When it comes to abortion, my “common ground” fantasy involves a pro-life leader standing up and declaring, “We will be open to looking at family planning efforts, including contraception, to reduce the number of abortions.” This would be followed by a pro-choicer saying, “we accept that society would be better if there were fewer abortions.”
Let’s unpack why these sentences don’t normally get spoken, and why it’s important that they are.
If you dropped in from another planet and were asked who would be the strongest advocates for birth control, you might well say, “the people who care most about eliminating abortion.” Yet the opposite is the case. Why?
The pro-life movement, like any movement, is a coalition. The Catholic Church is hugely important player in the pro-life coalition and, for reasons largely unrelated to abortion, they oppose birth control. Conservative evangelicals often oppose family planning for different reasons, a fear that it will lead to promiscuity and a de-sacralization of sex.
I’m not minimizing their reasons – the Church’s teachings on sex are thought-provoking, and as the parent of teenagers, I find much merit in the Christian argument about the dangers of casual sex.
But they are not fundamentally about abortion. So pro-lifers need to decide which of their beliefs is more important: their concern for the unborn or their concerns about the nature of premarital sex.

Some pro-lifers try to avoid this trade off by asserting that family planning wouldn’t be effective in reducing the number of abortions — because contraception would encourage sex, which leads to more unintended pregnancies and therefore abortions. But this is a practical, not a philosophical view. So a truly single-minded pro-lifer, who places reducing the number of abortions above other coalition or philosophical considerations – would say, well this may work or it may not work, but there are so many babies’ lives at stakes, it’s certainly worth trying.
In other words, what we need are pro-life leaders who are MORE single-issue oriented, more focused on abortion, and able to disentangle their views on abortion from their beliefs about sex or contraception.
As for pro-choicers, they’ve been all over the map on whether they want fewer abortions. Pro-choice groups cheered when Bill Clinton came up with the “safe, legal and rare” formulation to defend Roe v. Wade.
But more recently they’ve resisted the idea of “abortion reduction.” Melody Barnes, the domestic policy director, was quoted as saying those seeking common ground should avoid using that language and focus instead on reducing the “need” for abortion. In an earlier interview, Barnes said, “”Our goal is to reduce the need for abortions. . . . If people have better access to contraception, that’s a way of addressing the issue at its root, rather than do a tally of abortions.”
Pro-life writers justifiably have called them out on the inconsistency. Why do you want abortion to be “rare” if there’s never anything wrong with them? How do you propose to make them rare without reducing their numbers?
There’s also the small matter that these pro-choicers are out of step with what Obama and Biden have promised. During the campaign, Obama said that dealing with unintended pregnancies is “the best answer for reducing abortions.” After his election, at Notre Dame, he said, “let’s work together to reduce the number of women seeking abortions.” Joe Biden was even bolder: “what we’re going to be spending our time doing is making sure that we reduce considerably the amount of abortions.”
Why are some pro-choicers resisting the abortion reduction language? In part, they feel it is “stigmatizes” women, implying that abortion is immoral. A few responses.
First, having the right to choose does not mean you get to be insulated from the debate about whether your choice is moral in every case. Let’s posit that there are some women out there making immoral decisions on abortion – say, getting a late term abortion because they don’t like the gender. A pro-choicer can look at that case and still argue simultaneously that a) her choice is immoral b) she should have the right to make it and c) society should try to convince her not to.
Second, wanting to reduce the aggregate number of abortions says nothing about the morality of any individual’s decision. It says that as a whole, society would be better off if there were fewer of them – in part because of the reasons that pro-choice activists have been highlighting: it’s crazy that a woman’s choice of whether to have an abortion should be dictated heavily by finances; it’s disturbing that so many teens have babies; it’s strange that so many families who want to adopt must go overseas at a time when almost a million women terminate their pregnancies. Those are all good pro-choice-friendly reasons why it’s morally preferable as a society that there be fewer abortions.
Third, there’s a fear that if you accept abortion reduction language, it will lead to efforts to restrict abortions through laws. But Obama has already dealt with that by declaring that outside the purview of the common ground discussions.
It’s hard for pro-choicers to take pro-life “common grounders” seriously if they won’t budget on birth control; it’s equally hard for pro-lifers to take pro-choice common grounders seriously if they won’t accept the basic premise of the exercise. So who will be the brave souls to break that conceptual logjam?
This article also appeared as part this new “Common Ground” web area created by RHReality Check.