Naomi Wolf

In the following viewpoint, author and feminist critic Naomi Wolf maintains that abortion must be seen as a serious and grave medical choice that puts an end to potential human life. Moreover, she argues, pro-choice advocates should admit that the high rate of abortion in the United States illuminates some of the nation’s social and moral failings. However, denying women access to legal abortion is unethical, Wolf contends, because it results in an increase in illegal abortions that endanger the lives of women as well as their unborn children. Abortion must remain a legal—even if undesirable— option; at the same time, Americans should support programs that reduce teen pregnancy and provide access to affordable contraception, prenatal care, and adoption.

As you read, consider the following questions:

1. In Wolf’s opinion, how has the rhetoric of the pro-choice movement actually undermined abortion rights in the United States"
2. According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, cited by the author, contraception decreases the likelihood of abortion by what percentage"
3. What is the Common Ground Network for Life and Choice, according to Wolf"

From a pro-choice point of view, things look grim. In March 1997, came accusations that abortion-rights advocates had prevaricated about how frequently “partial birth” or “intact dilation and evacuation” abortion is performed. Then the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to ban the procedure. The Senate may soon address the issue, but even if it fails to override President Bill Clinton’s promised veto, the pro-choice movement is staring at a great symbolic defeat. [In June 2000, bans on late- term abortion were declared unconstitutional.]

This looks like a dark hour for those of us who are pro- choice. But, with a radical shift in language and philosophy, we can turn this moment into a victory for all Americans.

How? First, let us stop shying away from the facts. Pro- lifers have made the most of the “partial birth” abortion debate to dramatize the gruesome details of late-term abortions. Then they moved on to the equally unpleasant details of second-trimester abortions. Thus, pro-lifers have succeeded in making queasy many voters who once thought that they were comfortable with Roe v. Wade.

Ceding the Moral High Ground

Unfortunately, we set ourselves up for this. Our rhetoric has long relied on euphemism. An abortion was simply “a woman’s choice.” We clung to a neutral, abstract language of “privacy” and “rights.” This approach was bound to cede the moral high ground to our opposition and to guarantee an erosion of support for abortion rights. Thirty percent of Americans support abortion based on the “woman’s choice” argument alone, but when people are asked whether abortion should be a matter between “a woman, her doctor, her conscience and her God,” 70 percent agree.

By ignoring this hunger for a moral framework around legal abortion, we inadvertently played into the drama that was performed before Congress. When someone holds up a model of a six-month-old fetus and a pair of surgical scissors, we say, “choice,” and we lose.

Some pro-choicers have recently resorted to heartless medicalese to explain away the upsetting details of late abortions, pointing out that no major surgery is pretty.

Such responses make us seem disconnected from our own humane sensibilities. We should acknowledge what most Americans want us to: that abortion at any stage, since it involves the possibility of another life, is a grave decision qualitatively different from medical choices that involve no one but ourselves.

What if we transformed our language to reflect the spiritual perceptions of most Americans? What if we called abortion what many believe it to be: a failure, whether that failure is of technology, social support, education, or male and female responsibility? What if we called policies that sustain, tolerate and even guarantee the highest abortion rate of any industrialized nation what they should be called: crimes against women"

A More Effective Strategy

If we frankly acknowledged abortion as a necessary evil, a more effective and ethical strategy falls into place. Instead of avoiding pictures of mangled fetuses as if they were pro-life propaganda, we could claim them as our own most eloquent testimony.

Rolling back abortion rights would merely ease lawmakers’ consciences, while many women, and more late-term fetuses than are aborted now, would die in back alleys, deaths as agonizing as those that pro-lifers have been so graphically describing. No woman, we should argue, should have to make the terrible choice of a late abortion if there is any alternative. And these late abortions are more likely to occur when 80 percent of women have to travel outside of their counties to end a pregnancy.

The moral of such awful scenes is that a full-fledged campaign for cheap and easily accessible contraception is the best antidote to our shamefully high abortion rate. Use of birth control lowers the likelihood of abortion by 85 percent, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute. More than half of unplanned pregnancies occur because no contraception was used. If we asked Americans to send checks to Planned Parenthood to help save hundreds of thousands of women a year from having to face abortions, our support would rise exponentially. A year of sexual responsibility can easily cost someone $200 or more (and that someone is likely to be female). To those who oppose access to contraceptives, yet hold up images of dead fetuses, we should say: This disaster might have been prevented by a few cents’ worth of nonoxynol-9; this blood is on your hands.

AWorld of Genuine Choice

Try to imagine real gender equality. Actually, try to imagine an America that is female-dominated, since a true working democracy in this country would reflect our 5446 voting advantage.

Now imagine such a democracy, in which women would be valued so very highly, as a world that is accepting and responsible about human sexuality; in which there is no coerced sex without serious jailtime; in which there are affordable, safe contraceptives available for the taking in every public health building; in which there is economic parity for women—and basic economic subsistence for every baby born; and in which every young American woman knows about and understands her natural desire as a treasure to cherish, and responsibly, when the time is right, on her own terms, to share.

In such a world, in which the idea of gender as a barrier has become a dusty artifact, we would probably use a very different language about what would be—then—the rare and doubtless traumatic event of abortion. That language would probably call upon respect and responsibility, grief and mourning. In that world we might well describe the unborn and the never-to-be-born with the honest words of life.

And in that world, passionate feminists might well hold candlelight vigils at abortion clinics, standing shoulder to shoulder with the doctors who work there, commemorating and saying goodbye to the dead.

Naomi Wolf, New Republic, October 16, 1995.

For whatever the millions of pro-lifers think about birth control, abortion must surely be worse. A challenge to pro-choicers to abandon a dogmatic approach must be met with a challenge to pro-lifers to separate from the demagogues in their ranks and join us in a drive to prevent unwanted pregnancy.

The Common Ground Network

The Common Ground Network for Life and Choice has brought activists together from both sides. They are working on ensuring better prenatal care; making adoption easier; reducing the rate of teen pregnancy through programs that give girls better opportunities and offer them mentors; and rejecting violent means of protest. They have teamed abortion clinics to prenatal care and adoption clinics to give desperate women real choices. The network has even found that half of the pro-lifers in some of its groups would support a campaign to improve access to birth control.

The pro-choice movement should give God a seat at the table. For many good reasons, including the religious right’s often punitive use of Scripture and the ardently antiabortion position of the Roman Catholic Church, the pro- choice movement has been wary of God-based arguments.

But on issues of values like abortion and assisted suicide, the old Marxist-Freudian, secular-materialist left has run out of both ideas and authority. The emerging “religious left” is where we must turn for new and better ideas. We should call on the ministers, priests and rabbis of the religious left to explain their support of abortion rights in light of what they understand to be God’s will.

America is a religious country—and a pluralistic one. Even in debate about “partial birth” abortion, unspoken religious assumptions and differences play a part. While Judaism generally maintains that in a choice between the fetus and the mother, the mother’s life, with its adult obligations, must always come first, traditional Catholic teaching holds that you cannot directly kill a fetus to save the life of the mother. Americans must be reminded that people of faith can reach different conclusions about abortion.

Real Choice

Finally, we must press Congress to work with the Clinton Administration to take this approach to the national level. On January 22, 1997, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Vice President Al Gore and Tipper Gore took the extraordinary step of calling on abortion providers and their opponents to reject extremism, support efforts to lower the abortion rate and talk with those who do not share their views.

Now lawmakers must follow through with sweeping policies to give that sentiment substance. Congress and the Administration should champion the “common ground” approach, and add to it bipartisan support for financing far more research, development and distribution of contraceptives.

We have all lived with the human cost of our hypocrisies for too long. It is time to abandon symbolic debates on Capitol Hill in favor of policies that can give women—who have been so ill-served by the rigid views on both sides— real help and real choice.