TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/071789/07178900.000

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 6KB | 105 lines

ESSAY, Page 96

The New Politics of Abortion

By Michael Kinsley


    Who said politicians are power hungry? American politicians
are greeting the happy news that they are free once again to
exercise their democratic prerogatives on the subject of abortion
with a reserve bordering on clinical depression. "It's terrible to
have this issue back again," New York Assembly Speaker Mel Miller
told the New York Times. Others gloomily predict "a mess" and
"havoc."

    The disaster facing America's state legislators, and
potentially its national legislators, is that they may have to
address an issue of public policy on which many of their
constituents have strong and irreconcilable opinions. This they
hate to do and are skilled at avoiding, even though it is what they
are paid for. They would far rather pass laws against burning the
flag. But there is no Gramm-Rudman-style automatic chopping
machinery that can resolve the abortion issue. Nor can abortion be
finessed by handing it over to a commission of distinguished
experts (although this ploy will undoubtedly be tried).

    The politicians have the Supreme Court to thank for the fact
that the abortion issue is now a nightmarish gauntlet that has to
be run between two ravening mobs. Not because of last week's
Webster decision, which opened the door (at least partway) to
legislation restricting a woman's right to abortion, but because
of the famous Roe v. Wade decision of 16 years ago, creating that
virtually absolute, constitutional abortion right, which Webster
partially overturned.

    Before Roe, abortion was slowly being legalized, state by
state, under varying rules, amid moderate controversy. Roe told
abortion supporters and opponents alike that it was all or nothing
at all, a Manichaean battle in which compromise was impossible. A
generation of social-issue conservatives was politicized and
mobilized. As a result, today's Republican Party officially
endorses a human-life amendment that would not merely return the
abortion issue to the states but would constitutionally ban
abortion except to save the mother's life.

    Meanwhile, many believers in a woman's right to control her
own body have become absolutists as well, hooked on the
Constitution. They fear that any breach in the constitutional
barrier -- that is, any role for the democratic process in settling
the abortion issue -- will condemn women to mass death by coat
hanger. In April hundreds of thousands marched on Washington in a
quixotic attempt to influence the very branch of Government whose
independence from public pressure they count on to protect them
from the mob on the other side.

    You can argue it either way about who will win the coming
legislative battles over abortion and what effect those battles
will have on politics at large. My bet is that the repeal of Roe
(especially if it is completed by the court next year, as seems
likely) will awaken and politicize social-issue liberals the way
Roe itself energized conservatives 16 years ago. From 1973 until
recently, abortion mattered a lot more to the antis than to the
pros; that is already starting to change. The new politics of
abortion will also put many Republican politicians in the sort of
bind Democrats have been in more often in recent years: trapped
between the demands of a vocal interest group at the core of their
party and the preferences of the moderate voters whose support they
need. They cannot abandon the human-life amendment without hell to
pay. Now that it matters, they cannot continue to trumpet this
extreme position without at least heck to pay. It will be an
albatross around their necks. Already it is a pleasure to watch
Rudolph Giuliani, a Republican candidate for mayor of New York
City, squirm.

    In the end, America's abortion policy could end up roughly
where it is now: abortion available more or less on demand for the
first three months (when more than 90% of today's abortions take
place anyway), available only for certain weighty reasons in
mid-pregnancy and generally unavailable for the last few weeks. But
we would arrive at that sensible arrangement without all the
embarrassing intellectual paraphernalia of "trimesters" and
"viability'' that came out of Justice Blackmun's futile effort, in
the Roe decision, to derive a necessary compromise between moral
absolutes from first principles. There are no first principles,
constitutional or otherwise, that can settle the abortion question
once and for all; only politics can do that.

    A political compromise could deal with subsidiary issues, such
as clinic standards and parental-notification requirements, on
their own merits, whereas they have until now usually been cynical
attempts to sneak around Roe's absolute constitutional ban. On the
one side issue pro-choicers have generally lost -- government
funding of abortions for poor women -- they might even find the
opposition more accommodating once the general issue is open for
debate and compromise. Right-to-life absolutists will find
themselves isolated. Appeals to fairness, not to mention more
cynical arguments regarding the cost to society of poor women
having unwanted babies, will be more likely to succeed when banning
government-paid abortions is no longer virtually the only
restriction available to those who think unrestricted abortion is
wrong.

    For a decade and a half, the abortion issue has made extremists
and hypocrites of us all -- pro-choicers enshrining trimesters in
the Constitution, pro-lifers using an ostensible concern for the
mother's health to restrict the mother's freedom of choice. Now we
can start being honest again. And with the Supreme Court out of the
picture, we can have the arduous but exhilarating democratic
experience of deciding an important issue for ourselves.