By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, July 01, 2016
I have an idea.
The federal government needs to compile a list of women
who shouldn’t be allowed to get abortions. The criteria for getting on the list
must be flexible. If an official at, say, the NIH or FBI think that a woman
should be a mother for some reason or other, he or she can block an abortion.
Maybe the woman has great genes or a high IQ or the sorts of financial
resources we need in parents. Let’s leave that decision where it belongs: in
the hands of the government.
Heck, there’s really no reason even to tell women if
they’re on the “no abort” list. Let them find out at the clinic. And if they go
in for an abortion only to discover they are among the million or more people
on the list, there will be no clear process for getting off it, even if it was
a bureaucratic error or case of mistaken identity.
Sound like a good idea?
You probably don’t think so, particularly if you took
part in the celebratory riot of good feeling in the wake of the Supreme Court’s
recent decision striking down Texas abortion regulations. In the case of Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, the
court ruled that Texas could not raise the required health and safety standards
of abortion clinics to match those of other “ambulatory surgical centers.” The
reforms were implemented in the wake of the Kermit Gosnell scandal, in which
the Philadelphia abortionist’s abattoir was revealed to be more like the
setting for a Saw movie than a decent
medical clinic.
The court held that abortion is such a fundamental
constitutional right that minimal health standards are an “undue burden” on
women seeking an abortion, even if they might save women’s lives.
There’s a deep and perplexing contradiction here. If
abortion is just another aspect of “women’s health” — currently the preferred
euphemism for the procedure — why have higher health and safety regulations for
dentists than abortionists?
But that’s just the first of many contradictions. The
court allowed Whole Woman’s Health to sue in the first place, even though the
company has no right to an abortion, and third parties aren’t supposed to have
standing to sue for someone else’s constitutional rights. The Left loves to say
“corporations aren’t people” — unless they’re suing for abortion rights. Then
the new mantra is: “Corporations are people, but human fetuses aren’t.”
The contradiction I find most glaring and galling is that
the euphoric hysteria from the left over the court’s decision occurred right in
the middle of a conversation about guns and terrorist watch lists.
In that conversation, many of the same voices on the left
argued that the federal government can — nay, must! — have the unilateral power
to put American citizens on a secret list barring them from exercising two
constitutional rights: the right to bear arms and the right to due process when
the government denies you a right. (Both, unlike abortion, are rights spelled
out in the Constitution.) Congressional Democrats even staged a tawdry tantrum
on the House floor about it.
Never mind that the Orlando slaughter — the event that
set off the House sit-in — would not have been prevented if the Democrats had
their way.
Writing for the majority in the Hellerstedt case, Justice Stephen Breyer argued that the Texas
statute was unnecessary because “determined wrongdoers” like Gosnell wouldn’t
be deterred by new laws given that he was willing to violate existing laws.
Maybe so. But isn’t that exactly the NRA’s position on
gun laws? Murderers, never mind terrorists, by definition don’t care about the
law.
It gets even crazier. President Obama, who hailed the
court’s decision, desperately craves the unilateral power to keep a list of
people to whom he wants to deny guns without due process. But he also insists
that known terrorists, particularly those held at Guantanamo Bay, have a
constitutional right to due process (though presumably not to buy a gun).
Yes, there’s a lot of deviltry in the details, but the
basic truth is undeniable: Those on the left — in all three branches of the
federal government, along with their cheerleaders in the media — believe that
the rights they like are sacred and the rights they dislike are negligible
inconveniences at best and outrageous cancers on the body politic at worst. As
Justice Clarence Thomas put it in his Hellerstedt
dissent: “The Court employs a different approach to rights that it favors.”
In this, the court is not alone.
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