Pro-choice Activists Should Embrace Free Expression

To the editors:



Re: “Twice Victimized,” op-ed, Nov. 2:

The recent call by the co-directors of Harvard Students for Choice for “limits” on postering by Harvard Right to Life (HRL) only further confirms me in my belief that those who claim to support free expression, except when it is hurtful, quite simply do not get it. The price of living in an open society is that we are liable to find ourselves contradicted, offended, and distressed at every turn. We pay this price because we are aware of the alternative. However sincere the desire of the writers to protect the emotions of rape victims, their call is one we cannot heed. The world has yet to see the act of censorship that was not advanced as an attempt to conserve, defend, or uphold. To paraphrase Justice Stephen G. Breyer, the proper answer to posters you do not like is not fewer posters, it is more.

Their article belies a further set of illiberal and unqualified assumptions in its blithe reduction of HRL’s campaign to an attack on rape victims. As an aside, it bears noting that the proportion of abortions attributed to rape and incest in the U.S. hovers between one and two percent, depending on the study. But more importantly, their claim elides the primary concern of HRL’s campaign, namely the fetus, as well as the campaign’s demand for greater resources to assist young mothers.

Pro-choice activists who summarily condemn their opponents as anti-women evince no more honesty or nuance than anti-abortion activists who condemn their opponents as anti-baby. There can be no progress on this issue until Harvard’s pro-choice spokespersons are more interested in confronting the sincere moral concerns of the anti-abortion movement than in constructing circuitous justifications for silencing it.



NATHANIEL A. SMITH ’06-’07

November 2, 2006