First thing this morning, there’s Dr. Ben Carson on the tube defending unleashing government power against women to make sure every woman is forced to carry every pregnancy to term.
In the service of that, he compared abortion to slavery (having reserved that comparison for Obamacare in the past), asking:
“What if people had said, ‘You know, I’m against slavery. It’s a very bad thing. But y’all go on and do what you want to do.’ Where would we have been then?”
He proves once more that either you don’t take history in pre-med or his U.S. history course whiffed him.
That’s exactly what the U.S. Constitution did!
So, had he paid attention, he would know where we were and are as a result of that decision.
He would also know that abortion prohibition has a history as well, in the world and in the U.S. The two histories teach a similar lesson even though prohibition in the U.S. was a relatively recent phenomenon in 1973, when the SCOTUS got rid of it: when abortion is prohibited, women die.
He can stay well within his medical education and know that legal abortion in modern times is safer than carrying a pregnancy to term.
As I’m so fond of saying about climate change, that’s not opinion. That’s arithmetic.
Some people have no problem killing women to save fetuses—indeed, they would kill women to save zygotes, believing zygotes to be just as human as us and more “innocent.”
Let’s be clear, “personhood” is not a medical term, and neither are “life” or “death” as used in the policy conversation. They are legal terms that define when H. sapiens is prepared to extend a body of rights at substantial social cost and when those rights are withdrawn at a similar cost.
At the front end, you have some people wanting to “adopt” the leftover embryos from fertility treatments and calling disposal of those embryos “murder.”
At the back end, if people of that stripe—and that would include Jeb Bush, the so-called moderate–had their way, Terri Schiavo would still be hooked to a machine, an IV, and a feeding tube, in disregard of the wishes she expressed when able.
I remain flabbergasted that nobody has publicly commented on Bush’s abuse of the Florida governor’s office to make that poor brain dead mass of human tissue continue to insufflate.
Philosophically, giving a fetus equal dignity with a woman does not lead to an absolute ban on abortion. If that were the case, nobody would ever have to die for lack of a kidney because everybody has a spare one and government would have the power to commandeer a kidney as easily as it could commandeer a womb.
Like most policy questions, this one reduces to how much power we are willing to invest in government.
It’s a fairly recent political and legal trend that we are no longer investing government with the authority to police what consenting adults do in private. Most of the same people who decry that trend give “moral” reasons. If the bedroom police are disempowered, how can we be sure that foot fetishists will do jail time as God intended? And everyone knows the Deity has a constant obsession with who puts what body part in which orifice, right?
Anyone who has had an extremely premature birth in their family has seen the sums of money involved. In Obamacare, we have decided to spend that money. But we have not decided to give government power to force that same woman to have a C-section to bring that degree of medical technology to bear.
One reason we don’t do that—among many—is that the issue is more complicated than sucking air v. not. Extreme preemies sometimes come out of intensive care none the worse for it. Sometimes they do not, and a doctor in that specialty knows what the odds are and will tell the family if asked directly.
At the other end of life, Obamacare disempowers the economic death panels and puts the question to the family how many hundreds of thousands of dollars should be spent to extend a painful ordeal how long. It is a fact that at some point we might decide by democratic means to replace the defunct economic death panels with political death panels.
I cannot for the life of me choose either economics or politics as morally superior to the other for making these decisions on behalf of ordinary working people. The rich make these decisions for themselves; always have and always will.
The rich also decide whether to have a safe and legal abortion; always have and always will. Only the not-wealthy have government power sufficiently arrayed against them to force the choice one way, to remove choice.
I am aware of no Indian nation that vested government with that much power until the Christian missionary infestation destroyed the idea of “women’s business” about which men seldom opined and government never intruded.
And they called us barbarians?
Steve Russell, Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, is a Texas trial court judge by assignment and associate professor emeritus of criminal justice at Indiana University-Bloomington. He lives in Georgetown, Texas.