The Voice Loses It

I yield to no man in my indifference to the Village Voice. Each week, I read Nat Hentoff and Dan Savage and then drop the thing in the trash. Last week, caught without a book while swilling a coffee at the local café, I ducked out onto Flatbush Ave. and grabbed a copy to read in full. What a mistake! New York Press isn't where we want it to be (and trust me, readers, we hold ourselves to much harsher standards than you do), but we make a point of publishing nothing that's objectively wicked, which is more than can be said for our corporate competition.

The main problem with the Voice has always been words without meaning. (Just try to translate anything Robert Christgau's ever written into English, for instance. It can't be done.) This often leads to writing that is simply deplorable, as in this last week's cover story, in which Rebecca Raber, apparently meaning to write a piece of standard pro-choice boilerplate, in fact came out with a pro-abortion screed. Such are the consequences of taking advocacy-group rhetoric seriously.

While the piece has the standard disclaimers about "fraught life choices" and the like, the gist is that television ought to show more abortions, mainly because having them isn't really a very big deal. "Abortion is not a dirty word," writes Raber, resorting to euphemistic rhetoric about "hard-won reproductive freedom" and feigning bemusement over the fact that many people feel that while "debating over abortion is OK, having one is not."

All of this is merely embarrassing, much like the sidebar feature in which Aina Hunter, interviewing former president of Planned Parenthood Faye Wattletton, actually asks, "[T]hirty-five years later women who've grown up with the protection of Roe v. Wade are ambivalent about their own reproductive rights?" (Imagine!)

Where the piece grows noxious is in its use of the word "conservative" as a epithet. She first connects the lack of abortions on TV to "the current political climate," then labels "The O.C." conservative because none of its characters have had abortions, then vaguely blames both the withdrawal of the Harriet Miers and the lack of abortions on TV on the "conservative sway in the culture." Her point is not so much that conservatives are against abortion, but that those who are against abortion (or even just disinclined to write it into the scripts of frothy TV shows pitched at teenagers) are conservative.

Much question-begging is involved in all this, as when, with the air of one making an indisputably valid point, Raber asks, "Since when is dropping out of high school to work construction and raise a child? considered doing the right thing for anyone?"

The biggest question, though, is whether she-or the Voice, which not only ran this rubbish but put it on the cover-is aware that there is indeed such a thing as a pro-life liberal.

This is all the more sad because the most eloquent of these is, of course, Hentoff, who has long opposed abortion for the same reasons he opposes euthanasia and the death penalty. He's hardly alone, being joined by everyone from such icons of the far left as Dennis Kucinich and Jimmy Carter to the unfashionably conservative Christopher Hitchens, who was pro-life even back in the days when he was a straight Trotskyite, though he's not entirely opposed to legal abortion.

On this if little else, count me with Hitchens rather than Hentoff. If only on pragmatic grounds, I don't think abortion should be illegal, though I am appalled both that our country is one of the very few to allow abortion on demand (England and France don't, though China, Cuba and North Korea do) and that the Democratic Party considers this, rather than, say, opposition to the death penalty or support for universal healthcare, its main ideological litmus test.

That said, it's something else to read the alt-weekly of record, as it were, and learn not only that I, as a liberal, am assumed to join in righteous indignation over the lack of abortions on TV-but that I am a conservative if I don't.

When people say that liberalism is morally and intellectually bankrupt, this is the sort of thing that they're talking about. Raber's thinking has been so clouded by such euphemisms as "the right to choose" and "reproductive freedom" that she watches "The O.C." and thinks, "Not enough abortions." In this she resembles the looniest of anti-abortion loons, who would no doubt be happy to see some prime-time teen sex followed by a realistically depicted dilation and extraction, a point they prove by marching around the business districts of New York and Chicago with gruesome placards depicting this rare but barbaric procedure, which Planned Parenthood supports.

More important, though, Raber, aided by the Voice, has done a small bit to remove conscience from politics, by making an argument premised on the assumption that a pro-life liberal is no liberal at all. Doubtless Voice readers agree, which is why, in a time when a conservative government is enduring the worst set of scandals since Nixon, no one cares what they have to say.