An Experiment in Scotch

Conor at The Amer­i­can Scene has a post up try­ing to clar­ify this Ross Douthat edi­to­r­ial. They are both inter­est­ing reads. I find that any dis­cus­sion of abor­tion, much like that of text edi­tors (VIM Roolz!) and of reli­gion, is dom­i­nated in large part by two very vir­u­lent, angry con­stituen­cies who typ­i­cally try to yell down the other side, never paus­ing to exam­ine the extremely sub­tle and dif­fi­cult dif­fer­ences in the topic. Then there are peo­ple who fall in nei­ther loud group who try valiantly to think through what can only be described as a hor­ri­bly com­plex topic, a topic that can cer­tainly have no clear res­o­lu­tion that says “This is the Truth”. And yet, in the case of abor­tion, we have Roe v. Wade say­ing very nearly that.

My think­ing on Roe has greatly evolved over the past 10–15 years. I was once a staunch, if rea­son­ably dis­in­ter­ested, sup­porter who believed that a woman should always have the right to an abor­tion because to me, in my highly sim­pli­fied view, women who had abor­tions were 18 year old col­lege stu­dents who had made a ter­ri­ble mis­take and couldn’t pos­si­bly have a baby because that would ruin two lives. Of course, noth­ing is ever that sim­ple. As it turns out, 50% of all abor­tions are repeat abor­tions and as many as 25% are the third or fourth a woman has had. Many women use abor­tion as a form of birth con­trol. The cases where abor­tion should be legal at all times like rape or great bod­ily dan­ger for the woman are so rare that they would eas­ily be leg­is­lated into law. It is inter­est­ing that the same extreme fringe on the left who say that any limit on abor­tion will lead to the ongo­ing degra­da­tion of the right are typ­i­cally quite vocal about “rea­son­able restric­tions to gun own­er­ship” being just fine. Of course, one of those rights is in the Bill of Rights and one isn’t.

Apro­pos of that, the more I thought about it and read Con­sti­tu­tional think­ing on the mat­ter, the more I came to believe that abor­tion has no busi­ness being decided, pro or con, at the fed­eral level. It just isn’t a fed­eral mat­ter. It doesn’t have the stature of vot­ing rights or civil rights. It should be a state mat­ter, like so many other rights that are enu­mer­ated in the Con­sti­tu­tion.
There are quite a few peo­ple talk­ing about abor­tion again (as if it ever really stops) because of George Tiller’s mur­der. Some peo­ple from both sides yell at each other as always and then there are peo­ple like Ross and Conor who try to make sense of the entire mess, try­ing to ratio­nal­ize actions of both sides, some­thing dif­fi­cult to do in nor­mal cir­cum­stances and prob­a­bly impos­si­ble in the cur­rent irra­tional sit­u­a­tion. How­ever, it’s impor­tant to try so that maybe sit­u­a­tions like this don’t hap­pen again.

Here is what I see as Ross’ main argu­ment: Because foes of abor­tion do not have a demo­c­ra­tic, leg­isla­tive way to air their views, some of them on the fringe see an act of mur­der as jus­ti­fi­able and in fact the only option. Because we can­not leg­is­late a ratio­nal though messy com­pro­mise con­cern­ing abor­tion, abor­tion oppo­nents feel help­less to change the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion and cer­tain fringe ele­ments of the over­all oppo­si­tion decide to take what they see as the law accord­ing to God or what­ever into their own hands. Hilzoy finds this to be a ridicu­lous argu­ment because just because a ter­ror­ist believes they are act­ing in the right, they are not above the law of man and walk­ing into a church and shoot­ing a man in the face point blank while he hands out bul­letins is always ter­ror­ism. And of course, this is true. But I don’t think that Ross is say­ing that Scott Roeder was jus­ti­fied in per­form­ing this cow­ardly act of ter­ror­ism. What he is try­ing to do is under­stand what might drive a man like Scott Roeder to do this.

This is where Roe v Wade has an unin­tended con­se­quence and I per­son­ally think it makes some log­i­cal sense. Instead of hav­ing a leg­isla­tive answer for abor­tion, we have a deci­sion by the Supreme Court say­ing abor­tion should be legal. Granted, oppo­nents of abor­tion could gather the required num­ber of peo­ple to get an Amend­ment to the Con­sti­tu­tion up and run­ning to over­turn abor­tion but let’s be hon­est, that is not any­where near the same thing as get­ting a law passed in Con­gress (or even bet­ter in your own State leg­is­la­ture) that lays out rules and excep­tions to the rule for when abor­tion should be allowed and when it should not.

None of this excuses the acts of one vio­lent man. How­ever, on a topic as con­tro­ver­sial as end­ing a preg­nancy, shouldn’t the rules be decided upon by the peo­ple? If it’s true that 58% of peo­ple sup­port Roe v. Wade, then a law would be passed that reflects that major­ity. If in fact, fewer peo­ple sup­port unreg­u­lated abor­tion depend­ing on the trimester, a dif­fer­ent law might be passed. Instead what we have is a sit­u­a­tion where none of that can hap­pen and in order to get rea­son­able restric­tions to abor­tion, we have to pass a Con­sti­tu­tional amendment.

In the end, real­ity trumps the­ory and what has hap­pened is that though Roe v Wade is the law of the land, one man has greatly changed a woman’s right to choose by walk­ing into a church in Wichita, KS and mur­der­ing one of the three doc­tors in the U.S who per­form late term (post 21st week) abor­tions. As of this writ­ing, the fam­ily of George Tiller has decided to close the clinic where he car­ried out his life’s work.