"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."