harpojaeger.com

Dave Weigel:

Many pro-life activists consider their work a continuation of other movements that protected human life and elevated the status of people whom the law doesn’t consider “human.” In the 19th century, it was African-Americans; in the 21st century, it’s children in the womb. This is a common point at the annual March for Life. In 2009, Rep. Jeff Fortenberry told activists at the pro-life event: “You are the new abolitionists. You are the new civil-rights movement.”

I think this is a deceptive metaphor.  Giving blacks full civil rights was a recognition of the fact that the government had no business permitting their status as second-class citizens.  Individual citizens are obviously free to think what they want about racial equality (being racist isn’t illegal), but in conducting business or public affairs, they have to treat all people equally.

Laws permitting abortion don’t require anyone to 1) believe that abortions are okay, or 2) have one.  In this way, the right of citizens to make private choices about a private matter (analogous to one’s right to believe black people are inferior to white people) is left intact.  But the fundamental difference between the two cases is that no one’s life is threatened by their being forced to treat blacks and whites equally in public.  They may not like it, but they can (and have) learned to live with it (one of the many sacrifices people have to make to live in an at least somewhat cohesive society).

Forcing all people to recognize an unborn child as deserving of the same Constitutional status as the woman who’s carrying that child ignores the fact that having a baby has a huge impact on people other than the baby, primarily the mother.  While I wouldn’t claim that anyone who’s anti-choice is automatically anti-feminist, this is the reason I can’t totally shake the feeling that refusing to allow a woman a choice that is at its core about her own body and what she wants to do with it is tantamount to declaring that her only function is to have babies (and that someone else gets to decide when she does it).

Jessica Arons has written a fabulous piece for The Nation, explaining just how moronic the thinking behind the Stupak amendment is (and thus reminding me of how glad I am it won’t be part of the final reform bill):

No transaction in our modern society is completely free of government involvement. The food we eat costs less because of farm subsidies. Students attend private universities with the help of Pell Grants and Stafford loans. Our churches and temples can afford to operate in part because they are tax-exempt. And employers who offer health insurance do so because of tax incentives. Stupak’s reasoning, taken to its logical extreme, would mean that virtually every activity in which we engage is government funded, regardless of whether it is condoned or condemned.

As I see it, the extension of her argument is that in supporting, for example, transportation subsidies, a person makes a judgment that the good derived from the availability of public transportation outweighs the harm done by freeing up citizens’ personal money to be used for an abortion.  Thus, opposing insurance premium subsidies is a judgment that the benefits of providing people with health insurance are less important than preventing those people from having abortions.

Simultaneously opposing insurance premium subsidies on abortion grounds while also supporting other federal subsidies shows that you prioritize your own religious or social beliefs over someone else’s health.  While this isn’t a logical inconsistency, I’d say it demonstrates a severe lack of empathy and a healthy dose of self-righteousness.

But then, those are all in a day’s work for congressional opponents of health care reform.