By Fr. Francis Walsh

The very liberal Ellen Goodman and the very conservative Barry Goldwater have found common ground on the question of abortion. In an article that appeared in the PDN on Wednesday, May 20, 2009, (see attachment below), Goodman invoked the memory of the late senator from Arizona in arguing for the liberal view of public morality.

Liberal morality wants to focus on form rather than on content. According to this view, rules of conduct should be arrived at that would focus on procedural fairness rather than on judgments of the intrinsic rightness or wrongness of specific actions. Goodman gives the example of Susan Struck who became pregnant in 1970 and was told by her superiors in the Air Force that she had to have an abortion if she wished to continue her career as an Air Force nurse. She sued and, rather than risk the loss of the suit, the Air Force changed the rules. This action rendered the case moot. Goodman finds it “mind-bending to think about how different the whole debate might have been if the first Supreme Court case arguing for the right to decide had been brought by a woman who wanted to have a baby.” Notice that Goodman paints the issue as “the right to decide.” No mention is made of the subject of the decision. The issue becomes one of form (the right to decide) rather than any concern about what is to be the content of the decision (to have or not to have an abortion).

Goodman worries that “a government that can force a woman to have an abortion is the same government that can force a woman to continue the pregnancy.” The liberal solution is to restrict the government’s role in such matters and to give to all women (both those who want and those who do not want to continue a pregnancy) the right to choose. What could be fairer than that? This way everyone is treated the same.

By focusing on conservative content rather than liberal form, says Goodman, opponents of legalized abortion are not being true to their conservative principles of limited government. Goodman quotes Goldwater in support: “A lot of so-called conservatives today don’t know what the word means. They think I’ve turned liberal because I believe a woman has a right to an abortion. That’s a decision that’s up to the pregnant woman, not up to the pope or some do-gooders on the religious right. It’s not a conservative issue at all.” Here is where the liberal Goodman and the conservative Goldwater have their meeting of the minds. How is this possible?

The kind of conservatism that Goldwater espoused is called libertarianism (the political version of individualism). The only form of justice it recognizes is commutative justice that governs the relationships of individuals, one to another. It denies any distributive justice that governs the relations of the whole of society to the individual because it denies that the individual is anything more than a private person on whom society can have no claim. It views civil authority as the result of agreements between individuals that can be abrogated at any time.

Liberals, on the other hand, strongly defend distributive justice. In its extreme form (collectivism) it only admits the claims that the community has on the individual. It denies that any private relationships exist between individuals. Communism (the political form of collectivism) views the individual simply as a state functionary. Yet there is an internal link between individualism and collectivism. They both share the Enlightenment view of rights as a liberty of action divorced from any duty to others. This internal link explains how the extreme right and the extreme left can circle around and share common ground when it suits their separate agendas. Goldwater is a conservative libertarian while Goodman is a liberal one. They have different agendas (content), but the same way of thinking (form).

Goodman’s libertarian liberalism does not understand a pro-life movement that refuses to separate commutative (with the rights and duties that are implied) from distributive justice (with the rights and duties that are implied), and which insists that not only do individuals have rights and accompanying duties, but that government has the duty to secure the rights of all persons, irrespective of the stage of their development. For the defenders of the unborn, considering the “form” of justice is not enough. The “content” of justice is crucial since it is often (as in the case of abortion) a matter of life or death.