Life's Dominion: An Argument About Abortion, Euthanasia, and Individual Freedom. - book reviews

The language of compromise on the abortion issue is in the air. There has long been an underground movement in that direction, feeding off the perennial public opinion surveys that show most Americans ambivalent about the issue. Yet this movement--and that word may be too strong--has had trouble finding the kind of strong leadership and focused agenda that could translate into an effective political force.

Now, however, the possibility of compromise has some intensified drive behind it. There is fresh pressure on Congress to find a way to deal with abortion in light of the coming debate on the Clinton administration's health-care plan, likely to include some abortion provisions, and because of the difficulties already being generated with the Senate's Freedom of Choice Act.

Playing an important supportive role may be a number of recent books that have sought, with varying success, to find some acceptable middle ground. Two earlier books by prochoice advocates took an irenical stance. The legal scholar, Laurence Tribe, in Abortion: The Clash of Absolutes (Norton, 1990), and Roger Rosenblatt in Life Itself: Abortion in the American Mind (Random House, 1992) both deplored the nasty flavor of the American debate, and both sought some way out. Rosenblatt's was the more successful of those two efforts, arguing for what he called a "permit but discourage formula." But he provided no details whatever on just what such a formula would look like in practice. Nor did he take account of the likely opposition of many feminists. They would not warm to that word "discourage."

The problem with Tribe's book was that his prochoice convictions were not sufficiently flexible to accommodate the moderate approach he seemed to be seeking. Every possible way to a compromise solution was shot down, always overpowered by fear of some limit on the right of women to make their own choice. The label on the can was hot tamales but the contents turned out to be rice pudding.

The two books reviewed here are more penetrating and nuanced, particularly that of Mensch and Freeman. Themselves legal scholars (and married to each other), they also, and most tellingly, have a fine eye for postwar theological and cultural developments. The Politics of Virtue takes as its starting point the question of "whether we can recover a meaningful public moral vocabulary."

Why does our society lack such a vocabulary? Mensch and Freeman pursue that question as insightfully as any who have written on this much-written-about topic, with a particular focus on the theological debate. They have a convincing answer: "abortion as a theologically debatable subject [was] replaced by abortion as a matter of personal choice and medical expertise," both well suited to stifle serious reflection. Mensch and Freeman pursue the story of that replacement with great skill and plausibility. Along the way they examine the rise and then decline of natural law thought, heavily Catholic in its inspiration; a similar curve with the thought of Barth and Bonhoeffer in Protestant circles; and the ultimate and decisive triumph of a "hasty, uncritical covenant with secular culture" in mainline Protestantism. That "covenant" provided a religious legitimation for abortion reform, but also as a result stimulated a Protestant fundamentalist counterattack, which turned out to be an unpleasant mirror image of a liberal prochoice fundamentalism.

Many of the strengths of The Politics of Virtue are missing from the Dworkin book, though he also is a legal scholar. Where Mensch and Freeman immerse the reader in the cultural and religious background of the abortion struggle, and show a fine appreciation of the now-vast literature on the subject, Dworkin's book looks mainly to the legal battle, and frequently generalizes on the moral issues without the apparent benefit of careful distinctions and documentation. This gap makes a great difference in the quality of his general argument. His argument is fairly simple: both the prolife and the prochoice groups share a common dedication to the sanctity of life, and only differ about how to respect that sanctity. But since the notion of the sanctity of life is itself an inherently religious or philosophical idea, it is not an appropriate subject for public law but should, instead, be left to the individual conscience and individual choice. This thesis is, Dworkin contends, equally applicable to euthanasia and abortion.

There is a two-fold problem with this argument. The first is that it overlooks some important factionalism within the prochoice movement. It is by no means the case that many who have defended a prochoice position either imply, much less speak, the language of the sanctity of life. Many instead hold that whatever value a fetus has is a result of a right to existence conferred upon it by the mother; its value depends solely upon her decision to grant it value. That is a sanctity of choice argument, not a sanctity of life view. The second problem is that by, in effect, segregating religious and philosophical views off into the private domain, Dworkin not only ignores the religious and philosophical foundations of much of our polity and culture, but also renders the idea of the sanctity of life thin if not altogether vacuous.

Dworkin argues, as many now do, that it is a mistake to cast the abortion struggle as that of contending rights, the fetus against the pregnant woman. But by trying to push the issue into a still higher, almost ineffable realm, Dworkin in the end leaves little ground to talk in public about morality. It is put out of bounds.

Reading the two books together helps one see why Dworkin's position, (albeit with his own twists and turns) has come to seem so self-evident to so many mainline American intellectuals. By trying to uncover the origins of that reassuring conviction, Mensch and Freeman open the way to a more productive debate in the future.

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