What If Abortion Lost Its Power as a Divisive Issue?

In my writing on reproductive ethics—here, in my book, and elsewhere—I've deliberately avoided writing too much about abortion and pro-life vs. pro-choice arguments. I think that traditional pro-life and pro-choice arguments have only limited utility when we're discussing the ethics of IVF, preimplantation genetic diagnosis, prenatal testing, and other topics related to reproductive technologies. I've observed that when people focus almost exclusively on traditional pro-life arguments (the sanctity of embryonic life) or traditional pro-choice arguments (reproductive freedom for women), they tend to discount or fail to recognize the many other ethical concerns with reproductive technology, and make oversimplified arguments for or against use of that technology. (I've written more about this observation here and here.)

But abortion is on my mind this morning because yesterday, for the second time in two months, a company I was working with decided they could no longer work with me because I do not hold traditional pro-life views. (You may recall the first time my being a pro-choice Christian was a problem.) This time, a web design firm that I've been conversing with for a couple of months about designing my author web site and migrating my blogs to WordPress decided they couldn't work with me. While their public information makes clear that they focus on building sites for Christian authors, nowhere in that information did they note that they focus on working with pro-life authors. Thirty or so minutes into a great phone conversation with the head of the company—a congenial conversation in which I was increasingly sure that this company was a great fit for what I needed, and in which we were down to talking details of where I send my first payment, the project timeline, and which of their designers I would work with—did he realize that I don't advocate a pro-life ethic in my work. He told me the company cannot work with me. So for the second time in as many months, I was left high and dry by the unexpressed expectation that "Christian" is synonymous with "pro-life."

Companies, like this web design firm and the magazine I used to work for, have every right to decide on their target audiences and niche markets, and to focus their energies on a pro-life audience. The problem is that neither of these companies made their expectation of a pro-life ethic clear up front, despite that ethic being so central that it determined whether or not they could work with me. A little more proactive transparency would be nice, along with recognition that devoted Christians can indeed be pro-choice.

These recent experiences have made me even more frustrated than I used to be about how divisive the abortion issue is, particularly in political and religious discourse. What would it take for us to move past this division? What would it take for abortion to lose its divisive power?

CNN writer David Frum answers that question in this article, in which he compares abortion to prohibition, which was an equally divisive issue for politicians and the culture at large in the early 20th century. Frum argues that prohibition lost its power as a defining cultural issue for three reasons:

1. When prohibition advocates eventually got their way, the legislation was a failure. Even supporters recognized it as such.
2. The problem prohibition was designed to address has dwindled. Americans don't drink nearly as much as they used to.
3. Finally, "drinking and non-drinking are no longer so intimately associated with other ethno-cultural divisions within American life. As alcohol ceased to be a cultural symbol, the appropriate regulation of alcohol ceased to be an ideological issue. When alcohol regulation flared up again in the 1980s, during the debate over stricter punishments for drunk driving, the debate never turned into a culture war because 'alcohol' was not code (as it had been a century before) for a dozen other identities and grievances."

That last point is of particular interest to me in its relevance to the abortion issue, because of how one's stance on abortion so often becomes code-speak for so much more, such whether you are a "real" Christian. Christians disagree about many, many other social and political issues, but abortion (along with homosexuality) more often becomes a litmus test of one's faith.

Frum argues that, even if abortion never gets a legislative trial as prohibition did, abortion could potentially lose its divisive power if the second and third circumstances come about. He notes that the number of abortions is already declining, and "we may expect that it will continue to decline as contraceptives improve and attitudes to out-of-wedlock birth become more accepting, and as younger generations increasingly reject abortion as an acceptable resolution of a pregnancy."

Frum concludes with this observation:

What about condition three? Alcohol became central to American politics at a time when Americans were arguing whether the country should be rural or urban, a farm economy or industrial, and whether Catholics could ever become good Americans. As those arguments lost their intensity, so did the alcohol issue. Abortion became central to modern politics at exactly the same time as Americans were arguing over sexuality generally, over the status of women and the rights of gays. 

I think it's a good guess that if we come to a new consensus about the status of women -- absorbing and digesting the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the feminist revolution of the 1970s into a new dispensation more comfortable with both women's equality to men and their differences from men -- disagreements over abortion will come to matter less. Such disagreements won't disappear, any more than we've seen the end of debates about whether bars should open on Sundays. But the disagreements won't matter so furiously much as they now seem to do.

This is one of the most useful, and hopeful, discussions of the abortion issue that I've read in a while. I look forward to a time when Christians can talk openly—and even (imagine!) work side by side with each other—even if we hold different views on abortion.

In a few weeks, my friend Amy Julia Becker will publish a series of blog posts in which a pro-choice Christian (me) and a pro-life Christian (one of my former colleagues at Christianity Today) will both explain why we hold the views we do, and respond to each other's questions. We hope to show that it's possible to hold passionate and dedicated views on abortion while also respecting and working with Christians who hold the opposite view. My co-writer is vehemently pro-life; she has spent time in a jail cell as a result of anti-abortion protesting. And yet she recognizes me as a sister in Christ, a friend, and a colleague. Her stalwart friendship and support over the past couple of months have embodied the love of God, and I am so pleased to be part of this blogging project with her and Amy Julia.

How would things change if abortion lost its power as a divisive issue? First of all, maybe I could stop writing blog posts about people rejecting my work because I don't subscribe to a narrow expectation of what real Christians believe. But more important, maybe our political and religious discourse would soften a bit, maybe Christian unity could move a few baby steps closer to reality. Wouldn't that be something.