Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War New Ed Edition

The broader project on how we ended up with the battlelines we have now on abortion rights is very interesting, and lays out how the closest thing we have to a national consensus on abortion is essentially libertarian in a way I hadn't really considered. It's also a valuable exploration of abortion politics beyond the easy pro-life/pro-choice dichotomy, one that takes in the range of perspectives which drive Americans to their policy preferences and politicians to their strategies, rhetoric and proposals. That being said, it's a little granular, and its interest in the details about individual (and often somewhat minor in the broad scheme of things) political battles of the late 1980s and 1990s as examples of Saletan's broader points start to drag. This was a slower read than it needed to be. I also walked away with a sense that Saletan's thesis was ultimately not fully defended - while he seems to lay responsibility for the arrival at the libertarian consensus at the feet of pragmatic decisions in political communications made by pro-choice advocates, I don't think he fully grappled with one other conclusion you could take from the case he made, which is that pro-choice advocates were facing a difficult big picture in defending abortion rights to a fundamentally conservative body politic and chose to fight the fights they could win in a way that would allow them to do so. (My version is also out of date. I would've been interested to read how he fit this theory to the developments of the Age of Obama and the campaign for clinic regulations.)

If you're particularly interested in abortion politics or political communications it may be worth a read. If you're casually interested in abortion politics or political communications the introduction (or maybe the introduction plus the first three/four chapters) should cover it.

Debate reading

This is an extremely readable and well-written recounting of the course of the politics of abortion from the perspective of the "sides" of the issue. As such, it's probably bound to tick off both "sides" at one point or another -- and I wouldn't take extreme negative reviews seriously, because they don't really appreciate the depth and clarity of the analysis. While I might quibble with some of the details, there's no denying it's a very well-researched book and one that, unlike most political tomes this side of Al Franken, can be read without feeling like you're stuck reading a textbook. My only real complaint is with the cover -- once again, a picture of a full-term pregnant woman to frame a book about abortions done months and months earlier, and this one with a little suggestion of female anatomy -- not helpful in taking the book seriously. But don't take this book by its cover -- if you're interested in genuine thoughtfulness and a little inside baseball on the give and take of an issue that touches most of the hot buttons of American politics, this is the book.

This unfortunately titled volume is sure to attract many puzzled and curious readers: "They/we won the abortion war?!? When did that happen?" But William Saletan's conservatives are the "pro-choice conservatives"; right-to-life activists call them liberals and politicians call them moderates. These swing voters, conservative but not radical, pro-choice but pro-restriction, have dictated the terms of engagement in the abortion war from the late 1980s on. And Saletan's well-written account of abortion politics since that time gives no indication that the conflict is over, or will be any time soon.

Bearing Right begins its narrative in Little Rock, Arkansas, 1986. Pollster Harrison Hickman is leading a focus group on a proposed amendment to the Arkansas constitution to ban public funding of abortions, while the strategists of the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) watch from behind a darkened glass panel, discussing how to turn the values of the Arkansas populace against the popular amendment. Remarkably, they succeed.

Despite voters' widespread disapproval of public funding for abortion, Hickman found a pair of key weaknesses: women were far less likely to support the amendment when rape entered the picture, and men reacted strongly when the amendment was portrayed as government intrusion into private family decisions. The resulting media campaign based on Hickman's insights marked the beginning of a dramatic shift in the terms of the public discourse on abortion rights. Pro-choice activists embraced the language of libertarian conservatism, the first slip onto a politically expedient slope that would gradually erode the meaning of "choice." They soon found that their ungrammatical new slogan, "Who Decides-You or Them?," was just as useful to their opponents for enforcing patriarchy and limiting the rights the poor and the young as it was for defending abortion rights generally. The only possible answer to the question was "you," but different groups had very different ideas of who, exactly, "you" referred to.

The story of the internal workings of NARAL is relevant to a wide array of scholars, activists, and general readers. For political scientists and historians it presents a compelling and personalized case study on rhetoric, special interests and the meanings of populism. The strategy decisions of NARAL and their consequences underscore the importance of what questions are being asked and in what contexts as competing interests try to define the "will of the people."

As Saletan points out in his less-than-subtle way, the abortion war highlights the pitfalls of sacrificing principles for expediency: inevitably, once the terms of debate are shifted toward the middle, especially in a disingenuous way, the double-tipped pen of rhetoric will write both ways. By 1992, recruiting Barry Goldwater to help defeat an Arizona ballot measure that restricted abortion rights, "pro-choice activists had reached the summit of victory stripped of the cumbersome weight of much of their agenda." "They had conquered the middle ground," Saletan concludes, "and the middle ground had conquered them." More interesting for activists and ideologues may be Saletan's discussion of "the right to choose life." Ironically, as pro-life and pro-choice rhetoric converged into a libertarian chimera of ideals and politics, it was the common ground that lost out. Within the framework of the public debate, in which abortion rights were protected by keeping the government out of personal, family (not individual) decisions, there was little room for protecting the rights of minors or working women to carry pregnancies to term against the respective demands or threats of parents or employers.

Unfortunately the intriguing NARAL story, based on organizational records and interviews, gradually dissolves into the broader context of the recent history of national abortion politics, essentially a distillation of fifteen years of news specials and newspaper clippings. The narrative loses momentum and coherence as it disconnects from the personalities and details of NARAL, and the issues spread from bans on abortion funding and government interference to parental consent laws, rape and incest exceptions, dilation & extraction/partial-birth procedures, cloning and stem cell research, and beyond.

Bearing Right is hardly adequate as a general account of abortion policy and politics; it leaves far too much out. The role of jurisprudence is mentioned occasionally but largely ignored, discussions of state abortion laws are unsystematic, and there is no analysis of the formal positions and ideologies that inform abortion activism. Even if the premise in the title is granted, the question of how the war was won is only partially answered. But what this book does do, it does very well. Saletan's extensive experience as a political correspondent shines as he analyzes the choices and public positions of activists and politicians, and though his biases are obvious, his work makes a strong enough attempt at a balanced treatment that it can-and should-be read profitably by combatants on either side, and the civilians in between as well.

Reviewer Humbug obviously doesn't see more than one facet to conservatives. For the sake of a manageable title, Saletan didn't say "anti-government" or "libertarian" conservatives, but once you start reading the book it's clear. It's the best analysis I've seen of abortion politics; I've long felt that both sides were framing the issue wrong. In my view it should be about helping women with the resources to carry their children to term, the pro-life feminist position. Saletan captures that dynamic pretty well - pro-choice feminists reluctantly using the libertarian stick to win, in effect giving power over the issue to people (and legislators) who think abortion should be legal but constrained by sensible restrictions through democratic institutions, not the courts.