In today’s New York Times, William Saletan examines whether common ground is really possible on the culture war issues like abortion and same sex marriage, and offers possible common ground based on personal responsibility:
Start with abortion. Pro-lifers tend to show up after a woman is pregnant, imagining that laws and preaching will make her bear a child she doesn’t want. They’re mistaken. Worse, they’re too late. To prevent abortions, we have to prevent unintended pregnancies.
How? The conservative answer is abstinence. That’s a worthy aspiration. But as a stand-alone national policy for avoiding pregnancies, it’s foolish. Mating is the engine of history. It has overpowered every stricture put in its way.
. . .
Mr. Obama, like many other pro-choicers, doesn’t like to preach on these issues. He talks about family planning purely in terms of access and affordability. Overseas, that’s a huge challenge. But in this country, the principal cause of abortions isn’t that we can’t get birth control. It’s that we don’t use it.
. . .
This isn’t a shortage of pills or condoms. It’s a shortage of cultural and personal responsibility. It’s a failure to teach, understand, admit or care that unprotected sex can lead to the creation — and the subsequent killing, through abortion — of a developing human being.
Our challenge is to put these two issues together. For liberals, that means taking abortion seriously as an argument for contraception. We should make the abortion rate an index of national health, like poverty or infant mortality. The president should report progress, or lack thereof, in the State of the Union. Reproductive-health counselors must speak bluntly to women who are having unprotected sex. And as Mr. Obama observed last year, men must learn that “responsibility does not end at conception.”
Conservatives, in turn, need to face the corollary truth: A culture of life requires an ethic of contraception. Birth control isn’t a sin or an offense against life, as so many girls and Catholic couples have been taught. It’s a loving, conscientious way to prevent the conception of a child you can’t bear to raise and don’t want to abort. It’s an act of responsibility and respect for life.
Read it all here (including his approach to ending the culture wars on the issue of same sex marriage). And let us know what you think.