The "doe Effect"

of terms. Higher education has come to be another kind of school of hard knocks, where alcohol consumption, drug use, "unsafe" sex (much less any sex), violence, gambling, and other vices are officially disapproved of with a wink that abhors more than anything else, public notice of rules broken, bent, and ignored. Wolfe's novel is not so much loaded with caricatures, as it is indiscreet in the new way. The worst indiscretion is acknowledging human nature, when the oversight of its waywardness is more a matter of reputation and public health than a moral concern. Reversing Roe With eight years of Republican ascendancy, and with bitter acknowledgment on the part of adversaries about the declining fortunes of the Democratic party, talk of the possibilities of reversing Roe have acquired a seriousness in tone not heard since the days of a Human Life Amendment to the Constitution in the late 1970s. The failure of constitutional amendments, whether about equal rights or human life, has been met with cultural responses that contain the seeds of social change. In the case of equal rights, whatever may have been lost by proponents, in principle, has been amply made up for in reality by the remarkable progress of women in education and the professions over the past quarter century. The brouhaha at Harvard University about the number of senior women on its faculty suggests something of success in terms of a better understanding of the consequences that follow choices. It will be a long time coming, if evolutionary psychologists, rationalchoice theorists, and most economists are to be believed, for the emergence of a statistically significant "daddy track." Men of this generation in marriages in the vast middle classes nevertheless know that if there is a "woman behind the man," she is earning a living rather than tending to domestic chores exclusively. What each of us wants to do, what we feel compelled to do, what we conform to, and what we dissent from, are all shaped in a crucible of culture that will, to some degree, defy stereotypes, but also, as far as social-scientific depiction is concerned, reinforce them. In the reality television of American ambitions, the Harvard faculty's attack on its leadership will have its long-term reckoning in how Harvard leads in the world of ideas and of men and women. It is not immune from that reckoning anymore than is any other place. Harvard students may appreciate this more than their teachers do. This leads to the reckoning about the future of abortion and the culture of privacy that supports it more or less exclusively as an unassailable right. This culture of privacy is also a culture of intense mistrust. In recent years, of all those who have had abortions, 67 percent have never been married. In addition 52 percent were performed on women between the ages of 15 and 24. There is nothing all that surprising about such statistics, where inexperience and youth combine to make for choices that empower some and haunt others. Those for whom such choices are empowering are evermore on the defensive, as religious and spiritual practices reinforce patience about the importance of community standards and moral judgment, if only at this moment in the breach. This marks an important dynamic of all social change, where sentiments must first be in place beIbm laws have meaning, to those obeying as well as breaking them. Any kind of reversal of the culture of mistrust, that so protkmndly marks the abortion right in its modern form. will first have to be met with the changes of heart and mind that become for more and more people deeply felt sentiments. This is the significance of what would be a reversal of a now highly symbolic ruling such as Roe. The distribution of abortion services in the United States today reflects more than anything else what would have been the case if Roe had never existed. Roe and Doe are forces that created sentiments about rights that have been under siege since the start. It is little surprise that in the passing moment of intense scrutiny that left no one without an opinion about Terri Schiavo's fate. the problems of dependence and trust at the end of life are understood to be as hauntingly similar and as difficult as those at the beginning. In the era of "rights" now passing, the imposition of moral sentiments other than in the celebration of individual choice may always feel Draconian to those who insist a backlash is underway, but against this culture of mistrust, even they may come to recognize the constructive force of such change, when someone else has to make decisions about their own lives in their waning years. Jo,athan B. briber is the Class qf1949 Pr~fi, ssor i , Ethics and professor of sociology at Wellesley College. He is editor-i,-chi~r qf Society.