Achin' Akin: An Admonishment of the Pro-Life Community As It Fast Approaches Moral Bankruptcy

Note: Originally written August 2012

Perhaps there are a few of us in the politically-minded camp who have not yet heard today’s outburst from Missouri. In the interest of context, the Republican senatorial candidate’s words are reproduced below:

            "From what I understand from doctors, that's really rare," "If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let's assume maybe that didn't work or something. I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be on the rapist."

There is little need to bog down in the mire of what exactly he said, suffice to say that is a deplorable statement.

If I could for a moment be more personal, I would like to share my view on abortion. As a Christian, a conservative, and a moral person, I am abhorred by the practice. Abortion does indeed terminate life without fault or blame for its explication. In a society of my own making, abortion would be strictly relegated to the extreme and rare cases of rape, incest, and life of the mother.

Those of us on the Right who are more willing to be critical of the grassroots GOP base will sometimes hone in on the steady progression of the Republican base towards radicalism on certain issues. For example, I remain stalwartly critical of the Tea Party approach to electoral success and intellectualism, especially in terms of its rhetoric. However, these excoriations are usually prefaced with a critique of the ‘modern’ itineration of the movement; the inference is that the divorce of pragmatism and principle is a recent phenomenon.

The pro-life movement, in contrast, cannot be disparaged in its ‘modern’ form. It cannot be done because it has acted in this fashion since its inception. The pro-life movement has never in its 40 year history any remembrance of days of pragmatism, no relic of less militant times buried away in a forgotten closet. Unlike any other American political movement, pro-lifers have been unique in that their message remains unchanged throughout four decades of shifting American political winds.

With this is mind, it must be made perfectly clear that the pro-life movement has been an utter failure. Even ‘utter’ is more understatement than an accurate assessment. Tell me, can they give me a list of states that have banned the practice? Or demonstrate to me how significantly they have reduced the number of American abortions? Perhaps they’ve acquired some success in altering the poll-verifiable opinions of the average American concerning abortion? No, no, and no. Every attempt made to ban abortion wholesale is rejected, even in Mississippi and the Dakotas. While abortion rates have declined from their peak in the early 1990s, the dip has been marginal by comparison. Americans polled on the issue of abortion remain nearly identical to their counterparts in the 1970s.

It is perhaps telling that the only tangible pro-life success in that time has been a ban on partial-birth abortion, a practice so despicable that only the most stridently pro-choice individual would support it. Even this progress took three decades to enact.

I repeat again that the pro-life movement has been a failure, and a resounding one at that. Why? Unlike any other social movement in the history of the United States, the pro-life movement has been the least willing to act pragmatically or compromise at any turn. This is endemic in the pro-life community. I personally know pro-life Americans who are against parental notification laws, ultrasound checks, etc because they feel that they are legitimating the practice by passing a law that does not abolish the action outright. Bans on second-trimester abortions, which a majority of Americans have expressed support in, are also cast aside. Instead, the standard of ‘personhood’ is raised via the ballot box, only to miserably fail every time it is voted on.

I am increasingly of the belief that electoral success is no longer, or perhaps never has been, a goal for the pro-life movement. It has become so inalterably obsessed with the moral rightness and ideological purity of its actions that it would rather breathe the evanescent vapour of moral victory and the buttress its own conscience than be successful. It is a movement overwhelmed with the hypocrisy of choosing its own self-aggrandizement over actions that would reduce, limit, or even eventually prevent the death of others.

This is the apogee of a movement fast approaching its own moral bankruptcy, yet still puttering along with its insistence that more aborted faetus photographs will shock the American conscience. It is a group who feels it necessary, as Akin did, to downplay rape in order to explain the internal contradictions in your own radicalism. Abortions in the case of rape, incest, and life of the mother constitute no more than 1% of all American abortions, but that 1% has now become what the movement has been defined by. If exceptions are made in these cases, American support for a national ban on abortion nears a majority. Yet that 1% means enough in their self-righteousness that they are willing to let the abortion rate remain unchanged and no progress be made towards saving the lives of the unborn?  

If they are to succeed in their goal, which should be to limit abortion as much as possible, there must be sharp movement towards pragmatism. Look to the environmental protection movement. If Rachel Carson had echoed the modern talking points of the Sierra Club in Silent Spring, the entire movement would be devoid of success. Indeed, would we be having a national discussion on same-sex marriage if LGBT advocates had called for it en masse sans compromise back in the Stonewall Riots? Of course not. We live in an America that celebrates Martin Luther King, but is largely ignorant or dismissive of Stokely Carmichael. Why? Because we value gradualism and denigrate radicalism in our social movements.

Yet the pro-lifers do not have the courage to engage in difficult compromises in order to achieve their goals. There is no bravery, no true moral fortitude to be found in screaming outside of Planned Parenthood with blood and gore bedecking your signs. There is no true moral conscience in a movement that routinely chooses a path it knows it will never succeed in save a moral high ground built ever higher on the graves of the unborn. If they were brave, if they were not increasingly morally repugnant, they would compromise. They would work every year to limit abortions in state legislatures, one trimester and restriction at a time.

The greatest fear of the pro-choice movement should be a pro-life counterpart that is willing to build a coalition of Americans around the idea that abortions must be strongly limited, but not banned. That is a movement that could eventually see a United States without 95 + % of its abortion. Also, it is a movement that this author will not feel ashamed to be a part of, one that does not label him pro-choice because he does not see progress towards a goal as an abandonment of principle. Therein lies the reason for their failures, and a rationale for a new course. Are they brave enough to take it? Most likely not.