It seems that so-called “pro-choicers” will never learn to appreciate that other people have choices too. At ThinkProgress, Alex Zielinski frets that “the U.S. has made it nearly impossible for low-income women to have an abortion”:
The majority of countries with liberal abortion laws rely on public funding to help patients afford the cost of an abortion, according to a new report published in the journal Contraception. This makes the United States, which has an amendment strictly prohibiting any federal dollars from backing abortion services, a global outlier.
The report, conducted by the same group of researchers responsible for informing the Supreme Court‘s recent decision overturning Texas’ anti-abortion law, focused on 80 countries that met criteria for having “liberally interpreted abortion laws.” The researchers found that 34 countries offer full funding for abortion — including Australia, France, Denmark, Canada, Spain, the United Kingdom, and other developed countries. The U.S. was one of the ten countries that only cover abortion in “exceptional cases.”
Those researchers are also responsible for a bogus, debunked study claiming Texas’s abortion facility regulations caused a dramatic spike in attempts at dangerous self-abortions—a claim Zielinski goes on to repeat, with no mention of its blemishes that pro-lifers have been noting for about eight months now—but hey, details.
By the way, in May the invaluable Prager University released a video showing that America’s abortion laws are also global outliers in ways ThinkProgress types wouldn’t be so eager to emulate, with Germany, Belgium, Denmark, and France limiting elective abortions to 12 weeks (and with a litany of restrictions and qualifications placed on any abortion sought after that point):
Last year, PolitiFact— no friend to pro-lifers—admitted that the United States was one out of just seven countries (the others being Canada, China, the Netherlands, North Korea, Signapore, and Vietnam) out of nearly two hundred that allow elective abortions past 20 weeks. So the same people who are supposedly our betters for financing abortion also support policies American abortion advocates routinely assail as sexist and barbaric!
The fact is that contrary to Zielinski’s cherry-picked premise, the international status quo isn’t a result of some deeper reflection and refinement Americans just haven’t gotten to yet—it’s simply what happens when people are allowed to actually vote on abortion for themselves. If our electorate hadn’t spent the last four decades shackled by the judiciary, our abortion laws would—at the very least—look much closer to Europe’s, minus the tax funding.
As for that funding, Zielinski quotes the Democrats’ presumptive presidential nominee’s rationale for why every American should be forced to pay for abortions:
During the campaign, both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders promised they would repeal the Hyde Amendment if elected.
“Any right that requires you to take extraordinary measures to access it is no right at all,” Clinton said at a January campaign event in New Hampshire.
Oh, how I’d love to ask Secretary Clinton if, by that logic, she also believes that any American who can’t afford a gun and ammunition is entitled to force other people to subsidize his exercising his Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms…
Fortunately for consciences and wallets everywhere, the Constitution requires us to subsidize neither guns nor abortions. Its foundational understanding of freedom begins and ends with the absence of artificial constraints on human action—nobody can lock you in your own house, shoot you for saying something unpopular, etc. Later, progressivism came along and turned that on its head, deciding that “formal freedom” was basically worthless if it didn’t give you satisfying outcomes, and replacing it with “effective freedom”—proactive government action to satisfy people materially.
The problem with that thinking, however, is that entitling someone to a particular outcome necessarily entails violating someone else’s rights. Carried to its logical conclusion, Zielinski and Clinton’s position would also necessarily entail that my freedom of movement means I get to break into someone else’s locked door, my freedom of speech means people can’t choose not to listen to me, etc.
There are only two ways of receiving something—if what you’re receiving has been voluntarily given by its original owner, or if it has been taken by force. Our Constitution is the work of people who understood that, and therefore recognized that “your rights end where mine begin” was a vastly more moral and peaceable principle for running a country.
Pro-“choicers” don’t respect the choice not to pay for abortion because they don’t respect that founding principle…but then, if they did, they wouldn’t support the “choice” to abort a child in the first place.
