Mutually Assured Denial: A Frontline History of the Abortion Wars.

• Author: Saletan, William

Roe V. Wade turned 25 this year, and its anniversary passed in the usual manner. Once again, abortion activists staged rallies, vilified their opponents, and congratulated themselves on their heroism. And once again, average Americans stared at their television sets and wondered: Who are these people, and why are they so obsessed with this issue? That question beckoned Washington Post reporter Cynthia Gorney to Missouri nine years ago. Her answer, Articles of Faith, isn't a treatise or manifesto. It's a rich and beautifully told story, spanning three decades in the lives of Missouri's most influential abortion activists.

By focusing on a few activists and exploring their fives and personalities in detail, Gorney debunks or complicates various preconceptions about the abortion war. Neither side is as ideologically narrow as its opponents suppose. Yet each draws its moral confidence from a primordial denial of its adversary's truth. These dueling denials predate the abortion war, but have been greatly reinforced by it. They are the "articles of faith" that sustain the war and render it insoluble.

The Missouri combatants defy the usual stereotypes -- that pro-choicers are irreligious, sexually permissive, or politically radical, and that pro-lifers are hostile to welfare, sex, birth control, and women's equality. In one passage, Gorney describes how three activists made their way to California: "On their drive west they slept in campgrounds and ate fruit and cheese from grocery stores, and when they reached San Francisco they laid out their sleeping bags on the apartment floor of a woman named Sunshine, who lived near the Zen Center, was married to a Buddhist taxi driver, and knew some of the sit-in protesters from the Trident missile demonstrations.' Were the activists there to defend abortion rights? No, they were there to implore factory workers to stop making abortion suction machines.

The most troubling pattern Gorney reveals is the activists' inability to recognize, much less examine, their premises. Is the fetus a human being? Pro-lifers stand accused of failing to prove that it is. Gorney shows that their problem is more basic: They don't accept the question. They find the personhood of the fetus obvious -- like the color of the sky, as one activist puts it -- and assign the burden of proof to those who doubt it. Sam Lee, the most thoughtful of the pro-lifers featured in the book, is willing to entertain and refute alternative answers...