While gay-rights groups have not yet announced their opposition
to the nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court, that
declaration is only a formality. They will politely wait until the
Senate has conducted hearings and then come out swinging against
him. Whether or not they are right to oppose him, one basis for
their likely opposition should be dispelled. Abortion rights are
not gay rights. And when it comes to constitutional law,
Lawrence is not Roe.
Typical of gay activists' reaction to the Roberts nomination was
that of Joe Solmonese, executive director of the Human Rights
Campaign. Writing for the online edition of the Advocate,
Solmonese warned that Roberts "has an extremely disturbing record
in opposition to Roe v. Wade," the historic 1973 Supreme
Court decision announcing a constitutional right to abortion.
Indeed, abortion has become the litmus test for gay groups
in deciding whether to oppose him.
Yet abortion is not a gay issue in practice or in principle. In
practice, gay couples are the least likely in the land to produce
unwanted pregnancies. Procreation for gay couples typically
involves months of planning and thousands of dollars in investment,
requiring the use of sophisticated reproductive technology or the
cooperation of a surrogate parent. "Oops babies" are simply not a
phenomenon common to gay life. Gays thus have less practical need
for the option of abortion than do heterosexuals.
Yes, a gay woman could become pregnant through rape or
consensual heterosexual sex. She might then want an abortion. But
this no more makes abortion a "gay" issue than the fact that gay
people die in plane crashes makes aviation-safety regulation a gay
issue. Not everything that could conceivably happen to a gay person
is thereby a gay issue.
Why then do gay groups make abortion a test of a politician's or
a judicial nominee's commitment to gay rights? One answer to this
question is that there's a demonstrated correlation in polling
between opposition to abortion and opposition to gay equality. When
a person is silent on gay issues, the next best indicator of his
likely views is his stand on abortion. There are people who oppose
abortion and support gay rights, of course, but these are
the exceptions.
But gay-rights groups go further than this, insisting that
there's a connection in principle between abortion rights
and gay rights. That supposed principle is the right to privacy.
"The privacy rights decided in Roe were at the core of the
landmark Lawrence v. Texas sodomy case," Solmonese argues,
referring to the 2003 decision in which the Supreme Court declared
sodomy laws unconstitutional.
This is wrong. True, the constitutional right to privacy
underlies both Roe and Lawrence. But the mere
fact that both opinions spring from the same root does not mean the
loss of one will erode the other.
For starters, it's remarkable how little the decision in
Lawrence relies on Roe. The Lawrence
opinion called on a phalanx of earlier privacy precedents and other
authorities but mentioned Roe only sparingly, and never
for a crucial point. The reason is obvious. Even for many liberal
scholars, the reasoning of Roe is an embarrassment.
As a matter of both the individual and societal interests at
stake, Roe presents a much weaker case for privacy
protection than does Lawrence. First, the individual's
privacy interest in abortion is weaker. Both abortion and sex
involve things that are deeply personal to people and so implicate
what some theorists call "decisional privacy." But there the
similarity ends. Abortions are performed outside the home, often
involve payment to state-licensed medical professionals, and always
destroy an unwilling third party (the unborn child). Sex, as
constitutionally protected, involves none of these things. It's
typically done in the home, involves no commercial exchange, and
imposes on no unwilling third party. Sex is a classically "private"
activity in a way that abortion is not.
Second, the state's interest in regulation is much stronger in
the case of abortion than in the case of sodomy. Every abortion
kills an unborn child who has no choice in the matter and who is,
at the very least, a potential person. The stakes are high. By
contrast, the state of Texas in Lawrence could not come up
with a single reason for prohibiting homosexual sodomy except
"morality." Abortion is always killing; sex is often loving.
Just about everybody gets this distinction, including the
opponents of gay equality. Much as social conservatives may
disagree with Lawrence, they will not be organizing mass
protests and annual marches on its anniversary thirty years hence,
as they do now against Roe. While the sodomites may be
harming themselves, they reason, at least they're not killing
others.
To resolve both the policy and constitutional matter of
abortion, we must surely weigh the autonomy interests of the
individual woman. But we must also analyze the moral and legal
status of the unborn child. Is it human life entitled to all the
rights of a person? Or is it just neutral growth matter, inhabiting
a woman's body, which she may dispose of at will? Or is it
something in between?
These questions involve complicated matters of biology,
medicine, religion, and moral reasoning. I have not answered them
to my own satisfaction. But I am quite sure the answers do not
depend on anything intrinsic to the case for gay rights.