aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Thursday, May 26, 2005

I’m pro-abortion

Howard Dean’s comment Sunday seemed reasonable enough to me:

I don’t know anybody who thinks abortion is a good thing. I don’t know anybody in either party who is pro-abortion. The issue is not whether we think abortion is a good thing. The issue is whether a woman has a right to make up her own mind about her health care.

Nathan Newman thinks it’s asinine:

One reason progressives are not as strong on the abortion issue is that we so rarely hear abortion defended on its merits. Instead, we have the religious right denouncing it as the equivalent of murder and slavery, and progressives essentially saying “that may be, but it’s really none of your business if people are committing murder and slavery, now is it?”

If that’s the debate, it would be no surprise that the rightwing would win over time.

Nathan Newman regularly has this effect on me. I think I’m going to disagree but his arguments win me over:

Back in 1968, only 15% of the population supported liberalizing abortion laws. By 1972, 64% supported increased access to abortion for women.
This change didn’t happen because of “anti-busybody” arguments but because feminists of both sexes stood up and declared that abortion—however sad an option when used—was necessary to improve the quality of life and equality of women in our society...Another part of the pro-abortion rhetoric was the slogan “every child a wanted child”, acknowledging the fact that great harm is done when parents raise children they don’t want, often because they know the stresses of their life make raising children untenable.

Pro-choice progressives should be embracing Steve Levitt’s arguments in his Freakonomics book that legalization of abortion led to drops in crime rates a generation later, since this reflects the fact that wanted children are less likely to be abused and less likely to end up as criminals when they grow up...Most abortion rights activists have not been libertarians who thought individual choices have no effect on broader society, but people who thought the availability of abortion causes profound and needed changes in that broader society: increasing women’s ability to participate equally in the workplace, changing power relations between men and women within the family, and encouraging family planning so that children were wanted and not abused.

Nathan was responding to this post by Kevin Drum:

Dean is right: if we make abortion and related cultural hot buttons into “anti-busybody” issues, they’re a lot more appealing to a lot more people.

Kevin answers Nathan today:

I still think that Howard Dean’s “anti-busybody” approach to the issue is a good one for a couple of reasons. First, not everyone agrees with me that abortion is morally neutral, but they might nonetheless agree that basic considerations of privacy and personal choice mean that people should be allowed to make their own moral choices in this matter without government interference. Second, it provides an appealing umbrella approach to a lot of social issues, which I think is better than having a hodgepodge of rationales aimed at a bunch of unrelated special interests.

On balance, I’m leaning toward Nathan. I want affirmative reasoned liberal arguments that directly address the other side.