The End Roe Deserves?

M y local NPR and PBS radio affiliate, KERA, is a pretty reliable font of bad journalism: First, there was that breathless report about Chicago’s being ravaged by gangsters armed with explosive bullets, which do not actually exist, and now comes a report about Texas’s new abortion law that gets it almost precisely wrong.

KERA claims, falsely, that the Texas law empowers random people to sue women for procuring abortions. In fact, the law is designed to expose not the women seeking abortions but almost everybody else involved in the procedure to civil liability. On this, you need not take my word — you could consult Professor Jessie Hill of the Case Western University law school, among others, as this ABC News report did, or the decidedly non-sympathetic folks over at BuzzFeed News. The law is open-ended enough that one might be exposed to liability for giving a woman a ride to an abortion facility with the knowledge that an illegal procedure was to be performed, but it is not designed to entangle the mothers themselves.

KERA’s report was accompanied by some classic NPR-listener sneering, to the effect of: If women are going to be punished for having abortions, what about the men who get them pregnant? That’s an old line of criticism, and a fundamentally stupid one. The point of anti-abortion laws is not to punish people for having sex or becoming pregnant — the point of anti-abortion laws is to stop people from butchering their children. In any case, this kind of rhetoric gets it backward in that a father who paid for an abortion would face more legal jeopardy under the Texas law than a mother who agreed to one.

The Texas law is, as you may have heard, a goofy one, a Rube Goldberg–worthy contraption of legal machinery designed to preempt the kinds of legal challenges that have undone other early-stage abortion bans. To that extent, it would be precisely the end Roe v. Wade really deserves: Roe was an implausible bit of canned legal maneuvering that retrofitted a risibly light “constitutional” pretext onto an outcome that already had been arrived at to satisfy political and cultural demands having nothing at all to do with the law, and the Texas law is an equally contrived means of partly reversing it.

The law has already begun to have some of its desired effect: Texas abortionists have in the main indicated that they intend to abide by the six-week deadline, which will prevent most abortions from being performed. It is, in fact, unlikely that we will see a great many of the lawsuits contemplated by the Texas law, because the threat of such lawsuits probably will be enough to change the behavior of physicians and others involved in commercial abortion. There is more than money at stake: Doctors who perform illegal medical procedures put themselves at risk of losing their licenses. Licensure is the point of vulnerability at which we can probably expect many future efforts to restrict abortion to be targeted.

The new rule will deprive Texas abortionists of some 90 percent or so of their business, meaning that many, most, or perhaps all of them will be obliged to seek their profits elsewhere. That’s fine — there are houses that need painting.

But back to that radio report.

We get a lot of dumb rhetoric about guns because progressives require, for moral and psychological purposes, that the violent crime that disproportionately affects African-American communities in cities such as Chicago be, somehow, the fault of a white, preferably Republican, preferably Christian businessman in Texas or Oklahoma or Missouri. We get a lot of dumb rhetoric about abortion for similar reasons: Abortion is so grisly and so patently inhuman that even abortion-rights advocates have trouble looking at it squarely, and so turn their attention to ancillary issues such as sexual hypocrisy. There is a reason that the group now known as NARAL took abortion out of its name, following the example of the fast-food chain formerly known as Kentucky Fried Chicken — one of the many ways in which the abortion racket resembles the fast-food-franchise model.

Still, that “What about the men?” line of complaint may tell us more than it means to. We have paternity laws and court-ordered child-support payments and all the rest of that, but none of it is sufficient to assuage the deep sense of a more general and more comprehensive abandonment — an abandonment beyond the merely financial — that one hears in such indictments. And why wouldn’t women in the United States — and in much of the rest of the so-called developed world — feel abandoned? We treat pregnancy as though it were a disease and young motherhood as though it were some kind of tragic automobile accident. From abortion to transsexualism to certain aspects of economic policy, we have created a great deal of dysfunction and unhappiness by cheapening, suppressing, and pathologizing the things that are unique to women, including — especially — motherhood.

The six-week period in the Texas law reflects the gestational stage at which a fetal heartbeat typically may be detected. It is against such heartbeats that the savagery at issue here may most easily be measured. The heartbeat communicates something: that the story about this being a meaningless lump of tissue, the moral equivalent of an inflamed appendix, is a lie, and a fairly obvious one at that.

And now, in its indirect way, the law in Texas takes some note of that fact.