By Russell Shaw
As the pro-life movement contemplates four decades of
legalized abortion in the United States and asks itself what really needs doing
to halt this hideous scandal, pro-lifers should consider adding a new word to their
vocabulary: ambivalence.
According to the dictionary, ambivalence is the state of
having mutually conflicting emotions or thoughts about something. And where
abortion is concerned, that obviously is how things stand with a substantial
number of Americans. They don't like abortion, but they want it to be legally
available.
The 2013 March for Life in the nation’s capital will be Jan.
25 instead of Jan. 22, the actual date of the Supreme Court's 1973 abortion
decision. Ironically, the switch was necessary to avoid conflict with President
Barack Obama's inauguration. As usual, the marchers will be signaling their
determination to keep up the fight.
Two fights
But which fight is that? In fact, there are two fights that
need to be fought, and the less obvious is also the more important of the two.
One is the ongoing battle in the arena of law and public
policy. For the next four years, the re-election of the most overtly
pro-abortion president America has ever had reduces the pro-life agenda at the
federal level to trying to prevent bad things from happening — no easy task,
given Obama's views on the issue. Meantime, if there are to be any new
initiatives restricting abortion, they will have to come from the states.
But underlying this struggle is — or should be — a
more deep-seated one: the battle for minds and hearts. Here, the biggest enemy
is the ambivalence of a dismaying segment of the public in regard to abortion.
Consider the evidence of the polls. A majority of Americans
describe themselves as pro-life — that is, opposed to abortion. But last Nov. 6
the exit polls told a different story. Fifty-nine percent of voters said
abortion should be legal in most cases or all, against 36 percent who said it
should be illegal.
A little simple math makes it clear that a goodly number of
those putatively pro-life abortion opponents also support keeping abortion
legal — if not for themselves, then for those who may want it. Ambivalent, you
might say.
Sending the message
In a way, of course, this intellectual confusion merely
reflects our less than perfect human nature. Abortion is scarcely the only
issue where it's operative. Americans routinely say, for example, that they
want lower taxes, less intrusive government and more government-provided
benefits and services. Crazy? Sure. That's how people are.
Still, this ambivalence about abortion extends beyond
confusion to the point of perversity. Once you say that abortion is wrong,
after all, you can hardly avoid asking why. But the answer is self-evident: abortion's
wrongness resides in its violation of a fundamental human good, the good of
human life.
In that case, though, it makes no sense to say, as some in
effect do, that abortion is wrong for me but right for you (or vice versa). If
it's wrong for one of us, then it's wrong for both of us, and wrong also for
everybody else. For the obligation to respect and nurture a fundamental human
good like life is a universal duty arising from our common humanity.
In our present era of toxic non-judgmentalism, that message
goes unheard and unheeded by many Americans. Since the election, there's been
much talk about reassessment. Here's hoping that the good people out there
marching on Jan. 25 will give thought, among other things, to how to get the
message across.
Russell Shaw is an OSV contributing editor.
