Gosnell: An Excuse For Bullshit Libertarians To Stop Pretending To Care About Reproductive Freedom

Shorter Roger L. Simon: “Everything changed for me after the non-existent media blackout of the Gosnell case. I used to pretend to be pro-choice. Now, I believe that abortion is murder, and should be illegal but not so illegal that my wife, daughter or mistress couldn’t get one.”

This is via James Taranto, who expresses similar sentiments at somewhat greater length. My favorite part of this particular manifestation of strategic dishonesty is his assertion that “[a] funny thing happens when you dissent from Roe v. Wade: You come to see that there’s not much else by way of intellectual content to the case for abortion on demand.” Taranto — almost as staunch a supporter of reproductive freedom as Megan McArdle! — was unable to think of any reason why selectively enforced laws requiring women to carry unwanted pregnancies to term might negatively affect women. (Siegel and Siegel happen to have a new paper out that will be of help to people with a similar lack of imagination and/or lack of knowledge about how abortion laws work in practice.)

In their own complacently reactionary and self-serving way, these arguments are perfectly logical. Let’s be frank: the idea that the Gosnell case undermines the case for safe, legal abortions is such a transparently obvious non-sequitur that if you draw such an inference it’s pretty obvious that you never cared about reproductive freedom in the first place. And certainly, nobody who cared about either the equality of women or their security of the person would consider bans on abortion a good policy.