Cover
story
Talk
fosters pro-life, pro-choice civility
By MARGOT PATTERSON
It’s been one of the most contentious issues in American
politics. Certainly one of the most divisive. Women involved in studying or
mediating the abortion debate say the subject of abortion cuts so deep because
it’s a personal issue, not an abstract one, and touches on deeply held
beliefs.
Those involved in promoting dialogue, rather than debate about
abortion, talk about the necessity for abortion-rights foes and advocates to
jettison rhetoric in order to talk with, not past, each other. Mediators and
scholars say the search for common ground means recovering civility in public
life. It also involves coming to understand the profoundly different worldviews
that divide pro-choice and pro-life advocates.
Laura Chasin is director of the Public Conversations Project in
Watertown, Mass. Founded in 1989, the Public Conversations Project adapts the
tools of family systems therapy to divisive public issues. For five and a half
years, Chasin facilitated a secret dialogue between six pro-life and pro-choice
leaders in Boston. The dialogue began in 1994 after an abortion foe went on a
shooting spree and killed two women at two abortion clinics and wounded several
more.
Being involved in these and other dialogues about abortion, Chasin
said she came to realize that the abortion conflict is a reflection of the very
different worldviews that pro-life and pro-choice supporters have.
“One of the things I learned from many, many dialogues --
I’ve probably listened to over 200 people talk about these issues -- is
that there is a whole spectrum of views within each side,” said Chasin.
“My current understanding is that for many people the differences involve
incompatible ideas about what truth is and how you discern it, different ideas
of what responsibility is and how you enact it, and different ways of
expressing caring and respect for other people.”
At the end of the five and a half years of secret conversations,
the six leaders wrote an article in The Boston Globe about their
experience of dialogue. None of the women had changed their mind about
abortion; they had, however, achieved a genuine and heartfelt respect and
affection for each other.
At one point, a pro-life leader in Virginia made it known that he
was planning to come to Boston to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the
murders in the abortion clinics, which he called a “righteous deed.”
Pro-life leaders involved in the dialogue told him that because of his
endorsement of violence, his presence would not be welcome. They also alerted
the head of Planned Parenthood, one of the pro-choice women engaged in the
dialogue, of his impending visit. In the end the Virginia pro-life advocate
chose not to come.
Growing trust
“A growing trust opened a ‘hot line’ channel of
reliable communication between us,” the women wrote in the article they
coauthored. Yet they acknowledged that deep differences remained among them.
Even in writing the article that appeared in the Globe, they came to an
impasse when the pro-lifers wanted to mention the Declaration of Independence
as proof that the right to life is inalienable and self-evident and the
pro-choice advocates viewed that as expropriating a cherished national text
that they saw as supporting freedom of choice.
“We saw that our differences on abortion reflect two
worldviews that are irreconcilable,” the women wrote.
Chasin, whose Public Conversations Project has gone on to
facilitate other debates on the environment, sexual orientation and religion,
social class, and now Islam, said there is a widespread misunderstanding about
what common ground means. “What we don’t understand as a culture or
what we seem to have lost is that we are more than our opinions on a single
public issue,” Chasin said. “It’s possible for me as a
pro-choice leader or me as a pro-life leader to passionately disagree with you
about abortion and also care for you and treat you in a respectful way. Common
ground is not a new position. It’s a relationship.”
In the case of the women in Boston, Chasin said their shared
commitment was to de-escalate what was then a tense climate in Boston and
prevent another shooting. As they got to know each, they stopped painting the
other side with demonic brushes in their public statements, Chasin said. Even
some members of the media noticed the change in the language each side used to
describe the other, though they didn’t know the reason for it.
The rise of single-issue politics has contributed to the decline
of civility and the fragmentation of American politics, said Chasin, who termed
abortion “a very wasteful conflict.”
“The conflict has pitted a number of very compassionate and
principled people, mostly women, against themselves in a way that has been very
costly. The rhetoric of this polarization also has contributed to the pollution
of the public square,” Chasin said.
Others who have studied or written about abortion agree that the
debate it stirs frequently reflects other issues. Christine Gudorf, a professor
of religious studies at Florida International University and author of
Body, Sex, and Pleasure: Reconstructing Christian Sexual Ethics,
argues that underlying the abortion debate is a debate about the role and
nature of women. Pro-choice women are adamant that the new possibilities for
women cannot be foreclosed; pro-life women tend to be married homemakers who
believe that they are increasingly viewed as anachronisms and that defending
the innocent is their role. “Both sides in effect see the role of women as
at stake in this position,” said Gudorf, who described herself as
sympathetic to both positions.
M. Cathleen Kaveny, a professor of law and theology at Notre Dame
University, offered a somewhat similar perspective. “Part of what’s
at stake for a lot of pro-life groups is returning to a whole matrix of a way
of understanding family life and structuring family values,” Kaveny
said.
Profound differences
Chasin called the differences between supporters of abortion
rights and opponents “profound” and said they go far beyond the role
and nature of women. “That’s one of the stereotypes that pro-choice
women have about pro-life women -- that they’re conventional and
don’t have a mind of their own. Pro-life women have a reciprocal
stereotype that pro-choice women are self-absorbed and don’t care about
children,” Chasin said.
Mary Jacksteit worked for seven years for Search for Common
Ground, a nonprofit organization that seeks constructive approaches to
conflict. In 1992 Jacksteit began conducting a series of dialogues about
abortion in Buffalo, N.Y., where the presence of Operation Life had polarized
the city. Eventually, Search for Common Ground would hold workshops in 20
different cities.
Jacktseit said the longer she worked on the abortion dialogue the
more she became convinced that people on both sides have important truths that
the other side does not understand in the same way.
“The longer I did it, the more seriously I took both
sides,” Jacksteit said. “Their passion about the preciousness of life
on the pro-life side, and among the pro-choice people the preciousness of
freedom and not being subjected to a humiliating kind of control. There’s
a strong sense among a lot of pro-choice people about human dignity.”
Among some pro-life supporters, there can be a corresponding sense
that abortion deprives a woman of dignity, Jacksteit said. “Certainly, the
feminist pro-life people will say that they believe that abortion destroys
women’s dignity, that abortion, as I’ve heard this viewpoint
expressed, is a societal thing, something that men force on women to make it
convenient for them and to conform to society,” Jacksteit said.
“Others would say you can’t look at women’s dignity apart
from the unborn, and if you’re balancing that life against a fetus, that
life can’t be cancelled out and that is the preeminent human value. They
bring the unborn human life into the whole balance and talk about the dignity
of that life.”
Jacksteit said the number of people who have stayed passionate and
involved with the abortion issue has shrunk dramatically. “Vast parts of
the public who were at one time easily mobilized into either movement have
gotten tired of it and walked away from it,” she said.
Public ambivalent about abortion
Kristin Luker, a professor of law and sociology at the University
of California at Berkeley, agrees. Luker said opinion polls also show that most
Americans today are somewhere in the middle when it comes to abortion.
“They want women to have the abortions they need but not necessarily the
abortions they want. They’re not comfortable with abortion being
completely illegal or completely legal anytime and anywhere, and they
don’t trust the states to craft a policy that will be in the middle
ground,” Luker said.
In her book, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood, Luker
investigated the views of pro-choice and pro-life activists. Luker asked
activists when was the first time they heard of abortion and what they thought
it meant. By mid-adolescence, she said individuals had an opinion on abortion,
and it didn’t track across religion. There were women raised in Catholic
families who had strong pro-choice views. There were people who were atheists
or agnostics who found abortion morally wrong. What accounts for why people
have the values they do is unknown, she said.
“What I discovered in my interviews is that people live their
lives according to these values. If you took two 15-year-olds who would look
pretty identical in terms of what social scientists look at -- socioeconomic
factors, size of family, et cetera -- they would come to different
decisions,” Luker said. By age 45, she added, those two individuals would
look very different. A woman with pro-life values would value getting married,
would marry earlier on average, would tend to have a large family, and would
tend to re-engage in her religion or perhaps join a more conservative religion
because she saw that religion as a congruent with her values. She would tend
not to invest in higher education after college. In contrast, a pro-choice
woman would defer marriage, would marry a highly educated man, and if she had
an unintended pregnancy would be likely to abort it. By age 45, pro-choice
women are often upper-middle-class women or above; pro-life women are apt to be
lower middle class.
Luker described pro-life people as often having a rather concrete
morality that they think is valid across time and space and is usually centered
on a divine being. “The pro-life people are heir to a long tradition of
thinking about a morality in a kind of rule-based way,” Luker said.
“The pro-choice people are heirs to the Enlightenment and are situational
ethicists. The pro-choice clergy believe that God has given humans the faculty
of reason and it’s the obligation of individuals to use that reason to
make moral decisions for themselves.”
Since publishing her book in 1984, Luker has gone on to other
controversial topics: teenage contraception and sex education controversies.
Today, Luker said it’s her impression that abortion is a single issue that
partisans still care deeply about but is not very salient to the American
public as a whole. Reflecting on her research, Luker said the passion abortion
aroused among activists often obscured rather than highlighted some of the
significance it involved.
“I thought all the important questions were getting lost in
the abortion debate. It was like two kids on the street yelling baby
killer,” Luker said. “I thought the pro-life people were raising very
interesting questions about who is to be included in the human community, an
issue much more pressing these days than 20 years ago, and they were worried
about the limits of human reasoning. I also thought they were a little more
sophisticated about evil, though it may be that the pro-choice people just
didn’t share their thoughts about this. They had on the whole a more
optimistic view about both technology and human reason; if we just sat down and
thought about this, we could resolve our problems. They had very different
views of suffering. The pro-life people saw suffering as a necessary part of
human life and just took for granted that some suffering was built into life
whereas the pro-choice people saw suffering as unnecessary.”
Equal to men
Luker said both groups were emphatic that women were equal to men,
but the pro-life group believed women were different from men. Luker said
pro-life supporters tend to suffer more from guilt; pro-choice activists from
anxiety.
What was particularly interesting in her research, Luker said, was
her discovery that the moral response to abortion occurs very early.
“What makes a nice Catholic girl say the Catholic church is
not a friend of mine and another casually raised in another religion convert to
Catholicism because she found Catholicism as not only morally rigorous but
supportive of what she saw as a proper way of life? I’m struck by how
early it is. Within the first time or two they heard of abortion, either a girl
went ‘Yuck, it’s wrong,’ or ‘Oh my gosh, why don’t all
women have access to that?’ ”
Chasin said her experience in Boston with pro-choice and pro-life
leaders shows efforts to establish some kind of relationship between partisans
on both sides of an issue can pay dividends. Advocacy groups generally organize
by demonizing opponents and exaggerating differences. Perhaps because of this,
at the news conference the six women held following the publication of their
article in The Boston Globe, Chasin said members of the press and the
public seemed stunned and amazed by the activists’ mutual respect. One
cameraman thanked the women; many of those attending the conference also
thanked the women, impressed by their show of respectful disagreement.
“When people see that friendly relationships between these public
adversaries is possible, they feel so hopeful,” Chasin said.
Margot Patterson is NCR senior writer. Her e-mail
address is mpatterson@natcath.org
National Catholic Reporter, January 17,
2003
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