By Kevin D.
Williamson
Sunday, May 08,
2022
For various reasons, many journalists and
so-called journalists have written many columns about my views on abortion. But
the only one of them to ever bother asking me about my views
on abortion has been Jane Coaston. We recently had a short email exchange on
the question, which she mentions in the New York Times. She writes:
In
response to an email, Williamson told me, “Returning abortion policy to the
democratic theater does not empower the pro-life movement to dictate abortion
policy — nor should we want it to.”
But have
no doubt that the people who oppose abortion will, in fact, be dictating
abortion policy in dozens of states . . . .
Coaston is one of the many writers on this
subject who, for whatever reason, keeps missing one of the central points: In a
post-Roe world, nobody gets to dictate abortion
policy to anybody — rather, abortion policy will be decided by democratically
elected lawmakers. That is not dictatorship, but democracy. The importance of
that point should be easily understood by all intelligent observers, including
those of our friends and neighbors who support abortion rights. It is wrong to
treat laws enacted by democratically enacted lawmakers as equivalent to the
undemocratic settlement we currently have. It is also wrong to fail to
acknowledge that this is a big part of what is being disputed.
There are really two separate issues in
play here: One is the particular question of abortion, which is indirectly
implicated in the Dobbs case (indirectly because throwing
out Roe would provide no guidance at all on what abortion
legislation should actually look like) and the independent issue of the Supreme
Court’s longstanding habit of making social policy far in excess of its
legitimate constitutional scope — a bad habit that is, I hope, about to be very
much curtailed. It is in the interest of pro-abortion political activists and
their media allies to conflate these issues, but they are not the same
issue.
Another way of saying this is that a
Supreme Court decision imposing a national ban on abortion would be just as
illegitimate as Roe — a fact that pro-lifers are more inclined
to appreciate because of the very fact that our ability to effect change as
citizens through regular democratic channels has been illegitimately held
hostage by the Supreme Court for half a century. Getting the Supreme Court back
inside its constitutional limits is an important political task that is
separate from the question of whether pro-lifers will get their way on abortion
or won’t.
Coaston asked me about my belief that
under a post-Roe legal order the United States is going to look
approximately like France rather than The Handmaid’s Tale. In
fact, France’s current abortion law restricts the procedure one week earlier in
pregnancy than the Mississippi statute would, at 14 weeks rather than 15.
Here is my full response:
This is
Civics 101. If you want to make a fundamental change to social policy and you
want your new policy to be effective and durable, then you need real consensus
and democratic buy-in. Consensus is why marijuana reform has had some success
while most health-care and climate-reform schemes have been failures. While
there surely will be some diversity among the states—we have 50 states for a
reason—I expect that in the near term U.S. abortion policy will land about
where Western European abortion policy is, because that is where public opinion
is. Most Americans take a pretty liberal view of abortion in the first
trimester, an increasingly skeptical view thereafter, and support certain
exceptions to restrictions—i.e., they are about where George W Bush was, and
very far from where the Roe regime is.
Our
pro-abortion friends have forgotten how to engage in persuasion and why that it
important because for half a century they have been able to misuse the Supreme
Court to unconstitutionally and undemocratically dictate abortion policy to the
rest of the country. Returning abortion policy to the democratic theater does
not empower the pro-life movement to dictate abortion policy—nor should we want
it to. It only gives us the opportunity to engage in persuasion. I wish the
median American had a less savage and more humane view of abortion, and I trust
that with time and diligence this will be the case. But every time some
activist bitches about the “intransigence” or even “sabotage” of the other
side, it is just one of 10,000 equally stupid and cowardly ways of saying, “We
have not been successful in persuading our fellow citizens of the wisdom of our
views.” I don’t want to see the pro-life movement replicate the mistakes of the
pro-abortion movement.
As I have written 1,000 times before,
overturning Roe is not the end of the fight over abortion but
the beginning. And pro-lifers need to get it into our heads that there is no
real way to win on this issue without convincing a politically dispositive majority
of Americans that ours is the correct position. As I see it, we are at best
about halfway there.
No comments:
Post a Comment