Baby With the Bathwater

Meet Candice. She’s a young white woman with long brown hair and soft features, bearing a resemblance to Alanis Morrissette. She’s seen in profile, eyes unfocused and bathed in yellow-orange light. Maybe you feel like she’s miles away even though her picture is right in front of you, and don’t know why you can’t connect with her. The first thing you learn about her is that she was raped.

But Candice isn’t in an ad for a domestic violence hotline or rape crisis center. She’s the cover girl on a Harvard Right to Life (HRL) poster. Is something wrong with this picture?

Of course, that’s not actually a picture of “Candice.” The same image appears on different posters to represent “Colleen” and “Lisa.” What do all these women have in common? They’ve had an abortion—and they’re sorry.

“I was raped and therefore ‘justified’ in my abortion,” reads the caption on the Candice poster, “but it didn’t change a thing. I suffered because I was led to believe that taking my child’s life was okay. It was not, and I have been living with that for almost five years.”

“The dilation was extremely painful,’” Colleen, who had an abortion at 18, tells us. “A counselor held my hand and told me not to cry. The suction machine was very loud—a horrible noise. My abortion to me is like a bad, bad nightmare.” Meanwhile, Lisa says she’s angry. She wouldn’t have had an abortion had she “had an ultrasound, been counseled on the emotional, physical, mental consequences; if I had realized I could say ‘No’ to my boyfriend who pressured me; if I accepted myself.”

The message? “Abortion,” the poster says, “is never the best choice for a woman.”

The group’s word choice of “choice” is no accident. These posters don’t say women shouldn’t be able to choose, just that they should be making what HRL thinks is the right choice. Has HRL become almost...well, pro-choice?

Discussion of HRL’s new strategy has monopolized many House e-mail lists, and given headaches to the leadership of its pro-choice counterpart, Harvard Students For Choice (SFC). The message that abortion is a bad choice is certain to resonate with moderates, precisely because it emphasizes that abortion is indeed one available choice, albeit one women should eschew.

The national pro-life movement has utilized what is sometimes called a salami technique in their fight against legalized abortion, by pushing for incremental prohibitions of particularly unpopular practices, one at a time. When certain forms of abortion are outlawed—such as the “partial birth” abortion ban recently signed by President Bush—it puts all other forms of abortion on the bargaining table.

HRL is deploying a similar technique: first, convince people that the decision to abort is wrong, and then persuade them that the option to abort is wrong as well. However, if women get accustomed to pro-lifers telling them they should exercise their freedom to choose to carry a baby to term, they may be even less inclined to support efforts that would endanger that very right to choose.

“People think they can make an argument, regardless of its philosophical implications, and not own up to those implications,” says Will Saletan, chief political correspondent for Slate magazine and author of a recent book on abortion politics, Bearing Right. “They think that arguments are like kites: they can float them up in the wind and pull them back when they want to. But what happens is the wind breaks your string and takes your kite away. The wind here is choice. When [pro-lifers] concede that abortion needs to be reduced through each woman’s choice, they’re giving away the ballgame.”

Last year, HRL’s campus posters depicted a fictional fetus, “Natalie,” and tracked her development in the womb, accompanied by the Dr. Seuss slogan, “A person’s a person no matter how small.” The Natalie posters were repeatedly torn down. “We got a lot of criticism last spring,” says former HRL president Paul C. Schultz ’03-’04, also a Crimson editor. “You know, ‘they’ve got this baby Natalie, and they don’t care about baby Natalie’s mom at all. Republicans care about life until birth, and after birth, screw ‘em.’ We don’t want ourselves to be presented as though that’s what we are. The woman is at least half of every abortion.”

According to Schultz, last year’s March for Life in Washington, D.C. included a group of women who regretted their abortions. Hearing that message inspired the group’s president Daniel R. Tapia ’05 and vice president Laura E. Openshaw ’05 to contact Feminists for Life of America, a national pro-life group who came up with the slogan “women deserve better” and have launched a “college outreach program” aimed at spreading the message on campuses. Tapia and Openshaw then settled on “abortion is never the best choice for a woman.”

“The rhetoric from the other side is choice this, choice that, choice choice choice,” says Schultz. “So [the campaign] adopts some of the rhetoric that the other side is always using in the continuing debate. We feel that they have too much thunder with their use of choice over the last three decades. The change in rhetoric is an attempt to take that bulwark away.”

Both sides insist that HRL has given no ground. “As much as I’d like to think that it’s a concession, I couldn’t say that it is,” says Evelyn Becker, deputy communications director at NARAL Pro-Choice America. “[Abortion] is a choice. Are they acknowledging that? I guess. To the extent that they’re recognizing that, well, OK. But the message they’re giving is certainly not in support of that choice.”

HRL also maintains that the postering campaign does not reflect a shift to the center—perhaps its only point of agreement with NARAL. There was no concern within HRL that the campaign represented any endorsement of the right to choose whether to have an abortion, according to Tapia. Schultz says, “The shift in the rhetoric comes from the recognition that more can be achieved in the short term if women stop making that decision, independent of the possibility of that option being taken away...I think if someone were really playing or teasing with the language, they could construe it [as supporting legal abortion], but it’s a back-assward way of going about it.”

However, the slogan’s incorporation of the word “choice” was indisputably ingenious. In the stale abortion debate, the questions are always framed the same way: when does life begin, what role should the government play, and what are the rights of the fetus versus those of the mother. The posters reconfigure the issue entirely. Just like Bill Clinton signing the Republicans’ 1996 welfare reform bill, HRL is sweeping abortion-rights advocates’ twin foundations—the logic of choice and women’s interests—out from under them. Once pro-lifers stop saying women shouldn’t be able to have abortions and simply say that they shouldn’t choose to have them, pro-choicers are left with almost nothing to say except that they should choose to have them—a message that they don’t believe, and would get nowhere if they did, even in a liberal oasis like Harvard.

“When somebody concedes something to you, you have to ask yourself, do you want the win or do you want the fight?” says Saletan. “A lot of people would rather have the fight—anything that pro-lifers support can’t be enough. But I think it’s a trap for zealots who are so determined to argue with the other side that they don’t notice when the other side has conceded the most important thing...It’s always been a slander against pro-choicers that they’re really pro-abortion. If you argue with somebody who concedes choice but opposes abortion, then you make the slander come true.”

Sure enough, Harvard Students For Choice (SFC) has struggled to find an effective response. The group put up black-and-white text posters addressing unsafe abortion practices in other countries, but they could hardly compete with HRL’s larger, colorful posters and potent message. And while an unaffiliated group, Students for the Right to Choose, put up posters depicting two bunny rabbits with the caption, “Shit happens, and when abortion isn’t an option, more shit happens,” even a humorous effort didn’t really engage HRL’s new message head-on.

“The debate has been framed in a way that Students for Choice doesn’t want to play into,” says SFC President Abigail L. Fee ’05. “We’re being pushed into this moral debate. The whole point of choice is whatever you want to do, do it. I’m not going to stick 400 coat hangers in front of the Science Center. I’m not going to point fingers at people who think abortion’s wrong. They have the right to think that way. I think [SFC] having no response has just as much effect as having a response.”

Fee says that HRL’s incorporation of the notion of choice into their materials is deceptive. “It’s judging women for choices they might make,” she says. “It tells a woman that a choice that she has is wrong, or that a choice she has already made is wrong.”

According to Saletan, the slogan’s co-opted notion of choice is undermined by the word “never.” “Pro-choice activists are within their rights to argue with these posters, but they need to focus their argument on the word ‘never,’ not on the word ‘choice,’” he says. “[SFC should] say congratulations to our former opponents for seeing the light and recognizing that the choice of whether to have an abortion or not should be up to the woman. The next step is for them to recognize that if the choice is to be up to the woman, no outsider can confidently say that abortion is ‘never the right choice.’ Choice means the woman gets to decide.”

Yet while HRL may have won the upper hand in this publicity battle, it’s unclear what it has given away. National pro-life organizations support HRL in saying that the slogan doesn’t necessarily convey support for choice. “It’s a different audience, it’s college women,” says Holly M. Smith, an advisor at National College Students for Life. “The women seeing the posters may be in a position where they’re considering abortion, so [HRL is] looking at a personal situation.” However, she says, “It’s not a slogan we would use. We’re trying to influence the culture and looking at a political consideration of the best way for government to protect its citizens. Harvard Right to Life using it is a case of pragmatism.”

HRL acknowledges that the campaign is just an initial step in an incremental agenda culminating in the overturn of Roe. “[Abortion] is only going to be illegal when people understand that it hurts women and ends the life of the child,” says Tapia. “It’s a moot point to argue for it being illegal until you show that it’s wrong.” The strategy, it seems, is to rope in moderates with liberal language that will make them start listening, and begin to form an anti-abortion consensus. Once abortion is, as Tapia says, “viewed like cigarettes,” it may be easier to ban it.

But pulling the bandwagon from persuasion against abortion to outright prohibition may prove difficult. On an overwhelmingly liberal campus, any socially conservative movement needs to tack toward the center to gain traction. And by separating the notion of choice from support for abortion, HRL has at least temporarily beaten the pro-choice movement at its own game. However, by removing choice from politically contested territory and accepting it as common ground, HRL may have trouble transforming the personally anti-abortion coalition they hope to form into a political anti-choice movement. It’s a nice battle for HRL to win, but it may cost them the war.