One of the issues Planned Parenthood is discussing and debating these days is the role of men in the pro-choice movement, if we have one.
It is a headline topic at a day-long seminar the leading pro-choice organization is holding today to observe Thursday’s 25th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s historic Roe vs. Wade decision that established the constitutional right of women to have an abortion.
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It’s a worthy question. The pro-choice demonstrations I have seen in recent years stand in contrast to their counterparts in the 1960s in one glaring respect. The protests today tend to be dominated by young women. Where are all the young men? Quite often I suspect no one has tried very hard to recruit them.
Rather, it has become chic in some feminist circles to take a separatist approach in the pro-choice movement. Like the exasperated phrase worn on T-shirts by some black youths, “It’s a black thing: You wouldn’t understand,” the feminist separatists say, it’s a women’s thing and we testosterone-poisoned guys just don’t get it.
Only a minority of pro-choice folks hold such extreme views, but it is a highly vocal group. It has influenced many women, particularly young women, and alienated manyy men who would be their allies. After all, major polls show men and women to hold almost identical attitudes toward abortion, especially after you adjust for statistical error.
For example, a new Gallup poll released today shows 21 percent of males and 24 percent of females believe abortion should be legal “under any circumstances,” 18 percent of men and 15 percent of women believe it should be legal “under most circumstances” and 43 percent of men and 41 percent of women believe it should be legal in “only a few circumstances.”
Only 16 percent of men and 18 percent of women believe it should be “illegal in all circumstances.”
This poll, like others in recent years, shows a significant drop-off in support for legal abortions in all cases, an erosion that undoubtedly reflects the relentless campaign by anti-abortion forces to criminalize what they call “partial birth” abortions.
Most abortions occur before the first three months, the period in which the public has been most comfortable. It is in the later weeks that support falls the most. Anti-abortion forces have given moderate Republicans and even some Democrats a fright by shifting public attention to abortions that occur in the late stages of fetal development, when the fetus could viably live on its own outside the womb. When the debate shifts to the earliest stages of pregnancy, where the vast majority of abortions occur, it’s much more difficult to call the developing fetus a person. Then public support shifts in favor of a woman’s right to choose what happens to her body.
At a time when men across the nation are redefining and rediscovering manhood in a variety of movements, it seems to me that pro-choice women have a golden opportunity to reach out and enlist more men toward their effort, especially teens and young adults.
Much of the political apathy so often decried by today’s youth is the result of a sense that politics are not relevant to them. What could be more relevant than abortion to an age group that most often has to face this painful decision? It is a situation women should not have to face alone.
I blame the media for much of that polarization. Turn to the news pages or turn on a TV talk show and you are likely to see the debate dominated by extremists.
I wish I could be that certain. Like most Americans, I know what I don’t like better than what I do like. I don’t like abortion. I don’t like legislators who are far removed from highly personal problems telling women what they can do with their bodies, either. I don’t like the photos of aborted fetuses that some right-to-life fanatics cheerfully send me. (Gee, thanks a heap, folks!)
But I like even less the ghastly memories I vividly recall of dead and permanently injured women during the pre-Roe days, not to mention the police raids, sometimes while women still were on the operating table.
Anti-abortion folks decry the “elitist” women who support choice. I decry the elitist reality that used to force only poor women into the hands of back-alley abortionists, while well-off women could go out of state or out of the country for the blue-ribbon version.
It is for those disadvantaged women that today’s pro-choice women continue the abortion crusade.