Any productive debate about abortion — a rare thing, but worth pursuing — has to start by acknowledging each side’s strongest arguments and most sincerely held beliefs.
If you tell yourself that opposition to abortion is rooted exclusively in a patriarchal desire to control women, as opposed to a sincere commitment to the human rights of the unborn, you have not really begun to reckon with the persistence of the pro-life cause.
Likewise, if you tell yourself that support for abortion is entirely driven by a desire to defend hedonism and sexual promiscuity, as opposed to a sincere concern for the burdens that pregnancy can place on women and a sincere disbelief in the full personhood of embryonic human life, you will not really understand the strength of the pro-choice position.
The debates we’ve been having since the fall of Roe v. Wade, however, have revealed the ways in which both sides of the debate live with incoherence or self-deception.
The controversies around in vitro fertilization, for instance, have exposed a fundamental confusion among the many abortion opponents — Republican politicians, especially — who have rushed to reassure the public that their movement would never restrict the popular fertility treatment.
Is it possible to be pro-life and support some form of I.V.F.? Yes — but not the mainstream American form, with hundreds of thousands of embryos kept on ice and a significant percentage slated for destruction. The most sincere and consistent pro-lifers know this, but for a number of abortion opponents the issue is clearly a zone of cognitive dissonance, where they prefer not to follow their own premises to a personally uncomfortable or politically untenable conclusion.