NARAL's choice to terminate their poll numbers

William Saletan’s piece on NARAL’s newly developed abortion polling language is insightful and thorough – worth your time to read. It’s also revealing, in some unintended ways, about the weaknesses of the abortion lobby and their overreliance on slippery language to sway a debate about something far more tangible than words.

Saletan starts by pointing out how stacked the deck is against abortion proponents.

“Only 22 percent of Americans say abortions should be "generally available." Another 26 percent say "regulation of abortion is necessary, although it should remain legal in many circumstances." That's a pro-choice total of just 48 percent, even when you phrase the second option to emphasize regulation. Thirty-nine percent say "abortion should be legal only in the most extreme cases," such as rape and incest, and 11 percent say all abortions should be illegal. That's 50 percent support for two hardcore pro-life positions.”

This just affirms what many have begun to suspect: the mood of the country is swinging dramatically towards the pro-life position. There are several possible reasons for this: the surge in evangelical Christianity, a growing distaste for what many see as unfettered liberalism and the results of a protracted, steady message by pro-life forces over the last several decades.

Abortion activists are understandably anxious about these numbers, but are hoping (as action groups tend to hope these days) that they can turn those numbers around by reframing the message. According to the article, if they poll using the phrase “We should promote a culture of freedom and responsibility by focusing on preventing unintended pregnancies and reducing the need for abortion through increasing access to family planning services, access to affordable birth control and by providing comprehensive age appropriate sex education in schools,” they get a 61 percent response in their favor.

Saletan goes on to point out the importance of the value words “freedom and responsibility,” calling them “plastic.” And he’s right: they can mean anything or nothing. Subsequently, the words become useless, about as representative as "4 out of 5 doctors agree..". Everyone, or at least the majority of Americans, wants to affirm freedom and responsibility, but when applied to abortion that could mean any number of things. NARAL’s new language gets people to accede to some generic values that everyone already agrees with. What it doesn’t do is get anyone to change their position on abortion.

One of the things that makes the abortion debate such a hot topic is that, unlike many issues, it’s not going to be solved by better language. Freedom and responsibility are great values to uphold, but neither affirmation is likely to change one’s view on the human dignity of a fetus. An abortion is either an individual choice to remove a hunk of one’s own cells or an unfortunate killing of a human being not yet detached from it’s mother. The words freedom and responsibility are hardly likely to change a significant number of attitudes about either position. Saletan points out the likelihood of NARAL blunting their new weapon fairly quickly in this passage:

“What is NARAL's version of responsibility? On the way out, I put the question to the organization's president, Nancy Keenan: What's the difference between making an abortion decision responsibly and making it irresponsibly? "Women make all of their decisions responsibly," she says. But if every decision is a responsible decision, then responsibility means nothing.”

And, one wonders, what about the women who decide not to support abortion? Are their decisions responsible as well? The statement is almost too ridiculous to talk about.

Saletan’s final point is the one that has probably been most responsible for declining support for uninhibited abortions. In this, he reveals his personal reasons for supporting abortion, making a fairly standard libertarian argument:

“I've always agreed with pro-choicers that the government is incompetent to regulate abortion. But I've never liked their aversion to moral judgments. If they'd just admit that abortion's legality doesn't make it right, or that some women take it too lightly, or that every abortion is tragic, I'd be so relieved. "Responsibility" gives me something to hold on to. It reassures me that the moral substance of life, which ought to take place in the personal and family spaces where government has no wisdom, really is taking place there—or at least that pro-choicers think it should.”

Not surprisingly, this is the pro-abortion argument I find myself most receptive to, but it’s one that NARAL will never be able to get behind. Admitting that abortion is a moral decision, and a tragic one at that, would establish a clear link between the procedure and the end of a human life, something that would very likely lead to a further slippage in the polls. For most people who aren’t ultra-strict libertarians, unrestricted access to abortion only makes sense if it’s a woman and her body making a decision with no more consequence than a haircut. Remind people that it’s “tragic,” or that NARAL’s vision of abortion on demand allows women to terminate their pregnancy out of flippant whim, and watch the poll numbers slide even more.