“Much of the security of person and property in modern nations is the effect of manners and opinion rather than of law.” – John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, p. 133
Growing up in southern California, seatbelt and helmet laws were a frequent topic of discussion. The laws seemed so logical, but my dad was against them. He explained that “I don’t think people should be telling us what to do.”
To be clear, my dad didn’t yearn for more fatal car accidents and motorcycle deaths. Quite the opposite. He just thought the law on matters of life and death was superfluous. Which it was, and is. Applied to the coronavirus, if its spread really was as dangerous as the experts told us, what was the point of lockdowns? Really, who needs to be forced to avoid sickness and death? People will buckle seatbelts, wear helmets, and take precautions amid a spreading virus because it’s the wise thing to do. Law is excess.
My view on abortion is the same. The problem is laws. This is based on what I’ve come to know from reading about abortion: supposedly it’s terribly traumatic for the woman holding the fetus, and it becomes more traumatic as the baby grows inside the woman. For these truths alone, law seems excessive. Really, who needs to be forced to not do so what is so traumatic?
After that, I subscribe to an unsophisticated view of rights: they’re near limitless. Short of someone hurting me, people should be free to do what they want. If “it’s none of your business” became accepted wisdom in the U.S. and around the world, the world would be a much better place.
Plus I think it very dangerous to even discuss “rights.” To do so implies power on the part of politicians to take them. This is arguably true with abortion too. Once its legality becomes situational, so grows the right of state and the people within the state to make decisions for others. It’s a perilous path.
It all explains my disdain for statistical arguments against the lockdowns as the virus spread. They were so appealing. The New York Times regularly reported how the virus was very much associated with nursing homes in a death sense. The CDC stat about numerous “co-morbidities” associated with death occurring with the virus was passed around too. I’ve even used the numbers on occasion to make different arguments, but statistics are a perilous path to take. They imply a right for politicians to take our freedom in the future if a virus threatens – say – the “much coveted” 18-24 demographic. No. They don’t have a right to our freedom. Furthermore, it rates re-stating the basic truth that the more threatening or harmful anything is, the more superfluous are laws.
So that’s my non-original stance on abortion. I don’t like majorities having any role in granting rights or taking them, plus no reasonable person would ever use abortion as birth control. See above. And if they do, laws are still excess. See the drug war, among other attempts to legislate behavior majorities allegedly don’t like.
All this said, legal experts make the point that abortion is different. For one, there’s another life involved. And since there are varying views of another life being involved, leave the debates about the meaning of it to the states. Let people choose their bliss. To me it still sounds like excess, that most won’t be cavalier about the other, so let people decide on their own.
Of course, some make the point that abortion is actually about more than a woman’s choice about what to do with her body: figure that a man is involved too. Absent the man’s participation, there’s no pregnancy. In which case, some will argue that a woman choosing to have an abortion is making more than a decision about her body, along with that of the unborn. There’s another human who made it all possible.
All of which brings us to George McGovern. He famously lost the 1972 presidential election to Richard Nixon 49 states to 1. McGovern didn’t even win his own state of South Dakota; his one electoral victory coming in Lefty Massachusetts. McGovern’s opposition to Vietnam, his opposition to jailing individuals for marijuana possession in small amounts, and his stance on abortion had him seemingly positioned outside the mainstream for his time. The bet now is that he wouldn’t be so outside, but counterfactuals are just that.
On the subject of abortion, Rice University historian Allen Matusow notes that McGovern considered it “a matter for the states.” This is notable with the present top of mind. From reading the debates about abortion, the justices allegedly planning to overturn Roe v. Wade aren’t as much against abortion as they’re against a national law.
Like McGovern, they believe this is something to be decided in states. Under such a scenario, California and New York would seemingly have more permissive rules than would Utah and the late McGovern’s South Dakota. Is it ideal? My view is no. My view is that rights are expansive, and once we put private matters in the hands of voters, we travel a dangerous path toward more and more in the way of majoritarian rule. Convention is so much better than force.
Still, with the “other life” and the rights of men in mind, maybe this is the best of a lot of bad solutions. At the very least, it’s interesting to see how the extremes have moved. McGovern once was extreme, yet it sounds like he believed as many so-called “conservative” Supreme Court justices believe today.
It’s something to think about as Roe v. Wade supporters respond emotionally. Perhaps they’re overdoing it, but the bigger story is that they can’t have it both ways. Indeed, one guesses that more than a few of the Roe partisans supported national mask and vaccine mandates.
