A few years ago, quite by accident, I discovered an important piece of common ground. Something I wrote in a conservative think-tank journal was picked up and quoted widely. I had written: "There is a tremendous sadness and loneliness in the cry ‘A woman’s right to choose.’ No one wants an abortion as she wants an ice-cream cone or a Porsche. She wants an abortion as an animal, caught in a trap, wants to gnaw off its own leg."
What surprised me was where it appeared: I started getting clips in the mail from friends, showing the quote featured in pro-choice publications. I realized I had stumbled across one of those points of agreement: We all know that no one leaves the abortion clinic skipping. This made me think that there was common ground, that instead of marching against each other, maybe we could envision a world without abortion, a world we could reach by marching together.
. . .
In the process we have contributed to what I think is a false concept—an unnatural and even bizarre concept—that women and their unborn children are mortal enemies. We have contributed to the idea that they’ve got to duke it out, it’s going to be a fight to the finish. Either the woman is going to lose control of her life, or the child is going to lose its life.
It occurred to me that there’s something wrong with this picture. When we presume this degree of conflict between women and their own children, we’re locating the conflict in the wrong place. Women and their own children are not naturally mortal enemies, and the problem is not located inside women’s bodies . . .
You'll want to read the rest.
UPDATE: And while you're at it, read this discussion of the central difficulty in occupying common ground. It's a five- or six-part series, and you'll want to read them all, but the post I've linked to does a masterful job of dismantling a lot of the mythology which passes for pro-choice talking points, and of pointing out that, at the end of the day, there's a limit to what you can do in cooperation with someone who operates on a set of assumptions utterly antithetical to your own.
2 comments:
Good articles. This is another one on "common ground" approaches, based on a speech Hillary Clinton gave to a pro-choice audience. It contains some pretty surprising statements given her past reputation as pro-abortion.
http://www.slate.com/id/2112712/
Thanks, Sarah. As a friend pointed out to me, and the Common Room article underscores, "common ground" is maybe a misnomer when one side really doesn't want fewer abortions; or in any event doesn't want abortions to be harder to obtain; or also isn't willing to concede that "more sex education/birth control" isn't really an answer, perpetuating as these things do the idea that pregnancy is an unnatural, not a natural, consequence of sex.
As another commenter on this blog has said, it's telling that the stereotypical pro-choice line is, "I personally would not have an abortion, but I defend another woman's right to do so." So . . . if abortion is something you wouldn't consider for yourself, under any circumstances, why *would* you consider it an option for anyone?
This maybe is where there is some possibility of common ground, if you could ever get another person to admit that yes, what they say they want for women is, truly, something really, really bad, so bad that they would never subject themselves to it. But that seems like an epiphany one has to experience personally, rather than a persuasive talking point.
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