What her new book says about ‘reproductive rights’
If anyone is looking for valuable insights from Hillary Clinton about how her views on abortion factored into her loss last November, they’d better look somewhere other than her new memoir, What Happened. The book’s fleeting discussion of the abortion debate is simplistic, offers no new perspective, and does absolutely nothing to resolve growing concerns among Americans about the Democratic party’s increasingly blind allegiance to abortion-on-demand.
Kicking off her under-three-page diatribe on the subject, Clinton takes a weak jab at her primary opponent Bernie Sanders for his claim that Planned Parenthood is just another part of the “establishment.” “Few organizations are as intimately connected to the day-to-day lives of Americans . . . as Planned Parenthood, and few are under more persistent attack,” Clinton counters. “I’m not sure what’s ‘establishment’ about that . . . ” (Here’s my take on why she doth protest too much.)
Clinton also provides a warmed-over version of the Democrats’ most beloved copout: “personal opposition” to abortion. “I believe there’s room in our party for a wide range of personal views on abortion,” Hillary graciously allows, noting her choice of “personally opposed” poster boy Tim Kaine as her running mate. “But when personal views on abortion become public actions — votes on legislation or judges or funding that erode women’s rights — that’s a different matter.”
So, in other words, when a legislator actually legislates or a judge actually judges, views on abortion must be tossed out the window. On this, Clinton sounds just like every other Democrat: increasingly radical and eager to denigrate conscience rights for the sake of protecting abortion access.
Sounding more and more like a dusty brochure from the local Planned Parenthood clinic, Clinton goes on: “Reproductive rights is central to women’s rights and women’s health. . . . And remember: It’s a constitutional right as defined in Roe v. Wade.” It takes a lot to sound like a schoolmarm in writing, but somehow she manages it.
Briefly, Clinton shows the slightest glimmer of originality when she defends abortion rights by claiming that Texas’s effort to defund abortion clinics has caused maternal mortality rates to rise. But even here her case falls flat. As issue-area expert Michael New has cogently articulated several times at NRO, such claims don’t hold up under further examination of the relevant statistics.
And Clinton’s closing argument for abortion rights does equally little to offer any kind of substantive defense of her preferred policy (i.e., abortion-on-demand, available at any stage of pregnancy, funded by taxpayers):
As I see it, the issue comes down to the question: Who decides? We can debate the morality of abortion forever . . . but at the end of the day, who decides whether a woman gets or stays pregnant? A Congressman who has never met her? A judge who has spoken with her for maybe a few minutes? Or should the woman be able to make this momentous decision about her life, her body, her future, for herself? Someone’s got to decide. I say let women decide.
Here she intentionally obscures the issue by changing the question under consideration. The fundamental question underlying the abortion debate isn’t “Who decides?” but rather “Is the unborn child’s right to life preeminent?”
Surely, we all agree that the government ought to enforce laws against murder. When a potential murder is discovered, we don’t throw the relevant law out the window and ask, “Well, who put the government in charge of punishing murderers, anyway?” In the case of abortion, the disputed issue isn’t whether the government ought to enforce laws against murder, but whether abortion is murder and thus whether the government ought to forbid it on those grounds.
Abortion supporters usually ignore these more complicated questions because it’s much simpler to advance the pro-abortion cause with airy, abstract points about liberating women from the oppressive yoke of government. Which leads to the second flaw in Clinton’s final argument: It wouldn’t hold up if she applied its underlying logic to every policy she advocates.
If each woman gets to determine abortion policy for herself, then, by Clinton’s own logic, why can’t each taxpayer determine his own tax rates, each business owner determine the rate of his company’s carbon emissions, each citizen determine whether or not he is able to own a gun? Clinton would never agree to these policies — and perhaps she shouldn’t.
Hillary’s astonishing lack of substance had something to do with her loss.
Because, ultimately, policy isn’t determined by an arbitrary answer to the question “Who decides?” but by an examination of the competing rights at stake. In the case of abortion, pro-lifers believe the government should establish anti-abortion policy because a child’s life is at stake, not because they want the government to be the ultimate arbiter on every policy question.
Judging from early reviews of her new memoir, it seems that Clinton doesn’t really understand what happened at all. But given the book’s utterly predictable treatment of the abortion debate, it’s safe to say her astonishing lack of substance had something to do with it.
READ MORE:
Forced Abortion and the Pro-Choice Movement
New Study Finds Increased Health Risks From Certain Abortion Procedures