The pro-life movement will always be bound to some degree of conservatism in the same way that an anti-abortion ethics is difficult to separate and a conservative ethic around sex. Monogamy. Marriage. But among its own writers and activists, the movement has understood itself to also be carrying on the best of America’s tradition of social reform, including causes associated with liberalism and progressivism.
Richard John Neuhaus was the most articulate prolife intellectual of my youth. He was once a left wing pastor who marched along with Martin Luther King Jr. and saw the fight against the abortion as coming from the exact same universalist premises. Contemporary advocates of pro-life feminism like Erika Bachiochi have linked their critique of abortion to the views of 19th-century feminists and suffragists, portraying an abortion rights politics as a fundamental evasion of society’s true responsibility to women.
At the same time the pro-life movement’s many critics regard it as not merely conservative but as an embodiment of reaction at its worst — punitive and cruel and patriarchal, piling burdens on poor women and doing nothing to relieve them, putting unborn life ahead of the lives and health of women while pretending to hold them equal.
To win the long-term battle, to persuade the country’s vast disquieted middle, abortion opponents need models that prove this critique wrong. They need to show how abortion restrictions are compatible with the goods that abortion advocates accuse them of compromising — the health of the poorest women, the flourishing of their children, the dignity of motherhood even when it comes unexpectedly or amid great difficulty.
These issues may seem minor compared to the abortion question, but they are crucial to the overall political and ideological debate. People are drawn to one side or the other in any major controversy because they believe that the position is right. However, it is also determined by whether it is embedded in a social vision that is attractive, desirable, worthwhile, and worth fighting for.
These are some of the problems that right-wing governance can lead to for the pro-life movement’s failure. Imagine a future where anti-abortion laws will be permanently linked to punitive and stingy political. Women in difficulty could face police scrutiny for suspicious miscarriages but receive very little prenatal guidance or support. If that were the case, severe abortion restrictions would be possible in the most conservative areas of the country, but not elsewhere, and national abortion rights legislation would have bright long-term prospects.
Source: NY Times