Amy Sullivan, who has carved out something of a niche covering liberal and progressive Christians, has an interesting article at the New Republic on the candidacy of anti-abortion Democrat Bill Ritter, who appears to have a good shot at winning the governor’s race in Colorado. Ritter, a Catholic, opposes abortion but seems to take a fairly pragmatic line that what he can do as governor is to actively seek to reduce the number of abortions, primarily through prevention and support of women in crisis pregnancies. But he is unapologetic about the fact that he is anti-abortion.

This reminds me of an article written for the Atlantic about ten years ago by George McKenna, called “On Abortion: A Lincolnian Position.” McKenna’s advice to pro-lifers is to follow a strategy analogous to Lincoln’s position on slavery. While admitting that it had been ruled legal, one could still denounce it as a moral evil and seek ways to mitigate its spread.

McKenna offers a hypothetical campaign statement embodying such an approach:

“According to the Supreme Court, the right to choose abortion is legally protected. That does not change the fact that abortion is morally wrong. It violates the very first of the inalienable rights guaranteed in the Declaration of Independence — the right to life. Even many who would protect and extend the right to choose abortion admit that abortion is wrong, and that killing 1.5 million unborn children a year is, in the understated words of one “a bad thing.” Yet, illogically, they denounce all attempts to restrain it or even to speak out against it. In this campaign I will speak out against it. I will say what is in all our hearts; that abortion is an evil that needs to be restricted and discouraged. If elected, I will not try to abolish an institution that the Supreme Court has ruled to be constitutionally protected, but I will do everything in my power to arrest its further spread and place it where the public can rest in the belief that it is becoming increasingly rare. I take very seriously the imperative, often expressed by abortion supporters, that abortion should be rare. Therefore, if I am elected, I will seek to end all public subsidies for abortion, for abortion advocacy, and for experiments on aborted children. I will support all reasonable abortion restrictions that pass muster with the Supreme Court, and I will encourage those who provide alternatives to abortion. Above all, I mean to treat it as a wrong. I will use the forum provided by my office to speak out against abortion and related practices, such as euthanasia, that violate or undermine the most fundamental of the rights enshrined in this nation’s founding charter.”

Obviously such a position would please neither hard core pro-lifers nor hard core pro-choicers. The former regard anything short of legal prohibition to be tantamount to legally approving the murder of innocent children, while the latter balk at any government interference in what should be regarded as an essentially private choice. But if it’s true that most Americans, as polls seem to suggest, regard abortion as an evil, but nevertheless think it should be legally protected under at least some circumstances, then such a stance might have real appeal.

Of course, it’s one thing for a Democrat in a fairly conservative place like Colorado to take an anti-abortion (even if still “pro-choice” stance), but it’s not clear this would fly on the national stage where abortion rights groups still hold a good deal of power in things like nominating presidential candidates. I remember during the Democratic primaries in the last presidential election how virtually all the candidates appeared at some NARAL event essentially swearing their undying fealty to the pro-choice cause. Could a Democrat make a statement like the above and have any chance of winning their party’s nomination?

The other interesting question is whether traditionally “pro-life” voters would pull the lever for such a candidate. My impression is that he or she would have a good chance of peeling off many moderate pro-lifers. Consider that President Bush, who has received so much support from pro-lifers, is actually to the “left” of many of them on abortion. He’s said that he supports exceptions in the cases of rape and incest to any hypothetical abortion ban, and has also claimed that people’s hearts and minds have to change for any change in the legal situation to be effective. So the space between the Bushian position and the McKenna position doesn’t seem quite so great.

Personally I’m pretty conflicted on what I think the best legal regime would be with respect to abortion. For one thing, I’m not fully convinced that killing, say, a one-month old embryo is morally equivalent to murdering a newborn baby or a full-grown adult. I recently revisited this in reading philosopher Robert Wennberg’s Life in the Balance. Wennberg, an evangelical Protestant, argues for a “gradualist” approach that locates the beginning of a right to life at conception, but qualifies it by saying that this right increases in strength as the fetus develops. That doesn’t mean that it’s not wrong (at least prima facie), but if it’s not as wrong, then the bar for interfering with a woman’s bodily autonomy seems to go up. Whether this is a coherent moral position or just squishy intuition on my part I’m not sure, but my uncertainty is enough to make me hesitant to seek the kinds of legal restrictions most pro-lifers want. That said, I think the case for restriction gets progressively stronger throughout the course of pregnancy, so that killing an eight-month old fetus is pretty darn difficult to distinguish from infanticide. Which isn’t to deny that specifying those gradations with any degree of precision would be tough, especially for purposes of enshrining them into law.

However, I’m inclined to agree with McKenna that it’s possible to say that abortion is wrong even if you don’t want to seek to outlaw it compeletely. At the very least, you can make the case that government should discourage it (perhaps with both negative and positive sanctions as he suggests) and at the very least not encourage it.

There’s also a natural connection here to scientific research that destroys embryos. Even if one doesn’t think that an embryo has value equivalent to a newborn baby such that destroying it is tantamount to murder, it doesn’t follow that it has zero value. And to encourage the existence of an entire industry that reduces nascent human life to raw materials certainly expresses a low value on that life. And the case here is if anything more cut-and-dried than the case of abortion since no one’s bodily integrity is at stake. So, part of an approach to abortion along “Lincolnian” lines would be not to allow the practice of devaluing unborn human life to spread in this way.

Now, some people will balk at the idea that the government should take a position on a contested moral issue like this. And there are good reasons for worrying about government-sponsored moral bullying. But, if the state is going, for example, to fund research that destroys embryos, then it has already effectively, if not explicitly, taken a position on the value of embryonic life. Maybe an argument can be made that the value of the research outweighs the value of embryonic life, but that itself is a moral position, not a value-neutral one.

Some progressive Christians seem to want to enact measures that they say will reduce the number of abortions without actually coming out against abortion as such. For instance, they may advocate increased anti-poverty spending which one suspects they would’ve advocated for reasons quite unrelated to abortion anyway. This has the added benefit of not rocking the boat too much with secular liberal allies. Which is fine in itself; the merits of various anti-poverty programs can be discussed without reference to abortion. But that doesn’t mean that the issue of the value of unborn life can be avoided altogether, as the example of stem-cell research shows. A position like McKenna’s shows that it’s possible to address the moral issue seriously without necessarily endorsing the full legal prohibition of abortion. But it may also require taking some unpopular positions, including ones advocated by the dreaded Religious Right.