Whatever else it is, the pro-life movement of the last thirty-plus years is one of the most massive and sustained expressions of citizen participation in the history of the United States. Since the 1960s, citizen participation and the remoralizing of politics have been central goals of the left. Is it not odd, then, that the pro-life movement is viewed as a right-wing cause?...

The Port Huron Statement issued by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1962 called for a participatory democracy in which, through protest and agitation, the “power structure” of the society would be transformed by bringing moral rather than merely procedural questions to the center of political life. Almost fifty years later, Shields notes, “some 45 percent of respondents in the Citizens Participation Survey who reported participating in a national protest did so because of abortion....

Shields says there are three categories of pro-life politics: deliberative (persuasion, mostly on college campuses), disjointed (loosely organized "demonstrations" and sidewalk counseling), and radical....

He cites striking instances of the campus efforts of groups such as Justice for All [JFA] and Center for Bio-ethical Reform [CBR] meeting with frequently vicious hostility, often led by faculty members. The truth is that such hostility reflects vehement opposition to civil deliberation and argument about abortion. Pro-life students eager to engage others in serious discussion find this very frustrating, but it is not entirely surprising.

Shields writes: “Such frustration is fueled by NARAL Pro-Choice America and Planned Parenthood, whose leaders discourage their campus affiliates from debating or even talking to pro-life students. NARAL’s ‘Campus Kit for Pro-Choice Organizers,’ for example, gives this categorical instruction: ‘Don’t waste time talking to anti-choice people.’” The campus organizer for Planned Parenthood told Shields that she “discourages direct debate.”

The reluctance of the pro-choice leadership to engage in public debate is another mark of its conservatism....Moreover, pro-choice advocates know very well that even the minds of activists in their ranks can be changed.

...pro-abortion intolerance of discussion or debate is sometimes given dramatic expression. In San Francisco...The Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in the mid-1960s has come to this.

From there, Neuhaus turns to the demographics of the pro-life movement:

“The current demographic makeup of the pro-life movement,” writes Shields, “also confounds the politics of motherhood.” The conflict is often depicted as one between housewives and career-oriented women. But a striking percentage of pro-life women are university educated...had one or more abortions...only moderately less likely to be ‘very concerned’ about women’s rights”...quite diverse...

So, Shields argues that it's not about class or "religious" values:

“The great conflicts in American history, especially slavery, civil rights, and abortion, have been unusually hard fought and passionate because they cannot be understood as symbolic fights over different worldviews or cultures. Instead, they are better understood as clashes over how common liberal values should be extended to different categories of humans. These conflicts have been disagreements over who counts as a human person.”

Then, Neuhaus turns to the ironic hindrance of intellectual activity within pro-choice ranks. (This joins the irony that the pro-choice view is typically anti-scientific or at least relies on metaphysical arguments.)

While the pro-life cause welcomes, and has been greatly bolstered by, the support of many distinguished intellectuals, the same is not true of the pro-choice movement. On the contrary, intellectuals who share their policy preferences are always raising inconvenient questions about the intellectual coherence of arguments advanced in favor of the unlimited abortion license.

For instance, Rosamund Rhodes of Mt. Sinai School of Medicine confessed three decades after Roe that abortion proponents are simply not prepared to explain “how or why the fetus is transformed into a franchised ‘person’ by moving from inside the womb to outside or by a reaching a certain level of development.” One of the most prominent of abortion proponents, Judith Jarvis Thompson, concedes that the “prospects for ‘drawing a line’ in the development of the fetus look dim.”

And of course there is Peter Singer of Princeton, who has written, “Liberals have failed to establish a morally significant dividing line between the newborn baby and the fetus.” Singer concludes from this that it is therefore permissible to kill babies outside as well as inside the womb. Needless to say, his argument is not helpful in advancing pro-choice politics. In short, pro-life intellectuals, like pro-life activists, insist on talking about the science and moral reasoning pertinent to the moral status of the unborn. So do the more honest of pro-choice intellectuals, which is why they are more hindrance than help to the pro-choice movement.

And then back to the politics of the 60s...

But it all comes back to the much touted “participatory democracy” of the 1960s being turned upside down. The writings of Robert Putnam of Harvard on social capital and civic involvement have received much attention. It is with a palpable sadness that Putnam writes, “It is, in short, among evangelical conservatives, rather than among the ideological heirs of the 1960s, that we find the strongest evidence for an upwelling of civic engagement.” As Shields writes: “In the 1960s liberal intellectuals and reformers longed for a more ideological politics. Greater moral controversy, in their view, would revitalize democratic life. Yet today many observers of the culture wars, particularly those on the left, claim that our democracy would be more participatory, deliberative, and just if controversial moral issues were pushed to the margins of American politics.” They got the moral controversy that they wanted, but it appeared in the form of controversy about issues they would prefer to see ignored....

Shields puts the matter nicely: “One might suppose that present-day conservatives would have declared war on a political system that was largely engineered by 1960s liberals. Yet it is liberals who are mounting a counterattack against this liberal revolution. What is more, their arguments often have a surprisingly conservative ring to them....”

Again, the pro-choice proponents are the defenders of the status quo. They routinely cite data indicating that a majority of Americans do not want to see Roe overturned. As has often been pointed out, these same Americans believe that Roe created a restrictive abortion policy. In what sociologist James Hunter calls “mass legal illiteracy,” it is widely believed that Roe permits abortion in the first trimester, allows it for serious reasons in the second, and forbids it in the third. But, of course, as Roe and companion decisions make clear, the law as presently imposed by the Supreme Court allows abortion at any time for any reason and up through the fully formed baby emerging halfway out of the birth canal. As Harvard law professor Mary Ann Glendon has written, it is the most permissive abortion regime in the Western world. When those same Americans are asked about the circumstances in which abortion should be permitted, a great majority says that abortion should not be permitted for the reasons that 90 percent of abortions are procured. It is understandable, however, that pro-choice advocates trumpet popular support for Roe, dependent as they are on the ignorance of “the silent majority.”

“One of the great political ironies of the past few decades,” writes Shields, “is that the Christian Right has been much more successful than its political rivals at fulfilling New Left hopes for American democracy. Far more than any movement since the early campaign for civil rights, the Christian Right has helped revive participatory democracy in America by overcoming citizens’ alienation from politics.”...