Muzzled (21 page)

Another group of state lawmakers, State Legislators for Legal Immigration, proposed changing the constitutional standard, expressed in the Fourteenth Amendment, that
grants citizenship to all children born in the United States. Under the new proposal a child must have at least one parent who is a U.S. citizen or legal permanent resident in order to qualify to become an American citizen. The law fit with concerns previously expressed by extremists and anti-immigrant critics about “anchor babies,” and probably “terror babies” too, for that matter.

The radical threat to the Constitution to deny citizenship to children born in the United States is another consequence of the federal government’s failure to deal with immigration for the last decade. As I am writing, there is no evidence of anything but continued posturing, political stagnation, and finger-pointing on this critical issue. The Obama administration does not have a record of fighting the good fight to get the debate under way. Its strategy is to work around the edges. It has put money into eliminating the FBI backlog on background checks for people applying for legal immigration and has also put more money into border security to try to defuse concern about terrorism risks posed by lax security. But basically the country remains adrift on immigration, legal and illegal.

“In the end,” President Obama has said, “our broken immigration system affects more than a single community; it affects our entire country. And as we continue to strengthen our economy and jump-start job creation, we need to do so with an immigration system that works, not the broken system we have now.”

President Obama is echoing President Bush on this issue. Left and Right agree at the highest levels of government that something has to be done. But the years continue to pass without
politicians taking the risk of tackling the problem. We are locked into a game of political checkers where no one is going to move for fear of getting jumped.

Midway through the twenty-first century, about 20 percent of the U.S. population will be made up of people born in other countries. Hispanics, the nation’s largest minority group, now make up 15 percent of the population. About a quarter of the Hispanic population is made up of illegal immigrants. Polls show Hispanics oppose most of the stringent enforcement plans intended to cut down on illegal immigration. They are almost perfectly aligned in opposition to the anti-immigrant crowd on the Right. Yet within that larger group, native-born Hispanics have the same opinions as the general American population about the need for better border enforcement.

What the polls tell us is that there is a large, unexplored middle ground on immigration. That it is not the divisive issue that political extremists tell us it is. Most Americans, whatever their backgrounds, believe we are a unique nation of immigrants and yet care about our laws of citizenship and national security in an age of terrorist threats. They understand the importance of opening doors for both low-wage workers who do many critical jobs in the United States and highly skilled workers who are key to the continued growth of the U.S. economy.

Why is no one talking to them?

A
MERICA LONG AGO reached the point where there is no productive way to discuss abortion. It is the issue that best exemplifies the difficulty of having an honest conversation in America. Ranting and vituperative slander erupt regularly in any public discussion of abortion. Extremists insist there is no middle ground—only their way. That’s why even an admission of uncertainty leads to condemnation from those who are either proabortion or antiabortion. Debate degenerates into arguments over abortion that are so personal and hurtful. To escape harsh judgment from those who would ostracize them, many women who have had abortions withhold the truth from parents, husbands, and children. They carry it as a private burden, and an increasing number of doctors do not even learn how to perform abortions, so they can avoid the harassment and arguments that would result from doing the procedure.

Political leaders, both for and against abortion, stick to politically correct scripts for fear of losing ground to another
politician who is willing to take an absolutist stance. Even politicians who speak out of sincere belief on abortion knowingly overstate their ability to end abortion or protect women who want an abortion.

It is difficult to discuss any social issue that has strong ties to the volcanic topics of sexual behavior and religious beliefs. But in 1972 abortion went into another dimension, beyond homosexuality and pornography. That year President Nixon captured 60 percent of Catholic voters, previously a reliable Democratic constituency. He won those Catholic voters after announcing his opposition to “unrestricted abortion.” However, the next year, in 1973, the Supreme Court ruled in
Roe v. Wade
that abortion was protected by the Constitution. Suddenly, abortion became the number one polarizing issue in the nation. Forty years later it remains the champion wedge issue to divide the American people and the major political parties. Nothing matches its powerful, highly combustible political mixture of sex, death, women’s liberation, and religion.

That is why abortion is the epitome of fixed, intractable, polarized American politics.

Every presidential candidate is compelled to support abortion rights if they are Democratic, or stand against abortion rights if they are a Republican.

Every Supreme Court nominee is scrutinized for any indication of how they will vote on abortion.

Catholic leaders threaten to deny politicians the right to communion if they disagree with the church hierarchy, without acknowledging that there is a major divide on the issue of abortion among the most faithful Catholics.

People who call themselves liberals can be intolerant
when it comes to abortion. Teddy Kennedy famously said of Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork that “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions.” Faye Wattleton, the former head of Planned Parenthood, a group that provides abortions, once charged abortion opponents with modern-day “McCarthyism.” Abortion supporters have made a hideous trademark of a twisted coat hanger as a reminder of the back-alley alternative to legal, supervised medical abortions.

The ugly talk, of course, has also come from people trying to stop legal abortion. During the health-care reform debate in 2010, Congressman Randy Neugebauer, a Texas Republican, felt free to slander a Michigan Democrat, Bart Stupak, as a “baby killer.” Incredibly, Stupak is an opponent of abortion. Nellie Gray, who organized the first mass protest in Washington against abortion, warned that like Nazis who killed Jews during the Holocaust, any member of Congress supporting abortion rights “will be held accountable, just as the Nuremberg trials found individuals personally responsible for crimes committed against humanity.” Representative Trent Franks, an Arizona Republican, has called abortion worse than slavery. Abortion opponents carry signs with pictures of bloody aborted fetuses. They badger and traumatize women entering abortion clinics.

There is little room in this charred landscape for hope or compromise. This harsh language, the personal insults, the reliance on religious dogma and threats of violence make it easy for most Americans to shut up when it comes to abortion. The fact that both political parties see benefit in keeping up the attacks has made it impossible to have an honest debate or to
compromise and achieve national consensus on abortion. People become angry, hurt, and bitter from being assaulted with charges that range from oppressing women to child-killing. The response to such slander is predictable. People on each side harden their positions and join in trading dogma. Tragically, the ill will is so thick it derails the need to resolve the myriad social and economic problems that surround abortion. Abortion takes up so much attention, emotion, money, and energy that by comparison political leaders appear indifferent to or bored with the tragic daily circumstances confronting too many American women and children—poverty, hunger, homelessness, joblessness, and abuse.

The obsessive focus on abortion results in the nation agreeing to a separate and artificial reality.

The alternate universe of bitter words never admits the reality that polls have painted a fairly consistent picture of what the American people think about abortion. It is a world described by President Clinton in which abortion is “safe, legal and rare.” A strong majority of Americans seem comfortable with that rational approach, according to the polls. For most of the last forty years, most Americans have told pollsters they approve of a woman being allowed to have an abortion. And studies show that one of every three American women, across all religions, races, income levels, and age groups, will have an abortion before the age of forty-five. The most recent data on abortions in the United States, from the Guttmacher Institute, reports that despite the blanket opposition of the Catholic Church and evangelicals, 28 percent of the women having abortions identify their religion as Catholic and 37 percent say they are Protestant.

The study showed that about half of the women who have abortions, 45 percent, have never been married and are not living with a man. More than 60 percent of the women who have abortions already have one or more children. And many women who have abortions are poor: 42 percent of them have incomes below the poverty line ($10,830 for a single woman with no children), and another 27 percent are limited to incomes less than twice the federal poverty level.

That sad picture offers no evidence to suggest that brutish husbands, pimps, or psychopaths are forcing these women to have abortions. There is no indication that wanton, loose women casually use abortion in place of contraception. The survey indicates that the average woman having an abortion is an adult—57 percent are between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine—who is making a difficult, personal decision, often while struggling to feed herself and her children, to terminate a pregnancy.

Given that reality, even if the
Roe v. Wade
decision giving women constitutional protection for abortion was overturned, abortion would not stop. If a conservative Supreme Court majority overturned Roe, it would open the door to each of the fifty states setting its own rules for abortion. Under those circumstances, states such as California and New York would likely allow abortions, while states like Alabama and Oklahoma would likely ban them. In the post
-Roe
world with no constitutional protection for abortion, the world so passionately desired by abortion opponents, women living in a state that did not allow abortions would be able to travel to states that allow abortion. Poor women and young women without the means or support to make the trip might be forced to find doctors or
midwives who would do abortions illegally. Or those women would keep children they didn’t want and might not be able to adequately take care of. Ideally, in that scenario, they would put those unwanted children up for adoption. But the overwhelming majority of abortions would continue unabated.

The fact is that abortions occur every day in America, and that has been true regardless of what the high court, Congress, the president, or any religious community says about them. This is not an expression of opinion. It is a recognition of reality. Abortion is a painful subject, but no meaningful debate can take place while opponents pretend it can simply be abolished.

The language around the abortion debate is so charged it has become a seductive, paralyzing toxin when applied to other topics. To avoid getting stung in the abortion debate, journalists are now instructed by the
Associated Press Stylebook
to refrain from using the terms “pro-life” and “pro-choice.” The problem with these terms is that they can be taken to imply that people who hold the opposite view are not just wrong but morally deficient in their character. If you identify as pro-life, then you are communicating to all those who disagree with you that they are bad people who are “anti-life” and “pro-death.” On the other hand, if you put a “pro-choice” sticker on your car, some people will take that to mean that you are impugning the other side as intolerant, small-minded people who are “anti-freedom” and “anti–individual privacy.” So the
Associated Press Stylebook
instructs journalists to use the more neutral terms “anti-abortion” and “abortion rights” in telling stories about abortion.

I am going to stick with that language because this book is
not about who is right or wrong on abortion. I don’t want to give anyone a convenient reason to ignore the damage being done by the abortion debate to all civil dialogue.

And both sides try to drag everyone into their miserable argument. In addition to the coded words and disturbing symbols, hyperbole is a ubiquitous tactic used by both sides. Supporters of abortion point to pregnancies that result from rape or incest to argue their case. In one of the 2004 presidential debates, Senator John Kerry, the Democratic nominee, posited this scenario to justify his opposition to parental notification laws. What Senator Kerry and the “pro-choice” crowd neglects to mention is that only about 1 percent of all abortions terminate a pregnancy that resulted from rape or incest. Opponents of abortion use similar tactics. They focus on “partial-birth abortion” of late-term fetuses and detail images of limbs being pulled off bodies to make a graphic, emotionally upsetting case for their point of view. And like their opponents, they fail to mention the dire circumstances that require the use of such a procedure or that it is rarer than the 1 percent of abortions tied to rape and incest. On every side politicians and interest groups have a penchant for manipulating the facts about abortion to shift the debate in their favor. Restraint and respect for the other side of the argument are viewed as evidence of lack of conviction. They are seen as weakness.

This dangerous minefield surrounding discussion of abortion is now creeping into discussions of all social issues. As the new standard it has reduced debate to the use of smear tactics, slogans, and questioning the integrity of anyone who holds a different point of view. On gay marriage, school prayer, allowing monuments with religious symbols on public land, and
even the celebration of Christmas by public institutions, the debate is always shaped to mimic the failed, frustrating, and purely political pattern of discourse on abortion. The reason the abortion debate has the power to set the beat for every other discussion of social issues is the tremendous success the issue has had in building political movements.