Shifting Ground on the Abortion Issue?

Shifting Ground on the Abortion Issue?

R. Albert Mohler, Jr.
October 20, 2005

Columnist Richard Cohen of The Washington Post now admits that he has grave doubts about abortion. In a fascinating opinion column published in today’s edition of the Post, Cohen recounts his experience of arranging an abortion for a friend of a friend who had become pregnant. “With little thought, I did so,” he explains. “She went home to Germany and I never saw her again.”

But, that was then and this is now. “I would do things a bit differently now,” he reflects. “I would give the matter much more thought. I no longer see abortion as directly related to sexual freedom or feminism, and I no longer see it strictly as a matter of personal privacy, either. It entails questions about life — maybe more so at the end of the process than at the beginning, but life nonetheless.”

Consider these two paragraphs: This is not a fashionable view in some circles, but it is one that usually gets grudging acceptance when I mention it. I know of no one who has flipped on the abortion issue, but I do know of plenty of people who no longer think of it as a minor procedure that only prudes and right-wingers oppose. The antiabortion movement has made headway.

That shift in sentiment is not apparent in polls because they do not measure doubt, only position: for or against. But between one and the other, black or white, is a vast area of gray where up or down, yes or no, fades to questions about circumstance: Why, what month, etc.? Whatever the case, the very basis of the Roe v. Wade decision — the one that grounds abortion rights in the Constitution — strikes many people now as faintly ridiculous. Whatever abortion may be, it cannot simply be a matter of privacy.

Cohen is not ready to join the pro-life movement, but he can no longer see abortion as a mere privacy issue. He claims to “support choice,” but believes that the infamous Roe v. Wade decision was wrongly decided.

The Washington Post is resolutely pro-abortion, especially on its editorial pages. Nevertheless, this column by Richard Cohen, along with the article by Patricia E. Bauer that ran in Tuesday’s edition of the paper [see my article], indicates that the Post is at least willing to allow some discussion of the issue. This is progress.



R. Albert Mohler, Jr.

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