R U 4 life

The odd, orchestrated dance that is the politics of abortion completed another quadrille last week with the approval of RU-486, a pharmaceutical cocktail that induces abortion.

The "pro-choice" lobby weighed in enthusiastically but warned of the imminent danger of electing an "anti-choice" president. The "pro-life" forces resorted to epithets like "baby-poison" and questioned the motives of the Food and Drug Administration. In the Manichaean debate over "life" and "choice" between Republican Representative Tom Coburn and abortion dogmatist Kate Michelman, the possibility of some sort of incremental progress appeared as remote as ever.

And yet it seems to me that RU-486 is indeed a sort of progress, if a kind fraught with moral danger. I say this as someone horrified by any abortion. It's something of a taboo to say this in polite society, but I can't think of any circumstances in which I could advise someone to abort a fetus. For me, abortion is the taking of a form of human life, as repugnant as killing a disabled person or euthanizing someone who has Alzheimer's. At the same time, I'm aware that good people in good conscience disagree and that the fact that this form of human life is contained within another human body makes the situation unique. I also recognize that, in a free society, the power of a government to regulate such a personal medical decision is rightly limited. As for the idea that such tolerance should not extend to "murder," I'm forced to say that abortion isn't "murder" as long as the "murderer" sincerely believes it isn't. Murder requires conscious intent. And the status of a fetus is murky enough to make the belief that abortion isn't murder a plausible one.

So my feelings on the issue-like those of so many others-are marked by a constant, acute unease. I would dearly love to live in a society with no abortions, but I'm not prepared to countenance the kind of government power that would make that possible anytime soon. I want to affirm the immorality of all abortions, but I don't want to treat my fellow citizens, half of whom confront the issue in a way I never will, as moral pariahs. Does that make me inconsistent, or does it simply make me realistic? I don't know. But whatever my position is, it is not well-described by either the term "pro-choice" or the term "pro-life." I think I am both.

Which is why RU-486 seems to me to be, on balance, a step forward. Its most immediate effect is to distill the meaning of the "choice" involved. Current medical abortions are essentially dual undertakings. They require a woman to consent to her body being invaded and her fetus killed; but they also require that another person perform the operation. The taking of a form of human life seems to me to have more serious moral consequences if it actively involves more than one person, just as the involvement of an accomplice in any wrongful act compounds its moral harm. So, in this sense, RU486 helps mitigate the evil of abortion. Of course, RU-486, properly administered, involves a doctor at every stage and may, in a small percentage of cases, even necessitate an old-style surgical abortion-but, in most RU-486 cases, the actual act of killing the fetus is restricted to the mother by means of a couple of pills.

Hence, for the first time we really have choice worthy of the name. A woman cannot passively defer the decision to medical experts or have it done to her in an abortion clinic where she may be told that her abortion is not a moral problem. She must do it to herself and to her baby-and in the privacy of her own home. This may, in fact, make abortion harder for pregnant women to grapple with, not easier, as some pro-lifers claim. It's one thing-to take a related, if different, example-to support the death penalty. But if we each had to pull the switch ourselves, we might think again.

It also seems to me that the current pro-life, anti-RU-486 position misses an important moral intuition: that the longer a fetus has lived, the more troublesome an abortion is. This used to be the Catholic position, based on the Thomist notion that a human soul enters a fetus during the "quickening" at the end of the first trimester. It's also, in a subtle way, the philosophy behind the pro-life movement's recent campaign against "partial-birth abortions" carried out in the third trimester, when the violence inflicted on a babylike fetus rightly evokes recoil. Some pro-lifers may think of this emphasis merely as a propaganda ploy, a way to humanize the fetus and so play to our moral concerns about killing it at any time in its development. But, if so, the ploy hasn't worked; the anti-partial-birth campaign has won support from numerous prominent pro-choicers, but, as far as I know, awareness of the horrors of the procedure hasn't changed any of their minds about abortion per se.

And there's a good reason. "Partial-birth" is the pro-life movement's first slam-dunk political issue in decades because it appeals to our deep moral sense that crushing the skull of a third-trimester fetus is more worrisome than terminating a cluster of cells a few weeks after conception. Purists find this distinction meaningless. Potential human life is potential human life, they argue, whether it's one month old or nine months old. But if this argument is logically powerful, it is also morally and practically obtuse. Unlike later-term abortions, which come close to having the psychological and physical effects of miscarriages, RU-486 abortions more closely mimic the natural, spontaneous abortions that often occur in early pregnancy.

If RU-486 increased the number of these early abortions and reduced the number of late-term abortions, it would not, I think, be a minor moral advance. That's a big "if," of course, but the European experience lends credence to the possibility. (In France, for example, where the abortion pill originated, the abortion rate is one-half that in the United States.) The difficult psychological impact of late-term abortions on women and families would also be lessened. Our society would be less coarsened by the knowledge that such procedures are being performed on fetuses that could live outside the womb. By making early abortion easier and more private, RU-486 would also subtly increase the social stigma of late abortions-paving the way perhaps for legislation making third-trimester abortions more difficult to get or even illegal altogether. In this way, the long-term effect of RU-486 might actually be to advance the pro-life cause rather than undermine it. If the prolife leaders weren't such purists, they might see this.

Of course, if all RU-486 did was increase the net number of abortions, this moral equation would shift. But the European experience suggests that this pill doesn't do for abortion what that other pill did for sex. Since the introduction of RU-486 in Britain and France, total abortion rates have actually declined. And RU-486, as any woman who has taken it will testify, is no walk in the park. Like most weapons designed to kill, it's messy: painful cramps, persistent bleeding, physical and emotional trauma. Few women, I suspect, will take it casually, and those who do will soon realize that RU486, like many other technological innovations, does not end moral choice. It merely sharpens it. For all of us.

Andrew Sullivan is a senior editor of The New Republic. This article first appeared on October 16, 2000 and is reprinted by permission of The New Republic (D 2000, The New Republic, Inc.).

Copyright Human Life Foundation, Incorporated Spring 2001
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