Sunday, Jul 20, 2008
By acknowledging painful emotional truths about abortion, pro-choice activists have reenergized their movement. But is all the talk about fetuses overshadowing women's rights?
Feb 9, 2005 | When Hillary Clinton addressed the Family Planning Advocates of New York state on Jan. 24, she surprised her audience by talking about abortion as "a sad, even tragic choice to many, many women." She called for advocates on both sides of the bitter reproductive rights divide to find "common ground." She reminded the crowd of her mid-'90s endorsement of "teen celibacy," and she reached out to those who have opposed reproductive freedoms for women by saying, "I for one respect those who believe with all their heart and conscience that there are no circumstances under which abortion should be available."
Clinton's remarks, on the heels of similar comments from leading Democrats Howard Dean and John Kerry, were widely interpreted as part of a post-election Democratic move toward the center, a wooing of the nation's perceived "values voters." In Newsweek, Eleanor Clift wrote that Sen. Clinton, on her way to a likely 2008 presidential bid, is "leading her party to the Promised Land ... treading a path to red state America." The speech was hailed by some Democrats as a move in the right direction, questioned by others who point out that abortion was not a deciding issue in the presidential campaign. Some critics saw Clinton's speech as a betrayal of the pro-choice party line that has long been a part of the Democratic platform.
But the story is not simply about the direction of the Democratic Party. Clinton's sound bites may well have been a loud -- possibly misinterpreted, certainly oversimplified -- public signifier that a far more profound and uncomfortable discussion is heating up the women's movement itself. After years of intermittent jostling from the inside, a December essay by Catholics for a Free Choice president Frances Kissling on the value of the fetus seems to have cracked the hard ideological shell of the pro-choice community, exposing its messy theological, moral and emotional innards. The resulting scramble may not be the end of a movement, but rather a chance at rebirth before what could be the fight of its life.
This past year has seen a number of surprising -- and divergent -- eruptions in the pro-choice movement, which has remained relatively on-message since the 1973 Roe vs. Wade victory that made abortion legal in all 50 states. Since the passage of Roe, pro-choice advocates have been forced to maintain a defensive position, watching their victory seep away as antiabortion activists push through piece after piece of restrictive legislation. The pro-life movement -- energized by being on the losing end of Roe -- has deftly tugged at American heartstrings by parading photos of bloody fetuses before the Senate and in front of clinics and by claiming the vocabulary of life and loss as its own.
Now many in the pro-choice community are looking to reclaim that language, to warm up what has come to be regarded as an absolutist, clinical, chilly movement with language that is emotional, conciliatory, moralistic and even religious. In short, what the wildly different pro-choice projects launched in recent months have in common is a risky mission to put the heart back into the fight for abortion rights.
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