Abortion

For nearly half a century, American politics has been defined according to the strictures of a single Supreme Court decision: Roe v. Wade. The 1973 case determined abortion policy for the entire nation, striking down state rules and creating a political movement in response which played out in unexpected and completely polarized ways. It drove southern evangelical Christians and northern Catholics into unorthodox political partnerships. It cut across the Democratic Party coalition, leading to constant squabbling even through the passage of Obamacare. It led directly to the creation of the conservative legal movement, the elevation of prospective judicial nominees as of the utmost importance in assessing presidential candidates.

We don't really negotiate much in the US and so we're bad at it. The American style of negotiating is to demand everything and settle for nothing less. We ask for an outrageously large amount and "bargain down" after the other side offers an equally outrageous small amount. Starting anywhere near your actual number is considered a sign of weakness. We don't like gray areas and we don't like to feel like we've lost out on something. So being asked to support something that on its face seems reasonable, like allowing two people in love living together in a home they co-own to marry, means buying into a whole LGBTQIA2+ agenda that somehow includes forcing kids to listen to drag queens read stories aloud about sexually ambitious caterpillars and their same-sex tadpole pals.

American idiot and Green Day lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong said he is going to renounce his US citizenship and move to England because he is so upset over the Supreme Court overturning the landmark abortion case Roe v. Wade. The singer made the comments to a crowd at the band's show in London, specifically "F*ck America, I’m f*cking renouncing my citizenship. I’m f*cking coming here." He called the justices "pr*cks" and said "f*ck the Supreme Court of America." Can he do that? Does it make any sense? Armstrong should first check on what abortion laws look like in the United Kingdom. Assuming he understands the difference, the UK is composed of Scotland, Wales, England, and Northern Ireland.

Sit back with me for a moment and marvel at the level of sociopathy it took for our most recognizable members of Congress to feign arrest before a swarm of cameras, complete with imaginary handcuffs. Of course, politics is just one big propaganda play, staged for the voters in pursuit of power. The media is supposed to apply scrutiny to the political theater, and separate nuggets of truth from hackneyed bluster for the audience’s benefit. But what happens when members of the media are not just complicit in the agitprop itself, but find themselves the mark? This was the case on Tuesday as members of Congress staged a protest in front of the Supreme Court.

Few releases have been better timed. “By the time this book is in your hands,” write authors Ryan T. Anderson and Alexandra DeSanctis, “we will all know how the Court has ruled.” And they were right, just barely: I began reading Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing the day after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision. Perhaps some might counter that now that the abortion movement has suffered such a blow, Tearing Us Apart is actually poorly timed. We won, didn’t we? Why rehash all the arguments against abortion in light of victory? Yet such thinking fails to understand how terribly toxic fifty years of an American abortion regime has really been.

You must have seen the horrific story reported out of Ohio. A 10-year-old child became pregnant through sexual abuse. Under the new post-Roe abortion laws in Ohio, she is ineligible for a termination because she was found to be six weeks and three days pregnant. Her unnamed doctor called a named abortionist in next-door Indiana where terminations can currently be performed past six weeks and began the process of arranging the out-of-state procedure. Someone took the story to the press, where it quickly became a Handmaid's Tale-level news item, the near-perfect example of everything wrong with overturning Roe v. Wade. It was almost too good (or too evil?) to be true. The victim was very young, below the average age of menses.

Now that America’s focus has zeroed in (for the time being) on the Supreme Court’s controversial decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the Democrats are hoping the predictions of a midterm red wave will dissipate. It’s possible. But it’s worth noting that whenever Democrats think they have a winning hand, they almost always overplay it. Will this time be any different? On Thursday, President Biden — who clearly does not abide by Senator Arthur Vandenberg’s aphorism about politics stopping at the water’s edge — blasted the Supreme Court’s “mistake” while speaking at a NATO summit in Madrid.

Cockburn isn’t much for parades, but one happened to pass him by on Thursday when protesters with the Center for Popular Democracy rallied to overturn the overturning of Roe v. Wade. For a while, Cockburn walked alongside the protesters, watching as people in blue vests herded them along until they reached an intersection, where they promptly sat down. Cockburn, being the exquisite legal scholar that he is, deduced that this was illegal. And the demonstrators knew it too. The event was intended as a “mass civil disobedience.” Once sat down, they enjoyed chants, songs, and generally being arrested by the police. One particularly excited speaker said into the microphone: Together we gather full of righteous indignation, threatened by a radical minority...

A few mornings ago, Cockburn caught Hillary Clinton on one of the CBS morning shows. As it turned out, she was on to discuss the recent Dobbs decision, and she had some choice words for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. “I went to law school with him," she said. "He’s been a person of grievance for as long as I’ve known him. Resentment, grievance, anger...women are going to die, Gayle. Women will die.” Clinton is entitled to her opinion (though who is she to call anyone else resentful?) but her sentiment on Thomas's statements has been contradicted by none other than Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Thomas’s ideological opposite on the Supreme Court.

Over the past fifty years, America has allowed a grave atrocity to persist. The magnitude of the callous disregard for human life constituted by abortion is unconscionable. Now, at long last, we can now begin the work of rectification. With the Supreme Court's rejection of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, countless innocent lives have been spared. America can now rejoin the ranks of nearly every other developed democracy, placing basic, democratically enacted limitations on when in a pregnancy an abortion may occur. Instead of a debate shrouded in legal jargon, we can finally have the necessary conversation about whether this is an acceptable practice in a civilized society.