Pro

Katha Pollitt thinks that advocates of abortion rights have been cowed into meekness. In Pro, she argues that abortion needs to be reclaimed as a “positive social good,” and “an essential option for women — not just ones in dramatic, terrible, body-and-soul-destroying situations, but all women — and thus benefits society as a whole.” 

According to Clara Jeffery’s NYTBR review, Pollitt’s book aims to highlight the inconsistencies of abortion opponents: “If we hewed to the notion that an embryo achieves personhood when sperm meets egg, Pollitt argues, we’d have to investigate all miscarriages as potential homicides, perhaps punishable by death, as one Georgia bill proposed. And why don’t more die-hard abortion opponents fret over embryos discarded during the course of I.V.F.?” 

Pollitt insists, in Jeffery’s words, that “many abortion opponents are less concerned with the plight of any one embryo — and the fate of that embryo if carried to term — than they are with curtailing women’s sexual and economic freedom.” There’s a point worth extracting in the middle of this insult. It’s true that abortion opponents want to limit women’s (and men’s!) sexual freedom. Most pro-life folks adhere to traditional standards of sexual morality, which limit sex to marriage. That curtails sexual freedom for sure, if “freedom” means freedom to copulate whenever and with whomever one desires. And most also hold to the astonishing belief that it’s good for moms to spend time with their little children. This curtails economic freedom, if “freedom” means the freedom to pursue profit and career regardless of family obligations. For the record, most pro-life folks I know don’t think dads should ignore their children in pursuit of a career either. So, yes, the end to the abortion regime would mean a limitation on – better, a redefinition of – freedom.

Pollitt supports her claim about the “real concerns” of pro-life activists by offering evidence of an “inverse relationship between support for abortion restrictions and support for programs that help low-income pregnant women, babies and children.” But this inverse relationship exists only when the programs in view are government programs. In 2013, there were 2500 pregnancy resource centers in the US, mostly privately funded. These centers try to deter women from getting abortions, but they also provide a range of services to low-income women, babies, and children.

Jeffery ends with a pep talk that might foreshadow the future rhetorical moves of abortion’s defenders: “Forget talk of compromise: Roe, which balanced the rights of the mother with the rights of a fetus nearing viability, was the compromise. Demand sexual and economic freedom, and the notion that motherhood should be entered into with the same forethought, the same liberty, that we value in all other pursuits. And enough of the shame, wear your scarlet A with pride.”