[Note: This post isn’t really about abortion itself but instead about the exception Democrats make for the issue of abortion in their ideology. It didn’t have to be abortion with all it’s related moral and legal complexity. It could have been some other medical procedure or anything that affects the human body. Don’t get distracted by the broader issues of abortion itself.]
The 2012 Democratic platform states:
The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to make decisions regarding her pregnancy, including a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay. We oppose any and all efforts to weaken or undermine that right. Abortion is an intensely personal decision between a woman, her family, her doctor, and her clergy; there is no place for politicians or government to get in the way.. [emp added]
The Democrats claim to support abortion, even to the extremes, because they believe that women own their own bodies and have the right to perfectly control anything that happens to those bodies. They argue that as long as any part of the fetus/infant remains inside the woman’s body, it directly affects her body and she has a right kill the fetus if she so chooses. Any interference in that choice is social and government violation of the principle of self-ownership and control.
That sounds good … but the Democrats are obviously lying. The Democrats don’t really believe that women own their own bodies nor that women have an innate right to control what happens to those bodies.
I state that with perfect confidence because once you stop to think about it, it becomes obvious that the Democrats commitment to “Our bodies, our choice,” begins and ends with abortion.
Far from being the natural outgrowth of a broad philosophical commitment to the idea of self-ownership and control of our own bodies, the Democrats stance on the right to abortion is the sole and glaring exception to an ideology that otherwise treats the bodies of women like the bodies of government owned cattle.
Talk is cheap and actions speak louder than words. Despite their rhetorical stances about respecting women’s control of their own bodies, the policy actions Democrats take in all areas except abortion clearly demonstrate they believe the opposite. For Democrat’s, abortion is the exception that proves the rule
To demonstrate, it would be unthinkable for the Democratic platform to contain the following:
The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports a woman’s right to make decisions regarding her her ovarian cancer treatment, regardless of ability to pay. We oppose any and all efforts to weaken or undermine that right. Cancer treatment is an intensely personal decision between a woman, her family, her doctor, and her clergy; there is no place for politicians or government to get in the way.
The Democrats currently argue exactly the opposite. They argue that the government should have total control over a woman’s ovarian cancer treatment. Why is a woman’s control over abortion more “intensely personal” than her control over the treatment of a disease that will kill her slowly and cruelly?
Democrats even advocate government control of all other sexual or reproductive treatments. They even only allow women to select from government approved list of contraception options, a practice that leaves women in America with fewer choices than women in India. Why is contraception or treatment of reproductive organs less of “an intensely personal” choice than abortion? Any argument made about the special status of abortion based on abortion touching upon issue of sex and family would also apply to other medical issue that touch upon sex and family such as contraception or fertility treatments.
Note also that in the sole case of abortion, socialization of cost does not give the government the right to regulate abortion in the eyes of Democrats. You will never hear a Democrat apply that standard to anything else. In any other circumstances, if the government pays for it, the government regulates your use of it. Obamacare is built explicitly around the premise of “the government pays, the government controls.”
The Democrats have no qualms about overriding all of a women’s medical choices. At no time in the last 50+ years have individual Americans had the right to choose from all technologically feasible and economically available medical treatments. The Democrats decided which subset of all possible medical treatments you can choose from by making it illegal for the creators of treatments to manufacture, distribute or sell treatments the Democrats don’t think you should have. They leave some choices on the table to preserve the illusion of choice but many times you lose choices before you even knew they existed because the Democrats prevent them from coming to market. Denying access to and knowledge about medical treatments is not respecting a woman’s right to control her own body.
Recently the Democrats have branched out into controlling what we eat and drink. A party that tells women what size of soda she can buy doesn’t actually believe that women control their own bodies.
Why the Democrats make an exception for abortion is speculative and beyond the scope of this post. That they do make an exception for abortion is objective, definitive and the important point.
It is important because if you vote Democrat because you are pro-choice, you need to understand that the Democrat’s don’t protect abortion rights because they respect your right to control your own body and what happens to it.
If you vote pro-choice you need to understand that the Democrats protect your abortion rights at present because they are forced to, not because they ideologically respect your individual ability to make any decision about your own body and life or believe you have an inalienable right to do so. Their true ideology is one of an elitist, centralized and impersonal control of every facet of your life literally down to the smallest biochemical mechanism in your body. They will let you suffer in agony and die rather than lessen their control and let you choose freely.
If you trade your other freedoms, such as economic freedoms and freedom of speech, for abortion rights, you are just trading away what little leverage over the Democrats you have left. As you trade your freedoms away you become more and more dependent on the Democrats until eventually you can’t tell them “no” on anything without losing everything you have. Once you no longer have enough freedoms to marshal the resources to defend yourself politically, they won’t have to humor you anymore and they will suddenly discover that your inability to choose your own soda size, cough syrup and cancer treatments also means you don’t have the ability to choose whether to have or refuse an abortion (given the history of Leftism, the latter is more likely.)
If you vote pro-choice, cherish the right to choose while you can.
The right to choose whether to have an abortion or not will be both the last freedom Democrats will leave you and the last they will take away.
An excerpt from President Obama’s 2015 speech on necessary improvements to the Affordable Care Act:
“A society, in order to progress, must not be burdened by the avoidable demands of unfortunate genes. To move forward, we need to invest in making future generations more capable of fulfilling the promise of human destiny.”
Shannon is absolutely correct. Abortion is just a shiny bauble they use to distract the rubes from the enormity of what they are doing — which is constructing a most awful tyranny.
I am going to set out here a few paragraphs from the most famous and most perceptive student of America — Alexis De Tocqueville, in which explains how democracy can become tyranny. I ask you to read them with the utmost care. They could have been written today:
“Democracy in America” by Alexis de Tocqueville Vol. 2 Sec. 4 Chapter 6
“What Sort Of Despotism Democratic Nations Have To Fear”
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/ch4_06.htm
[Shannon says: In order to keep the comment thread length down and give Robert’s excepts higher visibility, I have relocated them to their own post.]
I have always wondered why the constitutional basis for Roe V. Wade hasn’t been applied to many other cases. Why doesn’t this right to privacy have wide application to many areas of life? I have no idea of the technicals of it but just wondering if anybody has tried.
Second point is I don’t necessarily agree that support for abortion is just politically expedient to satisfy a constituency. Considering the abortion rates and vocal support for them for poor, minority women one could argue that they are merely engaging in eugenics. Just look at some of things the Chicago teachers were saying about their students and why there shouldn’t be accountability. It has been implied ( and I use that generously) that test scores are bad ways to rate teachers because poor and minority students in that city. A reduction in poor and minority students through tax-payer funded abortions would help improve test scores and education would it not? It is no different than restrictive zoning that pushes out minorities in places like Santa Monica or San Francisco. The fact is that if one spouts the leftist talking points, one can put engage in policy that act to exclude minorities from certain communities.
Eugenics? Probably in the back of some heads. Certainly, when the government becomes a supplier, it becomes the only supplier. And I can’t imagine why we would want the government to control – withhold contraceptives or require abortions, as the “planners” see the need – our great reproductive drive. For one thing, as the genome is mapped out, I suspect reproducing those with the great rebellious gene that resonates to the sight of a Gadsden flag may not be considered a useful addition to the next generation. I agree with my friends who feel strongly the immorality, that our tax money should not go to such morally freighted uses.
Foxmarks,
The history of eugenics is the history of the progressive movement prior to WWII. The health of the gene pool and the species (races were thought to be different sub-species back then) was just as much a concern as any other public health issue and the state was presumed to be able to control it just as well.
Eugenics was the global warming of its day. It’s basic premise, that civilization allows people with marginal traits to survive and reproduce thus degrading the gene pool, is still considered basically true today. It’s just that now we recognize that races aren’t subspecies, evolution has no direction or destination and that it takes way longer than the Eugenist thought. At the time though, the science of eugenics was “settled” and the only objections were those of morality and practical politics.
Eugenics only disappeared from politics because of the counter-reaction to all things Nazi but the idea is still floating around. Worse, once you assume that the state has not only the right but the obligation to manage the health of its citizens like a rancher has the right and obligation to manage the health of his cattle, something like eugenics appears both necessary and moral.
They only real safeguard against that is destroying the idea that the government is empowered to manage the health of the citizens against their individual wishes.
The Eugenics movement was farcical to begin with; it’s premise is that modern medicine stopped/muted natural selection; instead, it meant that natural selection could work more directly on other useful traits (although, admittedly, natural selection’s view of ‘useful traits’ are limited to the ones that help you reproduce.)
As an example, it’s probably more ‘fit’ for a modern man to be able to lie convincingly to crowds than to have an unusual ability to survive massive blood loss; not only are crowds easier to come by these days, but you’re far less likely to suffer the sort of trauma that leads to massive bleeding… and modern medicine can aid your survival and recovery from the lack of blood.
The liar can parley his speaking talent into fame, money, and other sorts of power which attract mates, as well as aiding in the ability to care for any of his children he acknowledges. Meanwhile, the slow bleeder survives in edge cases where modern medicine isn’t quite good enough for the average man.
Boobah…at this particular moment in time, in this particular society, it’s probably true that the ability to lie convincingly is more valuable, from the standpoint of survival and reproduction, than the ability to survive massive blood loss. But 50 years from now, things might be quite different.
In the relatively-civilized era of ancient Rome, it was also probably true that being a convincing liar had more survival/reproduction value than the ability to survive violence. But things were quite different a few centuries later.
One of the many problems with Eugenics is that it would almost certainly to be used to select for criteria which are “hot” at the moment, at the expense of other which will be more important over the sweep of future history.