The War between the women.(survey establishes profiles of pro-life and pro-choice activists)

Abortion and arguments about abortion have been a common feature of the American scene for at least the last century and a half. (1) The 19th century had its own right-to-life movement, made up of male physicians who argued that abortion was murder if performed by women, but a therapeutic measure if performed by themselves. (2) The abortion debate today is different in important ways from earlier rounds. For most of its history, the discussion about abortion in this country was conducted by professionals, usually physicians, and men. As a result, until very recently, the abortion debate most resembled the disputes over other bioethical issues: It was for the most part quiet, collegial and restrained. None of these adjectives begins to describe the emotional and volatile abortion debate today. On the contrary, over the last decade the subject has galvanized-- and polarized--Americans in the same way that such moral issues as abolition and temperance once did. What accounts for this remarkable transformation?

The full answer is complex. Physicians, who had successfully controlled the right to make all decisions about legal abortion since the 19th century, began to disagree among themselves. Technical advances in obstetrics meant that only a minority of abortions after 1940 were undertaken to preserve the physical life of the pregnant woman. Once abortion could no longer be presented as a case of trading the life developing in the womb against that of the pregnant woman, physicians were forced to confront the underlying dilemma: Is the embryo or fetus a person or only a potential person? Both positions have long philosophical traditions, and have existed side by side over the long history of abortion in America. (3)

In the early 1960s, some physicians began to press state legislatures to reform laws that permitted abortion only when the pregnant woman's life would otherwise be endangered. The proposed laws were designed to guarantee to those doctors the right to perform the kinds of abortions that they had been doing-those that would protect the social, psychological and emotional life of the woman as well as her physical life. (4) Increasingly, however, physicians were unable to agree among themselves about the conditions under which an abortion was justified. When the doctors signaled that they were no longer willing or able to control the abortion issue in house, the stage was set for the first time for a public debate about abortion.

To explore what it is that makes that public debate so heated and passionate, interviews with activists on both sides of the issue were conducted over a five-year period. A sample of more than 200 prolife and prochoice activists in California was the source of these interviews. We identified a beginning pool of activists from letterhead stationery, newspaper accounts and citations in advocacy literature, and asked those activists who were the people most involved in the issue, both on their side and among the opposition. All those selected for this study were named by at least two others as active as themselves (most were named by many more people), and they met the study criterion of time spent on this issue-at least ten hours a week on the issue if prolife, five hours a week if prochoice. (*) We have reason to believe that for the years under study, we interviewed a representative, and at times exhaustive, sample of the prominent "positional" leaders (people who hold elective office) and "reputational" lea ders (people who are highly visible workers) on both sides of the abortion debate. Interviews were intensive, lasting for at least two hours, and often for as many as six, and were tape-recorded, transcribed and analyzed. What follows are selected excerpts from the research. The quotations are verbatim from the interviews. These five years of interviews with those most intensively involved make three things clear:

* The present-day abortion debate, unlike prior rounds, largely involves two very different groups of women.

* These women are differentiated not only by their beliefs about abortion, but by the circumstances of their lives as well.

* The life circumstances and beliefs of the activists on both sides of the issue serve to reinforce one another in such a way that the activists have little room for dialogue, and few incentives for it.