Light On Dark Water

Sunday Night Journal — April 25, 2004M

There was a large rally for abortion rights in Washington
today. A few days ago I happened across a list of celebrities who
intended to participate, and I took time to read it because I try
to avoid spending money on the work of artists who are militant
supporters of abortion.

I don’t expect virtue of artists, and I certainly
don’t expect moral clarity and logical thinking from pop
musicians and actors. I know that most artists today are on the
leftward end of the political spectrum and that support for
abortion rights comes with that territory. I also know that most
of them preach and practice a way of life that puts them in a
pretty fair way to want the services of an abortionist. So I am
neither surprised nor outraged when they speak the conventional
doctrines. But it’s one thing to be more or less
thoughtlessly or selfishly “pro-choice,” quite
another to be so committed to the notion of a fundamental right
to abortion as to take to the streets in support of it. I look
askance at anyone who does so, and the work of an artist is
diminished in my eyes by such an association, just as would be
the case with an artist who participated actively in fascism or
communism: there is something amiss with his moral apparatus.
In the case of a couple of artists, such as John
Irving and Garrison Keillor, the intensity of their detestation
for those opposed to abortion is enough to distort their work and
make me avoid it altogether—a sad event in the case of
Keillor, whose work I once enjoyed but which, when I last checked
in with him five or six years ago, seemed to be getting steadily
uglier.

But back to the rally: one name I noticed on the list was that
of pop musician Sheryl Crow. I don’t really know Ms.
Crow’s work except for a few songs that have been on the
radio. They were not particularly to my taste and I haven’t
investigated her music any further, although I’ve been told
some of it is quite good. But her name caught my eye because she
had been in the news a year or ago for her views on the war in
Iraq. She was the author of one of the silliest things I’ve
ever heard anyone say about war: “The way to avoid war is
not to have enemies.”

There are many good reasons for opposing the war in Iraq, but
to think that we can unilaterally decide “not to have
enemies” is pretty stupid and would be criminally
irresponsible in a person whose duty is diplomacy or defense. Of
course there is a kernel of truth in Ms. Crow’s
idea—we should certainly try not to make enemies, we should
try to make peace, and one can, again, reasonably argue that we
have made in the Middle East enemies we need not have made. But
one wonders if she has read Osama bin Laden’s various
declarations of war against the United States, and, if she did,
how she believes she could coexist with someone who would
probably at one glance classify her as a harlot deserving of death.

“Those youths know that their rewards in fighting you, the
USA, is double than their rewards in fighting some one else not
from the people of the book. They have no intention except to
enter paradise by killing you.”

Avoidance of reality is not a virtue. Discretion may be
justified in averting one’s eyes from that which is
unseemly to dwell upon, such as the broken bodies of the victims
of a car crash, but there is no virtue in pretending that there
was no crash and no one died. There is a degree of symmetry in
Ms. Crow’s position on both war and abortion, in that they
are both grounded in avoidance of reality. One may reasonably and
fairly suppose that the motive for the first is a kind heart and
a horror of violence, and that the motive for the second is
something much less noble.

In regard to war she doesn’t
wish to acknowledge the intractable conflicts that no one has yet
figured out how to remove from human life, conflicts that are not
mere disagreements subject to negotiation and compromise but deep
and deadly oppositions that can only be settled by force.

In regard to abortion she seems to share with other advocates
of the practice a wish to avoid acknowledging the thing itself,
to the extent of not wanting to use the word at all. The strange and
compulsive use of the word “choice” as a euphemism
indicates a bad conscience and a suspicion that what they are
advocating is abhorrent, which often seems to increase their rage
against those who openly call it abhorrent. Sheryl Crow’s
performance in Washington today is sponsored by a pro-abortion
group called “Rock for Choice” whose official press
release never uses the word “abortion.” The one-time
National Abortion Rights Action League is also suppressing the
word, having decided that its former abbreviation, NARAL, shall
itself the name of the organization: I think the full name is now
NARAL Pro-Choice America. The abortion rights movement wishes to
avoid the reality that it is the abortion rights movement.

But those who propose abortion as a solution to the problem of
unplanned and unwanted pregnancy attempt to avoid reality on a
deeper level. They wish to avoid or cancel the fact that sexual
relations between men and women frequently lead to the conception
of a child, and that once that has happened there is no going
back: a life has begun, and will cease only with a death. The
promoters of abortion wish to pretend that it is possible to go
back.

People who are opposed to abortion are frequently told that
they are advocates of a “simplistic” solution, by
which is meant not that the solution is simple but that it is too
simple to serve the purpose. The idea that making abortion
illegal would remove the problem is indeed
“simplistic.” And in fact there are not many abortion
opponents who think it would end the problem; they only think it
would greatly reduce the number of abortions, not begin a golden
age. I don’t think I’ve ever heard from the
anti-abortion camp an idea so truly simplistic as Sheryl
Crow’s suggestion for avoiding war.

There is, however, a perfectly simple solution to the problem
which abortion is intended to solve. That is for people (I
suppose nowadays I ought to specify “male and female
people”) not to engage in sexual relations when they
aren’t willing to accept the possibility that a child will
be conceived. In any single concrete case this is always
perfectly workable (barring, of course, the case of rape). It may
be difficult, but “simple” and “easy” are
not synonyms. And it is hard to imagine any reasonable person
having an ethical objection to it (I specify
“reasonable” because no doubt there are those who
would argue that restraining sexual desire is immoral). Of course
it is foolish to expect that everyone would follow this rule, and
so it would never solve the problem across the entire scope of
society, but it is simple, and it is a solution for
any specific couple, in that it will always work for those
willing to avail themselves of it. Unlike Ms. Crow’s
proposal for ending war, it requires no utopian conditions in the
world at large, and depends on no help or cooperation from the
state or anyone else. As Garrison Keillor himself had one of his
Lake Woebegon priests say “If you didn’t want to go
to Minneapolis, why did you get on the bus?” (the fictional
character thus, in a paradoxical phenomenon not at all unheard of
in art, showing himself more wise than his creator seems to be,
or to have become).

The problem of unwanted pregnancies may be a complex
shades-of-grey sort of business when viewed from the perspective
of the law, which must apply to all. From the perspective of any
individual couple it is very much black-and-white: they either
do, or they don’t, engage in sexual relations, and they
either are, or are not, willing to accept the possibility of
pregnancy. (Once a child is conceived things are less
straightforward, at least for those who do not maintain an
absolute prohibition against the deliberate taking of innocent
life.) The decision for war takes place at the level of the
state, where a great number of calculations and guesses, some of
them mostly blind, about the motives, intentions, and
capabilities of other states, and about the consequences of
going or not going to war, are involved, and it will in many
cases never be perfectly clear in retrospect whether the decision
was wrong or right. Anyone who thinks he has a simple solution to
that problem is truly being simplistic.