Abortion The Clash of Absolutes : BOOK MARK: Positioning in the fight over abortion leaves no room for compromise. The intensity that sears both extremes prevents each from acknowledging there might be points of agreement. In “Abortion: The Clash of Absolutes,” Laurence Tribe explains.

Most people are torn by the abortion question. There is something deeply misleading about discussing the abortion debate solely in terms of a clash between pro-life “groups” and pro-choice “groups,” as though each of us could properly be labeled as belonging to one camp or the other. For nearly everyone, the deepest truth is that the clash is internal. Few people who really permit themselves to feel all of what is at stake in the abortion issue can avoid a profound sense of internal division. Whatever someone’s “bottom line”--whether it is that the choice must belong to the woman or that she must be prevented from killing the fetus--it is hard not to feel deeply the tug of the opposing view.

A story told in a recent newspaper interview by Dr. Warren Hern, director of the Boulder Abortion Clinic in Colorado, demonstrates this. Hern recounts calling one of his closest friends, a “strongly pro-choice” physician who had “done abortions himself.” When Hern told his friend that he was at work at his office, his friend asked, “Still killing babies this late in the afternoon?” Hern recalls: “It was like a knife in my gut . . . it really upset me. What it conveys is that no matter how supportive people may be, there is still a horror at what I do.”

Something akin to horror must be felt by everyone involved in the question of abortion who has not become anesthetized to the reality of what is at stake. This feeling may be less intense with abortions performed in the beginning stages of pregnancy, when the embryo is a tiny, visually undifferentiated, multicelled growth without discernibly human features. But certainly by some point in pregnancy, as soon as abortion involves a fetus recognizably human in form, or involves a fetus one might imagine feeling pain, few can avoid the sense of tragic choice each abortion entails.

The “absolutes” at issue are the fetus’ right to life and the woman’s right to liberty. Neither “absolute” is really that. Whatever right a woman might have to choose abortion would be undermined if the fetus could be saved without sacrificing the woman’s freedom to end her pregnancy. Most would intuitively sense the force of any such fetus’ claim to life.

The principal case in the abortion battle is named Jane Roe vs. Henry Wade, where the Supreme Court said that, except in narrow circumstances, the U.S. Constitution does not permit the government to interfere with a woman’s right to choose abortion.

Roe vs. Wade is many things. It is a legal decision by the Supreme Court; a rallying cry for both sides in the abortion debate. But it is also, and was at first, an entirely human story, one that has become by now familiar to many, a story similar to other stories repeated all over the United States every day.

“Jane Roe” is not a real person’s name, but a pseudonym. “Henry Wade” is the real name of a Texas official, enforcing the criminal laws of a legislature that had decided to protect unborn lives.

Soon after the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe vs. Wade, “Jane Roe” revealed who she was. Her name was Norma McCorvey. She explained that as she walked home from work late one summer evening in 1969, 25 years old and unmarried, she became the victim of a gang rape. Her anguish grew several weeks later, she said, when she learned to her dismay that she was pregnant.

Abortion was illegal--except to save the woman’s life--in Texas where she lived, and she lacked the resources to travel to a place where a legal abortion might be obtained. McCorvey had little education, and did not realize the attention her case might receive. When her lawyer informed her that the case would be presented to the U.S. Supreme Court, McCorvey was dismayed. “My God,” she said, “all those people are so important. They don’t have time to listen to some little old Texas girl who got in trouble.”

A decade and a half after the court handed down its decision in Roe vs. Wade, McCorvey said she had made up the story to hide the fact that she had gotten “in trouble” in the more usual way. Many reacted with dismay. How could the heroine of the most important abortion-rights case have deceived the advocates of such rights? Few asked why she had felt a need to deceive them. In a different sort of society, the life she would have faced as an unwed mother might not have been nearly so lonely. In such a society she might not have made up a story about how she became pregnant. In such a society she might not have chosen an abortion.

It seems telling that in Roe vs. Wade both the woman on one side of the “versus” (Roe) and the fetus on the other (represented by Wade) are nameless. In much of the debate over abortion in our society, one side or the other is reduced to ghostly anonymity. Many who can readily envision the concrete humanity of a fetus, who hold its picture high and weep, barely see the woman who carries it and her human plight. To them, she becomes an all-but-invisible abstraction. Many others, who can readily envision the woman and her body, who cry out for her right to control her destiny, barely envision the fetus within that woman and do not imagine as real the life it might have been allowed to lead. For them, the life of the fetus becomes an equally invisible abstraction.

Who knows the names of the countless women who have died from painful and illegal abortions? What of the names of the countless babies who would have been born but for all the abortions, legal as well as illegal, that have been performed in recent decades? Melissa Able would have been aborted if Sandra Race Cano, the “Mary Doe” in the case of Doe vs. Bolton, another abortion case decided by the Supreme Court on the same day as Roe vs. Wade, had been able to obtain in Georgia the abortion she sought there. Because abortion was so heavily restricted, Cano ended up giving birth to a daughter--Able--whom she put up for adoption. Biological mother and daughter have since met; indeed, for several months they even lived in the same house. Remarkably, Cano and Able are now playing out on a personal level the clash of absolutes with which so many of us are familiar.

Although she was once a key pro-choice litigant, Cano believes today that abortion should be illegal. She is now active in the pro-life movement. Her daughter Able--herself now a mother--disagrees. Able knows she would never have been born if abortion rights had been established sooner, but she said, in November, 1989, that she believes women have the right to choose. Cano, Able and McCorvey are three real individuals. That the names of millions of others--the women, the fetuses not born and the many who were born but unwanted--are not known to us should not make them any the less real.

We must see the reality that “Roe” and “Wade” stand for if we are to move beyond the clash of absolutes. Giving voice to the human reality on each side of the “versus”--keeping both the woman and the fetus in focus--may be the only way to avoid the no-win battle that mercilessly pits women against their unborn children and leaves us all impoverished losers.

America is at a crossroads. In 1989, the 16-year era of judicial protection of legal abortion rights that began with the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe vs. Wade, ended with that court’s 5-4 decision upholding certain state regulations of abortion in the case of Webster vs. Reproductive Health Services. A right that, since the time of Watergate and Vietnam, had been kept by judges from the rough-and-tumble of local politics is now subject to regulation--and possibly even prohibition--by our elected representatives. A right that many Americans took for granted is now up for grabs. As the 1990s dawn, the complexion of politics in America is changing daily, and the shadow of the question of abortion rights grows, with widespread significance for our society.

The debate is unending. None of its participants ever seems even mildly persuaded by the arguments of the other side. As the apparently irresistible force of the pro-life movement bears down on the seemingly immovable object of abortion rights, local politics may at times be overwhelmed by the kind of single-issue campaigning that has already distorted the face of national elections. If this happens, the losers will be the democratic process and the American people.

The traditions that divide us and the myriad difficulties that plague all attempts at compromise in matters touching the absolutes of life and liberty, and lying at the crossroads of power and sex, may seem overwhelming. But we should not let them obscure the common ground we all can stand on.

If advocates on both sides of the abortion debate would just pause, they would recognize at least one shared interest: working toward a world of only wanted pregnancies. Better education, the provision of contraception, indeed the creation of a society where the burden of raising a child is lighter, are all achievable goals lost in the shouting about abortion. For while solving the puzzle of the abortion dispute will take a journey of self-discovery, nearly all of us agree that we should strive for a society in which every child a woman conceives is wanted and every child born has someone to love and nurture it.

Book Review: A review of “Abortion: The Clash of Absolutes” appears in the Book Review section on page 1.

1980 by Laurence H. Tribe. Reprinted with permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.