The Moral Veto

The Moral Veto

The lead paragraph in a news story doing the rounds in Australia on Monday highlights one of the biggest hurdles pro-choice advocates have always faced in their battle to decriminalize, or even just reform, abortion laws. It goes like this:

 AUSTRALIANS in general, and Queenslanders in particular, hold liberal views on abortion, yet politicians' fear of small religious minorities appears to have stymied decriminalisation of the procedure in some states, a new study shows.  

 The article goes on to say that a clear majority of Australians, 57 percent, support a woman’s right to obtain an abortion “readily when they want one.” And it challenges Queensland premier Anna Bligh’s refusal to champion decriminalization:

 “A Queensland Labor MP told journalists: ‘Liberalising abortion laws is not a vote-winner, it's actually a vote loser, and everyone on both sides of politics knows that.’

But the author of the study, Katharine Betts, an adjunct associate professor of sociology at Swinburne University, said the politician was wrong:

‘Abortion is one of those issues that doesn't fit neatly into a left versus right continuum, and politicians feel it's dangerous to try to change the status quo in the face of a very vocal anti-choice lobby. But they're wrong. Voters are more likely to vote for a pro-choice candidate than an anti-choice candidate.’”

 The moral veto is arguably what prevented liberalization here in the 1970s and is what keeps it from happening today. As the American author of a book of the same name (Gene Burns’s “The Moral Veto: Framing Contraception, Abortion and Cultural Pluralism in the United States.”) put it: “Legislators would rather avoid dealing with an issue involving moral polarization, even if the group(s) exercising a moral veto are a definite minority.”

Burns argues that while these groups are unlikely to advance their own agendas, i.e. succeed in getting the legislature to further restrict or ban abortion (or homosexuality, or gay rights, etc. etc.), what they can and do achieve is stopping any liberalization. Abortion is still the issue no NZ politician wants to touch, despite generally liberal sentiment in society.

One of the ways the anti-abortion advocates do this is clearly being adopted in Queensland, and it’s to highlight extreme cases.

Quoted in The Australian Cherish Life Queensland’s spokesman Alan Baker said this:

“I don't know if you can say a majority of Queenslanders are supportive of decriminalisation. What it effectively means is that you can have abortion at any time, for any reason, up until the day of birth.”

Of course public opinion will recoil at full-term pregnancies being aborted willy nilly (we all know how likely that is!), and it’s with these kinds of tactics – images included – that anti-abortion forces here and everywhere manage to scare politicians into thinking they will lose their majorities over abortion because they will get voters all riled up.

Politicians’ fears of the so-called Catholic Vote (or anti-abortion vote) was rife in New Zealand during the crucial abortion debates of the 1970s. Myriad opinion polls pointed to an increasingly liberal attitude in NZ. But the 1975-77 Royal Commission on Contraception, Sterilisation and Abortion actually managed to discount evidence from opinion polling. One of their reasons was this: “It is difficult to know whether the opinions expressed on these issues are based on an adequate knowledge of the relevant facts or a full appreciation of the issues involved.” So if Kiwis were pro-choice, it was only because they didn’t know what they were talking about. And as we see from the Cherish Life quote, that’s right out of the anti-abortion playbook.

 How do we combat the Moral Veto? How come one problematic abortion (too late, too depressing, too regretted) counts for more than all the women who die during illegal/unsafe abortions, and more than all the women saved (in all kinds of ways) by having access to safe legal abortion? How do we change this formula?

 In the U.S., the wielders of the Moral Veto do seem to be over-reaching in their efforts to have fertilized eggs be given full personhood rights, a goal also sought by Right to Life here in New Zealand, though not one they’ve been overtly campaigning on. That kind of over-reaching could help blunt the edge of the Moral Veto.

 Efforts in the 70s to turn the tables and have politicians afraid of losing the pro-choice vote failed. But would they fail today? We watch the Queensland situation with interest.

-----

We welcome feedback. This blog is moderated, so your comments may not appear right away. Thank you for your patience.