Abortion is now in decline. Nobody on either side of the debate took into account how women’s attitudes would change.
NORMA MCCORVEY WANTS TO OVERTURN Roe v. Wade. There’s little surprise in someone’s wanting that. Plenty of people, from anti-abortion activists to Constitutional scholars, would like to do away with Roe. The only difference is that Norma McCorvey is Roe.
In 1973, she was the anonymous plaintiff who sued Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade and achieved victory in the Supreme Court. Thirty years later, in June, she again filed suit in a Dallas court—as the original plaintiff has the right to do—to have the ruling overturned. Judge David Godbey almost instantly rejected the suit, saying Roe is now settled law. McCorvey will appeal.
McCorvey seems just as complicated as the rest of us, if not a little braver. She fled an abusive home at 15, was married at 16, became a mother at 17, and now is a born-again Christian. She came out years ago as a lesbian and for 28 years has shared her life with the same partner. In the last 10 years, she’s come to believe not only that abortion damages women emotionally, but also, on the basis of new scientific evidence, that it takes a human life—things she didn’t believe 30 years ago.
In her misgivings, McCorvey reflects the majority of American women. The latest survey by the Center for the Advancement of Women, headed by former Planned Parenthood president Faye Wattleton, shows that only 30 percent of women think abortion should be generally available. Fifty-one percent now say there should be severe limits on abortion, and another 19 percent think restrictions should be tougher than they are now. This is a remarkable turnaround from the 68 percent who supported abortion on demand in 1990.
Why this sea change in the way women think about abortion?
Wattleton’s explanation is that “we now have a generation of women who … have not lived without the option of legal abortion.” In other words, because younger women don’t have to worry about its availability, they are free to disdain it.
It’s a good point, but it’s not the only explanation. Fifteen years ago, I visited James McFadden, founder of the scholarly journal Human Life Review. Although deeply engaged in the abortion debate, he told me the battle was lost. With the pace of abortions then at 1.5 million a year, too many people—family members, spouses, friends—had a personal stake in defending abortion, not just as a right but as a positive good. McFadden’s arithmetical logic seemed indisputable at the time, but that’s not the way it has worked out. Many women who have had abortions now speak of a hole at the center of their being that can never be filled. Their friends, relatives, and daughters speak of abortion not in the combative language
of rights, but in the softer mournful tones
of tragedy.
At the same time, the social embarrassment of an unmarried girl having a child is disappearing. Far from being a humiliation, having the child is now seen more often than not as the responsible choice to make.
Then there is science. Technological advancements allow us to see barely formed fetuses in the womb (on the cover of Newsweek, no less). These are clearly not lumps of tissue, as some once argued, but babies waiting to be born. It is impossible now to say that abortion does not take life.
Abortions have declined every year in the last decade. That reminds us again that there is no calculus that can ever capture the complexities of the human heart. In trying to wend her way back from where she started to where she found herself, Norma McCorvey is not alone.
