POLITICS : Fueled by Moral Certainty, Abortion Fight Goes On

By all rights, abortion should no longer be a major issue in American politics. It is now 23 years since the U.S. Supreme Court decided Roe vs. Wade; many young people hardly seem aware there was a time when virtually all abortions were criminal. Poll after poll finds an overwhelming majority of Americans opposing government intervention in the abortion decision, and many political experts, Democrat and Republican, believe the Republican Party’s identification with the anti-abortion movement was one reason for George Bush’s defeat in 1992.

But abortion is hardly an issue of the past. Dr. Henry W. Foster Jr. who, like most Americans, believes abortion should be safe, legal and rare, stands defeated in the U.S. Senate because he practiced what he preached: The 39 abortions this distinguished doctor performed over the course of a three-decade career in which he delivered 10,000 babies precluded him from serving as U.S. surgeon general.

In addition, the House of Representatives is poised to act on a new round of anti-abortion initiatives, aimed at prohibiting abortions at overseas military hospitals (though all such abortions are already paid for by the soldier, not the military); nullifying a new American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology requirement that accredited residency programs teach gynecologists to perform abortions (though there is an exception for residents conscientiously opposed to abortion), and making criminal an abortion procedure used late in the second trimester in cases where the fetus is severely deformed or could not survive.

The persistence of abortion as a political issue is a painful reflection of the power of a morally certain minority to tyrannize the majority in a democracy. They cannot lose; surrender is impossible. The anti-abortion forces compare themselves to the abolitionists, who argued in defending John Brown’s raid: “In God’s world there are no majorities, no minorities; one, on God’s side, is a majority.”

When the anti-abortion side loses in the courts, they go back to the state legislatures; what they have lost in the political process, they gained on the streets. In 83% of the counties in America today, there are no doctors and no clinics that perform abortions. In the Congress today, a majority of House members can be relied on to support anti-abortion initiatives.

But if defeat is impossible, so is victory, as the history of Prohibition makes clear. That is why the fight is so intractable.

Fifty years ago, this nation conducted what Winston Churchill called “the noble experiment” when it prohibited alcohol consumption. The impetus for Prohibition came from women who believed religiously in the evil of alcohol and saw saloons as the enemy of the family. The link between alcohol and the work of the devil was repeatedly invoked. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union led the nearly 50-year fight to enact the 18th Amendment at a time when women did not yet have the vote. Indeed, one of the arguments made for giving women the vote was precisely that they would bring morality into politics, with the WCTU setting the example.

The common wisdom, of course, is that Prohibition was a massive failure, a lesson to future generations of the limits of government when it seeks to enforce private morality. But that is not entirely true. Prohibition did reduce drinking; historians cite evidence that Prohibition cut drinking at least by half in the United States, and that per-capita consumption did not rise to pre-Prohibition levels until the 1970s. From the point of view of those who associated drink with the devil, that was some success.

What Prohibition also did was spawn lawlessness: Many who did not share the WCTU’s moral certainty about the evils of alcohol continued to drink; speakeasies flourished, particularly in the cities, and organized crime was handed an industry. A new generation of women drank, too, and were among those leading the fight for repeal.

In 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who supported repeal, was elected in a landslide. Opponents of Prohibition seized on the opportunity to insist, in the repeal amendment passed by Congress, that ratification should be by state constitutional convention. In effect, what they got was a national referendum on Prohibition: Voters in 38 states were asked to choose between “wet” or “dry” slates of delegates, and in 37 of the 38 states voting, repeal won. Only then did the majority finally rule, nationally. Even so, 50 years after Prohibition’s repeal, the WCTU still exists--albeit with less than 30,000 members--and more than 400 counties around the country are still dry.

Opponents of abortion cannot stop women from having abortions, any more than the WCTU could stop people from drinking. No one doubts that if abortions were prohibited tomorrow, there might well be fewer of them; women would have to travel even farther and pay even more than they do today, and incur much greater risks. But many American women would continue to find ways to terminate pregnancies--even at the risk of losing their own lives. Lawlessness, not life, would be the result. Besides, such a total ban is almost inconceivable politically--if nothing else, it would at least arouse the dormant majority, and any state-by-state or national election that became a referendum on abortion is an election the anti-abortion side would lose.

The majority in Congress today is against abortion not because abortion was an issue in the 1994 elections but because, for most Americans, it wasn’t. The anti-abortion movement may not be able to win, but they aren’t losing, either. They vote, even in primaries--as the grandstanding of Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Tex.) last week made clear. And they vote the abortion issue--while the rest of us wait for the general election, focused on crime or immigration or the deficit.

In a democracy where most people don’t even bother to participate, a morally certain and engaged minority can impose its will on a morally divided and disengaged majority. The pro-choice majority in this country includes many Americans whose moral views on abortion are ambiguous at best, and who have been willing to ignore or forgive a candidate’s position on abortion--particularly when it is not squarely raised as an issue. The Republicans wisely left abortion out of their contract because it divided their majority; the anti-abortion side won in November because, for many on the pro-choice side, abortion wasn’t an issue.

The current set of legislative initiatives in Congress is an effort, as Republican pollster Glen Bolger put it, to “nibble at the edges of abortion policy” by reducing the number of abortions and sending a message of support to the religious right with proposals that it will be “hard for most Americans to get worked up about.”

But make no mistake. There is no offer of compromise from the minority. Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), co-chair of the Congressional Pro-Life Caucus, is clear on this. “We’re trying to bring some scrutiny and light to the hideous practice of butchering children,” he said, using proposals whose passage would be “the beginning of a process” to end abortions. Prohibition is the goal. The fact that the anti-abortion forces are unlikely to get there, and it would not be a noble experiment if they did, hardly matters. That’s the advantage of moral certainty.