Conservatives generally believe that certain sex-related laws and practices (such as the Obamacare contraception mandate) often infringe on religious freedom, but at least one liberal, the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik, doesn’t think that even abortion constitutes such an infringement. In his Friday review of Katha Pollitt’s recent book, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights, Gopnik declared, “There is no conflict between abortion rights and religious liberty. There is a conflict between women’s rights and religious intolerance.”
Gopnik also skewed the abortion debate as follows: “The choice—the only actual choice, in the world as it really is—is between safe, legal abortion and dangerous, illegal abortion. Everything else is just misogyny, cruelty, and superstition.”
From Gopnik’s review (bolding added):
[Pollitt’s book] has two major originalities. First is its lack of bowing or scraping for its pro-woman position. Abortion, in Pollitt’s view, must be seen not as a moral compromise requested by poor, weak women…but as a positive doctrine of women’s control over their own bodies, and of their own lives and destinies...The Clintons’ shrewd formula—“Safe, legal, and rare”—may have been born of political necessity, but it misstates the truth. Abortion need not promise to be rare to be secured as safe and legal. One of the greatest moral achievements of human history—the full emancipation of women—should not be seconded to a metaphysical intuition, one with no scientific support or even coherent meaning: that a fertilized egg makes the same moral claims as an entire person…
…A fertilized egg or embryo is not some freeze-dried essence of human but a complex set of potentials that need many, many conditions to develop into a human being...All of biological life exists on a slippery slope, where we walk with ice picks called rules and moral decisions. We may allow abortion without restriction in the first and in the third trimester, and still not permit infanticide. The distinctions, as always, are our own.
This does not make them arbitrary. We have always before us the Enlightenment choice between empty authority and rational argument—between divine rules made by an authority we know for certain to be nonexistent and rational ethical argument we know in advance will be ongoing and inconclusive. This uncertainty causes an enormous strain, huge social anxiety…But that some people can’t bear the strain is no reason for the rest of us not to go on trying to make sane rules. Accepting moral complexity is a sign of moral maturity…
There is no conflict between abortion rights and religious liberty. There is a conflict between women’s rights and religious intolerance…What is not tolerable is trying to impose irrational intuitions on people who don’t just fail to accept them but who feel that the removal of women’s freedom is itself a moral crime…
…The choice—the only actual choice, in the world as it really is—is between safe, legal abortion and dangerous, illegal abortion. Everything else is just misogyny, cruelty, and superstition.
