Abstract
Ziad Munson has written extensively on the subject of abortion. Abortion Politics is his second book. It begins with two infamous examples of how the issue affects politics: Todd Akin’s unsuccessful run for the US Senate in 2012 with his controversial statements regarding women, rape and abortion; and the trial of Dr Kermit Gosnell, a Philadelphia abortion provider. These cases and arresting statistics of prevalence of the abortion issue in our media and society get the reader hooked.
The author skillfully uses social science to describe the interactions of the pro-choice and pro-life movements. In Chapter 2, he reminds us that initially, abortion before quickening, that is, before a mother could feel the foetus move, was legal and a private matter in the United States. Many readers should be surprised to learn that the driving force behind first criminalizing the abortion in the end of nineteenth century and then de-criminalizing it a century later were medical doctors and the American Medical Association.
In Chapter 3, Munson discusses development, interactions and diversity of the pro-life and pro-choice movements. Chapters 4, 5 and 6 methodically cover the politics of abortion, arguing that different opinions on the subject define voters’ identities. He also looks at the similarities and differences in the role abortion played in America and the world. Chapter 7 is especially interesting for seeking to connect aspects of the abortion debate to questions of race, class, partisanship, birth control and capital punishment. However, with no bold predictions about the rapidly shifting frontlines, the sections ‘Where Are We Going’ and ‘What This All Means’ are anticlimactic.
Although Munson mostly manages to keep his promise not to take side on abortion (p. 6), he drops his guard every now and then. For example, sounding like unapologetic MA Warren (1973), who flippantly asserts that getting abortion is as morally neutral as getting a haircut, Munson wonders (p. 118): ‘After all, we do not have large social movements mobilizing around … heart-bypass surgery or vasectomies’. Yes, but none of them eliminate a genetically unique organism that in pro-life view is a human being and in pro-choice view has the potential to be one.
Munson’s coverage of the stand on abortion by the Catholic Church, the pro-life movement’s driving force, is based mainly on a social history of the abortion abolition campaign (Jacoby, 1998) seen through the pro-choice lens, while it should have been based on Catholic sources. The two-millennium long trend within the Church to ban abortion from conception does not seem to get a fair hearing. Clear about protection of a foetus and embryo, the first-century Epistle of Barnabas (‘You shall not slay the child by abortions. You shall not kill what is generated’, Barnabas 19.5) is not mentioned. Neither is the third Marian doctrine that Mary was free of sin ‘in the first instant of her conception’ nor are the crucial papal encyclicals.
This is a relatively short book, but it packs a lot of information. The author could easily have doubled its length. The small book size is both its strength and a weakness: Munson’s treatment is more accessible, but important topics had to be left out. Aiming at presenting the ‘history of the abortion debate’ in the United States (p. 5), the book is missing two such topics: the analysis of the Roe v. Wade (1973) decision, including the reasoning behind it, and alternative defences of legal abortion and associated counterarguments.
Roe relies on a privacy rationale. Why does it matter for abortion politics? The answer is foetal personhood, if legally recognized, sidesteps not only Roe’s privacy justification but also the gender-equality justification used by Justice Ginsburg at her 1993 confirmation hearing.
Munson does provide the history of the failed attempts to pass the Human Life Amendment, but without exploring the legal consequences of recognizing foetal personhood. His inattention to the matter is likely related to his overly narrow account of the pro-life belief sources: ‘the politics of gender, the politics of sexuality, and the politics of identity’ (p. 71). At no point in unpacking them, does he mention the source that is foundational: the foetal personhood.
Munson (p. 27) and theorists on both sides of the debate recognize that there is nothing ‘biologically or morally unique’ about quickening or the point of viability, and that with advancing medical technology, the latter should inexorably converge to the moment of conception. As our understanding of embryology deepens, the momentum for recognition of the foetal personhood continues to grow (George, 2013; George and Tollefsen, 2011; AR Preuss, 2011). When legally accepted, it would obviate privacy considerations as there is no privacy with two people present. Indeed, pro-choice Manninen (2010: 38) observes, ‘Even Justice Blackmun conceded … that if fetal “personhood is established, the appellant’s case, of course, collapses, for the fetus’ right to life would be guaranteed specifically by the [14th] Amendment”’. Manninen (2010: 33) concludes that ‘it is necessary to defend the right to an abortion’ even if a Human Life Amendment passes.
A number of such defences exist, for example, the forced-labour defence by A Koppelman (1990) and SD Gelfand’s (2001) response to Don Marquis’s (1989) ‘Why abortion is immoral’. In the earliest one, ‘Defense of Abortion’, Thomson (1971) gives an example of a violinist suffering from a fatal kidney disease, whose circulatory system is plugged into yours after you were kidnapped. Unplugging him would result in his death, as would denying a foetus the access to the woman’s body. Critics argue that Thomson’s defence applies only to abortion following rape.
Manninen (2010) replaced Thomson’s violinist example with the McFall v. Shimp (1978) case and made a powerful bodily autonomy argument. McFall sued his cousin Shimp to force him to donate bone marrow to save McFall’s life. Yet the court sided with Shimp concluding that ‘no person’s right to life entailed that another person had to forcibly submit to unwanted bodily intrusion to sustain the former’s life’. Doesn’t a woman then have the right to refuse unwanted bodily intrusion of a foetus? Pro-life Jack Mulder Jr (2010) questions the analogy, and the debate continues. New arguments keep appearing on both sides (e.g. Manninen and Mulder, 2018). Yet the author mentions none of them.
In conclusion, Munson’s concise book, Abortion Politics, strives to be even-handed in presenting the pro-choice and pro-life politics. Although it does not provide a full picture, it gives a solid background and stimulates intellectual curiosity – I recommend it with confidence. To reach its full potential, however, the book should be expanded in the second edition.
