|
Abortion support losing ground?
by Gregory R. Norfleet · Op-Ed · August 15, 2007
Anna Quindlen in Newsweek’s Aug. 6 edition took a mini-documentary that catches abortion opponents off-guard and tries to turn it into the definitive reason to keep all forms of abortion legal.
She even wrote that Gov. Chet Culver swept into office because of his support for abortion.
Thankfully, most of the laws — and their penalties — that the majority of Americans accept as proper for a first-world nation like the United States are not written from knee-jerk reactions.
Here’s the context of Quindlen’s column: Buried deep within YouTube is a film shot in front of an abortion clinic in Libertyville, Ill. The filmmaker asks the abortion protesters what the penalty should be if abortion was made illegal. None of them has a decisive answer.
It’s a shame they don’t, but just because they had not thought it through before doesn’t make them wrong on their central point, which is that abortion ought to be illegal. Clearly the protesters are more interested in protecting unborn babies than punishing the mothers — which, in and of itself, is admirable.
But the filmmaker asks a good question — a question that demands an answer.
However, Quindlen positions herself into a “gotcha” stance by believing that her argument for abortion must be correct if abortion opponents can be caught off-guard with an unanticipated question.
After making that point, one would expect her to use the balance of her column, headlined “How Much Jail Time?,” to build a reasonable argument to support her claim. She doesn’t.
Just the opposite, in fact. She went on to make broadbrush statements that only buried her deeper. She wrote that politicians don’t have the backbone to enact laws that punish women for abortion and references how even the senior George Bush, in a presidential debate, makes his own flat-footed response to a similar question with “I haven’t sorted out the penalties yet.” Quindlen is prompted to quip: “Neither, it turns out, has anyone else.”
But someone has: In 1973, before the Roe v. Wade decision, the punishment for women and doctors ranged from fines to one to 10 years imprisonment. And that was during a time when American society was less inclined to imprison women than today.
It’s true that a woman’s body is her own, but when she agrees to have sex, she, whether she likes it or not, whether she uses contraceptives or not, is putting herself at risk of getting pregnant. Humor columnist Dave Barry captures this thought well in one of his books, entitled “Babies and Other Hazards of Sex.” When a woman has sex, her body may very well accept part of a man’s body and start forming a third. (If the egg is hers, then it stands to reason that the sperm is his — so who does it belong to when the two are together?) It’s been happening for thousands of years of recorded history and no one ought to be surprised.
Quindlen then quotes Jill June, president of Planned Parenthood of Greater Iowa, who believes that since abortion proponents have not considered punishing the mother, then they have no standing to make abortion illegal.
“They never connect the dots,” June said. Planned Parenthood asked the Iowa’s Republican gubernatorial candidate Jim Nussle how much jail time women should serve for abortion, and June said his lack of a good answer is what lost him the election.
“Culver, the Democrat who unabashedly favors legal abortion, won that race, proving that choice can be a winning issue if you force people to stop evading the hard facts,” Quindlen wrote.
That conclusion is quite a stretch. Quindlen’s column seems to imply that she’s getting tired of abortion opponents’ constant pounding away at the law as written. Indeed, since Roe v. Wade, abortion opponents have successfully chipped away at it with things like parental notification laws, rights for the unborn and “partial-birth abortion” restrictions. Quindlen does not try to advance the discussion, but to end it.
Here’s another question: Put yourself in place of the baby — how would you feel if your mother weighed the pros and cons of an abortion based upon how it affected her future without giving the same weight to how if affected yours?
When John Roberts was facing a Senate panel before becoming Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, abortion proponents in the Senate wondered how he would handle an abortion case, and kept referring to the 1973 decision as “settled law.” It should be easy to argue that a law that has stood for 34 years is “settled,” but not when it comes to abortion. The fight still rages, and it has been a major question of presidential, congressional and gubernatorial races ever since then.
It could be that Quindlen and other “pro-choicers” realize they are starting to lose ground and would rather someone come along and say the game should end while the abortion proponents are still ahead.
It seems unlikely.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
