Thursday, August 02, 2007

National Review: "One Untrue Thing - Life After Roe"

A symposium on criminalizing abortion at National Review Online:
Anna Quindlen’s column in Newsweek this week is titled “How much jail time?” and argues that pro-lifers are dodging the issue of jail time for women who seek abortions. She concludes: “there are only two logical choices: hold women accountable for a criminal act by sending them to prison, or refuse to criminalize the act in the first place. If you can’t countenance the first, you have to accept the second. You can’t have it both ways.”

Knowing Quindlen isn’t the first and won’t be the last to ask the question, National Review Online asked a group of pro-life experts: Is “How much jail time?” a key question pro-lifers ignore when discussing abortion and life after Roe?

HADLEY ARKES
Once again we find ourselves twitted by the partisans of abortion to show our own seriousness by our willingness to punish in the severest way the taking of an innocent life. Is the implication that, if we use a gentler hand, we must not really think that human beings are being killed in these surgeries? It has apparently escaped the notice of Ms. Quindlen that the law does not need to invoke the harshest penalties for the sake of teaching moral lessons. The point may be made at times with gentler measures. In the tradition of legislating on abortion, a certain distinction was made out of prudence: On the one hand there may a young, unmarried woman, who finds herself pregnant, with the father of the child not standing with her. Abandoned by the man, and detached from her family, she may feel the burden of the crisis bearing on her alone, with the prospect of life-altering changes. On the other hand, there is the man trained in surgery, the professional who knows exactly what he is doing — he knows that he is destroying a human life, either by poisoning a child or dismembering it. And in perfect coolness and detachment, and at a nice price, he makes the killing of the innocent his office-work. Certain women may indeed be guilty of a callous willingness to destroy a child for the sake of their own self-interest. But the law makes a prudent, tempered choice when it makes the abortionist the target of its censure and brings solely upon him the weight of the punishment.

— Hadley Arkes is the Ney Professor of Jurisprudence at Amherst College.

***
RICHARD W. GARNETT
In “How Much Jail Time,” Anna Quindlen contends that, with respect to the question whether abortion should be criminalized, “there are only two logical choices: hold women accountable for a criminal act by sending them to prison, or refuse to criminalize the act in the first place. If you can’t countenance the first, you have to accept the second.” No, you don’t.

The point of criminalization, after all, is not merely to put people in prison, or deter people from engaging in harmful behavior. It is, instead, to make a statement — a public statement, in the community’s voice — that certain actions, or certain harms caused, are morally blameworthy. It is simply not the case that time in prison is the only way, or always the best way, to convey this social judgment.

It is this judgment — and not the particular way it is expressed, or even the consequences that follow — that best distinguishes the workings of the criminal law from, say, the law that governs compensation for accidents. And, it is not “hypocritical” — nor, contrary to Ms. Quindlen’s suggestion, does it “ignor[e]” or “infantaliz[e]” women — to think that the law may, and even should, give tangible expression to our commitment to the dignity of every human person — including unborn children — in ways that do not require prison terms for women who have abortions, or that treat them differently from doctors who perform abortions.

— Richard W. Garnett is a professor at the University of Notre Dame’s law school.

***
RAMESH PONNURU
The argument Anna Quindlen makes deserves an extended response. (How’s that for a statistically improbable phrase?) As it happens, I have just started work on an essay on the question of what criminal penalties logically follow from pro-life premises.

As Justice Blackmun noted in Roe, many states’ anti-abortion laws did not impose criminal penalties on the women who sought or obtained abortions. Like Quindlen, he assailed this feature of the laws as irrational. I believe that it was and is rationally defensible: that pro-life premises do not require (or, for that matter, preclude) criminal penalties for these women. They do not even require (or preclude) criminal penalties for the abortionist.

For now, let me just say this in defense of this conclusion: The crucial legal goal of the pro-life movement is not any particular set of punishments. It is that unborn children be protected in law. We could, for example, eventually secure laws that prohibited most abortions, that removed the medical licenses of doctors who committed illegal abortions, and that imposed fines on people who committed them without medical licenses. If that legal regime sufficed to protect unborn children, there would be no need to go further. The lack of jail time, I trust, would not stop Quindlen from opposing such laws. Indeed, she would probably not want to let such laws be enacted democratically.

— Ramesh Ponnuru is author of The Party of Death.


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My Comments:
Anna Quindlen is, and always has been, a twit. The fact that her reasoning skills - especially when it comes to abortion - are so deficient, make it all the more puzzling that anyone anywhere takes her seriously at all.

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4 Comments:

At 8/02/2007 10:38 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

If she had reasoning skills she wouldn't be a liberal in the first place.

 
At 8/02/2007 1:25 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

It's the classic pro-abortion strategy of attempting to force people to choose between women and children, only writ large.

 
At 8/02/2007 2:12 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

The best argument that can be made along the lines of Quindlen's consistency argument is that many pro-lifers are rigid law and order types who are not willing to give an inch of Justice (as they see it) in the interests of mercy and compassion (with regard to illegal immigrants, for example). They may indeed be inconsistent in allowing other considerations (the perp's circumstances, compassion, practicality, etc.) in the case of women procuring abortions but not allowing such considerations in other cases. Assuming such an argument wasn't made (I haven't read Quindlen's piece), I would guess it is because it is a weapon that would only apply to some pro-lifers. Given that most of Quindlen's readers almost certainly agree with her, the argument has to be shaped with that in mind. The real purpose may be to perpetuate the canard used by many pro-aborts, from Rudy Giuliani to St. Blogs own heretical Fr. O'Leary, that pro-lifers do want to imprison women. If it's challenged, the person using can just pull out Quindlen and claim that if pro-lifers were consistent they would want to do that, or they secretly do and are just waiting for the opportunity.

 
At 8/02/2007 2:23 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Make it illegal first, then we can talk about punishment.

 

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