The Moral Issue of the ‘90s

It’s the issue that will not go away, the issue that surfaced immediately, once again, when the name of Clarence Thomas was presented as President Bush’s choice for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Increasingly, abortion is a topic that book publishers are tackling. The moral tug that Americans feel about abortion is reflected in a growing number of books that deal with this prickly subject.

Peter Osnos, publisher of Times Books and associate publisher of Random House, likens this decade’s stepped-up literary assessment of abortion to the “great many books about the arms race and arms control” that were published in the 1970s and 1980s.

“I think these are all subjects where people need and want a kind of thoughtful, provocative discussion,” Osnos said. But as they agonized over nuclear weapons, readers struggle with which way to point themselves in the highly polarized arena of abortion, Osnos said. “People need a compass.”

Accordingly, Osnos and his Random House colleague Joni Evans (now publisher of Turtle Bay Books) turned to Life magazine columnist Roger Rosenblatt for a book that would examine “why we find it so difficult to come to terms with the issue of abortion, why nowhere else in the world do people struggle with it as we do here.” Rosenblatt’s “Life Itself: Abortion in the American Mind,” will be published in February by Random House.

Rosenblatt said he dispenses with his own pro-abortion-rights feelings “in the first five pages of the book.” Best known as an essayist whose magazine and television pieces deal with complex ethical questions, he said he accepted the abortion-book assignment because he thought “there ought to be a way to think about this without the discomfort” and the mutual disrespect that seems to come with the territory of abortion. “One ought to start talking about it as a continuous, perpetually conflicted moral issue and not as a political issue.”

Because abortion is such a political football, it plays a more and more prominent role in general political books as well.

A Simon & Schuster publicist noted that in touring to promote his current book, “Why Americans Hate Politics,” Washington Post staff writer E. J. Dionne Jr. often heard people seizing on his contention in the book that abortion has been made much more of an issue than it warrants.

“People would say things to E. J. like ‘What I care about is that I’m not making any money, that I might lose my job,’ not how they felt about abortion,” the publicist said.

Still, the fact that Dionne’s book treads on the abortion turf at all does reflect what Helen Alvare of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops in Washington sees as “certainly a noticeable increase in writing about abortion, not just in books that are strictly about abortion, but in everything from sociology to theology to jurisprudence. People are thinking about it, and writing about it. They are trying to put abortion into a context.”

One example of this kind of contextual approach is a fall title from the University of Chicago Press, law professor Gerald Rosenberg’s book “The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring about Social Change?” The book deals with a number of social issues--including, for several chapters, questions raised by the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion in this country.

A more unusual approach was demonstrated in the 1990 title from the University of Chicago Press, “Abortion, Choice and Contemporary Fiction: The Armageddon of the Maternal Instinct” by Judith Wilt which looked at how recent American fiction deals with the dilemma of abortion.

A major Random House title this fall is “Koop: The Memoirs of America’s Family Doctor.” This autobiography of former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop “does deal with abortion,” Random House assistant director of publicity Mary Beth Murphy said. “It is brought up a number of times in the book, because it was so central in the controversies involving the Reagan Administration.”

“The Abortion Pill,” by French physician and biochemistry professor Etienne Emile Baulieu, is a fall book from Simon & Schuster that traces how Baulieu developed the French “unpregnancy” pill RU-486. Some of the same ground was covered in a spring 1991 title from Addison Wesley, “RU-486: The Pill That Could End the Abortion Wars and Why American Women Don’t Have It,” by Lawrence Lader, a writer who was a cofounder of NARAL, the National Abortion Rights Action League.

Do these books actually influence the way people think about abortion?

“I wish I knew,” said Lader, whose first book on the subject came out in 1966. “It’s something we’re all somewhat in the dark about,” he said. “Somehow the message is getting out. What effect it is having, I can’t tell you.”

Lader’s recent book came out just about the same time W. W. Norton was releasing the paperback of Harvard Law School professor Laurence H. Tribe’s “Abortion: The Clash of Absolutes.” Don Lamm, chairman and president of W. W. Norton, said he approached Tribe about writing the book soon after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Webster decision weakening some of the authority set forth in Roe v. Wade.

“What I wanted was a good cool head, because the larger part (of the abortion discussion) is that it is an area which doesn’t admit of grand compromise,” Lamm said. He said Tribe’s hardcover “sold very well,” and in fact that “if all the sales had been in a more concentrated point of time, it would have been on the lower rungs of the best-seller lists.”

Abortion in the aftermath of the Webster decision also was a theme in a book released this spring from Random House. “The Choices We Made,” edited by Angela Bonavoglia with an introduction by Gloria Steinem, presented the personal stories of 25 women and men--including Whoopi Goldberg, Polly Bergen, Kay Boyle and Jill Clayburgh--who had had personal experiences with abortion.

The fact that so many books dealing with abortion are being written, published and sold is itself heartening, said Mary Jean Collins, deputy director of Catholics for a Free Choice in Washington, D.C. “I assume that means that someone is reading them,” Collins said. “I think they do influence people.”

And Nancy Myers of the National Right to Life Committee in Washington, D.C., offered a rare note of accord with her nominal adversary. “In the past, these books have been more heat than light,” Myers said. “We feel the increased discussion works in our favor. We think the more people know about abortion, the more opposed to it they will become.”

The very disparity of those two positions is part of what Roger Rosenblatt said he hopes to address in his new book. “Abortion is the moral issue of the ‘90s and that is why I want to get beyond it,” Rosenblatt said. “I want to look at the nuances and contrarieties of this subject so that this country will be able to live abortion, much as it lives with the anomalies of other issues, such as free speech. We earn the right in a democracy to live uncomfortably with these issues.”