Sidney Callahan & Daniel Callahan. Family Planning Perspectives. Volume 16, Number 5. Guttmacher Institute, Sep-Oct 1984.
Apart from some of the nastier reasons people impute to each other, just why is it that there are such profound differences about abortion? For at least 20 years, we have asked that question of each other, just as we have asked how our own differences and those of others might be reconciled. Ever since we began discussing the topic of abortion in the 1960s, we have disagreed. Well over half of our 30 years of marriage have been marked (though rarely marred) by an ongoing argument. For all of that time, Daniel has taken a prochoice position and Sidney a prolife position (to use, somewhat reluctantly, the labels adopted by the activists for themselves). At one time, while Daniel was writing a book on the subject, we talked about it every day for four years. Thereafter, Sidney wrote a number of articles on abortion, some of which would be photocopied and distributed by prolife protesters at Daniel’s lectures. Whether observers made the connection between the two Callahans was not always clear, but we experienced the conflict firsthand. Over the years, every argument, every statistic, every historical example cited in the literature has been discussed between us. As Eliza Doolittle says about words, “There’s not a one I haven’t heard.”
Yet we continue to disagree. How can that be? Our desire to understand better our own differences and those of others led us not long ago to organize a small research project at The Hastings Center. Why not, we thought, look at the problem by considering the different ways in which abortion opponents understand themselves and the world? How do they bring that wider and deeper under. standing to bear on this difficult, divisive issue? Many people, we reluctantly suspect, are not greatly interested in understanding in some sympathetic way why abortion is so divisive an issue. To recall Karl Marx, they want to change the world, not understand it. In the larger political arena, it is victory that counts. But given the depth and apparent intractability of abortion differences, we think that in the long run, most people will have to find a way to live with differences. In our project, therefore, we tried to see if we could provide some better insight into how individuals weigh and order their values when dealing with abortion. Though they came up from time to time, we did not directly deal with such common issues in the abortion debate as when life begins or what the law should be. Instead, we concerned ourselves with the way in which abortion as a problem is situated within the terrain of a person’s general, more encompassing values. We hoped that if we could not entirely escape the common forms of sociological or psychological reductionism, we might at least bring to them some greater complexity and penetration. We sought only understanding-not a compromise solution, a consensus position or a political recommendation.
A few other decisions gave the project its final shape. With the exception of Daniel, all of the participants were women. They were drawn equally from the prochoice and the prolife sides. And they were instructed to Focus their discussion on four broad themes: Feminism, the family, childbearing and child rearing, and the political and cultural nature of our society. Those topics, we believe, provide for many people the background framework of values that often shape abortion attitudes. Finally, although we wanted a group that was evenly divided on the moral and political issues, we also wanted one that could effectively talk and work together. There was no pretense that the group would be representative of all the ethnic, religious, political and cultural groups active in the abortion debate. But it was representative of one important, if sometimes overlooked, group–those women who, though they differ, are willing to talk with those on the other side, willing to make the effort to empathize with those who h old opposing views and willing to see if they can find some shared ground to keep their dialogue alive. The results of our discussion were sufficient to persuade us that a more complex, nuanced and fruitful argument is possible.
The general debate has seen an effort, on all sides, to make abortion fit into some overall coherent scheme of values, one that can combine personal convictions and consistency with more broadly held social values. Abortion poses a supreme test in trying to achieve that coherence. It stands at the juncture of a number of value systems, which continually joust with each other for dominance, but none of which by itself can do full justice to all the values that, with varying degrees of insistence and historical rooted-ness, clamor for attention and respect. Here, we will try to present a composite picture of the positions presented at our meetings.
The values that sustain and give theoretical legitimacy to both the prolife and the prochoice movements command widespread respect. Neither side has invented unusual moral principles or idiosyncratic values. Consider first the prolife position. It is committed to:
- Respect for an individual’s right to life, even if that right is uncertain or in doubt (or even if there is doubt about whether life actually has begun);
- The need, at the least, to protect the weak and powerless, in order to preserve them from the harm that can be done by the more powerful and, at the most, to provide them with an opportunity to develop their full potential;
- The legitimacy of writing moral convictions and principles into law, particularly when that seems necessary to protect the rights of others (as in the civil rights movement);
- The value of acceptance of accidents and mischance as a part of life, and a denial of violent solutions as a way out of such vicissitudes;
- An obligation on the part of the community, whether through mediating institutions or through the state, to provide support for those whose troubles–for example, an unwanted pregnancy–might lead them to forced, destructive choices; and
- Finally, the conviction that moral values and ideals toward nascent life should be upheld even at the cost of individual difficulties and travail.
The values that were identified as integral to the prolife position are a mixture of those commonly labeled liberal and conservative. The prolife movement cannot be reduced to a simple conservative nostalgia or backlash, however much that may characterize some of its activist leaders and many of its mainline features. In the formulations of some, it can just as well go in a recognizably liberal direction. What probably most distinguishes it from the garden varieties of liberalism is its willingless to live with, and accept, externally imposed tragedy as a part of life. That has not been a traditional part of secular liberalism, which has always been far more inclined toward instrumental rationality than has the version that has surfaced in the prolife movement. The liberal community itself, however, has engaged in some sharp criticism of that part of its tradition which has stressed a rational socially engineered solution to personal and political problems, emancipation from the restraint of society and rejection of moral traditions. Hence, not only can the prolife movement make a strong claim to be upholding many traditional liberal values, it can also, in some important formulations, claim to be reflecting some recent developments intrinsic to liberalism’s self-definition.
The prochoice movement can lay an equally strong claim to an important strain in American and Western traditions. By stressing freedom of choice, it gives centrality to the sovereignty of the individual conscience, especially in cases of moral doubt. It also recognizes a closely related principle: Those who must personally bear the burden of their moral choices ought to have the right to make those choices. By its emphasis on the unique burden of women in pregnancy and childrearing, it has fostered the enfranchisement of women in controlling their own destinies. The prochoice movement is in harmony with the emerging trend to free procreational choices from the control of the state and, more generally, to give the benefit of uncertainty in matters of conscience to the individual rather than the government. Its recognition of the injustice inherent in making abortion illegal–the de facto discrimination in favor of the affluent and the powerful—makes an important contribution to a more just society. Through its concern for choice and control in procreation, it has focused attention on parental responsibility, helping to remove childbearing from the realm of biological chance and sexual inevitability. By sundering a once necessary relationship between sexual activity and procreation, it helps provide an adaptation to a world that no longer needs, or can afford, unlimited childbearing.
Just as the prolife movement can be said to have its conservative and liberal wings, the same is true of the prochoice movement. In its libertarian formulation, it is heavily weighted toward the maximization of individual choice and the privatization of moral judgment. The basic concern is not so much with the social and economic conditions under which choices are made, or with the ethical criteria by which they ought to be made, but with preserving the right to make a choice. But that is not the only prochoice formulation. In a different rendering—what might be called liberal communitarianism—the prochoice movement recognizes that a socially forced choice in favor of abortion is not a fully free choice; that a lack of communal, economic and social support often coerces an abortion that would not be necessary in a more just society; that private moral choices are subject to moral judgments and standards; and that what ought to be an inherently difficult and even tragic choice can easily be trivialized and routinized—tacitly sanctioned and advanced by a society that promotes narcissism, prefers technological fixes to structural change and is all too happy to see abortion put to the service of reducing welfare burdens.
There are, we think, two different abortion debates now taking place, one of them tense, open and familiar, the other more relaxed, less public and in some ways surprising. At one level, there is the fairly primitive, monochromatic struggle that takes place between the most public and vociferous activists on both sides. Kristin Luker’s research on those groups has vividly laid out the background values and assumptions that animate their convictions. At that level, the debate admits of no accommodation. It is a living out, in bold relief, of the struggle between modernity and traditionalism that has been waged at least since the Enlightenment. Each side is doomed never to be able to talk with the other, the likelihood is that neither side can wholly triumph in the future, and there remains for everyone else the disheartening prospect of never-ending, never-decided civil strife.
For all of those reasons, it is the debate at the other level that bears attention, cultivation and development. Our own discussions manifested traits significantly different from those sketched by Luker. Four features are especially worth noting. The first is that participants from each side combine both liberal and conservative, modernizing and traditionalist ingredients in their respective positions. Both sides are uncomfortable with the more stark options and tight combinations of values pursued at the extremes. They thus feel free and, in many ways, compelled to appropriate and adapt from both poles to fashion a different kind of synthesis. Both, strikingly, borrow from the various civil rights struggles of the recent past. The prolife groups point out that a fundamental aim of the civil rights efforts was to protect and give voice to those without power—to give them an equal moral standing in the community. For them, the task is to extend to the fetus the rights won by women and racial minority groups. Fetal rights are not inherently hostile to women’s rights. The prochoice groups, sensitive to the deprivations of women who are given no options in their reproductive lives, want to provide women with a choice about something central to their lives. Yet, though they may differ about the meaning of the various civil rights struggles, those battles serve as a common reference point for both. Most critical, neither side finds the understanding and interpretation of the other outlandish or implausible.
Second, both sides tend to share a distrust of that form of libertarianism that would wholly sunder the individual from the community, setting up the private self as an isolated agent bound by no moral standards other than those perceived or devised by the agent. In this, they not only share some of the traditional conservative and neoconservative critiques of liberalism, but share as well a kind of questioning that has become part of the liberal tradition itself. They are, however, hardly less distrustful of that form of traditionalism that believes the past must be preserved in all of its purity. They want to be able to use the past selectively, preserving what remains valuable and rejecting what has been either harmful or wholly overtaken by time, and, in general, they see the past as a resource requiring constant adjustment and adaptation for life in the present.
Third, they are uncomfortable with the labels prolife and prochoice. Those terms, they are well aware, were devised for polemical and political purposes, not for nuanced distinctions. Prolife is misleading because it begs the question of what actually serves human life and welfare; prochoice is no less misleading because it begs the question of whether freedom of choice ought to be made an ultimate moral value, regardless of the nature of the choice to be exercised. Put another way, prolife begs the questions of moral ends, and prochoice begs the questions of moral means. They dislike these labels also because of a suggestion that one must be wholly one or the other. But the more complex reality is that many in the prolife group will not condemn out of hand all women who have abortions, and many in the prochoice group are repelled by the banal moral arguments used to justify many abortions. Neither group, in short, is happy when prolife or prochoice seems to require a require a reductio ad absurdum or that inflexible, insensitive moral rules be pursued regardless of consequence.
Fourth, both sides are concerned about the conditions that lead or drive women to obtain abortions, and about the social, economic and cultural contexts of abortion decisions. They reject, on the one hand, that rendering of the prolife position that construes all choices in favor of abortion as merely personal convenience or crass expediency and, on the other, that version of the prochoice position that is interested only in the easy availability of abortion, regardless of cause or motivation. They are willing to pursue together an understanding of ways to limit a forced choice of abortion because of poverty or the oppression of women or the lack of social support for childbearing; and they are no less willing to pursue together those social reforms that would be more supportive of troubled pregnancies.
Why, then, sharing so many beliefs about how the abortion problem should be understood, and sharing some criticisms of the assumptions and premises of those who lead the public fight, do they still differ? In part, they differ because of the relative weight they give to various considerations. Ever so faintly tilting one way or another can be decisive when the political and legal choices are so narrow. But in the end it comes down, we think, to what is perhaps one of the most profound and subtle value differences of all. That is the matter of one’s general hopes and beliefs about the world, human nature and reality. Put simply for many who are prochoice, abortion is a necessary evil, one that must be tolerated and supported until such time as better sex education, more effective contraceptives and a more just social order make possible fewer troubled pregnancies. Even then, there will still be some justifiable reasons for abortion; it will never disappear. For the prolife group, it is a ban on abortion that must be the necessary evil, one that must be advanced as a long-term step in devising a social order that is more supportive of women and childbearing and more dedicated to an eradication of violence as a solution to personal or social threats.
Both sides, then, are prepared to agree that abortion is undesirable, a crude solution to problems that would better be solved by other means. The crucial difference, however, is that those on the prochoice side believe that the world must be acknowledged as it is, and not just as it might or ought to be. Here and now, in our present social reality, there are women who need or desire abortions. Future solutions to the general problem of abortion, at some unspecified date, will do them no good. They have to live with the reality they encounter. They cannot be asked to bear personally the burden of helping to create a better future, which, even if possible, is not within their power as individuals to bring about. By contrast, the prolife group believes that a better future cannot be achieved unless we begin now to live the ideals that we want to achieve, unless we are prepared to make present sacrifices toward future goals and unless aggression toward the fetus is denied, however high the individual cost of denying it. The acceptance of reality as it is implicitly legitimates the status quo, undercuts efforts to bring about social change and sanctions violence as an acceptable method of coping with problems.
Differences of that kind run deep, pitting fundamentally discrepant attitudes and predispositions against each other. The dichotomies are expressed in our ordinary language when “idealists” are contrasted with “realists,” or when the “hard-nosed” are pitted against the “starry-eyed.” The liberal prolife group, it sometimes seems, favors the equivalent of unilateral disarmament on abortion and is willing to bear the hazards of a stance that will put many women at risk of disaster. They are willing to make a moral bet that the violence inherent in abortion will, in the long run, be repudiated. The public, they think, will eventually respond to the principled witness of those who reject it. The prochoice group, for its part, is hesitant to indulge hopes of that kind. They are unwilling to ask women to give up a viable solution to their present problems in the name of a future that might never come.
Perhaps the most striking outcome of our discussions was the way they broke many stereotypes. Too often, it is assumed that a commitment to feminism entails a prochoice position; but that is only one version of feminism, not necessarily its essence. Too often, it is assumed that a commitment to the family as an enduring value entails a prohibition of abortion; but that does not follow either. Too often, it is assumed that a prochoice stand entails treating children as disposable goods, of value only if wanted. But that view can be a parody of the genuine affirmation of the value of children that can be a central part of a prochoice position. Too often, it is assumed that a society that values the rights of individuals must deny the value of community and, thus, any social restrictions on abortion choices; but in some renderings, a denial of abortion can be a way of affirming rights.
There is no suggestion here that the differences are any less sharp than ever; or to deny that even slight differences can have a significant social impact. We suggest only that the relationship of abortion to deeper values such as feminism, the family, childrearing and the political culture is open to more flexible, interesting possibilities than has been apparent in much of the public debate. If our own domestic wrangles have not led to a general shift in position for either of us, they have nonetheless been valuable. Neither of us has remained unchanged by the other.