Over the last month, America has been witnessing one of the biggest abortion battles in the country since the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
Today, Bari shares her thoughts on the case of Kate Cox. She explains why it’s an appalling example of the cruelty of near-total abortion bans, and a tragic rebuttal to the pro-life claim that exceptions to these bans allow for a doctor and patient to make decisions in the woman’s best medical interest. And, Bari explains why she still grapples with the other side of the abortion debate—and why we all need to.
For more Honestly on abortion, please listen to:
Caitlin Flanagan on Why You’re Wrong—and Right—About Abortion
Akhil Reed Amar on The Yale Law Professor Who Is Anti-Roe, But Pro-Choice
Bethany Mandel, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Jeffrey Rosen on America After Roe: A Roundtable
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
your "honesty video" just reminded me and reinforced my opinion why i know i made a good choice in subscribing to TFP. You made me think about a vivid and painful experience in my life and why it still haunts me and makes it so difficult to take a solid stance on this issue. The short story is I am living i Hollywood in the late fifties, abortion is illegal. For a weird confluence of events I have a best friend (Guy) who gets his girlfriend pregnant and a family friend ( girl and not a dating girl friend ) who gets pregnant. Avoiding many details I know here, but to keep it short, I am the person who drives the girls, the incidents are 6 months apart, down to Tijuana Mexico for the removal of a "Pelvic Tumor". I had to borrow my Moms car and make multiple excuses why I needed the car. TJ, as it was known then was dark , scary mysterious and caused me tremendous stress driving there to a specific address. The girls were silent, shaking, crying often , and I did my best to help but sorry to put it this way, but I was dumb shit kid who had no idea what they were about to experience. Again to shorten the story, they did what they had to do and in both cases it was a very long dark drive back to Hollywood and I delivered them to their mothers. Whom to this day I harbor ill will, anger towards them and confusion as to why me and why did they allow their daughters to endure this. Years forward I am interning at Cook County Hospital in Chicago as a Student at Northwestern University and I am assisting at what i was told was a routine "D& C" ( abortions were illegal ). The Dr. was performing the curettage and asked me to take the tray. When inspecting the tray I noticed much to my incredible naive eyes were portions of the early fetus. tiny sections of hands and feet, legs and a section of the skull. To say I was stunned does not begin to examine my thoughts which to this day still remain as I close my eyes to day at the age of 82 and they are vivid. So my point here, as I can say I lost contact with both girls and do not allow any conjecture on their mental health today as compared to back then. Both girls dropped out of school and one father left the mother. I know what is a viable fetus , I can hear the heart beats and i can see the little human being forming and I still have great difficulty just accepting the cavalier attitude, which I think many people have, of the Mom is not ready, it is not a good time, financially a disaster to the rest of the family, father is a monster, she was raped. So the "best" the reasonable , the fair thing for the mother is to, and sorry to put it this way, but as a doctor, the absolute correct term is to say terminate the child. Lets us solve that mothers "problem" by just terminating the fetus. To make it clear, I am able to mentally adjust now to reaching a common ground of some reasonable time frame when a termination of a pregnancy is going to be the best solution to an intractable political and emotional issue. Not all things in our life have simple or acceptable outcomes depending on which side you are on but I think I have to just realize that. Final point>> it is not just a clump of cells, it is not really a human, it is really not a baby, then what do we call it.
Bari, I admire you, and think you are right on most things, but I will make a few arguments here about why I think you are wrong on this. The “playing God” argument your colleague and many others make may already be the winner; it rightly carries shadows of eugenics. Also - and I’m sorry to sound hyperbolic - but aborting a child for convenience or for the prospect of some future good is literally human sacrifice. Even with the case of Kate Cox, she sacrificed her current unborn child for the possibility of a future one. (Of course, I am not talking about situations where the mother’s life is in peril).
Secondly, not only who are we to decide who lives and who doesn’t get a chance at life, but who are we to decide when someone is “human” and when they are merely a “fetus”? So an unborn child can just be unlucky if their mother decides to abort on “day x” or “week x” because the law doesn’t consider them human yet, but if the mom had waited one more day - “day y” or “week y” - suddenly this child is declared human and has the full protection of the law? You know how absurd that sounds!
Also, to be honest, I’m surprised that a person of faith such as yourself isn’t pro-life. What does Judaisim teach about this? (Maybe someone can enlighten me in the comments?). And anyone - whether religious or not - who has seen their child on the week 9 ultrasound should feel an instinctual moral compulsion to protect that innocent life, no?
Finally, you say that Republicans losing recent elections shows that they don’t represent the will of the people. Now, I can’t speak for Texas or other states where more restrictive laws on abortion were proposed, but here in Virginia - where the Democrats recently won back both chambers of the legislature - the Democrat candidates and their campaigns lied about Republican intentions (imagine that!). The Dems spoke repeatedly of state Republican “bans”, when Governor Youngkin clearly had proposed a compromise of a 15-week limit with exceptions for rape, incest, and life of the mother. But the Democrats lied about it.
Finally, when you hear Democrats speak of bodily “autonomy”, can you educate them that “auto” means “self”, as in “one”, when clearly there is another, second human life inside the pregnant woman?