins, and we can't measure the risk of losing our reproductive rights by asking Tom Ridge to pick an arbitrary color on a chart and declaring today "an orange day." Pro-choice Americans, however, should make no mistake. Abortion is an issue of the moment.

Republicans control both houses of Congress and the White House. With time, they will gain greater control of the courts as well. Our President may be a compassionate conservative, but the people who make up his loyal base and who advise him on political matters are so far to the right of the average American, we can't even see them. Certainly the judicial nominees who have been put forward thus far have been extremist. One, approved by the Judiciary Committee last week, believes Senators should be elected by state legislators rather than by voters. That's just what we know he believes. I can only imagine the skeletons in his ideological closet that the Committee was not able to uncover in the few hours it bothered to spend considering his nomination.

The complacency of pro-choice Americans is understandable. We have our rights – there wasn't much for us to protest on the anniversary of the decision that granted them. But there is danger in our sense of safety. Our generation has never known a time when abortion was illegal. Young women do not know what it would be like to be faced with the option of a back-alley abortion and all its possibilities: pain, sterility, even death. Men cannot understand how it might feel to have a girlfriend come to them with no choice but to bear a child unwanted by both parents. We find it difficult to be afraid of what we do not know, but what we do not know is exactly what we must fear.

The people on the other side of the debate, the protestors who swarmed around me in front of the Supreme Court, pushing leaflets with pictures of fetuses into my hands, are passionate. Their dedication to their cause is unwavering. They will march on a freezing cold day at the end of January or go door to door for months campaigning for candidates who believe as they do. The pro-choice side has never had that kind of unity. Liberals are notoriously less well-organized than conservatives, and most pro-choice voters are of the "abortion should be legal, but I wouldn't have one" variety, a more than acceptable moral position but one that hardly engenders a core of letter writers, sign bearers, and campaign workers.

Activism does not have to mean extremism. In a compelling editorial in The New York Times on the anniversary of Roe, the program director of the New York Abortion Rights Action League and the media director of Michigan's Right to Life chapter pointed out how many issues pro-choice and pro-life Americans agree on: encouraging provisions for high-quality child care, promoting adoption, decreasing the number of unwanted pregnancies. We should collaborate on promoting these goals, and discuss intelligently the divide that exists between us on a moral and political plane.

Little attention was paid when pro-choice activists went home early on the anniversary of Roe or when our legislators turned their "advise and consent" role into a rubber stamp. When will our outrage arise? We cannot wait until the courts are packed with people whose views are out of line with those of most Americans or until pro-lifers dominate state legislatures and Congress. Our fear should be that thirty years from now, as Roe turns sixty, we might actually have something to protest. By then, of course, we may be too late.