N ovember 5. Bill Baird is speaking at New Hampshire College on the right of a woman to choose to have an abortion. He had earlier in the day been quoted in a radio interview as saying that a Reagan victory might render him superfluous by rendering him illegal. A sobering thought.
As the lecture opened that night it was clear that the pro-lifers were not there to debate the issue but to win it, and the pro-choicers, afflicted with their own kind of arrogance, left in a huff, saying that "You can't talk to those people." That was a true statement for both sides; the two can't really talk to each other.
That, it seemed to me, was the crux of the whole problem. The issues about when a fetus becomes a person or whether a fetus has a soul or if abortion is good or bad per se, despite the artillery brought out on their behalf, are dangerous distractions. The fact that these two groups have no common language, no agreement upon definitions and syntax, fogs the entire debate and threatens to reduce it to the level of passionate sincerity, the last refuge of the mute and the desperate.
S.I. Hayakawa, in his Language in Thought and Action, has a term for this situation: "The Two-Valued Orientation." Two-valued orientation is, in his words, the "penchant to divide the world into two opposing forces...and to ignore or deny the existence of any middle ground." This allows people, as Aldous Huxley said of propaganda, to do in cold blood things that they could otherwise do only in the heat of passion. As Jerome Frank says, in one of the epigraphs to Hayakawa's chapter, "Once we have cast another group in the role of the enemy, we know that they are to be distrusted -- that they are evil incarnate. We then twist all their communications to fit our belief."
The debate about abortion, more often than not, is two-valued. But not all two-valued thinking on the subject is alike. The essential weakness of the anti-abortion two-valued orientation, at least of the groups who were there that night, is its foundation in the Bible and faith in God's word and deeds. This makes the abortion issue not a matter of debate, but of war. (Witness the fire-bombing of a number of abortion clinics in the days before the election.) This war-vocabulary deafens the anti-abortionist and forces him to relegate all who oppose him to "the enemy."
Baird also seems to rely on a two-valued orientation: Having no choice is bad, having choice is good, but one with a subtly important difference. Baird never argued that choice has the "self-evidentness" ascribed to faith. Choice and no-choice are never simply stark postulates for him. His talk about choice is about choice under what circum stances, with what information, with what degree of political and economic freedom.
Thus it seems that part of the reason for the high pitch of the abortion debate, perhaps the sole reason for it, is that the opponents do not speak in the same tongue, with agreements about qualification and flexibility, what Hayakawa calls, in opposition to two-valued orientation, multi-valued orientation. Abortion, as a topic, as an act of language, is impervious to resolution because each side looks at the world with different words. There are no "multi-values" by which one can some bearings, no common language that can bring each side into the other's ken without creating fear or disgust.
Does that mean that the contention around abortion is irreconcilable? No. But the debate and its language must shift back to the common customs of political democracy, back to the unum that gives the pluribus its freedom. The real issue is the freedom of choice in a democratic society, not the divinity or "personness" of the fetus. It is an issue about finding a democratic language with which to articulate differences of opinion so that those differences do not result in sectarian warfare, political imposition, or cultural polarization. Both sides must find that rationalism that Karl Popper said was "bound up with the idea that the other fellow has a right to be heard, and to defend his arguments." And both sides could begin their reconstruction of the democratic language with a large stiff dose of humility and a time-out for some much needed silent meditation.