No peace in US abortion debate
Ann Coulter lives to make trouble, so she aimed her mischievous mind at The New York Times Opinions page on Tuesday and pointed to its headlines:
“Overturning Roe would discredit the court and conservatism”.
“It’s time to rage”.
“‘You haven’t seen anything yet’: What’s next if Roe goes?”
“Women in blue states shouldn’t assume they are safe”.
“The Supreme Court is out of step with most Americans”.
Coulter snarked, “You gotta hand it to the @nytimes, they sure have a lively debate on their op-ed pages. So much diversity of thought!”
The left was emphatic all day on Tuesday that the Supreme Court’s draft opinion vacating Roe v. Wade is “an abomination,” as Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer called it. “One of the worst and most damaging decisions in modern history.”
With the High Court awakening to a massive betrayal by one of its own, these two leading voices of the Democratic Party swung their wrecking ball at the institution. “Several of these conservative Justices, who are in no way accountable to the American people, have lied to the U.S. Senate, ripped up the Constitution and defiled both precedent and the Supreme Court’s reputation.”
Perhaps the Democratic leadership and its fan club in the national media are self-assured because the Gallup tracking poll that measures U.S. attitudes on abortion has recently detected the highest level ever of Americans who now say the procedure is morally acceptable.
That would be 47%.
On the other side, according to Gallup, 46% of Americans still believe abortion is morally wrong.
Americans who have not yet surrendered their brains to competing ideologies could be forgiven if they looked at that single percentage point that separates and decided the matter is unsettled.
Abortion is hard.
It’s hard if you’re fighting against it, because controlling what happens in a woman’s uterus requires government intrusion of a disturbing magnitude. It offends our libertarian impulses.
It’s hard because before Roe, women trusted themselves to the backroom butchers who ended up putting them in hospital emergency rooms with perforated uteruses, massive bleeding and sepsis. Eyewitness accounts from the doctors and nurses of that era are heartbreaking.
Such facts are all-confirming to the American left, which has moved in recent decades beyond defending abortion to trying to normalize it and even celebrate it. Liberal congresswomen and movement T-shirts have boasted “I had an abortion,” and comedian Michelle Wolf decked herself out in a drum major outfit to deliver her musical “Salute to Abortion”.
These have fallen flat because abortion in practice means dismembering and vacuuming out tiny developing bodies in the womb. Even in our decadent age, that’s nothing to boast about.
Self-confident liberals who are sharpening their battle axes this week should know that abortion would probably be outlawed if it weren’t so antiseptic. It is clean in the sense that the real loss goes unseen.
No one apparently keeps track of the total number of abortions performed since the passage of Roe v. Wade, but Life News, an anti-abortion advocacy group, has drawn together numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and the Guttmacher Institute to estimate that 62.5 million abortions have been performed since the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.
I don’t trust the organizations on either side of the abortion debate, but if Life News is even close to correct, then we as a nation have extinguished more than eight times the population of Arizona (7.2 million) in the Roe era.
If you could convene the counter-factual – the fully-formed humans who would have lived out their existence were it not for Roe, who would have had ambitions realized and dreams dashed, who would have had children and grandchildren to further multiply the human toll of Roe, it is doubtful we would go back to aborting the next million.
That doesn’t mean the pro-abortion lobby is wrong. The arguments for body autonomy are compelling. But it does mean there’s no clean path to a NARAL world view.
To support abortion, you have to live with the fact that African American women will abort their fetuses at five times the rate of white women, according to Guttmacher, and that Hispanic women will abort at a rate double that of white women. And you must come to terms with the knowledge that those numbers have already profoundly impacted our society.
None of this is to make anyone feel ashamed about an abortion. These are intensely personal decisions caught in the crossfire of competing philosophies.
But as the abortion-rights legions swell with righteous anger this week, they should understand that like their foes on the anti-abortion side, they have managed to make peace with some disturbing counter-facts, all of which leads to undeserved certainty in both world views.
The truth is that no American should be at peace with the issue.
Abortion is hard, it’s unsettled and it should humble every one of us.