Review
A Deadly Confusion
Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights
by Katha Pollitt
Picador, 2015
(258 pages, $16.00, paperback)
reviewed by Howard Isaac Williams
Pro is part of a new front opened by abortion advocates who assert that, instead of being considered a necessary evil, abortion should be celebrated as a benefit for society. The book, however, offers nothing to prove this. Its author is a poet, essayist, Guggenheim Fellow, Fulbright scholar and longtime columnist for The Nation. That an intelligent author can produce no better case than this that abortion is a social good is a reflection of the weakness of the assertion.
Pro makes three main arguments: (1) that the "concept of personhood" of human fetuses "makes no sense" in the abortion debate; (2) that the "argument that abortion is murder" obscures a hidden agenda to oppose women's rights; and (3) that abortion is "a positive social good."
A Truncated Argument
Pollitt devotes a chapter to arguing against the relevance of fetal personhood to the abortion debate. She claims that in early pregnancy, the fetus is not yet a full person. Regarding the later weeks of pregnancy, however, she simply drops the personhood issue, claiming that it doesn't matter anyway, stating, "No person has the right to make such a demand [that he or she be born] on another person." But Pollitt can only offer an asymmetrical analogy to organ donation. She notes that even if one of her kidneys can save another person, she is not legally obligated to donate it. This analogy fails on two counts. First, her kidney donation may not be necessary; the diagnosis may be erroneous, or the patient may somehow recover without it. Second, withholding an organ is passive and does not further endanger the sick person. Abortion is not passive but is an action that specifically intends to destroy the person.
With this understood, the irony in Pollitt's statement becomes evident even to the dullest reader: sick persons have no right to make demands for life (through organ donation) on other persons, but pregnant persons have the right to make demands for death on other persons (at least until they're born). After making her incomplete argument against fetal personhood, Pollitt tries to defuse the accusation of murder by claiming that what abortion opponents are really about is opposition to women's rights. Though her argument is sophisticated, it often descends into ad hominem attacks that distract the reader from the abortion issue.
That abortion is a positive social good is the most arresting doctrine of Pro. In The Abolition of Man (1947), C. S. Lewis strongly warned against those who "know quite well how to produce a dozen different conceptions of good in us." Mindful of his observation, one may ask: If we fail to identify good by imagining numerous and even contradictory variations of it, will we also be unable to identify evil? And will we then be unable to support good and oppose evil? Pollitt's only argument for her singular declaration is that some women have personally benefited from their abortions. While this may support the notion that abortion is a necessary evil, it falls far short of making it a social good.
As Kristan Hawkins, president of Students For Life of America, has observed: "A social good is something that is good for everyone . . . like clean air and water." So, if abortion is a social good, shouldn't we have more of them? Sometimes Pollitt does seem to imply that, as when she writes that the pro-life claim that "there are too many abortions" is a "myth" (136). On the next page, however, she writes that the recent decline in abortions "is very good news," and on the last page she claims that more justice and other social goods will lower "America's high abortion rate." Twice she implies that pro-lifers really oppose abortion only for middle-class and wealthy women. But she also laments their successful opposition to taxpayer-subsidized abortions for low-income women.
Forgotten History
Pro confuses its readers in other ways. Pollitt laments that much of the history of abortion in America is forgotten. She herself, however, apparently forgets that Susan B. Anthony, Alice Paul, and the other founders of feminism stood against abortion. Even Margaret Sanger, who founded Planned Parenthood, opposed abortion at least insofar as it allowed her to advocate for contraception as a way to prevent it. Pollitt states that Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders supported Planned Parenthood in its early decades, but once again fails to mention that in those times Planned Parenthood did not support abortion.
Howard Isaac Williams lives in San Francisco, where he attends St. Sergius Orthodox Church. He is semi-retired from the messenger and pest control industries.
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more on abortion from the online archives
27.2—March/April 2014
on C. S. Lewis & the New State Paganism by W. E. Knickerbocker
26.1—Jan/Feb 2013
on Abortion as a Matter of National Welfare by W. Ross Blackburn
24.1—January/February 2011
How Planned Parenthood's Founder Played the Christians, and Won by Allan C. Carlson
more from the online archives
31.6—November/December 2018
on the Church's Response to the Anti-marriage Tide by Diane Woerner
24.2—March/April 2011
Certain Death & the Last Lectures of Socrates & Jesus by Randall B. Smith
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