Some issues may be settled in law but remain contested in culture. Abortion is one such issue. It’s been 45 years since the U.S. Supreme Court, in Roe v. Wade, found a constitutional right to abortion and yet the debate rages on.
A recent Marist poll found that most people gravitate toward the middle, focused not on the binary choice, usually framed as pro-life or pro-choice, but, rather, they hold nuanced positions that reflect serious reservations about how extensive the right to abortion should be.
If the U.S. Supreme Court reverses Roe, a constitutional right to abortion will be lost; if it doesn’t, the right remains, but states will likely continue to legislate restrictions within their own borders, as they do now. So, either way, abortion will remain a divisive, polarizing issue in our culture.
Rather than seeing abortion solely as a battle to wage in the courts, then, perhaps we ought to see how it might be negotiated in our culture, starting with a focus on that middle ground where most Americans claim to be. We could, say, talk about acceptable restrictions on abortion.
There is another opportunity for discussion, though, that would not focus directly on abortion at all, but on the critical, indirect issues relating to abortion where, potentially, some common ground may be found. Judging by efforts elsewhere, there is promise in this approach.