'Pro-Choicers' and the Fact of Life
"Our Bodies, Our Souls" by Naomi Wolf, in The New Republic (Oct. 16, 1995), 1220 19th St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036.
"Our Bodies, Our Souls" by Naomi Wolf, in The New Republic (Oct. 16, 1995), 1220 19th St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036.
"Our Bodies, Our Souls" by Naomi Wolf, in The New Republic (Oct. 16, 1995), 1220 19th St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036.
In a recent Atlantic Monthly essay, George McKenna, a political scientist at City College of New York, urged that foes of abortion take "an unequivocally pro-life" position that is also "effectively pro-choice": namely, recognize the legal status of abortion and "grudgingly tolerate" it but at the same time seek to restrict and discourage it (see "The Periodical Observer," WQ, Autumn '95, pp. 115-16). Now, from the other side of the barricades, Wolf, a noted feminist writer, argues that abortion rights advocates should abandon their euphemistic rhetoric and admit, to themselves and others, that "the death of a fetus is a real death," and that "this country's high rate of abortion--which ends more than a quarter of all pregnancies--can only be rightly understood as what Dr. Henry Foster was brave enough to call it: 'a failure.' " By clinging to the pretense that there is no life and no death involved in abortion, Wolf contends, the pro-choice movement forfeits the backing of "the millions of Americans who want to support abortion as a legal right but still need to condemn it as a moral iniquity." More important, she says, "choice" proponents "entangle our beliefs in a series of self-delusions, fibs, and evasions. And we risk becoming precisely what our critics charge us with being: callous, selfish, and casually destructive men and women who share a cheapened view of human life." Making an analogy to war, Wolf writes that abortion should remain legal and is sometimes necessary. "Only if we uphold abortion rights within a matrix of individual conscience, atonement, and responsibility," she says, "can we both correct the logical and ethical absurdity in our position-and consolidate the support of the center."