Talk about having your mythology and aborting it too

This LifeSiteNews.com piece has a somewhat surprising quote from Ruth Ginsburg:

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg last Thursday insisted that America would "never go back" to outlawing the murder of the unborn, now that a whole generation of women has experienced the effects of Roe v. Wade.

"Over a generation of young women have grown up, understanding they can control their own reproductive capacity, and in fact their life's destiny," Ginsburg said in remarks at the Aspen Ideas Festival. "We will never go back to the way it once was."

Ginsburg went on to point out that, should the Supreme Court restrict Roe, "the only women who would be truly affected are poor women." "Because even at the time before Roe, women who wanted abortions could have a safe, legal abortion ... Women could travel from one state to another and didn't have to go to Japan or Cuba.” [emphasis added]

And yet, what is the very common chorus used by pro-aborts when it comes to talk of Roe v. Wade being reversed? That women seeking abortion had no choice but to undergo "back alley" abortions. For example:

Criminalization of abortion did not reduce the numbers of women who sought abortions. In the years before Roe v. Wade, the estimates of illegal abortions ranged as high as 1.2 million per year.1 Although accurate records could not be kept, it is known that between the 1880s and 1973, many thousands of women were harmed as a result of illegal abortion.

Many women died or suffered serious medical problems after attempting to self-induce their abortions or going to untrained practitioners who performed abortions with primitive methods or in unsanitary conditions. During this time, hospital emergency room staff treated thousands of women who either died or were suffering terrible effects of abortions provided without adequate skill and care.

And:

Abortion is never an easy decision, but women have been making that choice for thousands of years, for many good reasons. Whenever a society has sought to outlaw abortions, it has only driven them into back alleys, where they became dangerous, expensive and humiliating. Amazingly, this was the case in the United States until 1973, when abortion was legalized nationwide.

Thousands of American women died and thousands more were maimed before abortion was legal. For this reason and others, women and men fought for and achieved women's legal right to make their own decisions about abortion.

And:

History shows that women have always tried to terminate unwanted pregnancies. When safe medical procedures are banned by law, they have resorted to dangerous--sometimes deadly--"back-alley" abortions.

Such a world might be hard to imagine for the tens of millions of women in the U.S. who have never known a world without the right to legal abortion. A look at the horrors of illegal abortion in the years before Roe v. Wade shows that the health and welfare of women is at stake.

Ad nauseam. Emphasis on nauseam.

Comments

[AJ Mauldin]

What a country. You can kill your unborn child with the government's blessing but you cannot buy or consume raw milk and we're on our way to creating the food police. Your kid will be expelled from school for having a tin of aspirins but given condoms or a ride to the abortion clinic without so much as a "by your leave" from you.

Why do we so placidly accept this cr... er, uh, stuff? (Rhetorical question - I know the answer.)

[LJ]

All of those citations simply beg the question. They presume that "abortion" is what they say it is, and that is what is at issue.

The legality issue comes from the understanding of what abortion is, ie. the killing of a human being. It is only if you presume that it is not the killing of a human being that you can get widespread support for the "legal procedure."

Another example of the "positive law" humanist thinking that presumes to make something morally right by making it legal. Hence the argument that women were doing it anyway and will do it even if it is illegal.

But for those of us who realize that the natural law comes from God and is not our own creation, then the question of whether people break the criminal law is irrelevant to the moral question.

[Howard]

She's probably right that America will never quit abortion, in exactly the same way Len Bias never quit cocaine. On the other hand, America will certainly quit abortion, probably the same way Len Bias quit cocaine.

[Jean]

The irony that pro-aborts have failed to explain is why abortion remains necessary. The reasons women sought abortions in the past have nearly faded into nonexistence as social mores no longer stigmatize single motherhood and adoption is an option for those whose partners will not support their children (even though government can garnish wages of noncustodial fathers). Feminists fought for the right of pregnant women to work up to the point of delivery and to get back to work immediately, proclaiming loudly (and rightly) that pregnancy is not a disease. Government then subsidizes childcare and single motherhood in various ways. The shame of adultery is gone as well. Somehow we are supposed to hold the view that women are hypercompetent at mothering and at the same time too fragile to manage the basics of life. Cognitive dissonance or simple madness?

[Gabriel Austin]

The same judge was quoted in the NYTimes: "Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said she thought the landmark Roe v. Wade decision on abortion was predicated on the Supreme Court majority's desire to diminish “populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”