On "Pro-Life-Friendly Democrats"
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Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for Senate for Michigan, was asked by a young pro-lifer why he, and by extension other pro-lifers, ought to vote for him. Similarly, James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Texas, was presented with a pro-life Catholic voter and the opportunity to try to win her over in a town hall co-hosted by CNN and Jubilee.
Both candidates made a sincere effort to be gracious and respectful in their responses, readily presuming good will on the part of the pro-lifer to whom they were speaking. Both candidates also seem to have the same suggestion for a policy goal that both pro-life and pro-choice voters can agree on: reducing unwanted pregnancies through comprehensive sex education and easy contraceptive access.
As someone who has been wrestling with what it would take for the Democratic Party to appeal to pro-life voters, and what it would take for those voters to take any such appeals to heart, I was deeply moved by their apparent sincerity. I respect their desire to find a policy goal that doesn't require either side of the abortion debate to abandon their core principles.
There are plenty of pro-life voters and organizations who are open to collaboration with progressives and willing to buck Republican Party orthodoxies. As Talarico pointed out, the Catholic Church, long noted for its opposition to abortion, has also been active in promoting access to healthcare. In a similar vein, the organization Democrats for Life of America has been helping spearhead a bipartisan bill that would make birth free, an initiative that, if successfully implemented, could help to pave the way for more robust government healthcare programs. In addition, several pro-life organizations directly criticized ICE's practice of detaining pregnant and postpartum women, opposing the Trump administration for its needlessly costly and cruel pursuit of its flagship issue.
Common ground can be found. However, I am afraid that neither Talarico nor El-Sayed recognizes why many pro-lifers will hesitate to accept the particular invitations that they have extended. For many pro-life Catholics and Evangelical Christians, the path to the suggested common ground of reducing unwanted pregnancies via contraceptive access and sex education goes through an ideological minefield. Until those minefields can be addressed on their own terms, the particular call to common ground used by El-Sayed and Talarico will have only limited success.
Although the pro-life movement is not entirely composed of Catholics and Evangelicals, these groups make up a significant proportion of all pro-life voters and activists. This means that even pro-life organizations that are willing to go against Republican policy preferences may hesitate to move on issues that will lead to controversy within these groups.
Unfortunately, both contraceptive access and comprehensive sex education are deeply controversial in these groups for different reasons. For the better part of a century, official Catholic doctrine has rejected contraceptives even as many Catholics use it: it is a can of worms that most Catholic organizations hesitate to open.
Comprehensive sex education, meanwhile, has been its own controversy for decades. We can understand the reason for this controversy through the trend toward homeschooling. This trend is especially notable among Evangelicals and Catholics: a homeschooling parent is about twice as likely to be Evangelical as a member of the general population is, and the Catholic homeschooling population has doubled in the past quarter century. Further, roughly 75 percent of religious homeschooling parents report “deep concern over public school instruction regarding gender identity [and] human sexuality.”
Whether the decision to homeschool is the result of bad personal experiences in public schools or just cynical and sensational propaganda about them, any policy proposal to expand sex education would feed into homeschoolers' perceptions about public schools and would therefore lead to internal conflict within the Catholic and Evangelical constituencies in the pro-life movement.
Internal Catholic controversies about contraception seem unlikely to fade away any time soon, and the controversies around public schools that contribute to the homeschooling trend seem to get worse year after year. Although some pro-lifers are perfectly happy to support policies aimed at reducing unwanted pregnancy exactly as Talarico and El-Sayed have laid them out, even they will have difficulty convincing others in the movement to follow suit. Unless these Senate candidates are prepared to help pro-life groups navigate these particular religious minefields, perhaps they should emphasize different possible areas of common ground.
This is not to say that it is counterproductive to talk about unwanted pregnancies. Rather, I think that examining this subject more closely and more honestly could break new ground in the abortion debate while simultaneously increasing the urgency of the issues of healthcare and economic justice that have driven both of these would-be senators' campaigns.
Regardless of how any given woman personally feels about the moral status of the fetus, she knows exactly how society as a whole will treat her if she becomes pregnant. If she does not know when she becomes pregnant whether society thinks she should want the pregnancy or not, she will learn quickly through the social judgment she experiences (especially when accessing public benefits), her access to quality healthcare, and the relationship of her pregnancy to her economic opportunities.
Rather than trying to find ways for our society to reduce unwanted pregnancies, we need to take a hard look at our society's un-want for pregnancies. This un-want is manifested in our under-investment in maternal health and Medicaid, our continual failure to implement robust parental leave, and the unnecessary burdens of paperwork and social judgment that we heap on women whose pregnancy is deemed to be a "burden on the state." This un-want of certain kinds of pregnancies contributes, in turn, to the phenomenon of unwanted abortions, where women whose personal values skew in favor of the unborn child still have abortions because of pressure from their partner, their parents, or their paychecks.
The problem to be solved through this discussion is not the birth rate, nor even the abortion rate. It is the way in which our society funnels resources to the already-comfortable while denying them to the needy–in this particular case, the pregnant woman and the unborn child.
The answer is not only to find new common ground but to rebuild our sense of the common good. El-Sayed and Talarico have both spoken eloquently and at length about economic inequality. If they extend this reasoning even further, they may find a message that pro-life voters and organizations alike will be eager to hear: the richest country in the world can afford a human-centered economy.
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Cover image by Conlan Houston, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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