By A.J. Liebling
Meta-Content Generator
Really we tried. We tried so hard to stop obsessing about pisspoor New York Times columnists. Nobody gives a f*** what they say anyway, as they have proven for decades. We haven't said boo about them in weeks.
It was this Tweet that broke us:
The answers to the political dilemmas @jbarro identifies are 1) tailoring laws to the malleable zone of public opinion in purple + reddish states and 2) proving that abortion bans can be sustainable and ultimately normal in the reddest states. That's it; that's the task.
— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) September 8, 2022
Sustainable and ultimately normal?
We know what banning safe, legal abortion looks like. It was normal for the first 70 years of the previous century. Maybe ol' Ross is too young to remember those days, but we haven't:
Pregnant women seeking abortions in Chicago had few options before 1973, when the Supreme Court codified the right to have an abortion in Roe v. Wade.
Abortion had been illegal in Illinois since the early 19th century, and few doctors were willing to defy the law. Some women tried to self-induce abortions using objects or chemicals, which often led to infection and sometimes death. Others turned to Chicago’s organized crime syndicate, but its services were expensive and often unsafe.
Some of us remember those days, especially those among us who faced the terrible risks of terminating an unwanted pregnancy. Those people can be described as “women.”
Here's one typical example of what happened to women who sought to terminate their pregnancies before abortions were legal. It was so common that it appeared on page 36 of the December 1, 1954 New York Times:
In 1954, the very act of putting career ahead of motherhood was uncontroversially regarded as a capital offense.
The pre-Roe agony and mortality of peritonitis, hemorrhage, or other fatal sequelae caused by an unsafe abortion was, to use Ross's anodyne term, ultimately normal:
"In the 1960s, it is estimated that thousands of people attempted to abort with these unsafe methods. Hospitals regularly saw women in 'septic abortion wards,' where they would die of hemorrhage or infection after an incomplete attempt to self-abort.
From the point of view of the woman who died painfully from sepsis, it probably wasn't sustainable, but that minority view was not shared by white men like Ross who arrogated to themselves the right to impose their religious metaphysics on women who did not share them.
And illegal abortions weren't rare either, according to Kinsey Report data:
Voters in the reddest states must not be subscribing to Ross's Tweets, or must be too dense to understand them, because in crimson-red Kansas, voters chose to maintain their rights over their own bodies by a margin of 59% to 41%.
By the way, what would constitute “proof” that outlawing abortion had become ultimately normal? 100 dead women a year? 1,000? How many girls would have to bear their rapist's child?
Speaking of sustainable, it's now the case in Ross's beloved red states that women are being denied all sorts of health care because of fear that their doctors will be criminally prosecuted for an abortion:
Now, when patients arrive with ectopic pregnancies, miscarriages or hemorrhaging — all situations where abortion has been established as standard care — the questions for the lawyers are more pressing: “Do we wait until the fetus is definitely dead, or is mostly dead good enough?” she asked. “If they’re telling us to wait for the condition to be fully emergent, how much bleeding is too much?”
“Having to consult a lawyer in an emergent situation is a whole new ballgame,” she said.
So is a felony conviction for providing medical care to women, but for the women who suffer and perhaps die while waiting for a lawyer to parse a statute written to criminalize anything any whackjob could consider an abortion (like Plan B, which isn't), it will soon become sustainable and normal and thus OK with Ross.
And the gratuitous cruelty of Ross's refined metaphysics doesn't stop there:
Forensic nurses who care for sexual assault victims in the emergency room said they would no longer provide morning-after contraception for fear it would be considered an abortion drug. Because the old law punishes those who “aid and abet” an abortion, an anesthesiologist worried that he might be prosecuted for putting a patient to sleep for an abortion. A neonatologist worried about liability for declining to resuscitate a fetus judged no longer viable. “We already work under a cloud of getting sued. That’s what we signed up for,” Dr. Kwatra said. “This is different. This is criminal liability, not civil liability. This is jail time.”
And if Ross has his way, these cruel restrictions on women with cancer or other serious health concerns will in purplish states will be tailored to the prevailing sentiments of Republican-dominated legislatures.
You'll be pleased to know that forced-birth flacks claim that doctors are being too cautious. If you're a doctor willing to stake your life and freedom on the half-assed opinions of notorious liars, you're better than we are. We'd be scared s***less.
We've only got the stomach for about two more words from Ross. Remember his reference to “thermostatic backlash?” We assume he's trying to equate the outrage of women and others who care about them to the loss of their rights and possibly their lives to the mechanical response of a brainless device like a thermostat to a change of conditions. You can reduce fear and anguish to a phenomenon no more human that expansion of a copper coil, but it doesn't sound like the “pro-life” position.
Maybe Ross thought that when his classmates got up and left when he sat down with them in Leverett House Dining Hall it was just “thermostatic backlash.” We think it was their considered judgment that his cruel freakish views wrapped in condescension were too repulsive to be borne.
And you know what? They were right.
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