Aborting the Draft

Two events, five days apart, illuminate the vexed individualism at the heart of our national character

On January 22, 1973, the Supreme Court announced its Roe v. Wade decision. It’s one that can be described or interpreted in a number of ways, but it’s safe to say that it codified a degree of bodily autonomy for pregnant women who wished to have an abortion, a codification that was recently revoked in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision earlier this year.

Five days after the Roe decision, on January 27, 1973, the U.S. Selective Service announced there would be no further draft calls in the Vietnam War. That June, the agency’s legal authority to induct soldiers or sailors by this means ended. The nation has had an all-volunteer military ever since, though beginning in 1980 men turning 18 have been required to register for a draft should one ever resume. Women have not. The end of the draft can also be described and interpreted in a number of ways—also among them as a matter of bodily autonomy.

I find it interesting that there has been so little discussion about the relationship between these two virtually simultaneous civil rights decisions by the U.S. government. The notion that men make war and women make babies—both existential ordeals with sometimes deadly consequences—has long been an anthropological truism in a great many cultures over a long period of time. There has been modest change recently in this regard; women now comprise 16% of the U.S. military, about half of them racial minorities, and for the last five years have been eligible for combat roles. It thus remains an overwhelmingly male institution and is likely to continue to be for some time.

For any self-respecting progressive, the current registration policy is indefensible: If you believe in gender equality, the same rule should apply across the board. That’s why feminists at the time of its implementation argued that no one should be subject to registration for the draft, and indeed that the draft itself is immoral. (I write about this in my new book 1980: America’s Pivotal Year.) This position is logically consistent. I also believe it’s wrong.

There are, in fact, times when the state does have a moral claim on the bodily autonomy of its citizens. The draft was ended in 1973 amid a war that most Americans at the time and since, myself among them, believe was a mistake. But it took a draft to end slavery. It took a draft (in multiple nations, notably the Soviet Union) to defeat Hitler and stop the Holocaust. The United States owes its very existence to local militias, like the famed Minutemen, in which men were required to serve. Across millennia, countless societies have regarded some form of conscription as an indispensable resource for their survival. To be sure, this power has been abused. But so are a great many powers whose existence we cannot simply banish from consideration in fear of their potential excesses.

Let me be absolutely clear: the state’s claim on the bodily autonomy of its citizens should be tightly circumscribed, closely monitored, invoked only in moments of emergency, and subject to legal challenge. The devil is in the details; those details fall into the realm of what we call politics. In that realm, there are rarely absolutes, and reasonable people can disagree. It’s messy. We have to face that, deal with that, and understand the role of contingency in what we regard as common sense at any given time. There will always be a great many people who will indulge in righteous anger. They should be regarded with skepticism.

I am arguing that this framework should also apply to the fraught question of abortion. Many pro-choice advocates seem to believe that the notion of bodily autonomy as a trump card—my body, my choice—is irrefutable, a self-evident truth. It isn’t, for the reasons I’m trying to outline here. I’ll note that virtually all abortion restrictions make exceptions for the life of the mother—an exception, among others, that I support—which is notably lacking in the case of the draft: death is a very real possibility for the conscript and no government will ever issue guarantee against such an outcome (not to mention lost wages, involuntary relocation, or any number of other impositions on one’s autonomy). Even in a democracy, there are times when it’s your body, no choice.

One can reasonably object that the state may not have the same interest in a pregnancy that it does in a war. The question here, of course, is when fertilized eggs, a little more than half of them with XX chromosomes, acquire rights under the law—notably life itself—protected by the Constitution. Most Americans believe this doesn’t happen at the moment of conception, but does by the time of viability (which, thanks to technology, has been happening sooner). Pro-choice advocates often argue that the pro-life position is the result of religious fundamentalism imposed on them in violation of the First Amendment’s separation of church and state. There are those who take an anti-abortion legal position on a religious basis. Such a view can be legitimately rejected. But it’s possible to be a pro-life atheist who argues against abortion as a matter of social justice. At the heart of the social-justice vision is the moral validity of taxation—in the broadest sense of the term—for the purposes of redistribution, of rights and resources as something we owe to the vulnerable for the good of society as a whole. And yes, that includes taking care of children after as well as before they’re born, even if one can also reasonably say that it takes a family no less than a village to do so successfully.

I hope it’s clear from the foregoing that I regard myself as holding a circumscribed pro-choice position. (Although we don’t like to admit it as such, least of all to ourselves, there are times when killing is permissible, if always morally fraught.) But I’m less interested in persuading you to adopt my views on abortion than calling attention to the curious libertarianism whose entrenchment in American life is so deep that we rarely recognize, much less question, our own investment in it. We seem most mesmerized by those who are self-ish in ways that are different than our own. We all rightly prize our autonomy, an emphasis on the inviolable dignity of the individual life that is Christianity’s legacy to the most secular among us. For precisely that reason, it’s worth recognizing and acknowledging its limits—economic, political, cultural, and biological. The perishability of all we hold dear is the very essence of what it means to be a mortal human.

My thanks to Gregory Grene and Tim Donahue for usefully provoking me to articulate the at least partially fallible views expressed here.

Check out my new book, 1980: America’s Pivotal Year — and this newly available podcast about it.