Losing the Abortion Wars

By Steven Jonas

The House of Representatives recently passed a bill that limits legal abortion availability to 20 weeks of fetal gestation. Whether it can pass the Senate is a matter up in the air, but as everyone on both sides of the abortion-rights knows, this Act is a direct assault on the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision of 1973.

The essence of Roe v. Wade was that, until the generally accepted time of fetal viability outside the womb, 24 weeks, women were to have freedom of choice in the outcome of pregnancy. The anti-abortion-rights movement lay fairly low during the 1970s. The effort was ramped up during the Reagan Administration. In the 1980 campaign, Candidate Reagan and the leadership of the Republican Party decided to use the issue to as one means of bringing the then-developing Political Religious Right further into the Party. Indeed, one the prices that Reagan demanded of George H.W. Bush in return for the Vice-Presidential nomination was that he and his wife Barbara leave their long-held seats of the Board of Texas Planned Parenthood. 

The pro-choice forces have been gradually losing the battle ever since. There are a variety of reasons for this state of affairs. One is in the realm of terminology. The pro-choice movement has stuck with that phrase rather than focusing on rights, as in "abortion rights," which in fact was at the center of Roe v. Wade, which was decided on a "right to privacy" interpretation of the 14th Amendment. Then, at least certain elements of the abortion rights movement allowed the anti-choicers to get away with the use of the term "pro-life," sometimes themselves even calling the anti-choicers "pro-life." Which gets to the essence of the problem and why the abortion rights movement is on its way to losing the battle on the national level. Indeed, as is well-known, in many states where the anti-abortion-rights movement is politically powerful, and through a variety of legislative acts has vastly limited the availability of legal abortion, functionally the abortion-rights forces have already lost.

This is at least in part because, with a few exceptions here and there, the abortion-rights forces have stayed with the "right-to-choose" argument (with which I fully agree), without using any others. And there is a big one out there, waiting to be mobilized. But for one reason or another (and I would very much like to hear what they are) the abortion rights movement, at least its leading organizations like the National Abortion Rights Action League, refuse to go there. And that is the issue of religious authoritarianism.

The position of the anti-abortion-rights forces is based exclusively on the religious concept of "when life begins." And it is a religious concept. In fact, to support it, the anti-abortion-rights movement most often cites the "inerrant word of God" as found in the Bible. That the version most often cited by the anti-choicers is the King James version, an English translation created in the early 17th century by a 52-member committee of scholars and theologians, is a point often missed by the "inerrantists" (and their critics as well). If the King James version were to be regarded as "inerrant," one would have to assume that "God" spoke through every one of them. And, of course, what does that say about all of the other versions, appearing in numerous translations from the original Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek and Latin? It should also be noted that the man who made the first English translation of the Bible, one William Tyndale, in 1536 was burned at the stake, in England, for having the temerity to do so. What the Republican Religious Right wants to do is right out of the 16th century: put the power of the State and the criminal law behind one particular set of religious doctrines.

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Source: OpEdNews.com