The Twilight of Roe
Pro-Choice advocates, promulgating a noble lie, undermined the women's movement
By the end of this month the US Supreme Court is expected to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that ruled access to abortion was a constitutionally protected right, returning the regulation of abortion to individual states.
Since the court’s decision conservative evangelical Christians, who had initially supported the Court’s decision, appropriated the ‘pro-life’ cause to promote their political agenda. Supporters of the Roe decision for their part refused to engage. They insisted that abortion was simply a women’s rights issue, a noble lie promulgated since before Roe, when activists campaigned to rescind restrictions on abortion at the state level.
As a student then I joined a children’s crusade drawn up by a pro-choice group to canvass for abortion law reform. At our training session, crusade organizers warned us that in discussion with local residents we were not to argue and, above all, to avoid being drawn into ‘philosophical discussions’. If anyone tried to inveigle us into such a discussion, we were not to take the bait but to parrot the slogan: ‘Abortion is a women’s rights issue: if you believe in equality for women you should support abortion legalization’. Eager to enlighten the general public about Locke’s distinction between person and human being (‘man’) I was disappointed, but organizers assured me that this was a shrewd political strategy.
It seemed like a good idea at the time. The Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution, guaranteeing equal legal rights to all American citizens, had been endorsed by Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter and, in 1972, received bipartisan support. Organizers did not anticipate that the emerging Religious Right would seize upon abortion as a political wedge issue or that a politically significant minority of Americans would conclude that since they did not favor access to abortion without restriction, they should not support equal rights for women.
So, the Equal Rights Amendment failed, policies aimed at securing equity for women were abandoned, and both wage gaps and occupational sex segregation have not appreciably diminished since the 1990s. Subsequently, the Democratic Party affirmed abortion to be a woman’s right and a number of Roman Catholic bishops declared that prominent Democratic politicians, including the Speaker of the House, were not welcome to receive Communion.
When Roe goes down the regulation of abortion will return to the states. Heavily rural red states, including the former slave states of the American South, have passed trigger laws banning abortion to take effect as soon as Roe is overturned. The most populous American states have enacted laws that will automatically keep abortion legal if Roe is overturned and cities within red states have proposed resolutions to decriminalize abortion locally or pledged not to enforce state bans. So it is not clear how much difference the overturn of Roe will make.
The moral of this story is that the dismissal of rational argument and engagement as naïve and ineffective is unwarranted. Shrewd politics, sloganeering, rhetoric, and dogmatism did not save Roe and, arguably, only set back the cause of women’s equality. Whatever our specific interests in doing philosophy and however remote our research is to practical matters, our fundamental commitment is to reason, to rational argument and engagement. And it is an article of our faith that people are amenable to reason.
I've been consistently amazed how willing the left is to cut its legs out from under itself by giving up on trying to persuade people of things.
I've a pet theory that there's something equivalent to the way people would like to see harsh criminal punishments happen even if they don't reduce crime.
Based on the way people react with indignation and "I shouldn't have to!" whenever some study comes out suggesting that talking to people and seeing why they think how they do and addressing their concerns can actually change minds in ways that contempt and moral outrage can't even dream of, I feel like a lot of people have a notion that discussing things reasonably with ones ideological opponents is Being Kind to Bad People and take great moral offense at this.