The Intensity of the Abortion Debate Is a Sign of America’s Vitality

Over a dozen years ago, at a Harvard faculty reception for visiting lecturers, I found myself in conversation with a fellow academic (name mumbled) “from Hungary.” To my polite inquiry about how he was enjoying his stay, he replied with surprising enthusiasm, “I love coming to America! I love your moral intensity.” Pressed for details, he said that in Hungary, abortion, for example, was a settled matter: “Women who want abortions get them. In America, by contrast, you treat it seriously, as a moral issue.” That we still so passionately debated abortion marked the difference for him between the decadence of Europe and the hopeful civilization of the United States.

In all that now troubles so much of this country, our European visitor would see his insight confirmed. From the time that the impending Supreme Court decision on Dobbs v. Jackson was leaked, headlines warned that the “Blue-Red Divide” was about to get starker. After the decision was released, contrasting front-page photographs of mourners and celebrants reinforced the impression of a nation about to break apart. But from our visitor’s perspective, nothing would represent us better than the intensity of our argument over the right to abort a fetus. Human control over life and death will always be subject to controversy, and advanced civilizations are those that learn to live with the debate.

By contrast, no statist country, of either the left or the right, would tolerate such disorder. Socialism legislates for the people and decides matters on their behalf; what it deems “progressive” dare not be challenged, let alone reversed. For their part, statist authoritarians in countries with a history of political chaos claim the need to impose order through national decree. Constitutional democracy, however, is never uniform in its thinking, and would ideally rotate between liberals who want to make things better and conservatives who want to prevent things from getting worse. We don’t need polling to tell us that most Americans are not dogmatic on whether and when abortion is morally sound: our political debate over where to draw the lines, geographically and otherwise, may indeed be the strongest proof that, even now, Americans are willing to rise up to the civic obligations of democratic self-government.