I mentioned a few days ago that I feared that the simple yes/no answers on the Idaho Chooses Life and Cornerstone Institute surveys may have hurt with people in my district--since the rather detailed explanations that I included were not. Here's the letter that I wrote to Idaho Chooses Life at the time. In retrospect, I suppose that I should have recognized that anything but 100% agreement wasn't going to go over well.
April 17, 2008
Mr. David D. Ripley
Idaho Chooses Life
P.O. Box 8172
Boise, ID 83707
Dear Mr. Ripley:
As I mention on the first page, I have moved over the last few years from reluctantly pro-choice (and, I should add, only for the first trimester) to mildly pro-life. Let me explain why I have moved the direction that I have, and why we are a little ways apart.
There are strong similarities between the pro-choice arguments and the pro-slavery arguments in the period before the Civil War. As I researched my fourth book, Black Demographic Data, 1790-1860 (Greenwood Press, 1997), the similarities became more apparent, and my discomfort with my old position became stronger.
In both cases, proponents argued that they had a right based in the Constitution—although slavery’s defenders at least had an historical basis for their claim. The right to abortion is based on a misreading of the Constitution in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), which is in turn a misreading of the Fourteenth Amendment.
A number of states, including California (of all places) have laws that expressly recognize the fetus as a human being—and an intentional killing of a fetus, except if committed by a doctor at the mother’s request—is homicide. This is derived from the common law recognition that once a fetus had started to kick, it was human. Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England is explicit about this: once the “quickening” had occurred, killing the fetus was homicide. This is part of the section on “the right to life.” When I taught Constitutional history some years ago at Boise State, I had my students read that section. I wanted them to understand that contrary to the claims that pro-choicers like to make, this dispute isn’t modern at all.
So if it’s human life—what makes it acceptable for a licensed physician to kill it with the mother’s permission? Does she own the fetus? The parallel to slavery was very disturbing—although again, slave owners at least acknowledged that slaves were human beings, and the laws at least theoretically prohibited masters from murdering their slaves.
Another disturbing similarity popped up when reading Nat Brandt’s The Town That Started the Civil War, which details what happened when U.S. marshals and private slavecatchers took into custody a runaway slave from near Oberlin College in Ohio. The entire student body, and most of the professors, took up rifles, surrounded the hotel, and announced that the slave wasn’t going back South. With minimal bloodshed, the slave was spirited away.
The ringleaders were soon known as the Oberlin Rescuers (rescue being a legal term for removing a prisoner from the custody of lawful authorities), and were charged under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The parallels between FACES and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 are also astonishing. The Fugitive Slave Act’s provisions concerning runaway slaves were Draconian--$1000 fines (equivalent to perhaps $20,000 today). More importantly, because this was a federal law, prisoners were not tried under state laws, in state courts, by juries of sympathetic Republicans, but tried in federal courts in largely urban areas where Democrat-dominated juries were less sympathetic. As the Oberlin Rescuers explained, when the laws of God conflicted with the laws of men, the laws of God took precedence.
I have come to the conclusion that the internal inconsistencies of the pro-choice position, the disturbing parallels to slavery, and the gruesomeness of partial-birth abortion,[1] makes me quite interested in doing what Lincoln intended to do to slavery, when he was elected. Crush it out, as best he could, within the limitations of the law and human frailty.
But how to do that? What is the most effective mechanism?
Current Idaho law already goes as far as it can to prohibit abortion within the limits the federal courts have allowed. Roe v. Wade (1973) was wrongly decided—and even Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), while abandoning the strict scrutiny standard used in Roe, was still wrongly decided. Until the U.S. Supreme Court mends its activist ways, there’s not much Idaho can do with respect to first trimester abortions.
Even if the Court does eventually return authority to the states to determine what the abortion laws should be, I am skeptical that a broad ban on abortion would be either enforceable or particularly effective, as long as support for abortion remains as strong as it is. Before Roe v. Wade, Oregon, for example, prohibited elective abortions except to save the life of the mother—and yet Oregon had 199 abortions per 1,000 live births in 1970.[2] Pretty clearly, doctors and pregnant women were ignoring the law. The progress that we have made in reducing abortion rates in recent years[3] is because pro-life forces have been effective at persuading women that abortion is wrong and they should either not get pregnant, or not abort a child if they do get pregnant.
There is still a large fraction of Americans, and of Idahoans, who refuse to see elective abortion as evil. Many refuse to even see it as pragmatically bad. The more Idahoans that we can persuade that abortion is either wrong or at least an incredibly destructive type of birth control, the fewer abortions there will be, and the easier it will be to pass much more restrictive measures when the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade. I would say that as long as 20% of Idaho’s population considers abortion to be acceptable, passing a more severe restriction would be politically divisive—without being particularly effective at reducing the abortion rate.
The parallel to slavery—which was prohibited by the Thirteenth Amendment—is quite strong. Slavery went away in the formal sense, but debt peonage, the sharecropping system, and the renting out of prisoners to private employers for the most trivial of crimes, meant that conditions were still abominable into the 1960s. Why? Because the hearts of white Southerners hadn’t changed.
What’s the most effective way to do this persuading? Remember: we aren’t trying to persuade the adamant pro-choice activists. Many of them have their own personal tragedies that drive them, traumas of long ago that make it impossible for them to bend. We are trying to persuade people in the middle—those who are uncomfortable with abortion, don’t like it used as birth control, but aren’t prepared to support too broad of a ban.
Things we can do:
- Continue the effort to persuade others that abortion is morally wrong. My experience is that many people change their view once they have a child of their own.
- Attempt to persuade others that abortion is an inferior choice—that birth control, adoption, being a single parent, or getting married, are all morally better choices than abortion. Some years ago, I remember being startled by a series of national television ads that emphasized what a tremendously wonderful decision it was to bring a child into the world. Nothing judgmental; nothing about abortion; purely a feel good kind of image. Piece by piece, bit by bit, such material can create a positive image that slowly poisons acceptance of the idea that an unborn child is “tissue.”
- Emphasize that abortion is pragmatically bad. We can point out that relative to birth control or abstinence, abortion is expensive, and involves some health risks. Even if everyone is doing their job right, an abortion increases scar tissue, impairs future fertility, and often results in infections. There are people who pride themselves on refusing to see anything as morally wrong (usually they fancy themselves intellectuals); we can at least appeal to the instincts of those who can see that abortion is a lousy form of birth control.
- Emphasize to parents the importance of supervising their sons and daughters—so that they don’t get forced into bad choices caused by passion leading to pregnancy.
- Emphasize to kids how tragic it is that they might have to make a terrible choice like abortion vs. carrying a child to term—and the importance of abstinence (best choice), contraception, adoption, or early marriage.
I support laws that provide women more information about the consequences of abortion as a requirement for abortion. The more information that is available about some of the long-term health risks, the fewer abortions there will be, and the greater willingness of pregnant women to see abortion not as a choice, but as something really gruesome.
I have pointed to a few situations where it is very, very difficult for me to oppose abortion: anacephaly (short, meaningless lives, with no chance for repair, and no prospect of survival); Tay-Sachs disease (short, incredibly painful lives). I’m sure if we spent some time at it, we could find a few other examples of horrifying, terminal, non-treatable conditions where abortion is an act of mercy. This doesn’t mean that every defect justifies abortion, especially as the science of in utero surgery continues to advance. (Britain has had a spate of abortions because of clubfoot, for example, even though this is a readily correctable problem.[4]) But these tragedies are reminders that any restrictions on abortion must be based on both respect for human life and a recognition that certain congenital mistakes may justify abortion as an act of mercy.
Very Truly Yours,
Clayton E. Cramer
[1] See Justice Kennedy’s opinion in Gonzales v. Carhart (2007), http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/06pdf/05-380.pdf, for an extraordinarily detailed description of the procedure, clearly intended to impress upon anyone reading it the barbarism of the procedure:
The doctor grips a fetal part with the forceps and pulls it back through the cervix and vagina, continuing to pull even after meeting resistance from the cervix. The friction causes the fetus to tear apart. For example, a leg might be ripped off the fetus as it is pulled through the cervix and out of the woman. The process of evacuating the fetus piece by piece continues until it has been completely removed. A doctor may make 10 to 15 passes with the forceps to evacuate the fetus in its entirety, though sometimes removal is completed with fewer passes.
[2] John R. Lott and John E.Whitley, "Abortion and Crime: Unwanted Children and Out-of-Wedlock Births" (April 30, 2001). Yale Law & Economics Research Paper No. 254. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=270126 or DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.270126, Table 1.
[3] SJ Ventura, WD Mosher, SC Curtin, JC Abma, S. Henshaw, “Trends In Pregnancy Rates For The United States, 1976–97: An Update.” National Vital Statistics Reports; vol 49 no. 4. Hyattsville, Maryland: National Center for Health Statistics. 2001, Table 3, available at http://origin.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr49/nvsr49_04.pdf.
[4] Sarah-Kate Templeton, “Babies aborted for minor disabilities,” Sunday Times, October 21, 2007, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/health/article2689787.ece, last accessed April 17, 2008.
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