State laws concerning abortion date back to the beginning of this country, but the modern debate about abortion began when women first asserted that the decision whether or not to bear a child was included within the Constitution's right to privacy. The legal and constitutional argument is about government power over the individual and the specific point at which states may control personal decisions. This strictly legal argument has played itself out in a number of factual arenas, from searches and seizures in criminal cases to laws governing specific kinds of speech.
But while the underlying issue was a legal one, advocates challenging state abortion laws framed the debate in more dramatic terms. What was at stake was "women's lives." The image of a coat hanger, symbol of the thousands and thousands of dangerous back-alley abortions, became the centerpiece of the pro-choice argument. Women who had undergone such humiliating and life-threatening procedures came forward to tell their personal stories. Details filled the air.
As in Callins v. Collins, those stories were not false. Women had suffered during illegal abortions, and women had senselessly died. And all to assert an important aspect of human autonomy--the ability to make a choice about a highly personal, intimate, and life-changing decision.
By answering the laws in these dramatic terms, women were using a powerful tool to persuade the public and the courts. And at least as far as public opinion goes, perhaps no other kind of argument would have been as effective. The questions of governmental power and individual dignity are complex and often difficult to comprehend. Stories about women's pain and suffering strike at the heart; pity moves. But by using that singular weapon so prominently, abortion rights advocates also changed the nature of the debate. Abortion opponents could not answer such arguments with strictly legal ones. Once one side uses drama, the other side is obliged to respond in kind.
Therefore, the debate surrounding Roe v. Wade became one pitting women's lives against the lives of fetuses. Again, at least as the courts framed the issue, the vocabulary was from the Constitution. But it was the images of pity and terror that stirred everyone up, not the 14th Amendment and citations of Griswold v. Connecticut. As we all know, in the battle between women and fetuses, fetuses lost: a KO in the first trimester, and a partial but pretty clear upset in the second.
But Roe did not end the debate. And what kept abortion alive as an issue was the unconditionally dramatic terms in which the debate was now cast. Far from accepting Roe as a defeat, anti-abortion activists viewed the decision as a challenge. If abortion rights advocates could win the battle on dramatic terms, anti-abortionists would up the emotional ante and try to seize their victory in the war. In the years following Roe, fetuses were not just defined as human beings entitled to all the rights and privileges of the law, they were described as human beings, referred to as human beings, and finally depicted as human beings. Commercials, videos, ads showed how much a fetus looks like a baby. They called our attention to little toes and tiny fingers, movement, brainwaves, and the little guy's beating heart.
Roe was not overturned, and so the emotional ammunition went nuclear. Some pro-choice candidates found themselves having to answer ads showing footage of abortions, the bloody parts and remains of actual aborted fetuses. Objects claimed to be the end result of such abortions were bottled and displayed like the fragments of unholy saints, or attractions in the abortion sideshow to the circus of American politics. Clinic blockaders hooked arms and crawled like children, praying with all the conviction only true believers can muster, and crying, crying real tears for all the murdered babies.
To many on the pro-choice side these tactics seemed unfair, but anti-abortion activists were doing no more than pro-choice advocates had done--they were making their appeal dramatically. Whatever legal issues had once provided the foundation for the abortion debate were now nearly invisible. All that was left was drama.
But the anti-abortion argument deploys a wondrous variation on the self-dramatization pro-choice women relied on. Women who had suffered through illegal abortions were always telling the stories they had experienced, the central conceit of the dramatic style. But those who oppose abortion have no story with which to start, no self to dramatize. They are not, after all, telling their own stories but are appealing to our compassion for someone who as yet has no voice. But just defining a fetus as "potential life" isn't enough for the dramatic style to work. There has to be an actual story to dramatize.
A fetus's suffering can be implied from the pieces that remain in the aftermath of an abortion. But that image presents suffering without a story attached. The details are lacking. After a quick, horrific image, there's not much drama to fill an argument's sails the way a good back-alley abortion will.
But there is a way to get around this almost definitional problem--appeal to stories that actually do exist. Extrapolate from "potential life" to the visible lives of real children. Every fetus becomes not just a fetus, but your child. Look in your child's eyes. Look in this fetus's eyes. Could you kill your child? How, then, could you let someone else kill hers?
This is an almost quintessential act of playwriting, and its creative brilliance is breathtaking. People who have no story to tell, but who must exist in the world of dramatic style where a story is the only currency accepted or appropriate, invent a small life story through an appeal to empathy, and then posit that the story is being ended, even though in reality it has never begun. Suddenly, the images of fetus parts disappeared from the debate and were replaced by children on swings, wide-eyed little girls and energetic little boys, and the nicest narrator in the world intoning, "Life. What a beautiful choice."
The point is not so much to demonstrate the emotional manipulation of these advertisements as to show how fully we have accepted the dramatic style as a style. The dramatic style is the argument. To the extent the beautiful choice ads are intended to influence public policy, they are emblematic of the necessity in the modern world of conducting public policy debate in drama's terms. If you don't have a story, invent one, or stage one, or buy one from somebody. But you can't be heard until you have a story to tell, until you've proved you can tug at heartstrings.
"So often we simply must see their faces, hear their voices, in order to really be convinced of the truth of what we are being told--and so often we do not because the reporter has failed us as a storyteller. He has not been sensitive to what readers like, to those high-interest elements that separate a good story--or story idea--from a tedious, unengaging one."
--William E. Blundell in The Art and Craft of Feature Writing
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