Abortion & the GOP: if the GOP is Lincoln's party, maybe it should use his tactics.

In his first 48 hours in the Oval Office, Bill Clinton proved he hadn't forsaken all his campaign vows. Although the middle class will never take delivery on a tax cut, escaping Haitians will continue to find no room at the U.S. inn, and the deficit, far from being halved, will doubtless continue to spiral, at least one element of the Clinton coalition has every reason to be happy: the pro-choice movement. Among Bill Clinton's first acts as President was the signing of memoranda rescinding the Bush Administration's ban on federal funding for fetal-tissue research, the ban on abortion-counseling at federally funded clinics, and the ban on abortions at military hospitals. Each of these restrictions had represented hard-won victories by embattled Republicans. Yet they were reversed with a scratch of the pen.

Worse is yet to come. A generation after Roe v. Wade threw out the laws of all fifty states to usher in abortion on demand, prospects of a reversal have receded dramatically. Although President Clinton's judicial nominations will doubtless make reversal more unlikely, he cannot take all the blame. Twelve years of Republican appointees have failed to produce a Court willing to dislodge Roe; indeed, it was a Nixon appointee, Harry Blackmun, who wrote the majority opinion in the landmark 1973 case. Pro-lifers have been further disconcerted by statements from the outgoing chairman of the Republican National Committee, Rich Bond, blaming them for Bush's defeat, and even from the new chairman, Haley Barbour, who vows to place abortion on the back burner. Of more immediate concern, the new Congress appears to be decidedly more pro-choice than the last, and Representative Don Edwards (D., Calif.) has already reintroduced his Freedom of Choice Act, which appears to have the necessary votes to pass. Pro-choicers are sitting pretty and know it. Perhaps that explains why there were few counter-demonstrations at this year's right-to-life march on Washington.

Sooner or later, of course, President Clinton's decision to compensate the left wing of his party for his compromises on foreign and economic affairs by granting them carte blanche on the social agenda will take its political toll, especially as it becomes clear to Reagan Democrats who deserted President Bush that abortion is just the thin edge of a wedge of social issues from gay rights to banning school prayer. Doubtless Mr. Clinton will find himself on the defensive for this come 1996. As congressional reaction to the Clinton bid to lift the ban on overt homosexuals in the military demonstrates, even Democratic congressmen understand that though they enjoy a political majority they remain in the popular minority on these issues. (And that the best way to get what they want is to work through the back door of the courts.)

Republican Muddle 

Whatever the potential troubles for Democrats tomorrow, Republicans face theirs today. The Democratic leaders at least know what they stand for on all these issues; what they have to worry about is how they get there. Republicans remain confused about both. The most obvious manifestation of this confusion is the party's commitment to a constitutional amendment to outlaw all abortions. Such an amendment is supported by at most a quarter of the public, but it seemed in the last campaign that no one in the Bush White House supported it. Republicans who resisted changes in that position in the run-up to last year's convention were nonetheless right, for a number of reasons, not the least of which had to do with the real political agenda behind such proposals.

Today, however, it is time for the GOP to make a change. But not just any old change. Taking into account the dramatic shifts in America's political, constitutional, and, yes, moral landscape, Republicans need to shift their position from support for a constitutional amendment outlawing all abortions to support for one asserting the constitutional prerogative of states in restricting abortion. The purpose of the shift would not be to water down the party's moral position but to strengthen its political one. And the reasons for it are simple, direct, and conservative: not only is a constitutional ban on abortion impossible, the Republican commitment to one now operates to disguise the intolerance of the abortion-rights community and to uphold a status quo that has brought us 29 million abortions since 1973.

Already I hear the groans offstage. Any change in language, the argument goes, would be taken as a retreat; certainly that is the way it will be portrayed by a press whose more candid members concede that abortion is the one area where even the pretense of fairness goes out the window. A change in language, moreover, would dilute the moral clarity of the existing position. It would split the pro-life movement. It would be portrayed as an abdication of responsibility. And so forth.

Each of these arguments has some legitimacy, and of course much would depend on the choice of language. But they are not ultimately persuasive, because the organization in question is not a church or a pro-life group but a political party. Precisely here the art of the possible must intrude. A constitutional amendment prohibiting all abortion has always been a fiction. Although most Americans are firmly against abortion on demand (the Boston Globe's own headline on its poll was "Most in U.S. favor ban on majority of abortions"), most do not want abortion completely proscribed. This means that continuing to hold out for a constitutional amendment essentially guarantees there will be no restrictions at all. Indeed, despite the grave warnings of all those who darkly prophesied that the confirmation of Clarence Thomas would mean a return to back-alleys, America continues to boast, if that is the right word, the most liberal abortion laws in the world.

This is not to say that fictions do not have their place. As with Taiwan's continued claim to be the legitimate government of all China, fictions often serve political purposes. Initial calls for a constitutional amendment in the wake of the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision helped galvanize the pro-life movement around a clear, fixed goal. Today that fiction is no longer convenient. Indeed, it is a hindrance to progress on the abortion front because it overlooks areas where pro-lifers can win and it lends cheap credibility to the press caricature of an inflexible Republican Party in thrall to religious bigots. And it completely overlooks the constitutional arrangements and dispositions that ought to be the greatest source of pro-life political strength.

That strength lies in a principled opposition to the Roe v. Wade decision, which opposition would include many Americans who are otherwise prochoice. Pro-lifers are fond of pointing to the parallels between abortion and slavery; these parallels are perhaps stronger than they know. In his 1858 debates with Stephen A. Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, a founder of the new Republican Party, made clear both his disgust for slavery and his distance from those abolitionists who thought their moral claim absolved them from a respect for process. "I will add this," said Lincoln in his sixth debate,

 if there be any man who does not believe
 that slavery is wrong in the three aspects
 which I have mentioned, or in any one of
 them, that man is misplaced, and ought
 to leave us. While, on the other hand, if
 there be any man in the Republican
 Party who is impatient over the necessity
 springing from its actual presence, and is
 impatient of the constitutional guaran-
 tees thrown around it, and would act in
 disregard of these, he too is misplaced
 standing with us. He will find his place
 someplace else; for we have a due regard,
 so far as we are capable of understanding
 them, for all these things. This, gentle-
 men, as well as I can give it, is a plain
 statement of our principles in all their
 enormity.

Certainly Lincoln himself danced on the precipice between moral conviction and political expediency. What sets him apart from other politicians, and what makes him a lesson for today, is how he managed to make his politicking serve his convictions.

Today, the pro-choice assumption is that the least restriction on abortion is wrong. A Republican Party that challenged that presumption would enjoy several notable advantages. Not least, the position of denying that all restrictions are wrong is one that can be defended by that majority of Americans who consider abortion an evil but nonetheless believe there are circumstances where abortion is the lesser of evils.

My position ought not to be confused with the so-called Big Tent position. The Big Tent proponents would purge the GOP not only of its political call for a constitutional amendment but of its moral content, whereas I would simply re-orient the political commitment to a more practical end. The Big Tent is not big enough for those who approve of abortion and yet it is far too large for the stronger constituency of Republicans who disapprove of abortion; it makes no commitment to any position and confuses a fuzzy moral language with a solid political position. The first man to pitch the Big Tent was Judge Douglas in his successful Senate race against Lincoln, where he argued not for slavery per se but for the right of every (white) man to make up his own mind about it.

Firm Platform

Tp be sure, party platforms do not usually have such importance, and there are any number of Republican Party members who would argue that changing the language on abortion would simply not be worth it, because it gives too much attention to something of little importance. President Clinton proves every day how little his own platform means to him. But abortion is different, if only for the unfair reason that a hostile press keeps it in the news and clubs Republican candidates over the head with it. Now, it's true that Ronald Reagan won two landslide elections with this plank. But Ronald Reagan was more persuasive than most politicians. More to the point, the public did not then believe, as they are led to believe today, that the "fundamental right to an abortion" was under threat. That has changed with the Supreme Court's decisions, Webster v. Reproductive Health Services in 1989 and Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992, that chipped away at Roe.

Together with the Bush people's own obvious disagreement with their President's position on abortion and a press more than willing to capitalize on it, this changed judicial landscape helped open the door to last year's bitter platform fight. The party was, as I say, right to resist the change urged upon it, both because it would have been seen, against Bush's background, as yet another cave-in and because those doing the urging were friends of neither George Bush nor the Republican Party. Among the press and Beltway philosophes, they were the selfsame people who incessantly urged upon the President the importance of putting aside his "no new taxes" pledge for a deal with Congress and then called him a liar over and over for having followed this advice.

As it turned out, the pro-lifers handily won all the votes at the Convention. Still, the election was lost, and however unfair the portrayal of Houston as "hate-filled" (compared to the Democratic Party Convention, where people handed out buttons of Pennsylvania Governor Robert Casey dressed in papal robes?), the GOP's opponents successfully conveyed the image of a party bent on eliminating abortion entirely and unleashing Pat Robertson as part of a jihad of intolerance.

How can this be in a country that twice elected the even more conservative Ronald Reagan just a few years earlier? It can be because American thinking on abortion remains muddled. It remains muddled because, as Mark Cunningham argued in a sterling article in these pages, if Americans are not forced to think about abortion, they won't. Hence the contradictions at work in Gallup and Harris polls showing, respectively, 77 per cent of Americans regarding abortion as some form of murder and 73 per cent who nonetheless believe the practice ought to be legal.

'Out There'

Alas, the preference for a federal "solution" unwittingly worsens the impasse. So long as the issue is decided "out there" in Washington, Americans can avoid addressing the issue. Were it returned to the states, however, Americans and their representatives would have to face up to abortion, to decide how much they are going to tolerate in their own backyards, to work to draw the line. This, of course, is messy and difficult, but chaining the GOP to a constitutional amendment means that Republican candidates at all levels who are not completely comfortable with the party plank-or are not ready for the pro-choice onslaught--will end up looking embarrassed and contradictory. But a Republican Party that argued forcefully that abortion was wrong and that states had the right to restrict the practice (even Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, Anthony Kennedy, and David Souter recognized a "compelling interest" in Planned Parenthood v. Casey) would again be on the offensive--the obvious strategy, moreover, now that we are faced with a Freedom of Choice Act.

Perhaps the most compelling virtue of a correct constitutional position on abortion is that it would finally highlight the pro-choice movement's complete inflexibility. As governor, Bill Clinton supported parental notification, but as the Democratic presidential candidate he embraced the Freedom of Choice Act, which would prohibit any state restrictions whatsoever, going even further than Roe. Ditto with Al Gore, who made pro-life noises early in his Senate career. Although no Democrat will admit being for abortion on demand, that is precisely the position they are forced to take witness the whacking Dianne Feinstein took from her own side when, in her bid to be governor of California, she attempted to soften her image by coming out against abortion for reasons of sex selection. So long as Republicans talk about outlawing abortion completely, they allow these Democrats to avoid the questions about their own, far more radical platform: not simply abortion on demand, but abortion on demand at taxpayer expense.

The Party of Lincoln

There are other, nonpolitical reasons for shifting the focus of the Republican Party away from a constitutional amendment banning abortion. Over the last three decades it has been the Left that has elevated ends over means and the idea of forcing "consensus" through whatever means possible, primarily the courts. But we pro-lifers have been guilty as well, demanding that Republican congressmen, senators, and Presidents offer the kind of moral leadership and responsibility in this area that mothers, fathers, teachers, and even priests, ministers, rabbis, and bishops are not demonstrating: by making the moral case against abortion. It is no wonder politicians have failed to fulfill this expectation. They are, after all, our representatives, which makes them as much the product of our culture as we are.

That culture is controlled by images and language, and the pro-choice side has been exceedingly clever in couching their position in positive abstractions such as "choice," "rights," and so forth. In a speech in Connecticut in 1860, Lincoln punctured the personally-opposed-but line of argument by moving to specifics:

 Let us apply a few tests. You say that
 you think slavery is wrong, but you de-
 nounce all attempts to restrain it. Is
 there  anything  else  that  you  think
 wrong, that you are not willing to deal
 with as a wrong? Why are you so careful,
 so tender of this one wrong and no other?
 You will not let us do a single thing as if
 it were wrong; there is no place where
 you will allow it to be even wrong; there
 is no place where you will allow it even
 to be called wrong! [W]e must not call it
 wrong in politics because that is bringing
 religion into politics; we must not call it
 wrong in the pulpit because that is bring
 politics into religion . .. and there is no
 single place, according to you, where this
 wrong thing can be properly called
 wrong!

Substitute the word "abortion" for slavery and the argument takes on an eerie relevance. Lincoln knew that the public hadn't entirely thought things out on the question of slavery, and he understood the need to proceed cautiously. He knew that the way to expose his opponents was not to advance an impossibly pure political position but to pin his opponents down on specifics. The same goes for abortion. The one question all Democrats fear to answer is one they are never asked: name just one out of 1.7 million abortions per year you would like to see restricted, A 13-year-old girl who does not have her parents' consent? A couple aborting for the third time because they would rather have a boy than the girls they have been conceiving? A woman who has deliberately gotten pregnant just to sell the fetus for research?

This is the debate Republicans need to join, and we need to join it by moving from our own abstraction of a constitutional amendment to the very real kinds of restrictions that are arising in the states. In moral terms we feel there is something incomplete and deficient about any states-based "solution" to an issue as serious as abortion. But that is because Washington has come to regard itself, and we have become accustomed to seeing it, as the arbiter of right and wrong, as opposed to the necessary mechanism by which we might all live together in relative peace if not absolute harmony.

In this light a Republican initiative to return the abortion controversy to the states, even if successful, ought not to be conceived of as an end in itself. It is, rather, a recognition of two vital points. First: in a democracy of, by, and for the people, means are no less important than ends in how we order ourselves. Second: if we are ever to enjoy any kind of ultimate consensus, it must work its way from the people up rather than be imposed from the top down. The Republican Party has it within its means at this moment-especially in the face of a proposed Freedom of Choice Act--to retain its moral disapproval of abortion, while adding a constitutional division of authority that would bring about a more honest debate and, undoubtedly, fewer abortions. Failure to do so today may mean the loss of all tomorrow.

Mr. McGurn, formerly NR's Washington bureau chief, is now a senior editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review.