Aborting the Lies About Abortion (SCOTUS-Pocus – The DOBBS Decision)
Aborting the Lies: Yes, I’m a man. And yes – I’m going there. Let’s talk about abortion.
Conventions
First, a couple of conventions. For my own purposes here for defining those in favor of unrestricted abortion access, and those opposed to unrestricted abortion access (notice I am deliberately saying “access” and not saying “rights”), I’ll more consistently use the terms “pro-abortion” and “anti-abortion” instead of other terms such as “pro-choice” and “pro-life”, as I contend that neither of those latter terms are completely descriptive for my purposes. Additionally I will be using simply the first term of the SCOTUS decisions for convenience, so Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization will be referred to as DOBBS, and Roe v Wade will be referred to as ROE.
Now that I have that out of the way…
Leaking Frenzy
Since early May, when the SCOTUS decision on DOBBS was leaked by a still unknown person or persons, the whole country appears to be whipped up into a frenzy. Many conservatives and persons of religious persuasion applauded this decision (which, at the time wasn’t even official) as a victory for the lives of the unborn. Conversely, the liberals and those claiming no religious affiliation decried the “leaked decision” using a variety of epithets, from “women aren’t persons”, to “violation of the 14th Amendment”, and the one I’ve persistently found the most ridiculous and hilarious, “I have a right to my own body.”
Even before the official decision was handed down on June 24, recorded and documented instances of violence against anti-abortion individuals, groups, and entities grew dramatically. At the same time, despite the false claims of abortion providers of being “afraid” for their lives, actual violence against pro-abortion people and entities was minute compared to that perpetrated against anti-abortion people and entities.
To The States
The shouting and bickering back and forth didn’t stop when the official decision was handed down in late June, and as expected, it was basically on-par with the leaked majority opinion. It effectively vacated the ROE decision from 1973, pushing the decision on abortion legality and procedures back to the individual states.
By sticking to a more strict and accurate interpretation of the text of the “life and liberty” clause in the 14th Amendment than the 1973 court chose, it was decided by the current SCOTUS that the 1973 court was incorrect in its interpretation, and declared that there was in fact nothing in the Constitution that gave women an absolute “right” to abortion.
Liberal Tantrums
Ever since that decision, the voices of those opposed to the decision ramped up the volume of the obfuscation of the issues, as well as some outright lies. These frankly toddler-like tantrums weren’t designed so much to inform, as to whip up their supporters with resultant exponential increase in violence and criminal acts against anti-abortion persons and entities.
You’ve probably seen, as I have, a massive amount of back-and-forth bickering on various social media, with pro-abortion and anti-abortion advocates going at it full steam. From what I’ve seen, a good number of comments from anti-abortion advocates have been considerate, though there are enough that are rather crude (and unnecessary) in their tone. However, nearly all of the pro-abortion arguments are well-seasoned with a number of inaccuracies from common misconceptions to outright lies.
Most Popular Liberal Abortion Fallacies
So, let’s examine and correct some of the major fallacies aka “massive piles of horse manure” that the pro-abortion advocates have been shoveling ever since May.
“Women aren’t legal people anymore.”
This takes a few variations such as “women are second-class citizens”, and most hilariously the attempt to push the impression that the post-DOBBS America would be a post-apocalyptic “Handmaid’s Tale” nightmare, but the above quote pretty much sums up the fallacy that the striking down of ROE has suddenly relegated over half of the population of the United States into “illegal” entities. You just have to think about that for about a half a second to realize how schizophrenic that is. If DOBBS made women illegal, then there would be a hell of a lot more restrictions on them than abortion access.
Technically, if women were suddenly made illegal by DOBBS, they wouldn’t be able to hold a job, drive, own bank accounts, hold political office, and so much more, until laws were passed allowing “illegal persons” to do certain things. Interestingly enough, the parallel is striking since illegal aliens (softened to “undocumented migrants” by most liberals in an effort to blur the fact that they have in fact entered the US in an illegal manner) have, in certain jurisdictions, been given the right to vote and drive, among other benefits that are supposed to be afforded only to legal residents of the US.
The simple fact is this: women have and always will be legal persons, and DOBBS did absolutely nothing to change the legal status of women in America.
“My rights have been violated!”
Some pathetic doofus on Facebook told my friend Vince (who contributes a number of posts here), “be honest… [j]ust admit that you don’t believe that girls and women who need abortions have the right to own their own bodies.”
This fallacy also takes some variations, including “I’ve lost control of my body” (which to a doctor like me, makes it sound like the woman saying it has lost bowel or bladder control), “it’s a violation of my 14th Amendment rights”, among other variants. So, first off, let’s shatter the myth that ROE somehow maintained a woman’s 14th Amendment rights. They refer specifically to the “life and liberty” clause, which is this:
Straight from the Constitution
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
– Clause 1 of Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution
Given the exact text of the clause, it’s not hard to see how the 1973 SCOTUS was able to bastardize the text to make the claim that states with restrictive abortion laws were “depriving” women of “privileges”. They use this erroneous leap to attach themselves to the third part of the clause, regarding depriving any person life and liberty without due process of law.
However, these assertions that the pro-abortion camp cling to, make no sense in context of the Amendment, for two major reasons: 1) denying a woman an abortion is not depriving her of life or liberty, and 2) there has never been a consensus on whether or not an abortion – which involves the deliberate death of another human – is actually a privilege of a US citizen.
Defining the terms in the clause
Looking at Clause 1 and the pro-abortion camp’s misuse of the Clause, let’s do some more definitions:
“Life” – it is statistically extremely rare that lack of access to an abortion procedure could deprive a woman of her actual physical life. That is not to say that there are certain circumstances where a pregnancy may put the mother’s physical life at risk, and very few people even in the anti-abortion camp would deny an abortion if deemed medically necessary for the life of the mother. However, again – these are rare circumstances.
Far more often as we’ve seen from abortion statistics that have been compiled over the last 50+ years, the lack of access to an abortion procedure would be claimed by the woman to be depriving her of “life” not in a physical sense, but only in an social or emotional sense, due to a pregnancy that is unplanned or unwanted. But this second sense is clearly not the meaning or intent of the “life and liberty” clause, and can’t be legitimately used as a reason to argue for unrestricted abortion access.
I’ll get into a deeper definition of “life” below.
“Liberty”. Legal scholars have traditionally defined “liberty” in this clause with “freedom”, in reference to its opposite, the “lack of freedom” or imprisonment. In fact, the whole “due process of law” concept is used in law enforcement to define the process by which someone accused of a crime shall not be deprived of his/her liberty (freedom) until tried and convicted of the crime in a court of law. Thus, “liberty” cannot be re-defined as “the freedom of a woman to do whatever she wants with her body”.
This point is double-edged for pro-abortion advocates, though. If they propose to re-define “liberty” to mean that a woman can do whatever she wants with her body, doing so negates any laws that could possibly apply to what someone can or cannot do with their body. A perfect example of this is prostitution. Certainly it can be said, in the pro-abortion advocates’ concept, that a prostitute is free to engage in prostitution because she should be free to do what she wants, it’s her body, so why shouldn’t she be allowed to let scores of men have sex with her any time she wants?
The roadblock to the woman’s “freedom to do what I want with my body” argument here, is that certain acts that one can do with their bodies (such as the act of prostitution) are in fact either illegal, immoral, or both. So which is it then, she’s at liberty to do what she wants, or is she restricted from doing what she wants by certain laws and ethics? And prostitution is just one example of this.
“Privilege”. This one needs a lot of explanation, since when pro-abortion advocates can’t clearly argue for abortion “rights” by using the second portion of the clause, they’ll try to hang their hats on the presumption that “abortion is a privilege”, often substituting the term “right ” for “privilege” in an effort to make their view fit. However, making this claim is really trying to shove a square peg in a round hole.
What defines “privilege” here? Is it really a woman’s privilege to have an abortion for whatever reason, or indeed no real reason at all, at any time during the baby’s development timeline? To answer that, we have to step back and look at what abortion actually is: the termination of a life. But what life? The life of the woman wanting the abortion? Certainly not. It’s the life of the baby, or fetus, inside the woman’s uterus. And herein lies perhaps the greatest abuse against humanity that has occurred since Hitler presided over the slaughter of over 6 million Jews and other “undesirable” humans.
Defining life
The central question that had to be re-defined by the pro-abortion camp is this: is a fetus a human life? If the traditional definition of life – life begins at the point of conception – was permitted by the pro-abortion camp to hold, then any deliberate abortion procedure performed at any point in fetal development would be seen as the deliberate termination of another human life, in other words, “murder.”
BUT if human life could be redefined so that the claim could be made that a fetus is not a human life (but as many claim, “a clump of cells”), there would be a period of time when an abortion would not be technically seen as “murder”.
And that is exactly what happened.
Re-defining life
Over the last few decades, the pro-abortion camp have made extraordinary efforts in their goal of redefining what a human life is and where life actually begins. When I was in medical training (back before ROE), it was universally considered from a biological standpoint that life began at conception, indeed, that ALL animal life begins at conception within their specific species. As we knew biologically, each species starts at some point (conception) and develops from conception to birth at a certain rate (obviously with humans, it’s typically 9 months).
This biological knowledge informed societal norms that life began at conception, and that the conception of a human fetus meant the new life formed was human – and was alive, because biological processes had started in a pre-arranged order to develop the cells into more cells and ultimately into a fully-grown fetus able to be delivered 9 months later.
Falsely claiming the fetus isn’t a separate life
But the pro-abortion camp went further in muddying definitions. Not only did they erroneously claim that a fetus was not a human life and thus not entitled to the protections afforded to living persons, they pushed the claim that the fetus inside a woman’s uterus was not a separate life or entity from the woman, so that the whole “I can do whatever by what with my own body” claim could appear to be a legitimate argument.
Unfortunately biology makes the pro-abortion camp into liars on this point as well since historically biological and medical science has accepted the fact that while the fetus requires certain things from the mother of to a certain stage (a medical concept called fetal viability), a fetus is in fact a separate living being, distinct from the mother carrying it.
Dehumanizing life
By all these efforts, the pro-abortion camp was indeed successful at convincing a portion of society, and indeed some otherwise knowledgeable medical providers, to “dehumanize” the fetus. This dehumanization effort achieved a huge goal on the part of the pro-abortion camp: easing the conscience. If people could be convinced that a fetus was not really human, then it could follow that there was nothing improper or illegal about aborting it. Those of us who know our history will instantly draw the parallel here.
This exact type of dehumanization of certain people in society, was exactly what Hitler and his Nazis did in the 1930s and 1940s. Those certain people were seen as “untermensch”, referred to as vermin or other dehumanizing terms. This constant Nazi propaganda enabled the numbing of the consciences of those Nazis who engaged in the mass murder of over 6 million people.
By employing the same tactics as the Nazis used, the pro-abortion industry made it easier to assume a link between an abortion with a woman’s “privilege”, a link that doesn’t exist in reality, but that pro-abortion advocates need to persist believing in, so they can feel good about not only indiscriminate abortion for any or no reason, but also about degrading and committing violence against anyone who disagrees with their extreme viewpoint.
“Abortion is a constitutional right!”
This fallacy informs all the others. For abortion advocates to be able to sleep at night, they have to believe this lie, so that all their other lies about abortion will appear on the surface to make sense to them. Unfortunately, I personally have not yet seen a pro-abortion advocate who isn’t completely sucked in to this lie, and when you ask them to point out the text in the Constitution that provides legal rights to abortion, they simply scream at you and call you various 12-letter words since they don’t think this through for themselves.
The lie here is in the implication that there ever was a “constitutional right to abortion” in the first place.
No such right actually exists
In fact no such right was ever enshrined or implied in the Constitution. The pro-abortion camp simply made this up, but funnily enough, it wasn’t an instantaneous talking point immediately after ROE was handed down.
The fallacious concept of “constitutional right to abortion” evolved over several years after ROE, when various states tried to enact laws that would specifically define types of abortion, and limits on them within the guidelines of the ruling. When these were attempted, the lie about abortion being a “constitutional right” became much more publicized; after all, what state could possibly make a law against a legitimate right enshrined in the Constitution?
What no one in the pro-abortion camp can legitimately point to, is exactly where in the Constitution it actually defines the abortion procedure as being a right available to all US citizens. Many of the pro-abortion “rank-and-file” (you know, they’re the ones you see in pro-abortion protests holding stupid signs like “off with their dicks”), when asked where it defines abortion in the Constitution, will instantly point to ROE as giving them the legal right, claiming the “ROE law…”
Interpreting Law
However, all of these people miss one very important detail about their Federal government: SCOTUS rulings are not actually laws. They all must have missed the day in their high-school Civics class (do they even still teach Civics? I’m old!) when they were supposed to learn that Congress makes law, and the Supreme Court interprets law, but does not make law.
Thus, the 2022 SCOTUS did the only logical thing: they simply decided what should have been all along, and they pushed the argument back to the states and their legislatures. Those who wish to have abortion access actually be “legal”, should have been pushing Congress and/or state legislatures for an actual law that officially legalizes an abortion procedure, as well as defining who can receive such services and under which circumstances, instead of pushing the lie that a SCOTUS decision constituted a law or (even worse of a lie) pretending that the Constitution of the United States specified abortion as a privilege or a right of US citizens.
This brings up the loud screech that many female pro-abortion advocates have been expelling from their mouths ever since May. I’ll get to that next.
Next: Hands Off My Body!
