Michelle Goldberg made the case for abortion rights in yesterday’s NYT. In a nutshell, she argues that the right believes fervently in the sovereignty of the individual human body in all cases except those in which regulatory burdens fall exclusively on women. Abortion rights are thus a matter of freedom and equality for women. This line of reasoning follows an argument made by Justice Ginsberg, not the majority in Roe.
Ross Douthat, in a lengthy column published the same day, acknowledges the equality argument, but makes two points in response. The first is that it should be possible for society to redistribute the legal and practical burdens of unwanted parenthood in a reasonable and fair way without resorting to abortion; the second is that the recent relevant past shows that women can make progress in economic and civic life without relying on abortion, so abortion rights are not a necessary element of equality. Is he correct?
There are two serious shortcomings in the first argument–one conceptual, and one practical. The conceptual problem is that, even if one created an ideal society in which unlimited additional resources were provided to women who are compelled to give birth against their will, there is no possible way to eliminate the pain and danger associated with carrying a child, or to redistribute that burden to society as a whole. Requiring fathers to pay child support and writing the criminal law to exempt mothers from liability for abortions just doesn’t do the trick. Second, the argument is made in bad faith, because Douthat, regardless of his personal sympathies, is perfectly aware that his party has absolutely no interest in raising taxes to improve the lot of mothers of unwanted children, or of the children themselves. To the GOP, as I’ve said many times before, the misery associated with most unwanted pregnancies is a necessary deterrent to inappropriate sexual activity. The misery is the point, not just unfortunate collateral damage.
As to the second argument, the correlation between the slow social advancement of women and declining abortion rates proves nothing, because there is no control on the experiment. We cannot know what the overall impact to women would have been if abortion had been more readily available.
Douthat also contends that fertilized eggs are unquestionably individual human beings in his column. I will address that argument in a separate post tomorrow.