By Dave Andrusko

Editor's note. Please send your thoughts and comments to daveandrusko@gmail.com. They are very much appreciated.

Since I have often dissected what I've considered to be intellectual puffery coming from the pen of Frances Kissling, formerly head of Catholics for a Free Choice, it seems only fair that when Kissling offers a still flawed but far more intellectually developed argument, the least I can do is give her credit for doing so. Such is the case with "Can we ever say a woman can't choose?: It's hard for pro-choicers to admit sometimes a woman shouldn't be allowed to choose abortion -- but we have to," which appeared at www.salon.com.

You can imagine the comments that poured in. There is no one who more passionately believes in the slippery slope than your run-of-the-abortion-mill pro-abortionist. To acknowledge (as Kissling does) that there can ever be any conditions in which an abortion clinic ought to say no is (switching metaphors) to open Pandora's Box.

As I read the responses, I had to admire them, in a back-handed sort of way, for a kind of perverse consistency. The typical response was a variation of either, yes, there can be what are, by any objective standard, absurd reasons for aborting; yes, it may require turning off your conscience to proceed with an abortion; and/or, yes, there are explanations offered that 99.9% of the known galaxy would reject, but, so what? "IT'S MY BODY!"

Kissling attributes her "change" ["There is a point when our respect for potential life, for that individual fetus, should outweigh a woman's desire, even need, not to be pregnant"] to a Planned Parenthood ethics panel she was on some 15 years ago, but "mostly" to her fear "that single value ethics about abortion, on either side of the debate, would result in a coarsening of our respect for both women and for life."

What in the world does that mean?

Pro-lifers supposedly fixate on only "one value"--the life of the unborn, according to Kissling. But if pro-choicers "follow the example of those opposed to abortion and present only one value -- a women's right to make this decision -- as the only ethical consideration worth discussing in difficult cases, do we not become as extremist as we say they are? Is there not, in an ethical sense, an important weighing of women's rights and needs against a respect for life, even the life of nonpersons? Is there a point in pregnancy when our respect for life might outweigh a woman's right to make this choice? And is the fact that we have avoided it part of the reason that polls show that more people are willing to call themselves pro-life than ever before?"

Let's think about this. And if you think about it for more than 30 or 40 seconds, what a curiously misbegotten parallel Kissling is making. Located in the DNA of pro-lifers is the sure knowledge that it is impossible to consider the unborn in isolation from her mother. The opposition of this understanding is at the core of the pro-abortionist's position--that all that matters is the woman. 

We try to meet her needs, to show the mother that there is a better way (for her and for her child). How is that remotely comparable to the unquenchable thirst of Planned Parenthood (at home and abroad) for more and more abortions?

Kissling also offers an excruciatingly unconvincing case that morally, most (if not all) abortionists are like tuning forks, endowed with perfect pitch. For example, she says that 80% of abortionists will not abort unborn children past 20 weeks. The implication is they know just how far they are willing to go, as if that is something for which they should be commended. This may mean that they have declared an uneasy truce with their conscience, but it hardly qualifies as a badge of honor.

What makes this so fascinating is that in the next sentence Kissling tells us that while "Some advocates are engaged in efforts to encourage doctors to perform abortions later than" what they currently do, "most are not demanding that doctors go beyond their comfort level in performing abortions." This is absurd. Near the top of the pro-abortionist's "to-do" list is compelling medical personnel to be, at the least, complicit in the ugly traffic of slaughtering the unborn. Their "comfort level"--complete separation--is an annoying speed bump on the road to co-opting the medical profession.

Obviously I don't know the larger context of Kissling's "change." But it's worth mentioning some of the more indefensible reasons for abortion she cites along the way: "because the baby would be born under the wrong birth sign"; "because her fetus' hands were deformed"; and cases where "deaf couples do not want a hearing child."

Those may have prepared the groundwork for her reassessment. However my guess is that more compelling is the rampant growth of sex-selection abortions and the extermination campaign waged against 90% of the babies prenatally diagnosed as having Down syndrome.

You can read Kissling's essay and the avalanche of negative response it engendered at www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/06/21/choice/index.html?source=rss&aim=/opinion/feature.