This weekend, the New York Times published a piece that attempts to paint anti-abortioners as hateful, oppressive, and evil people. It got a great deal of attention and was shared by major pro-abortion advocates, including Dr. Leana Wen of Planned Parenthood. However, the article is fundamentally inaccurate on many, many counts. It makes foolish arguments that educated pro-abortion advocates would be ashamed of.
The article, titled “The Long, Cruel History of the Anti-Abortion Crusade,” opens by asserting that the Founding Fathers were ideologically in line with the modern pro-abortion movement. “Our founding fathers got this right; the choice to have an abortion or a child belonged to the woman,” the New York Times says. Really?
Unlike author John Irving, the novelist who glorified abortion in The Cider House Rules, I will not make wild, unsubstantiated, and dubious claims about exactly what the Founders did or did not believe about abortion. But on the role of government, I will confidently say this: The Founders would have lamented the destruction of federalism and state powers in Roe v. Wade, and they’d despise the federal government repeatedly giving over $560 million in taxpayer money to Planned Parenthood, an independently wealthy abortion giant.
The article then notes that in the 1900s, abortion was very restricted in almost every state, and then asks, “Why was it prohibited for almost a century?”
Irving leaves this question unanswered, but the explanation is very simple: The American people democratically chose to prohibit abortion, like people in most of the civilized world at that time. That is exactly how this issue should work. There is no way on earth those ratifying the Constitution believed they were creating a right to abortion, and the 10th Amendment powers not explicitly delegated to the federal government belong to the states. Thus, state governments should have the power to regulate abortion as the voters see fit.
Next, the New York Times attempts to dress up the anti-abortion position. “I’m pro-choice — often called pro-abortion by the anti-abortion crusaders, although no one is pro-abortion … the difference between pro-life and pro-choice is the choice.”
Sadly, this is not true either. With Joe Biden’s flip-flop on the Hyde Amendment, every major Democratic 2020 candidate now supports direct taxpayer funding for elective abortion. They support taking money out of your wallet and using it to pay for someone else’s abortion procedure, including late term and partial-birth abortion procedures. That is pro-abortion. One does not need to be “pro-life” to object to this coercive action, which involves no choice at all, least of all on the taxpayer’s part. Pro-abortion is in fact the more accurate descriptor of such a policy.
The next argument is perhaps the most foolish of them all. In an attack aimed at the Catholic Church, Irving claims that abortion restrictions violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment — as if the only reason to oppose abortion would be to follow a state religion … or something.
“I must remind the Roman Catholic Church of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution: ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.’ In other words, we are free to practice the religion of our choice, and we are protected from having someone else’s religion practiced on us.”
This implies that all sorts of other activities frowned upon by both the church and the state — murder, robbery, perjury, etc. — should perhaps be legalized.
It is an incredibly fatuous and weak argument. And don’t take my word for it, take the word of the Supreme Court justices who decided Roe, not one of whom invoked the Establishment Clause. The 1973 Roe opinion cited the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment, the Ninth Amendment as applied in Griswold v. Connecticut, and even the Fourth Amendment right of protection from search and seizure. But its authors were not so weak-minded as to think abortion restrictions are a violation of the Establishment Clause. Nor did they make that argument anywhere in Doe v. Bolton, Roe‘s sister case, which was decided on the same day.
Irving further attacks the Catholic Church (see a pattern here?) and its traditional values by making a nonsensical claim about the Catholic Church’s view of women. “The Roman Catholic Church, and many evangelical and fundamentalist churches, willfully subject women to mandatory childbirth and motherhood — procreation is deemed a woman’s primary purpose and function. I’m not overstating. In his 1951 ‘Address to Midwives,’ Pope Pius XII states that ‘the procreation and upbringing of a new life’ is the primary end of marriage.”
In case you failed to notice Irving’s sleight of hand here, the statement that procreation is the primary end of marriage is remarkably different from his misrepresentation of it as a woman’s primary purpose. That’s both ignorant and intentionally deceitful, and you wonder how it got past any half-competent editor. But one might say the same of Irving’s entire piece.
