UNCOMFORTABLE?

Ann (or, as she as known in the New Yorker, "one blogger") points out that Aliza Shvarts will be turned into the kind of apocryphal symbol that will be used by anti-choicers for decades. Ross Douthat approves: "there's a larger sense in which stories like these - with the uncomfortable questions they raise for at least some segments of the pro-choice side -- are too helpful to the pro-life cause to be ignored."

But what exactly are these uncomfortable questions? The approximate percentage of abortions obtained because women deliberately choose to get pregnant specifically to get an abortion is zero. Even if Shvarts had intentionally induced three miscarriages, it would be silly to change one's political or legal position on abortion based on such an obvious outlier. It's also true that defenses of reproductive rights, like defenses of all rights, are not premised on the idea that every single person will exercise their rights in ways that everyone else will recognize as responsible or desirable, for the obvious reason that this would be a ridiculous standard.

On the other hand, Shvarts and the kabuki surrounding her does raise uncomfortable questions ... for Americans who believe that (poor and rural) women should be forced by the state to carry pregnancies to term. The official position of the Republican Party, and as far as I can tell most pro-life groups, is that performing an abortion should be a serious criminal offense in all 50 states but obtaining an abortion should be subject to no criminal sanctions at all. Apparently, this is because women who obtain abortions are just too "desperate or helpless" to be considered moral agents in the eyes of the law. At any rate, if we are to take the typical public positions of American pro-lifers seriously, if Shavrts had actually done what she claimed to have done this would be much less problematic than an ordinary situation where a woman goes to a doctor's office to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. So while Shavarts does nothing to undermine the case for legal abortion, she does provide another useful demonstration that the positions of American pro-lifers are a complete shambles: most of their public representatives are unable to explain why abortion is wrong and what should be done about it without collapsing into incoherence, reducing to extremely reactionary notions about women's rational capacity, or both.

--Scott Lemieux