Why liberals and conservatives keep talking past each other on abortion

Ambitious Republicans once ran away from the pro-life cause of defunding Planned Parenthood for fear they would be casualties in what Democrats called the "war on women." Now, these ambitious GOPers are quick to take on the women's health provider, with GOP presidential contenders practically competing to see who can defund Planned Parenthood first.

What has changed?

The answer is those videos showing Planned Parenthood officials talking casually about the sale or donation of body parts harvested from the remains of aborted fetuses. Even liberals acknowledge that Planned Parenthood supporters are on the defensive, rather than talking up the health benefits of fetal tissue research.

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The videos, in edited or unedited form, remind people that in addition to doing a number of uncontroversial things, Planned Parenthood is the nation's largest abortion provider. The videos also remind people that abortion involves tearing apart a fetus, a human being in its earliest stages of development.

This is not a new wrinkle in the abortion debate. The right to choose has relied heavily on ambiguity about what is being chosen. We hear about "choice," "termination of pregnancy," "safe, legal, and rare," even "fetal tissue donation." Pro-choice politicians frequently avoid using even the word "abortion," much less describing what one actually entails. What is being aborted is not a baby or a child, but a blob of tissue, a mass of cells, or a "product of conception."

No wonder some have called abortion the right that dare not speak its name. At the 2012 Democratic National Convention, both President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden defended the legality of abortion without using the word. In his 2008 acceptance speech, Obama only explicitly mentioned abortion as something "[w]e may disagree on."

Advancements in ultrasound technology have likely increased moral qualms about abortion. After all, generations of pro-life activists came to oppose abortion because of films like Silent Scream that showed the procedure taking place, in a degree of detail unseen even by some who had performed abortions.

One prominent convert was Bernard Nathanson, a former abortion provider and early pro-choice advocate who later recalled asking a colleague "doing 15 or maybe 20 abortions a day" to film his work. "I had done many," Nathanson explained, "but abortion is a blind procedure." His colleague complied, Nathanson wrote, "and when he looked at the tapes with me in an editing studio, he was so affected he never did another abortion."

There's a reason abortion opponents have in recent years focused on late-term abortions or specific procedures like partial-birth abortion while having more trouble persuading the public to oppose embryonic stem-cell research: The more the object of abortion looks like a baby, the more likely people are to oppose it being killed.

These facts have also occasionally prompted pro-lifers to overreach. There was public backlash against mandatory ultrasound legislation that was predicated on the idea that such information would prompt women to reject abortion. And many pro-life demonstrators use grisly photos of aborted fetuses in their protests, a tactic that has long divided abortion opponents.

In 2013, the National Catholic Register published a listicle giving eight reasons to avoid using such graphic images at the country's largest pro-life march. Abortion is a sensitive and unpleasant subject. Sometimes, letting people see the grim details moves them in a more anti-abortion direction. Other times, it makes them angry at whichever side of the debate made them confront it by bringing the issue up in the first place.

Market research done by abortion opponents in the 1990s didn't find that the intricacies of fetal development were a decisive factor in a woman's decision to abort. Paul Swope wrote about these findings in First Things at the time: "Descriptions of fetal development and even graphic abortion pictures can still be used to great effect with certain audiences, particularly among people already disposed to the pro-life message and as a means to activate pro-lifers." But they weren't necessarily effective at persuading women considering abortion.

In many cases, people know full well what an abortion does. (Stops a beating heart, as the old pro-life slogan goes.) They just can't get past the fact that asking a woman to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term is not a small ask.

Planned Parenthood deserves the scrutiny it is now receiving, just as the country deserves an abortion debate that is less shrouded in euphemism. This may be the first step toward a culture of life, but it won't finish the job.