Ross Douthat, conservative Catholic and the youngest ever op-ed columnist for the New York Times, has a two-part response to Katha Pollitt's "Questions for Pro-Lifers." He purports to "answer" Pollitt's questions one-by-one, but it seems to me you'd have to be comatose to think she'd really been answered. Her first question, for example, concerns the problem of illegal abortions that are performed in countries--she cites Brazil--that by outlawing abortion force desperate women to resort to dangerous substitutes for legal abortions performed in medical facilities by trained professionals. Douthat's response is long--all his responses have a lot of padding--but here is his most direct point:
If you compare Ireland, the major Western outlier on abortion, to other countries like it, there’s simply no evidence that its laws are imposing the kind of massive, back-alley harms that you deem inevitable; its maternal mortality rate is normal for Western Europe and compares favorably to Great Britain, it has the same female-versus-male health indicators as Sweden and Denmark, etc.
But Pollitt's point relates to an abortion ban that actually has the effect of making abortion unavailable, which is what Douthat seeks. Ireland's ban accomplishes no such thing. Irish women who want an abortion simply go to the U.K. and have one. In Brazil, it's different, and Douthat just skates past the distinction.
Suppose that the U.S. Supreme Court, instead of ruling as it did in Roe, had returned the whole question of abortion to the individual states. We can be sure that North Dakota would have adopted a law prohibiting abortion, whereas Minnesota would have permitted it. A woman in Fargo who wanted an abortion would then cross the Red River to have one. After this had been going on for a couple of generations, Douthat would look up the health statistics for North Dakota women, compare them to Minnesota, and conclude that there is no problem at all.
That there's no problem should be attributed to Douthat's goal of an abortion ban being unrealized. In fact, North Dakota women would have reasonable access to legal abortion, just as the Irish in fact do. It seems this is such an obvious objection to Douthat's "answer" that it's surprising he doesn't take it up, especially considering how much extraneous mumbo-jumbo he does interject. One is left to suspect that, with respect to Pollit's first question, this is all he's got--a kind of feint.
And so it goes. Would he support more assistance for poor women raising children? Lots of words that boil down to: Not anytime soon. Since abortion is caused by unwanted pregnancies, which are prevented by contraception, does he support more access to contraception? Lots of words that boil down to: No. Pollitt's eighth and last specific question addresses the notion that "abortion is murder," since a zygote is a human being as surely as my second grader or Ross Douthat himself. If that is so, Pollitt wonders, then what is the appropriate penalty? Capital punishment? Life in prison without possibility of parole? For the abortionist? The woman who hires him? If dad writes the check, or best friend drives the car, are they accomplices to a homicide?
Douthat's response begins, "This is the hardest and most reasonable question, and the place where I least expect my answer to convince." Well, anyway, it turns out that he's right about that! His "answer," as near as I can extract it from the crush of words, is that although abortion is murder, it's not THAT KIND OF MURDER, that really bad thing. The rhetorical gambit involves qualifying an assertion out of existence without acknowledging that you've done so. You say a fertilized egg is a human being and that abortion is murder. When challenged, you say it's not that kind of murder--the kind where the person who delivers the victim to the killer is guilty of aiding and abetting, the kind where the criminal deserves death or life in prison, etc., etc. All this is so because, while I won't come right out and say it, abortion, though murder, isn't as bad as murder. That's what Douthat is really saying.
But, if abortion is the kind of murder that isn't as bad as murder, shouldn't there be a different word for it? Shouldn't people stop saying, "Abortion is murder"?
Pollitt's questions must have been designed to reveal that the other side doesn't have much of a case. Douthat hasn't shown she's wrong.
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