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I've always had a fair amount of sympathy for pro-choicers who find abortion morally problematic and conduct some of their hand-wringing in public. The fury directed at them often seemed a bit out of proportion to the banal misgivings they expressed. But over at Tapped, Scott Lemieux gives the clearest explanation I've heard of why it's actually pernicious for political types to spend all their time emphasizing their moral struggles with the issue:
Good coalition-building on reproductive freedom would consist of emphasizing agreement (the stupidities and inequities of using inevitably arbitrary state coercion to force women to bring pregnancies to term, the greater effectiveness of the broad panoply of pro-choice policies in reducing abortion rates by reducing unwanted pregnancies) and de-emphasizing moral conflicts. People object to Sullivan and Saletan because they emphasize the latter rather than the former -- and especially in Saletan's case, in fact denying that abortion is morally complex but that people who don't share his moral views are simply wrong -- and argue almost exclusively on the political terrain favored by anti-choicers. Creating conflicts where no necessary ones exist -- like writing yourself out of the pro-choice movement because you think there are moral problems with abortion -- is coalition-fracturing. Acknowledging that many people find abortion immoral can be the start of a pro-choice argument, but it can't be the end of one.Obviously, not every Slate article should be evaluated in terms of its worth to the progressive coalition, but insofar as certain writers have carved out a space which isn't pro-life, but is simultaneously anti-pro-choicer, it's a fair topic for criticism.
