@FeserEdward..sophistry from RFK Jr.: “Every abortion is a tragedy… But I think ultimately I don’t trust government to have jurisdiction over people’s bodies. I think we need to leave it to the woman…
Let’s consider this bit of sophistry from RFK Jr.: “Every abortion is a tragedy… But I think ultimately I don’t trust government to have jurisdiction over people’s bodies. I think we need to leave it to the woman… I think there’s a very, very good argument, a compelling argument, that the state has an interest in protecting a fully-formed fetus. I absolutely think that that argument is very convincing. But again… I don’t trust the state and I think we need to trust the woman… We should leave it to the woman, we shouldn’t have government involved… even if it’s full term… I don’t think [abortion] is ever OK… [But] I think we have to leave it to the woman, not the state… [It’s] a terrible, terrible choice… You can’t overstate how bad that is… [But] ultimately we have to trust women.”
So, RFK Jr. says both that abortion is very, very bad but also that women can be trusted on this matter more than government can be.
Really? Let’s compare their records, then.
Suppose we add up the casualties from wars that the U.S. has been involved in since Roe v. Wade. The biggest are the Gulf War, the war in Afghanistan, and the Iraq War. Total casualties for the Gulf War are estimated to be somewhere between 175,000 and 300,000; for the war in Afghanistan, between 176,000 to 212,000; and for the Iraq War, between 150,000 and 650,000.
If (implausibly) we go with the highest figures, that comes out to 1,162,000 deaths. Suppose we add to that deaths from all the smaller conflicts that might be attributed to U.S. government action. Suppose (implausibly) that that came to another 1,000,000 casualties. Suppose we add as well yet other deaths caused by government, such as those resulting from police shootings. Police shootings (of people of any race, whether armed or unarmed) these days come to about 1,000 people a year. Even if we supposed (wrongly) that there have been that many shootings every year since Roe v. Wade, that would add at most another 50,000 deaths to the government tally.
So, we’re still actually well short of 3 million deaths, but suppose for the sake of argument we concluded that about 3 million deaths could be directly attributed to government action in the U.S. since the time of Roe v. Wade. Notice that I am not getting into the question of whether any or all of these wars were justifiable or not, what percentage of the police shootings were justifiable, and so on. But suppose, for the sake of argument, the worst case scenario that none of these deaths was justifiable.
How many abortions have there been in the U.S. in that same period? Over 63 million.
In other words, over the last fifty years, women have caused at least 60 million more deaths of innocent people than even the U.S. government has.
(Christian and other cultural conservatives tempted by libertarianism should take a moment to let that sink in.)
So exactly why, Mr. Kennedy, should we “trust women” more than governments to do the right thing where the “terrible, terrible” evil of abortion is concerned?
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