Douthat on abortion

Among the Abortion Extremists

I agree with the right to life "extremist" view that abortion should be illegal and both providers and their clients should be punished, as should abortion seekers and people who attempt abortions, once the embryo has developed enough to be clearly an unborn child, however small and regardless of viability.

Yes, that means the women who seek as well as the women who have abortions should be punished along with anyone involved in providing abortions, except when only abortion can save the life of the mother.

Just as we punish women - or men, for that matter - who kill their children, and with similar penalties.

And no, not also except in case of rape.

I do not agree that a mere fertilized ovum is a person or that stem cell research ought to be outlawed.

And I hadn't realized Williams was actually fired by the Atlantic over his anti-abortion views.

This is Douthat.

But I also think that they are deceived by a cruel ideology that has licensed the killing of millions of innocents for almost 50 years. 

In the language that the respectable use to banish views without rebuttal, I regard them — friends and colleagues and faithful readers — as essentially extremists, for whom the distinctive and sometimes awful burdens that pregnancy imposes on women have become an excuse to build a grotesque legal regime in which the most vulnerable human beings can be vacuumed out or dismembered, killed for reasons of eugenics or convenience or any reason at all.

I am sharing these reflections in the context of the latest media war over whether a particular conservative columnist should be hired by a particular establishment publication — in this case Kevin Williamson, a National Review scribe with a brilliant pen and a long paper trail of insults and wild opinions, who was boldly hired by The Atlantic and then quickly jettisoned, after it came to light that he had not only suggested hanging as a penalty for abortion in a since-deleted tweet but also more carefully defended the idea of someday prosecuting women who obtain abortions the way we prosecute other forms of homicide.

From my own anti-abortion perspective, this opinion makes Williamson an extremist as well. 

When American laws restricted abortion they generally did not impose such penalties, and today’s pro-life movement likewise generally rejects the idea of prosecuting women. 

This position often gets cast as inconsistent by pro-choicers, but I think it represents the incorporation by pro-lifers of the points that my pro-choice friends actually get right — that pregnancy is unique in ways that mitigate culpability and make it unwise to treat abortion like a normal homicide, that the government can only go so far in restriction without becoming a reproductive police state — without making the literally fatal mistake of believing these things also require a civil right to kill your unborn child.