Moral Issues Frustrate Our Bent for Compromise

For the past two decades, the conflict over abortion has survived every political stratagem to subdue it. Even the usually conclusive policy instrument of a U.S. Supreme Court decree fueled rather than dampened the debate.

In virtually every term, the court hears cases involving new state laws intended to restrict the right to abortion; opponents of abortion militate for a change on the bench in order to have Roe vs. Wade reversed. Congress has prohibited federal funding for abortion except when the mother’s life is in danger.

In 1982, the Brookings Institution and the Ford Foundation found the political tactics of abortion activists on both sides worrisome enough to conduct a symposium to examine “the effects of the abortion controversy on the governmental system.” Had “the relentless pursuit of a policy objective” through “sometimes . . . novel or unprecedented techniques” jeopardized the functioning of the governmental system? These analysts concluded not.

But they might have asked a different question: How does the American political system deal with questions like abortion? The answer: ineffectively.

The American political system was not designed to deal with those kind of questions--moral issues that can’t be negotiated--where you can’t split the difference and have all the players feel that they came out with something.

With abortion, no compromise can be acceptable, even temporarily, to both sides. For one side, abortion is murder; for the other, it is an exercise in the fundamental human right to control one’s body.

So, the outcome of each abortion battle is determined not by compromise but by the number of votes on each side in a legislature. The loser’s position is never respected and never accommodated. Because of the character of the dispute, it can’t be.

But the persistence of the abortion dispute also grows out of the most esteemed qualities of the American system. One is respect for a multiplicity of religious expressions incorporated in the separation of church and state. From the beginning, Americans deliberately excluded the church, the very institution designed to grapple with questions of individual morality, from governmental decision-making. European nations historically have had no such bar. Middle Eastern nations make no pretense of separating religious and civil authority. In the most theocratic states moral questions are resolved by fiat.

But the United States was too diverse even in the 18th Century to choose one church to establish; the American response was to decree that individual morality was (within some limits) a matter of individual conscience, not for the state to define.

The upshot of such a policy has been that the state enforces only those moral positions that are virtually unanimous. When the country has been riven by deeply felt divisions on moral questions, like slavery or Prohibition, abortion or homosexuality, government attempts to compel obedience to laws banning particular kinds of behavior have not succeeded.

But this incapacity also derives from American strengths: a commitment to free political expression and to the principle of a nonintrusive state. Enforcement of morality laws requires both repressive and invasive police procedures that Americans traditionally eschew. During Prohibition, federal agents complained to Congress that they could not catch law-breakers unless allowed to conduct warrantless searches, which are banned by the Fourth Amendment. Congress nonetheless rejected the proposal. Vocal opponents of laws may encourage violations, but the courts continue to expand free-speech protection.

Constrained by such legal barriers, states rarely even try to enforce morals statutes. When it was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1965, Connecticut’s law prohibiting the use of birth-control devices, even by married couples, had never been used against a married couple despite the widespread and open sale of contraceptives.

Conflicts as bitter as the one over abortion have been rare in U.S. history. To crib from political scientist Louis Hartz: Americans are used to taking their ethics for granted; our debates are much more likely to be over technique, not ends.

The abortion argument is certainly over moral imperatives, not strategy. And, as with the issues of slavery and Prohibition, both the pro-choice and the anti-abortion positions are emblems of larger world views, each of them turning on the place of women in that world.

But as long as we endorse the right of citizens to voice their political opinions and to bring pressure to bear upon policymakers, and confirm our belief in limited government intrusion in personal behavior, two things will be true of this controversy: If abortion once again becomes illegal, women will certainly continue to have them (albeit dangerously and expensively) and the dissension over these fundamental moral differences will stay with us for a long time to come. Free expression and conflict come together in a single package.