How nice to see Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton turn right.
In recent appearances on the Sunday TV talk shows, the liberal New York Democrat seemed to regard the war in Iraq as an opportunity to seize the day in the name of democracy and freedom. She appeared to be caught up in the exciting possibilities of creating a democracy in the middle of the dangerous Middle East. Like President Bush, and unlike many Democrats.
So while Howard Dean, the newly named Democratic National Committee chairman, seems intent on digging a deeper ideological hole for his party, Clinton understands that to win in today’s political climate, she needs to do more than rehash old liberal dictums. It’s a sure sign that she’s running–for re-election to the U.S. Senate in two years and for president in four. Which is just fine.
But the softening of her hard-left rhetoric has her base wondering. When she called for a compromise on abortion, pro-choice forces raised their eyebrows. Could Clinton, who gets a “100 percent” rating from the dogmatic NARAL Pro-Choice America, be going astray?
In her speech a month ago to New York Family Planning Providers, she extended an olive branch, saying she respects “those who believe with all their hearts and conscience that there are no circumstances under which abortion should even be available.” She correctly noted that this isn’t the position of a large number of pro-lifers.
Hoping to shift the terms of the debate, she called for a “prevention agenda,” in which greater access to contraceptives would reduce the number of “unwanted” children. She may be surprised, but many pro-lifers support this too. She even acknowledged we must wait for more “facts” before concluding that abstinence sex education fails, an absolute no-no to the NARAL crowd.
Unfortunately, she demands much from pro-lifers but gives little in return. And the compromises she is proposing only nibble at the edges of the central issue. Until Clinton and pro-choice groups are willing to discuss the rights of the fetus as a person, a call to compromise will be futile. For some pro-lifers, this is a non-negotiable item. For them, doing so would be the moral equivalent of debating just how much of a person a slave was.
But compromise is not impossible. Society generally has defined death as the cessation of brain function. “Brain-dead” now trumps all, even a still-beating heart. The civic consensus is that a person who is brain-dead ethically can be unplugged from life support. Could the beginnings of some degree of brain activity likewise signal the existence of a person who has rights? It’s certainly a better measure of what constitutes a person than the extreme and untenable pro-choice position that a person does not come into existence until the moment of birth. It would give a marker, however tenuous, to when the idea of a “community” between mother, child and the rest of society becomes real.
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(Of course, some people believe the activity of brain function in Terri Schiavo is no obstacle to pulling her plug, even though it is possible that she is conscious and unable to express her desire to live.)
So, an agreement (or “compromise” if you prefer) on when a fetus (or embryo or zygote) becomes a person, endowed with human rights, opens the door for further discussion. How do we balance conflicting rights–a woman’s reproductive rights, and another person’s right to life itself and all the good that comes with it? Such a compromise would be a recognition that the privacy right to terminate a pregnancy isn’t absolute, as no right is, be it speech, press or bearing arms.
To suggest that compromise is possible is not to toss aside heartlessly the very real suffering that women face from unwanted pregnancies. But to suggest that a compromise is possible is to acknowledge that choosing abortion means that an individual disappears from the family of mankind. That all the good that he or she could have done will never be.
Clinton can go a long way to settling this issue by not trying to block any U.S. Supreme Court nomination that would shift the abortion debate back to Congress and the state legislatures, where compromise is the heart of the democratic process. Clinton has opened the door. Now let’s see if she walks through it.
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