For every pro-life argument, a pro-choicer stands ready to mock it without trying to understand it. In response to my Nov. 12 post about why the law takes certain “rights to choose” out of individuals’ hands, our old friend Robin Marty writes that I oppose abortion because I think “women can’t be trusted” and “believe women are incapable of making ‘the right’ decision.”
To be fair, she quotes enough of my post to get my basic point across – but apparently not enough for her to digest it. That’s what makes her response so oddly lacking – she doesn’t try to explain why I’m wrong; she just lets her paraphrases about me distrusting women hang there, as if expecting my knuckle-dragging wrongness to rise self-evident from the page.
This is because abortionism, like all subspecies of liberalism, doesn’t really believe in using reason to discern truth or derive positions; adherents to this ideology decide what they want first, then manipulate whatever emotions they can to help them get it. You don’t trust women is merely one of an arsenal of slogans and buzzwords meant to elicit a Pavlovian response in one’s followers – in this case, they are meant to instinctively recoil in disgust at my alleged disdain for the fairer sex.
Unfortunately for Marty, ten seconds’ worth of non-brainwashed thought about my words – or, in this case, just reading them – would have sufficed to see my real argument: I think “women can’t be trusted” with the power to abort only because I don’t think anyone can be trusted with the power to unilaterally decide whether someone else dies, male or female. Indeed, if the several dozen words I spent explaining my position weren’t enough to convey that to Marty, my use of words like “men,” “people,” “our,” “human,” and “we” should have taken her the rest of the way.
But because genuinely understanding and accurately depicting one’s opponents fall so low on pro-aborts’ priority list, Marty instead settles for the implied sexism cliché, and she makes almost no effort to address the various aspects of my argument – not human nature, not the rights of the unborn (or, indeed, what the unborn even really are), and not the hypocrisy of liberals. The closest she comes to an actual response is this:
Of course, we do have an independent, impartial authority—the courts. At least, we do so far. And that independent, impartial authority ruled that a woman’s right to bodily autonomy supersedes a fertilized egg’s right to be born if the woman doesn’t wish to carry it to term.
Sadly, instead of correcting my fallacies, Marty has introduced a whopper of her own. The true “independent, impartial authority” is the Constitution and the principles it enshrines; the courts settle these questions only to the extent that their rulings faithfully reflect that Constitution and uphold those principles. Roe v. Wade fails that test spectacularly. (And if you don’t believe me, Robin, don’t take Live Action’s word for it – take your own side’s legal experts.)
Robin Marty set out to undermine my argument, but by providing such a great example of the lengths to which abortion apologists will stretch language and reason to keep unborn babies killable, it seems to me she’s only strengthened it.
