I tend to buy the idea that abortion is an agonizing choice and the Democratic response should be empathetic and tolerant, not blase and laissez-faire. But my friend Julian Sanchez makes a compelling case in the opposite direction:
Treating fetuses as persons has harmful consequences, even if we simultaneously insist that their interests are trumped by women's right to control their bodies. For one, it means endorsing the notion that the one-third of American women who will have an abortion will be killing a child. And in the political realm, how uneasy we are about abortion will determine what measures short of an outright ban we are willing to entertain as means of ensuring that abortion remains "rare." Hillary Clinton, for instance, has suggested that because "religious and moral values" are strong predictors of abstinence, we should "support programs that reinforce the idea that abstinence at a young age is not just the smart thing to do, it is the right thing to do." But if there is nothing seriously immoral about abortion, then this sort of unseemly government-sponsored religious indoctrination would gain little of importance even if it were effective.[...]
When enough people self-consciously move to the political "center," it ceases to be the center and becomes a new pole. A "mainstream" of political discourse defined by the shared assumption that all abortion is morally suspect should be regarded by all advocates of reproductive freedom as a rough beast, slouching toward 2008 to be born.
I'm very comfortable with choice and profoundly uncomfortable with abortion, though not for any reasons that strike me as intellectually coherent. Instead, my discomfort stems from a fuzzy impression that the act is morally ambiguous, albeit not actually wrong. But that view, on consideration, is weak. Indeed, I fear I hold it in no small part because others like me hold it, and so the impression that abortion kills something recognizably childish has snowballed, and I'm now part of the avalanche of unfocused moral opprobrium. Which is bad, both from a political perspective, and because it causes women making a choice I agree with to suffer unnecessary personal anguish.
