Steve Waldman: An abortion compromise?

Steve Waldman suggests a possible way out of the abortion dilemma. Excerpt:

The political debate on abortion has for several decades focused on the wrong moral question: Does life begin at conception? Those who believe it does, oppose abortion. Those who don't, or think the question is unanswerable, unknowable, believe the pregnant woman should make that choice.

Yet consider this statistical couplet. According to a 2007 survey commissioned by a progressive think tank called Third Way, 69 percent of Americans believe abortion is the "taking of a human life," but 72 percent believe it should be legal.

Let that soak in. Most people think abortion is taking a human life and yet favor the procedure being legal. How grotesque! Are we Americans utterly immoral?

Actually, what the data proclaim is something that politicians and activists can't: Most Americans believe there are gradations of life. Some living things are more alive than others, and so the later in the pregnancy it gets, the more uncomfortable people become with the idea of ending it. But in reality they believe both that a life stirs very early on and that a one-week-old embryo is more "killable" than a nine-month-old fetus. For them, determining whether "life" begins at conception really doesn't determine anything.

More:

Instead, an abortion policy matching the values implicit in the polls would focus less on rights or numbers and more on timing. Success would be measured on the basis of moving abortions earlier in the gestational cycle--even if that conceivably means more overall abortions. It would be not about whether, how or how many, but when. Not "safe, legal and rare" as Bill Clinton once said, but "safe, legal and early."

Steve's piece is really thoughtful, because he honors the absolutist logic in both the pro-choice and pro-life positions. If you believe that life begins at conception, then it's always wrong to abort that life. If you believe that a woman should have the absolute choice over whether or not to give birth to a baby, it's more logical to grant her that right absolutely. But as Steve says, that's not how most Americans see it. Logically or not, most Americans are in favor of first trimester abortion, but against late-term abortion. What Steve advocates is a way of seeing abortion as permissible, but only to a point. It is, in his view, a reasonable compromise between the extremes, one that would have the virtue of being popular.

What do you think? Read his whole piece and let's talk about it. In the end, the Supreme Court will not let any restrictions on abortion stand, so this is theoretical for the time being. I can't endorse it because I don't believe that in terms of sanctity of life, there is a continuum. Nevertheless, I think Steve's proposal will strike most people as staking out the sensible middle ground. I don't think that pro-abortion groups will give Obama permission to move toward it, though.

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