Considering Social Policy on Abortion: Respecting Women as Moral Agents

Every year in the United States, 6.4 million women get pregnant. Half of these pregnancies are unintended, and almost half of these end in abortion. One-quarter of U.S. women will have an abortion by age thirty, and 30 percent of women will have an abortion by age forty-five.¹ That’s roughly one in three American women. Abortion, while highly contested in contemporary political rhetoric in the United States, is statistically safer than childbirth, and it is one of the most commonly performed medical procedures in the country.²

The thesis of Beverly Wildung Harrison’s 1983 book, Our Right to Choose, was that women’s capacity to control their own reproductive destiny is a broad-based social good that women require.³ In developing her argument, Harrison discussed the moral significance of the state recognizing women’s capacity to act as “rational moral agents” in the same way that the state affords this legal and moral right to men.⁴ It is this point that I wish to examine in this essay, namely, the extent to which the principle of respecting women’s moral agency does or ought to serve as the foundation for public policy on abortion.

Examining the Political Landscape

Harrison observed that the intensity of the political rhetoric around abortion is at least partly due to the fact that the population most negatively affected by abortion policy is “all but excluded from a direct voice in the policy-making process.”⁵ Little has changed on that front in the intervening thirty years. While there are more women legislators at the state and national levels than there were in 1983, women still only hold 24 percent of seats in state legislatures, 16 percent in the U.S. Congress, and 12 percent of governorships.⁶

However, the political landscape around abortion and abortion rights has transformed significantly. One major shift has been the emergence of a new and increasingly influential group of antiabortion activists who are organizing to change the political landscape of the United States. Groups like the Susan B. Anthony List,⁷ Americans United for Life, National Right to Life Committee, and Concerned Women for America are increasingly funding the campaigns of antichoice political candidates, drafting sample antichoice legislation to be introduced at the state level,⁸ lobbying to limit access for women to abortion services, and testifying against judicial candidates who are perceived to support Roe v. Wade. These groups, which range from political-action committees to public-interest law and policy groups to activist organizations, are becoming the public face of the antiabortion movement in the United States.

The women who dominate these organizations as leaders and spokes people represent a political shift from antiabortion leaders of the previous generation such as Henry Hyde, Jesse Helms, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Randall Terry.⁹ These men were white, heterosexual, Christian political and religious leaders who often worked in tandem on the political and religiocultural front to shape attitudes and legislation about abortion in this country. Of course, women such as Beverly LeHaye and Phyllis Schlafly were also influential in their respective roles as the founders of Concerned Women for America and the Eagle Forum, but their political approach was often seen as harsh and judgmental in its attitudes toward women seeking abortions (and, more generally, toward women who embodied different values from the traditional, conservative Christian values that they and their organizations represented and promoted). This newer, younger group of women is still composed of conservative, heterosexual, married Christian women who, like LeHaye and Schlafly, are working mothers raising young children. But they have changed their rhetorical and political approach considerably by attempting to position themselves as sympathetic sisters, concerned about women facing problem pregnancies and publicly pro-claiming their desire to help women even as they seek to deny them access to their legal rights.¹⁰

While their long-term goal remains overturning Roe v. Wade, antiabortion activists have increasingly turned their energies toward eroding abortion access at the state level. In 2011, legislators across the country introduced more...