October 2020 Edition
A pro-choice voice revisits Roe
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In this edition:
Democrats for Life in Colorado—and in the NYT
A pro-choice voice revisits Roe
Quick links
Off-topic (sort of): Fratelli Tutti
Together Amy Coney Barrett’s SCOTUS nomination and voting casuistry about the upcoming presidential election have unsurprisingly swallowed the national abortion conversation. Because they’re unavoidable, I’ll touch on both below, but first I wanted to highlight this Colorado Politics interview with Tom Perille, President of Democrats for Life of Colorado h/t Kevin J. Jones. There are many quotable moments in the interview, such as:
I talk to Democratic candidates for office at the state and federal level all the time. I also reach out to current Democratic state representatives and senators. What I have learned is that they are much closer to my position than their public persona would suggest […]
The contrast between what Republican politicians think about abortion and what Democratic politicians think is not as stark as it seems. One of the main differences is that abortion special interests play an outsized role in Democratic politics. Planned Parenthood and Cobalt are to the Democratic Party what the NRA and Rocky Mountain Gun Owners are to the Republican Party. They strike fear in the hearts of politicians. If politicians don’t tow the line on their preferred stance on an issue, their soft money will disappear, and they will be threatened with a primary challenge. Colorado Democrats have told me this — always in confidence. It appears that the influence of the NRA/RMGO is waning in the Republican Party. It is my hope that we will see the same thing happen in the Democratic Party
Perille mentions supporting Colorado’s Proposition 115, which is a November ballot measure worth watching; I previously covered it here. Prop 115 would prohibit abortions after 22 weeks gestational age (with an exception for the life of the mother). Colorado currently is “one of seven that does not prohibit abortion at any point during a pregnancy.”
The national parent organization for Perille’s group recently placed a full-page ad in the New York Times. It stated, inter alia, that “we are concerned that many Democratic leaders support policies on abortion that are radically out of line with public opinion,” and it advocated a couple of policy choices: “we call upon the Democratic Party to avoid divisive policies, such as passing a law in Congress defining a right to abortion (‘codifying Roe v. Wade’) and introducing taxpayer-funded abortion (‘repealing the Hyde Amendment’).” The letter was signed by four governors and lieutenant governors, nine current or former Members of Congress, and 57 state legislators, among others. Groups including Pro-Black Pro-Life, Secular Pro-Life, and New Wave Feminists were also listed as endorsers.
Futile though the fight to make space for pro-life Democrats in the Democratic Party seems, it’s a supremely worthy effort. As Simon Leys reminds us, “In debates, the word ‘quixotic’ is nearly always meant as an insult—which puzzles me, since I can hardly think of a greater compliment…The successful man adapts himself to the world. The loser persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the loser.”
In the meantime, it’s valuable from a public opinion standpoint for groups like Democrats for Life, Secular Pro-Life, and the like to make themselves seen and heard—and for Tom Perille to issue a reminder that there are people who both are pro-life and support, in his words in the interview, “‘whole-life’ policies, such as paid family/medical leave, affordable daycare, affordable healthcare/housing, a living wage, immigrant/refugee rights, criminal justice reform, gun safety and green energy.”
On to ACB. It’s clearly an important development with a lot of “angles,” including the push to confirm her before the election, the extent to which the recent COVID-19 breakout that infected, among others, President Trump, will affect the proceedings, the fate of abortion law and especially Roe v. Wade if she is confirmed, the relevance of her nomination both to the presidential and down ballot races, and on and on. Many of these aspects have garnered so much coverage that I’d rather not contribute overly to that saturation here.
There is, however, one article partly occasioned by ACB’s nomination that is of particular interest, h/t Charles F. Lehman. In the NYT, Joan C. Williams, a law professor at the University of California, wrote a piece making the case that there could be benefits for Democrats/progressives in accepting defeat on Roe and “moving on”:
Often forgotten is that R.B.G. herself had decided that Roe was a mistake. In 1992, she gave a lecture musing that the country might be better off if the Supreme Court had written a narrower decision and opened up a “dialogue” with state legislatures, which were trending “toward liberalization of abortion statutes” (to quote the Roe court). Roe “halted a political process that was moving in a reform direction and thereby, I believe, prolonged divisiveness and deferred stable settlement of the issue,” Justice Ginsburg argued. In the process, “a well-organized and vocal right-to-life movement rallied and succeeded, for a considerable time, in turning the legislative tide in the opposite direction.”
Williams continues, writing that “the emotional heat that surrounds abortion as an issue manages to obscure that the attitudes driving opposition to abortion actually reveal some surprising common ground with progressives on economic issues” and that, “if abortion stops playing such a role in presidential elections, then Democrats may fare better with the 19 percent of Trump voters who have bipartisan voting habits and warm feelings toward minorities.”
Williams’s history—or rather, RBG’s history, which Williams cites—is a little tendentious. The direction in state legislatures prior to Roe was not uniformly in the direction of liberalization, as historian Daniel K. Williams has argued. But the piece is remarkable nonetheless. You sometimes hear pro-lifers argue that you don’t have to be pro-life to believe that Roe was poorly reasoned strictly on legal grounds. Williams here is giving us an equivalent case in the political realm: you don’t need to be pro-life to see that the Court’s decision in Roe has had bad effects on American politics, even if pro-lifers and pro-choicers might see some of those effects differently.
If indeed ACB is confirmed, and if indeed the Court subsequently does significantly scale back or in time overturn Roe (something whose likelihood Trump during the recent debate was dishonestly eager to deny, in a move that uncomfortably echoed the dishonesty of some other strategies pro-lifers have used), then the bet that anti-abortion organizations placed on Trump in 2016 will have to that extent paid off. Politically speaking, any victory traceable to Trump may turn out to be a pyrrhic victory for pro-lifers—and even if it’s not ultimately pyrrhic, it’s unavoidably…complicated. But if, in the face of possible or actual defeat at the Court, more progressives are pushed to embrace a view like that articulated by Williams, that will be a knock-on gain, indeed.
Speaking of possibly pyrrhic victories…
In National Review, Robbie George and Ramesh Ponnuru argue that, while the logic of being pro-life (anti-abortion) does not require a vote for President Trump, it “practically preclude[s]” a vote for Joe Biden. George and Ponnuru are obviously right about the gravity of abortion and it’s obviously right as well to say that the issue must be heavily weighted in one’s considerations. There are some positive statements in the piece I would quibble with, but the omissions are probably more important to note. On Twitter, Ross Douthat mentions one consideration the piece does not address. Racial injustice, police violence, and other related concerns are also strikingly not mentioned; neither is the handling of COVID-19.
Another reasonable consideration left unaddressed by George and Ponnuru, it seems to me, is the effect on the pro-life movement of another four years of President Trump. In Politico, Tim Alberta profiles Rep. Elissa Slotkin’s reelection campaign in Michigan. In the piece, Alberta interviews two women about abortion and their current political positioning. “I’ve been a single-issue Republican, a pro-life voter, for a very long time. But Trump changed my thinking in that regard,” one of the women remarks. On Twitter, Alberta remarks, “I've now heard some variation of this at least a dozen times in the last couple of weeks.”
To be sure, the single-issue pro-life voter turned into whole-life voter who attributes his or her new stance to Republican enormities has always been a type, but I don’t think one can simply rule out the idea that Trump may genuinely be having this effect on people.
Even if admitted, the idea that an (even purely transactional) alliance with Trump damages the credibility and therefore the medium-term prospects of the pro-life movement would not, of course, compel a vote for Biden—it could lead to voting Trump anyway, or voting third party or abstaining*, choices George and Ponnuru also leave open. But however you weigh them, these kind of political considerations shouldn’t be left out.
*the case for abstaining was recently articulated here by Brandon McGinley
Quick Links:
October is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month (I use the official name). In response, Leah Libresco Sargeant shared on Twitter the essay she wrote “after we lost our first child, Robin. We’ve been pregnant seven times in all, and only Beatrice is here to hold.” From the piece: “We lost our baby too early and too suddenly to have a body to bury. If I wanted to have a grave to tend, my only option was my own body, which had become the sepulcher for my child. And all around me, in the women who invited me into their grief, ‘The tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised’ (Matt 27:52).”
In the journal Philosophy and Technology, Christopher M. Stratman argues that “the possibility of ectogestation will radically transform the problem of abortion.”
In The New Yorker Margaret Talbot discusses Food and Drug Administration v. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, a case in which the FDA decision to continue regulations on telemedicine + medical abortion during the COVID-19 pandemic are at issue. The Court’s decision in this “first post-RBG abortion case” could come down at any time; a decision to let the injunction by the lower courts stand could set political precedent for loosening restrictions on medical abortion even after the pandemic is over, which would have profound effects. But at Vox Ian Millhiser explains why, in his view, the Court is likely to rule for the FDA
Off-topic (sort of):
From Pope Francis’s new encyclical, Fratelli Tutti:
All this can help us realize that what is important is not constantly achieving great results, since these are not always possible. In political activity, we should remember that, “appearances notwithstanding, every person is immensely holy and deserves our love. Consequently, if I can help at least one person to have a better life, that already justifies the offering of my life. It is a wonderful thing to be God’s faithful people. We achieve fulfilment when we break down walls and our hearts are filled with faces and names!” The great goals of our dreams and plans may only be achieved in part. Yet beyond this, those who love, and who no longer view politics merely as a quest for power, “may be sure that none of our acts of love will be lost, nor any of our acts of sincere concern for others. No single act of love for God will be lost, no generous effort is meaningless, no painful endurance is wasted. All of these encircle our world like a vital force.”