In 1992, Bill Clinton made the point succinctly, that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare.” Aborting a fetus wasn’t a “good thing,” some sort of abstract virtue that should be applauded, even as some of the most twisted feministish voices “wished” they had had an abortion.
But as hysteria whips up about the omnipresent Supreme Court partisan hacks reversing Roe v. Wade and Casey, this same conflation is being insinuated back into the battle. Or maybe it never really left the argument, and so its raising its ugly head again doesn’t make it onto the radar of the unduly passionate.
The first thing that should smack you upside the head is that Justice Ginsburg’s quote has been bastardized for the same of inclusiveness, the only saving grace being that the ACLU didn’t use ridiculous “birthing persons” as the current administration prefers. RBG spoke of women, which is no longer an acceptable word in the woke lexicon.
But putting this unsurprising affectation aside, the ACLU makes a more subtle, but more fundamental shift.
With Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, we lost a champion for abortion and gender equality.
RBG was no champion of abortion. She was a champion of a woman’s right to choose abortion. Not that this will be comprehensible to many, but she was not a champion of “gender” equality either, but of women’s equality.
Is it no longer possible to understand that abortion is not a good thing, not a fun choice, not something to throw a party about? In the hysteria surrounding its perpetually predicted demise, must its proponents try to “reimagine” abortion as if it’s some bold and fierce act of defiance, the sort of thing that turns women into heroes?
As I’ve long said, I am a strong support of choice as a matter of sound public policy. It’s not that Roe v. Wade was a sound and well-reasoned Supreme Court opinion, holding that the criminalization of abortions violated a constitutional right. I’ve no doubt that criminalizing it was a terrible way to address this awful, but necessary, procedure, but that still doesn’t give rise to the stunning leap of creating a right out of thin air. But the Supreme Court did it, and it’s not as if they have created other doctrines from nothing (think qualified immunity), so I will respect the Court’s decision even if the rationale was steaming pile of nonsense.
And now that Pandora’s Procedure has become a constitutional right, there is no going back to the days of fire and brimstone over a zygote, even if there might still be some room to tweak the details that Harry Blackmun made up in the dark of night in his lonely Mayo Clinic room. The push back is now that the right to an abortion should prevail even as the baby emerges from the womb, which is probably the most insane and counterproductive argument to make, since no one outside of the seriously deluded would believe that’s where the line should be drawn.
Let’s not forget that abortion was never a good thing to do. Not for the woman who has to endure the procedure. Not for whatever you want to call the thing being aborted. The objective is to have as few abortions as possible. We need to stop the pretense that it’s only justifiable when pregnancy is the product of rape or incest, or to save the life of the mothers (birthing person?). Women get pregnant for a host of reasons, including that they screwed up, had sex and now have something growing down there. It’s not that abortion is a means of birth control, but a stop gap for the failure of birth control. The same rationale, that the choice belongs to someone and that someone is the person whose body carries the inchoate child, applies.
But this isn’t because anyone celebrates abortions. They horrible and its a shame they have to exist at all, no less be a battle where a woman finds herself torn between a choice she needs to make but abhors making. No one should be a champion of abortion. RBG wasn’t and the distorted presentation of the ACLU to the contrary is a lie that needs to be called out. Justice Ginsburg was a champion of a woman’s right to choose. In a better world, that choice would be exercised with the utmost of care, grave sadness and, as Clinton said, rarely.
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