The View co-host tried to get her own way via rhetorical elimination and hand-waving brute force.
The View co-host tried to get her own way via rhetorical elimination and hand-waving brute force.
O n yesterday’s episode of The View, Whoopi Goldberg staged an indignant rant in defense of abortion on demand. Specifically, Goldberg was vexed by Justice Samuel Alito’s having asked during the oral argument in Dobbs whether, during a pregnancy, “the fetus has an interest in having a life and that doesn’t change . . . from the point before viability to the point after viability?”
“How dare you?” Goldberg said to the camera. “How dare you?” And the audience applauded.
It should have booed, because none of what Goldberg said made any sense. As is de rigueur, Goldberg started by trying to exclude half of the population from the debate. “Do any of you men have any eggs or the possibility of carrying a fetus?” she asked. This, of course, is irrelevant to the matter at hand. But it also rang rather hollow, given that it is not pro-lifers who are likely to answer this question with a jarring “Yes,” but the very pro-choice activists to whom Goldberg was presumably attempting to appeal. At some point, progressives are going to have to decide whether pregnancy is intrinsic to womanhood (as Ruth Bader Ginsburg had it, and as the plaintiffs’ lawyer insinuated throughout Wednesday’s hearing) or whether gender is a patriarchal myth and pregnancy universal as a result. In the long run, it cannot be one thing when progressives wish to expel men from the debate, and another when they wish to cast abortion as a political issue that affects everyone.
For now, though, it remains in the hands of Schrödinger, and this week it is a woman’s issue — which is presumably why Goldberg continued her jeremiad by asking irately of Samuel Alito, “How dare you talk about what a fetus wants? You have no idea.”
Which, well . . . what? I have read this sentence nine times now, and I am still no closer to establishing what Goldberg could possibly think she means. Is she arguing that, as a rule, unborn children might be suicidal, and that abortion is doing them a favor? Is she arguing that some unborn children wish to live and some wish to die, and that it remains a mystery which is which? Is she arguing that, because men do not “have any eggs or the possibility of carrying a fetus,” they are unable to intuit “what a fetus wants,” whereas women somehow can? And, if so, what about pro-life women who believe that their unborn children deserve protection from the moment of conception? Is Goldberg’s implication that, through some extraordinary alchemy, the wishes of the mother and the wishes of the unborn child are bound always to mesh — as if Baby A’s most heartfelt desire is to be born and to be named Steve, while Baby B’s is to have his brains sucked out with a vacuum? In the quotation to which Goldberg objected, Justice Alito was being asked to balance competing interests, and he was inquiring as how he should do that. In what possible universe can his assumption that unborn children want to live be so controversial as to deserve an incensed “how dare you”?
Goldberg’s next offering was equally irrational. “I’m fine if you disagree with abortion, I have no problem with that,” she said. “My problem comes when you tell me what I need to do with my doctor and my family. How dare you? How dare you?!”
Or, put another way: Goldberg is not fine if you disagree with abortion.
Most political topics do, indeed, lend themselves to an “I’m fine if you disagree with me, but not if you try to legislate that disagreement” construction. In fact, as a good, old-fashioned classical liberal, I happen to hold this view on almost everything: drugs, speech, gay marriage, gun ownership, the existence of the state of Delaware. But, like slavery, abortion cannot fit properly into this category, because it is the life and liberty of someone else that serves as the source of the objection. “Don’t like heroin, don’t inject it into your body” is a perfectly comprehensible stance. “Don’t like gay marriage, don’t get gay married” is, too. But “Don’t like slavery, don’t own a slave” is obviously not, because it is not the slaveowner’s autonomy with which critics are concerned, but the life and liberty of the slave. Practically, there really is no sense in which a person can logically say, “Well, I’m personally against the killing of children, but if you and your doctor decide to kill some children, that’s okay with me.”
Which brings us back to Goldberg’s peculiar “How dare you talk about what a fetus wants?” inquiry. Why was Goldberg so angered by Justice Alito’s question? Well, because it is from this question that the rest of the debate logically flows. If an unborn child is a Tonka toy, then there’s no reason to care one way or another what happens to it. If unborn children are presumed to be suicidal, then we’re presumably doing them all a favor by preventing them from being born. If a fetus is a human if the mother wants it, but a tumor if the mother does not, then we can pick and choose our approach on the basis of convenient telepathy, and solve the problem with a shrug. But if an unborn child is a human being — a human being that is like other human beings — then the calculation must change considerably. Properly understood, Whoopi Goldberg’s rant was a poorly executed attempt to sidestep that objective debate completely and get her own way via rhetorical elimination and hand-waving brute force.
How dare she?