It stands to reason, doesn’t it? If we live in a “multiverse”, containing an infinite number of universes, then surely there would be one in which liberals would respond “rationally” to Justice Alito’s leaked draft majority opinion for Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, right?
Well, probably. It might depend on whether our particular multiverse contains a non-denumerable versus a denumerable infinity of discrete universes, the idea being that the more non-denumerable an infinity is, the bigger it is.1 The problem is, wherever that universe is, presuming it exists, we probably aren’t in it. Because if there is a liberal other than myself willing to say that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided in toto, well, they’re keeping their heads down.
The “trouble” with liberals is that they believe in “progress”. You can’t argue with progress, because that’s what it is, progress! Related to this—at least in their smoothly reasoning minds—is that progress is, usually, “science” and thus is the province of “experts”, experts whose judgment should not be questioned or subjected to review by any outside authority, including the public at large. (See Fauci, Anthony, ego of)
Liberals are continually trying to take the “big issues” off the table of public discussion. “It just upsets people for no good reason. Since we know what the right answer is, let’s just get it done without any fuss.” It is stuff like this that forces me to agree with, yes, Jonah Goldberg, who called liberals on this tendency in his 2007 tome, Liberal Fascism, which unfortunately downplayed liberal devotion to free elections and majority rule, something now signally lacking on Jonah’s side of the great divide.2
“Sensible” liberals—and conservatives like Charlie Sykes—can do the math and point out that only 8% of Americans believe that abortion should be illegal in all circumstances, which is the logical consequence of the standard “true conservative” position that human life begins at conception, precluding abortion even to save the life of the mother, because you are not allowed to kill someone in order to save your own life. But liberals never want to engage conservatives on the moral status of a fetus at all.
We have all sorts of laws forbidding cruelty to animals, who are, of course, not human, and all sorts of laws forbidding abuse or improper treatment of human corpses, who, legally, are not human beings. We “even” have laws strictly regulating the treatment and disposal of human body parts. Yet discussion of the moral status of an eight-month fetus is something very few liberals want to talk about.
Part of this simple, and reasonable, political calculation. As an obscure man—a very obscure man—I can “safely” proclaim myself an atheist who does not believe that human beings possess immortal souls, who does not believe that a newly formed fetus should be considered a human being in the eyes of the law, who believes that there are circumstances when abortions are justified even in the last stages of pregnancy, but that there is a gray area in between that does not admit of perfect definition. But the fact that most “civilized” countries have more restrictive abortion policies that the U.S. is something that liberals rarely wish to discuss. The sweeping guarantees of Roe v. Wade are too precious even to examine.
Instead of addressing these issues, liberals are too often content to howl. This is not “science.” This is not “reason”. This is blind self-righteousness, of which, these days, we have such a vast supply.
Afterwords
I complained about both liberal and conservative judicial overreach (and plain incompetence) in a rambling post occasioned by Justice Ginsburg’s death, Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Yes, she should have retired, which could be supplemented by some more rambling on the same subject contained in the post George F. Will and “Truth”.
Ginsburg, as is fairly well known, thought that Roe v. Wade was overly broad, and based on the “wrong” constitutional provisions, but also argued that the abortion law actually under consideration in the case (Texas) should have been overturned. I don’t believe it’s “reasonable” to find a right to abortion in the Constitution at all. I also believe that the current Texas law is atrocious and unconstitutional, and that the current efforts to preclude women from even traveling to obtain abortions in the event that Roe is overturned are vicious and grotesque and hopefully will be found unconstitutional as well. Fortunately, thanks to, yes, “science”, the use of effective abortion pills will greatly simplify the process of abortion for most women, and, perhaps, in a decade or so, take some of the heat out of the current furor.
I have previously remarked that it is not an “accident” that the “Trump right” is very largely composed of the two major religious groups in the U.S. which deny women leadership roles in their religion, Catholics and evangelicals. The current fury over abortion will eventually take its toll on these groups, I think. But that is in the future, and the future is not now.
UPDATE
Over at Reason, Jacob Sullum rounds up some sensible liberals who have, over the years, pointed out a number of Roe’s flaws, in particular a contemporaneous take by Yale law professor John Hart Ely. Sample language (footnotes omitted):
Of course a woman’s freedom to choose an abortion is part of the “liberty” the Fourteenth Amendment says shall not be denied without due process of law, as indeed is anyone’s freedom to do what he wants. But “due process” generally guarantees only that the inhibition be procedurally fair and that it have some “rational” connection—though plausible is probably a better word—with a permissible governmental goal. What is unusual about Roe is that the liberty involved is accorded a far more stringent protection, so stringent that a desire to preserve the fetus’s existence is unable to overcome it—a protection more stringent, I think it fair to say, than that the present Court ac cords the freedom of the press explicitly guaranteed by the First Amendment. What is frightening about Roe is that this super-protected right is not inferable from the language of the Constitution, the framers’ thinking respecting the specific problem in issue, any general value derivable from the provisions they included, or the nation’s governmental structure. Nor is it explainable in terms of the unusual political impotence of the group judicially protected vis-à-vis the interest that legislatively prevailed over it. And that, I believe—the predictable early reaction to Roe notwithstanding (“more of the same Warren-type activism”)—is a charge that can responsibly be leveled at no other decision of the past twenty years. At times the marks for special protection have been controversial, even shaky, but never before has its sense of an obligation to draw one been so obviously lacking.
1. Wikipedia, in its explanation of all this, uses the terms “countable” versus “uncountable” infinities, but “denumerable” sounds more like le mot juste to me.
2. Jonah’s great worry now is the “tyranny of the majority”, which he believes can best be countered by the tyranny of the minority, at least until Republicans can figure out how to command a majority of votes in presidential and senatorial elections.
