Not Dead Yet
The pro-life movement is winning.
RAMESH PONNURU
Mr. Ponnuru is National Review's articles editor.
NOBODY told the losers outside the clinics, but the abortion wars are over. The Republican party is in danger of becoming "operationally pro-choice," laments pro-life journalist Fred Barnes. Jim Pinkerton, a pro-choice Republican who writes often on the baleful influence of social conservatives on his party, is positively gleeful that the GOP has finally taken his advice and become "functionally pro-choice."
Both point to the presidential primary race as evidence. George W. Bush has declared that a sweeping ban on abortions is unattainable. Elizabeth Dole says that even talking about a ban would merely extend a "dead-end debate." John McCain wants to revise the party platform to make it clear "to young women in this country who may have a disagreement with us on the issue of abortion" that "there's room for all of us in our party." John Kasich suggests that pro-life Republicans "lower the volume" on the debate over abortion. The "underlying message," according to Christopher Caldwell, is that these are pro-lifers "you can vote for without fear that your abortion rights will be curtailed." Says the columnist Charles Krauthammer, "The great abortion debate is over."
Actually, Krauthammer wrote that back in 1992. Since then, pro-lifers have added about three dozen congressmen, a dozen senators, and four governors to their ranks; they have twice passed in Congress a bill banning some abortions and come close to overriding the president's vetoes of it; they have moved the debate over abortion to ground more favorable to them; and they have converted the Jane Roe of Roe v. Wade to their cause. So are the latest obituaries for the pro-life movement any more accurate?
Krauthammer read too much into the failure of Missouri attorney general William Webster -- who had argued a high-profile abortion case before the Supreme Court -- to win the 1992 gubernatorial race. In fact, Webster's defeat had less to do with abortion (an issue he ran away from) than with scandal: He would be sentenced to jail within a year of the election. But Krauthammer's deeper mistake is a common assumption: that a pro-life stance must be, except in a few places, a political liability.
Almost the entire national press corps believes this. So do most Republican officials and consultants, not to mention their Democratic counterparts. As a result, many sincerely pro-life Republicans are defensive about abortion. Even Pat Buchanan has occasionally conceded the point, arguing that protecting the unborn is worth losing some votes. That abortion is a losing issue is the premise of most of the talk about whether the primaries pull the GOP's presidential nominee too far to the right to win a general election. Abortion is also frequently cited as a major cause of the "gender gap" -- the tendency of women to vote more than men for Democrats.
Ralph Reed, the political consultant formerly affiliated with the Christian Coalition, points out the flaw in the dominant view that being pro-life loses votes: "There's not a scintilla of evidence to support that position." He's not exaggerating. Yes, Americans oppose a constitutional amendment and support Roe, in some polls by substantial majorities. And yes, more Americans regard themselves as "pro-choice" than "pro-life" -- though that margin has been shrinking and is now statistically insignificant in some polls. But the picture changes when people are asked to describe their views in greater detail.
POLL POSITIONS
Men, contrary to conventional wisdom, have been found again and again to be somewhat more likely than women to support legal abortion (though marital status and church attendance are both better predictors than gender of attitudes toward abortion). Including men, about half the population would ban abortion with an exception for rape, incest, fetal deformity, or to save the life of the mother -- which would mean a ban on 95 percent of abortions.
Another quarter of the population would ban abortions after the first trimester. Only about 10 percent agree with abortion-rights groups that abortions should be allowed at any stage of pregnancy. And while there has been some movement in these numbers over the last few years -- support for abortion on demand has actually been getting slightly smaller -- a restrictionist majority has existed throughout the entire period since Roe. For ten years, CBS/New York Times polls have found that about 55 percent of the population wants abortion either "illegal" or "under stricter limits than it is now" rather than "generally available." There's a reason abortion-rights groups fight so hard to keep the issue in the courts: They'd lose a lot of ground in a democratic debate.
So why the support for Roe? Why have more Americans called themselves "pro-choice" than "pro-life" for most of this period? Public ignorance may play a role. Americans probably overestimate the percentage of abortions that result from pregnancies begun in rape or incest. Even highly educated people misunderstand Roe, believing that it allows increasingly severe restrictions as pregnancies progress. In fact, Roe and its companion case, Doe v. Bolton, make it impossible to restrict abortion at any stage of pregnancy if a woman's emotional "well-being" or family life could be said to be threatened.
Without an appreciation of Roe's radicalism, an amendment to overturn it is what looks radical.
In addition, a lot of people who hold pro-life views are probably too uncomfortable with and distrustful of the pro-life movement's perceived militancy to call themselves pro-life. Almost nobody wants to be on the side of snipers and bombers, or even associated with them. In First Things last November, David Andrusko cited two measures of the political impact of violence against abortionists and abortion clinics: "Around the time of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Roe, the Associated Press sent out a twelve-item summary of major abortion events that have taken place since 1973. Half of these concerned instances of violence. In [a 1998 CBS/New York Times poll], 44 percent of the respondents said they considered 'anti-abortion activists' in their states 'extremists.' By contrast, 66 percent considered 'abortion rights advocates' in their states 'reasonable.' "
COUNTING THE VOTES THAT COUNT
A Los Angeles Times poll gave Dole an even bigger margin among women who voted on abortion. George Bush, too, benefited from votes cast on the abortion issue in both 1988 and 1992 (according to Voter Research and Surveys). In 1994, the pro-life advantage was 2 to 1. When pollsters ask voters how they would react if the GOP dropped the abortion issue, more say they would be less likely to support the party than say they would be more likely. The political intensity is on the pro-life side.
This is true almost everywhere. According to a CNN poll, Illinois pro-lifer Peter Fitzgerald won 55-41 among single-issue abortion voters in his Senate race last fall. In liberal New York, the margin for Sen. Al D'Amato -- who was terrified of the abortion issue but nominally pro-life -- was slightly bigger (58-42). Even in California, Republican gubernatorial candidate Dan Lungren, who lost big, had a tiny edge among voters who cast their votes on abortion.
A pro-choice partisan might respond that the hard evidence doesn't take account of the image of the anti-abortion candidate: Voters who may not think about abortion specifically may consider the candidate intolerant or insensitive or extreme. There is some truth to this, especially given the media's treatment of pro-lifers. But it is also true that being pro-life is associated with conservatism, a positive image in most places. The crucial blow to Republicans' image resulted from their campaign to curb the growth of Medicare in 1995, which wasn't a social issue or even a particularly conservative one. Finally, an image problem can at least theoretically be solved without a shift in position -- for instance, through a modulation of rhetoric.
The gender gap, meanwhile, afflicts pro-choice Republicans as well as pro-life ones. New Jersey governor Christine Whitman, an ardent proponent of abortion rights whom the national media still seem to regard as the hope for the future of the party, has never won the women's vote. Pro-choicer William Weld had a 21-point gender gap when he ran for the Senate from Massachusetts in 1996. And since women tend to be more liberal than men on guns, defense, and the safety net, there are issues other than abortion that can explain the gap. "The gender gap has many complex causes," says poll analyst Karlyn Bowman. "Abortion is not one of them."
If being pro-life is a major liability, you couldn't tell it from the record of pro-life candidates in the '90s. In 1994, pro-lifers gained 48 House seats and not a single pro-life incumbent of either party was defeated by a pro-choicer. In 1996, pro-lifers picked up seats in the Senate and lost fewer seats in the House than the Republicans did; several pro-choice Republicans lost high-profile races. The 1998 election went badly for pro-lifers. But the election went badly for pro-choice Republicans too, and the pro-life defeats were pretty clearly a result of issues other than abortion. In Alabama and South Carolina, for instance, voters favored Democratic candidates for governor who promised to create state lotteries to raise money for schools. (A neat trick: exploiting public ignorance to promote public education.)
And pro-lifers had a better election than the Republicans they supposedly hurt. Republicans ended the elections with fewer governors than before, pro-lifers with more. Republicans lost five seats in the House, pro-lifers three -- partly because Democrats were actively recruiting pro-life candidates to run in pro-life districts.
HEAR NO EVIL
But there is a real reason for Republican caution. The central fact about the public's thinking on abortion is that most people don't like to think about it. In the Wirthlin poll of the 1996 election, abortion was one of the top two issues for only 12 percent of voters. The aversion to the issue explains some of the weird dissonances in the polling. Not thinking about the issue is the way a majority of the public can say that abortion is "murder" but not feel obliged to do anything about it. Similarly, the widespread ignorance of basic facts about abortion after more than a quarter-century of strife is a testament not only to the dishonesty of academic, legal, and journalistic elites but also to the public's refusal to know.
Voters don't want to hear about abortion. It's that discomfort that forces abortion-rights groups to run ad campaigns that praise "choice" without mentioning what choice they're talking about. In the two most prominent endorsements of legal abortion in the 1996 campaign -- Colin Powell's at the Republican convention and Al Gore's at the Democratic one -- the word "abortion" was not uttered. Abortion has become the right that dare not speak its name.
If the public resents being forced to think about abortion, this attitude must in general benefit the status quo: legal abortion without government funding. A political crusade against abortion faces an uphill battle against both this silent resentment and the screaming opposition of the abortion movement. This brings us to Jeff Bell's paradox: that pro-lifers get more votes but less talk from Republicans.
What Bell is describing is actually the normal trajectory of a wedge issue in a two-party system. Declamations against abortion -- and, to a lesser extent, homosexuality -- attracted millions of evangelical and Catholic voters to the GOP in the '70s and '80s. Says Ralph Reed: "We would certainly be a minority party if we were not a pro-life party. There's no doubt about that." But eventually new constituencies get absorbed into a party, and opponents get organized. The religious-conservative movement may have reached this point with the emergence of a powerful coalition of vice including the clinics, the gambling industry, the pornographers, and Hollywood. The cause may continue to advance, but (as Kasich would have it) the volume of the debate goes down. The same process took place as the Democrats absorbed black voters.
Now that pro-lifers have been absorbed into the Republican party, it usually makes sense for a pro-life candidate to narrowcast his message to them through direct mail and the like. Most of the pro-lifers who vote on the issue know or will take the time to learn the candidates' positions anyway, and the candidate doesn't get too identified with the issue by everyone else.
THE CASE FOR CONFIDENCE
Most Republicans don't make Neumann's mistake. Instead, misled by their consultants' advice and uncomfortable talking about abortion, perhaps even personally pro-choice themselves, they twist and turn to avoid the issue. They say that some of their best friends are pro-choice, or that there are a lot of other issues, or that they can't do much anyway. None of this, of course, makes the issue go away; indeed it invites further questions. And it does hurt candidates, by calling their characters into question. A candidate doesn't need to lead with abortion, but he should be able to stand his ground when challenged.
It's not clear yet whether the Republican presidential candidates will do that. But it's also unclear whether, as most pundits are saying, Gov. Bush and the others are backing off abortion because they think the country is pro-choice. It's possible that Bush, at least, is trying to signal the public, not that he is just kidding about being pro-life, but that he is not fanatical about it -- and not intent on an overnight revolution. Most pro-lifers, reasonably, are holding their fire in the hope that Bush is serious about working toward the goal of eventually giving full legal protection to the unborn and appointing Justices who will overturn Roe.
If the Republican platform changes, meanwhile, it will not be because of pressure from pro-choicers and nervous party officials. That pressure makes change less likely, since pro-lifers will not accept a symbolic defeat. No, if the platform changes it will be because pro-lifers have concluded that a change will make it easier to advance the cause. Pro-lifers have for years been coming to the conclusion that they should shift their short-term focus away from a Human Life Amendment. They haven't forced a vote on it since 1983. And they started making partial-birth abortion an issue long before any of the current presidential candidates came knocking. The beauty of that issue has been to take the debate down from grand abstractions about "choice" to the concrete reality of what is being chosen -- to shift public attention from the extremism of pro-lifers to the unjustifiable extremism of pro-choicers.
The new strategy has shifted public opinion. Gallup had 48 percent of people calling themselves pro-life in 1998, up from 33 percent three years before. Still, there are pro-lifers who accept the myth that their position is politically suicidal. So they hunker down, afraid that any attempt at tactical flexibility will make them lose their tenuous grip on the Republican party and determined to win through sheer willpower. Instead of exerting quiet, behind-the-scenes pressure, they force candidates to pledge not to consider a pro-choice running mate -- and thus to look intolerant to the public. They should be more confident.
The abortion wars aren't over yet.
A poll released earlier this year by the Center for Gender Equity, a feminist group, found that 53 percent of American women favor prohibiting abortion either altogether or with exceptions for rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother. A lot of people were shocked by this finding. They shouldn't have been. It's consistent with polls pro-life groups have been doing for years; a Christian Coalition poll taken the same week had an identical result.
The opinion of the public, in any case, is not as electorally important as the opinion of that subset of the public willing to vote on the issue. And here the pro-life advantage is unequivocal: Far more pro-lifers than pro-choicers vote on abortion. An exit poll by Richard Wirthlin found that in 1996, voters for whom abortion was one of the top two issues went 45 percent for Bob Dole and 35 percent for Bill Clinton.
Given all this evidence, the persistence of the notion that the pro-life cause is crippling the GOP is a little puzzling. The media contribute to it. Covering abortion neutrally would be difficult in the best of circumstances -- should an anti-abortion law be described as "restrictive" or "protective"? -- but journalists are almost unanimously for abortion rights. The Republican party's big donors, with whom GOP officials spend a lot of time, are mostly pro-choice. Jeff Bell, a social-conservative activist who is now managing Gary Bauer's presidential campaign, complains that even as Republicans become more unanimously pro-life -- nobody in the presidential field openly avows abortion rights -- they are talking about the issue less and less.
Mark Neumann took a different tack in his 1998 campaign to oust Wisconsin Democrat Russ Feingold from the Senate, running a barrage of TV ads on partial-birth abortion. Pro-lifers argue that he wouldn't have come as close as he did to winning without the ads, pro-choicers that they cost him the election. They both have a point. Neumann mobilized pro-lifers: He cleaned up, 82-17 percent, among the 20 percent of voters who cited abortion as the reason for their vote. That showing helped pro-life House candidates Paul Ryan and Mark Green win their races. But it didn't push Neumann over the top because his ad buy passed the point of diminishing returns. He should have started talking about something else.
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