Kevin Collins: Trying to find the middle on abortion

Can I be both pro-choice and pro-life?

As you may have heard, there will be a women's rights demonstration in Washington this Sunday. What you may not know is that while it was at one point called the March for Choice, its organizers have since renamed it the March for Women's Lives. This name change poses exactly the above question: Are the pro-choice and pro-life philosophies mutually exclusive?

This dilemma is not new; rather, it has troubled many believers in reproductive freedom ever since our society was first forced to ask how Thomas Jefferson's declaration of inalienable rights to both life and liberty applied to pregnancy.

As a liberal Catholic, I feel deeply divided over the question of abortion, and I know many others marching with me on Sunday, not to mention the nation as a whole, feel the same way. As Nicholas Kristof wrote recently, "A fetus seems much more than a lump of tissue but considerably less than a human being." As such, abortions are the most heartbreaking of medical procedures, and furthermore bear significant risks of physical and mental trauma for women. These facts and emotions leave many of us on the left feeling profoundly ambivalent.

Kristof's column aside, the mainstream debate rarely reflects such qualms, for while the bulk of pro-choice voters may be more moderate, the pro-choice position is usually articulated by the most ardent defenders of abortion rights. Given the nature of this debate, it is perhaps not surprising that the most vocal advocates for each side express their positions in the most strident terms. Yet such arguments often result in a public debate that is little more than opposing sets of myths that have only a loose correlation with reality.

The pro-life myth is that the best and indeed only way to reduce the prevalence of abortion is to outlaw it. The pro-choice myth is that any step toward aiding unborn children -- even wanted ones -- will send America sliding inexorably down the slippery slope of a reproductive police state. Neither is true, and both encourage a deficit of attention, funding and political capital devoted to moderate policies on which both sides should agree.

Such moderate measures could do great good. For example, America must make raising a child a plausible option for poor women facing pregnancy. We ought to make pre-natal health care accessible and undo recent welfare "reform" efforts that have slashed funds for day care and food stamps. Similarly, we have little excuse for the sad state of our social service agencies and their inability to match children with would-be adoptive parents. That so many families are forced to go overseas to find children is a mark against our system. Pro-life and pro-choice lobbies alike should give adoption the support it deserves.

While the left may pay inadequate attention to these issues on Capitol Hill, the pro-choice movement has still been more willing to work toward consensus than have the pro-lifers. For example, Dianne Feinstein's failed amendment to the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, which would have criminalized harm to a fetus without giving it explicit rights, was an effort to accomplish good in a way that could have suited both sides. However, the right voted it down, trying instead to surreptitiously outlaw abortion.

Distorting otherwise good laws that protect both mothers and children to extend government control over a woman's body is as crass as it is deceitful. It is, however, typical of a pro-life movement that is too often more interested in abolishing reproductive choice than it is in aiding women and children.

In 1997 pro-choice advocate Tom Daschle proposed a bill that would have greatly restricted third trimester abortions. While conservative stalwarts like William Bennett praised the compromise bill, it was killed by pro-lifers who preferred the semantic quicksand of "partial birth" legislation. Most hypocritical, however, are conservative pro-lifers who oppose comprehensive sex ed and enact laws to make contraceptives more difficult to obtain -- the exact opposite of policies that in the 1990s reduced the number of both unwed pregnancies and abortions.

So can I be both pro-life and pro-choice? Yes, I can, because morality may ask when life starts, but the question for law is when rights begin. Because I can agree that each abortion is traumatic and tragic without thinking each should be criminal. Because my ideal (if utopian) world is one in which abortion is safe, legal and nonexistent. Because the truly pro-choice among us support contraception, adoption and motherhood in addition to the right to choose. Because the policies advanced by the left and spurned by the right are those that can most effectively reduce abortion in America. In short, because I can favor abortion rights while not favoring abortion itself.

So when I march this weekend, I will be demonstrating my support not just for these rights, but for reproductive choice in its fullest sense. And when we march a million strong for women's lives, just maybe the left and right will hear our call for a consensus. Only then, when we protect both life and liberty, will we fulfill the great promise and potential of Jefferson's lofty ideals.

Kevin Collins is a sophomore political science major from Milwaukee, Wis. ...And Justice For All appears on Mondays.

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