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Abortion: The Clash of Absolutes

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Professor Tribe gives every argument a fair hearing. Every position is respected. I kept waiting for his bias to show, but it never did. Finally, an impartial and well reasoned book on abortion.

firmly in historical and legal contexts, making it possible view the question of conflicting rights from a fairly objective point. Whether one is pro- or anti-, this text offers information and supporting arguments for a variety of positions, and looks at the relative merits of each. Religious hysteria aside, if one is looking for a thoughtful text that permits one to form an opinion on the debate, one could do worse than to start with this book.

Please limit your review to the actual book rather than the vitriol that some readers have vented. Such "reviews" do not help a potential reader determine whether or not the book is worth reading. One thing for certain is that your reviews are not.

Tribe's book, Abortion: The Clash of Absolutes is an excellent read for anyone who highly regards the constitutional and basic right to life. In his book,Tribe devotes equal time to shedding light on both to other cultures to see how they have dealt with this issue the Pro-life and Pro-Choice perspectives towards abortion.
Tribe investigates other cultures views and ways of handling abortion as well the evolution of abortion throughout American history.
I would strongly recommend this book to those who are interested in political science and the controversial issue of abortion. Whether you are Pro-Choice or Pro-Life, you will find this book highly enlightening and yourself forever changed.

Though Lawrence H. Tribe wrote Abortion: The Clash of Absolutes in 1990, almost fifteen years ago, though the exact same issues surrounding the abortion question are all relevant today. That's how much progress is made when two sides are tugging at one subject with the same fervor - it just doesn't move. Abortion is just as a hot topic today as it was in 1973 when Roe vs. Wade made it legal in the United States. It is the perfect issue for a culture war; it has everything - sex, feminism, death and religion. Tribe does justice to the abortion question. He rotates around his subject from all angles to get the best view possible. From the title alone and then supported by the first three paragraphs, it is evident that Tribe refuses to belittle either side but is determined to show how and why these absolutes clash. These absolutes, or course, are the right to life and the right to liberty, which when they meet at abortion, directly conflict.

My book got here rather quickly than I anticipated and I must say I am highly pleased with its condition. It's as though it's never been used before! Thanks!!

Set aside, for a moment, the question of whether you want abortion to be a right or not, and consider only how the Court got to the point where
it made its ruling. It had, first, to assume the right, nowhere spelled out in the Constitution, to review the constitutionality of laws. It had,
next, to extend its reach to state laws, which had several times been explicitly placed beyond its grasp. It had, then, to rely upon a "right to
privacy" which exists nowhere in the language of the Constitution. The issue that confronts even those who support abortion is : are we a
nation of laws, a constitutional republic, or are we mere creatures of the judiciary, prey to their every whim? For if we are to allow the Court
to seize new powers and create entirely new "rights" when we like the results, we must also be prepared to acquiesce when they start arriving at
results we abhor. To accept that the Court can make unprincipled decisions is to abandon the notion that they can be bound by principle.

It is especially important to note here that it might have been possible to secure abortion rights without utilizing these subterfuges and
imperious court rulings. People who wish to have a right of privacy protected by the Constitution need only propose and pass an amendment
that would do so. This is the system that the Founders, in their wisdom, put in place for making changes to our system of governance and to
what rights we choose to afford special protection from government. It also has the very great advantage of actually being democratic. In
particular, such a radical alteration of the scheme of protected rights would seem to be best accomplished via the democratic and constitutional
processes, rather than by judicial fiat. Presumably, proponents of privacy rights chose not to follow this course because such an amendment
would be unlikely to pass. They instead chose the judicial route precisely because it is antidemocratic and allowed them to overcome the will
of the people. This success has been followed by entirely predictable hostility on the part of many Americans, as should be any effort to make
an end run on democracy.

Meanwhile, although conservatives could spin out even more compelling arguments for a right to life, which is after all specifically mentioned
in the text of the Constitution, many ask for far less than this. We really would just like the Court to butt out and allow the States to regulate
abortion as their citizens see fit. This, the direction in which the country was headed before Roe was decided, would allow the more
permissive states on the two coasts to permit fairly easy access to abortions while allowing more traditional states and populations to restrict or
even ban them. It would return the issue to the rough and tumble of democratic debate and restore the primacy of the Constitution, rather than
of judges. It's hard to see how one can both believe in our system of government and oppose the idea of returning abortion to the political
sphere.

As for the rest of Mr. Tribe's book, bad enough that his discussion of the constitutionality of Roe v. Wade is so dishonest, Mr. Tribe also
includes a history of abortion in America that has been thoroughly discredited, much like Michael Bellesiles's fabricated history of gun
ownership. It reaches a spectacular height of delusion when he asserts that the absence of anti-abortion laws early in our history indicates a
general societal acceptance of the practice. We might similarly argue that terrorism was accepted in the 19th Century because there were no
anti-terrorism laws. He proceeds from there to a discussion of abortion in other societies that is a complete non sequitir. Should we also
legalize infanticide because the Chinese use it? Maybe we're just lagging behind other cultures in not practicing female circumcision? This
kind of reasoning hardly deserves the name.

When we get to Mr. Tribe's attempt to reconcile the opposing sides of the abortion debate, the partisan nature of his analysis is perhaps
adequately demonstrated with just a few quotes :

[T]he feeling that abortion should be blocked by government may grow, at least in part, out of a reflexive willingness to enforce
traditional sex roles upon women and to impose upon them an unequal and harsh sexual morality.

Note the contempt for tradition and morality? the assumption that opposition to abortion is "reflexive" and a mere "feeling", while support
would of course be reasoned? and the incoherent thought that prohibiting abortion is unequal? Of course, Mr. Tribe fails to consider that
allowing abortion is unequal too, since men can't have them and it takes the decision out of men's hands. The argument that abortion has to be
made legal if women are to be treated equally with men makes about as little sense as arguing that rape should be made legal in order for men
to be treated equally with women.

At another point he refers to antiabortionists as believing, "that men and women are different by nature and that they have intrinsically different
roles to play in society." Did I miss something? Are men and women now the same? Perhaps we've located the real problem in this whole
debate. Maybe Mr. Tribe just isn't aware that it is only the female of the species that bears children. His real disagreement is not with abortion
opponents but with Nature.

And so, having misled us on the law, the history, and the biology of abortion, Mr. Tribe arrives at his final advice to us :

For both sides...a greater measure of humility seems in order. If we genuinely believe in the democratic principle of one person,
one vote, then each of us will have to treat the votes, and hear the voices, of our opponents as being no less worthy or meaningful
than our own.

On both sides of the abortion debate, this will require an unaccustomed and in some ways unnatural forbearance. Right-to-life
advocates are inclined to respond to pleas for tolerance by insisting that the exclusion of the fetus from the processes of voting
and debate distorts the discussion profoundly from the outset, for reasons that bear no proper relation to a moral or just outcome.
That the fetus is voiceless and voteless, they may say, follows from a biological condition but is irrelevant to how society is
morally bound to behave.

And pro-choice advocates are inclined to react to pleas for mutual respect by insisting, no less vehemently, that it begs the question
to attribute legitimacy to the views of those who tell women how to lead their lives and what to do with their bodies. To submit a
woman's fate to a popular referendum, they may insist, already assumes that the matter is properly one to be resolved by voting.

In the end, the answer to both sides is the same : In a democracy, voting and persuasion are all we have. Not even the Constitution
is beyond amendment. And since we must therefore persuade one another even about which 'rights' the Constitution ought to place
beyond the reach of any temporary voting majority, nothing, neither life nor liberty, can be regarded as immune from politics writ
large. Either some of the views expressed in the political arena are to be privileged and untouchable from the start or all views are
to count equally, those of the supposedly less sophisticated no less than those of the self-professedly more tolerant elite.

The reader will feel justified in believing that they've accidentally wandered into a different book at this point. For in what has come before,
Mr. Tribe has demonstrated that Roe v. Wade is not the product of "one man, one vote", and in defending it anyway has effectively shown
himself not to believe in democratic principles. And, whatever his point about the voiceless fetus, the complaint of pro-lifers is that their own
voices are not heard, because the Court has placed abortion beyond the reach of anything except a Constitutional Amendment or an activist
Right-wing majority. So the point that he has italicized (presumably indicating its importance), about voting and persuasion, is quite wrong, as
he must well know. It is possible for the Court to create a privilege for some views, as it has done with abortion, and to thwart the both the
majority and the Constitution itself. The clash of absolutes, as it regards the opposing views of whether abortion is morally defensible, is
probably unresolvable. But it is vitally important to our democracy that we resolve the clash between those who favor judicial usurpation of
power, so long as it achieves ends with which they agree, and those who believe that courts must be bound by the text of the Constitution, as
written, by the American people. Perhaps we are at the point, that Albert Jay Nock foresaw, where our society has become :

...tired of itself, bored by its own hideo

On the flyleaf, the written summary of this book claims that Tribe "points us toward accomodations that respect the conflicting visions of pro-choice and pro-life, and away from the false compromises that respect neither. Showing how the apparent clash of rights asserted on behalf of both mothers and unborn children can yield to values shared by all, he offers a 'negotiated peace' that will take into account the large issues at stake..." I read this to mean that both sides of the abortion issue would be honestly evaluated in this book, and that the pro-life position would be treated with the respect it fully deserves. So much for expecting "truth in advertising" from pointy-headed, post-modernist Harvard Professors like Lawrence Tribe. I should have learned better from my recent days as a master's degree student at Stanford. Professors like Tribe start with the same radical basic assumptions that allowed Stalin to kill 20 million Russians. For instance, he says that the fact that women have babies and men don't is simply a "biological accident." Therefore, women must have unrestricted abortion "rights" in order that they can overcome this accident to achieve equality with men. Well, totalitarians believe that equality must be achieved, no matter how many people are sent to the Gulags. This obsession with equality is not only a false dogma, but pernicious. A good thing about the book is that it does tell an interesting story of the history of abortion, both in other countries and the United States. He focuses on the political aspects, and traces what happened before and after Roe v Wade. Be aware reader, that this is a very slanted view though. Post-modernists believe that history can be written to serve their interests, so he finds support that "it's always been done" and leaves out the ugly side of the story. He also twists the Constitution to fit his preconceived notions, and of course makes it sound passable, and legalistic. I'm sorry, but underneath his high-sounding rhetoric, I detect between the lines a sexist lusting after men's "right" to exploit women sexually, because heck, they can just go take advantage of Roe V Wade if birth control fails. As if the decision to kill your own child and possibly deform your body is (or should be in his view!)simply a matter of convience; just another option in one's recreational choices. I'm sorry, I'm a baby boomer, I've been through a lot, I've had marriage problems, and I'm the mother of three children. I had a time when I considered a pregnancy a "problem," and considered different "solutions." Divorcing yourself from your own womanly and divine nature with intellectual rationalizations that would allow you to kill your child (I love my children more than my life!) is an act of violence that is profoundly and disturbingly wrong. Reading Tribe confirms my view that the Supreme Court imperially overstepped its bounds and unjustifiably legislated "rights" that are not in the Constitution, and were never endowed upon us by Our Creator. This apology for Roe v. Wade by Tribe underscores, in my mind, how democratic checks must be put on the judicial branch, so that elitist, atheistic views like his are not imperially imposed on the country without their consent. A new poll by the Center for Gender Equality (a feminist group who if anything designed questions to get different results) shows that 70% of women want more restrictions on abortion. This moral question should be in the hands of the people and their elected representatives, not in the hands of judges. Like Robert Bork said in "The Tempting of America", to what do "privacy rights" extend? The right to commit murder in the privacy of your home