CMC Professor Jon Shields on Abortion, Stupak Amendment, and the Politics of the Pro-Life Cause

There's a fantastic interview with Professor Jon Shields in The New Yorker of all places. Here's his response, in part to a question about why the pro-life movement continues to draw in adherents.

Why, in a rapidly liberalizing culture, has opposition to abortion basically stayed the same? What political steps did the pro-life movement take to shift public sentiment after Roe v. Wade?

The pro-life cause has indeed resonated in a liberal, rights-oriented culture far more than other “culture-war” issues. Even as attitudes toward gay marriage and gender roles have rapidly liberalized, abortion opinion has been remarkably stable since the early nineteen-seventies. The remarkable spread of social liberalism, therefore, has not left our nation any more pro-choice than it was in 1973, when Roe v. Wade was decided. There is even some evidence that opinion might now be moving slightly in a pro-life direction. Young Americans, for example, are suddenly less pro-choice than older Americans, even though they strongly favor gay marriage and are less religious.

This development, however, is not as odd as it appears. I think the pro-life cause continues to inspire activists and cannot be dismissed by secular, socially liberal Americans precisely because it appeals to common liberal values that we all share. Few other causes associated with the religious right, whether prayer in school or gay marriage, resonate in the same way.

The liberalism at the heart of the pro-life campaign, however, is constantly distorted by a generation of scholars who have insisted the right-to-life movement is really about the preservation of traditional gender roles or male control over female sexuality. Such interpretations tend to ignore that the right to life movement regards itself as today’s civil-rights movement. The failure to grasp this reality renders the passion and dedication of the pro-life movement almost impossible to comprehend.