Two recent articles in The New York Times highlight a common (mis)understanding concerning the politics of abortion, and in the process reveal much about the state of political disagreement, particularly as it involves the role of the Constitution in public life.
Dwight Garner reviewed the Library of America's release of the works of Wendell Berry. At nearly 1700 pages, the collection gave Garner a lot to read, so he might be forgiven for writing summarily, although not dismissively. In the limited space he had to deal with Berry's work, Garner could not resist observing about Berry: "A man of Christian faith, he is opposed to abortion." One would have to work hard to find evidence in Berry's work of his Christian faith, and even harder to find evidence of its orthodoxy. A reader doesn't, however, need to search much to find what Berry has to say about abortion. Pretty much everything Berry has to say about the topic can be found in his essay "Caught in the Middle," also available in a different form in his recent book Our Only World. In that essay Berry argues there should be no laws against abortion, and in general his essay cannot be said to be a defense of the "pro-life" position. My guess is that Garner read only a small part of Berry's works, but the gratuitous inclusion of the abortion reference raises the suspicion that writers for The New York Times seem to think it's the most important issue of the day.
A more thorough, and I suppose more thoughtful, expression occurs in Linda Greenhouse's recent essay on abortion and the Establishment Clause of the Constitution. Like Garner, Greenhouse believes that objections to abortion ultimately and exclusively arise from religious beliefs. Granted, Greenhouse does provide accompanying evidence indicating that, in some instances, restrictions on abortion were accompanied either by overt religious justifications or implicit religious assumptions, or adorned with religious language. Whether the accompanying policy would be discredited under the Establishment Clause would be, minimally, a matter of debate.
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