I see Erick Erickson is defending his position on abortion using all the dubious tools at his disposal. Shall we take a look?
Roe takes the Constitution, a document written so American citizens could understand their rights and government, and hands it over to a professional class of life-tenured black-robed masters and lawyers who can conjure at will their coveted requests from the constitutional framework. We are, with Roe, a nation of judges and lawyers, not men and women. It began a series of cases that separates citizens from the Constitution, requiring a near-divine and always infallible intermediary in a black robe to tell the citizen what his Constitution actually says.
This is part of the general right wing denigration of the expert, the person who’s spent years studying the subject matter, thinking about its implications, perhaps doing research – and whose opinion may grind the grits of the yahoo who spent, if we’re lucky, a couple of hours thinking about the issue, based on rumors of facts, imagination, narcissism, theological inclinations, and all nature of other tomfoolery unique to the individual.
That Erickson is an admitted lawyer, specializing in elections law years ago, who has recently professed that he’s not an ‘intellectual’, is really quite ballsy.
But this is how you get people in trouble: tell them their opinion is no worse than the expert in the big city, who has trained for years to see the critical nuance that someone without that training doesn’t yet imagine. That’s how you get people dead.
That’s what we’re seeing with Covid-19.
And the violence that would erupt without those interpreters in their black robes … ! Opinions of scholars and laypeople alike vary on nearly every single one of the original ten amendments, as well as many of those added in later years. Erickson’s not thinking clearly. But then, he’s too busy unloading the heavy artillery and trying not to pinch his fingers as he does so.
With the second amendment, the average citizen can ascertain the right of gun ownership in America. With abortion, no citizens not trained in the dark arts of liberal legal interpretation and how to read the breath of a living piece of paper can even understand and so can never truly respect the rule of law. The law becomes not the compact of governance, but the possession of the great “Says Who” — who says what the law is, regardless of what the law plainly means.
It’s interesting that he references the Second Amendment, as its formulation is quite the puzzling bit of text, with multiple interpretations over the years – remember, just fifty years ago, before the takeover of the NRA by LaPierre and his ilk, the NRA itself was a supporter of gun control laws, as well as a strong supporter of requiring gun education for the prospective owner. He’s playing to his absolutist gun rights segment of his readership, using this approach to link them, via paranoia concerning the Big Bad government, with the anti-abortion absolutists.
And it works, because a huge majority of the audience is, like any such audience on the right and left, susceptible to confirmation bias, the quite human tendency to believe arguments that confirm preconceptions and beliefs.
But anyone who has worked to excise confirmation bias from their ego, and has some critical thinking skills, will look at Erickson’s argument and just shake their heads.
Not only does Roe conjure things no one can fairly read into the Constitution, it imposes a morality on 350 million people demanding those people give a right to kill children that many of them abhor. Roe set off the culture war we have today all because seven lifetime appointees of the Supreme Court decided the morality of Harvard Yard could be imposed as a one size fits all morality for all of the varied fifty states. It remains a decision of ultimate pride that has seeded a culture of death in America.
Notice the sleight of hand here. He’s quietly steering the reader’s attention away from the Bill of Rights – your rights – so he can try to save something that may be miscarried tomorrow. Sadly for him, the Bill of Rights is part of the Constitution, at least in the non-expert atmosphere that he presumes to promote – and, I suspect, given the importance attached to most of the Amendments contained in the Bill of Rights, it’s a good assumption.
Why does this matter? Using what he told me I should be doing, I’m going to point at the Ninth Amendment,
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
and suggest that anti-abortion laws violate the 9th Amendment. Let’s look at his next argument:
Beyond that, the defenders of abortion rights now are left in the morally depraved state of using the arguments of nineteenth-century slavemasters to defend their right to kill. “It’s my property” has become “it’s my body.” “If you don’t want one, don’t have one” stays the same. “They aren’t even really human” stays the same. “They can’t survive off the plantation” becomes “they can’t survive outside the womb.” On and on the moral depravity goes.
Notice his ad hominem flavored attack. Two keywords are depravity and slavemaster, and these are keyed to make the opposing side, the pro-choice side, distasteful and worthy of hate. The reason to use such an attack can be tactical – meaning, This argument is weak so I better distract the reader with some flash. He’s using analogy to push along the ad hominem against the pro-choice, and this is where he’s made a critical error, in the fourth part, above. There should be no doubt, given the performance of former enslaved people and their descendants, that proclamations of their inferiority, as found in the speeches of Jefferson Davis and other prominent Southern politicians, were little more than political hot air by men and women who cared more for wealth and power than justice. That’s the basis of the ad hominem, but it breaks down under examination. They can’t survive off the plantation was, of course, false. They can’t survive outside the womb?
No, a fetus can’t. Take a fetus out of a woman’s womb prior to reaching term, dump it on a lactating woman’s breast, and, depending on its age, it’ll die immediately to a few minutes later. That term baby, on the other hand, will, barring certain tragic medical problems inherent in the messy business of being biological, happily suckle and, with luck, go on to prosperity.
This lack of biological severability serves to differentiate the fetus from the infant; but it is a magnitude greater than that between adult and the immature. To call a fetus a baby is simply an intellectual error; to call it an unborn baby is to heap deeply dishonest propaganda on top of that intellectual error.
But medically we can save that fetus taken early from the mother’s womb, you say? It doesn’t matter. We have grown human ears on the backsides of rats – does that make them human? The test here isn’t what medical miracles can be used to heroically save the premature, but the natural flow of events. Upon that is based morality. And, yes, the SCOTUS test of viability is wrong.
Erickson’s failure here also validates the statements he seeks to bring to grief. Yes, it is her body. Yes, a fetus is not human, seeing as, depending on age, it lacks a brain, a heart, other recognizable internal organs, and it’s totally and completely dependent on the woman and her health to survive. It has no independent life nor, until near the end, thought.
And, no, abortion is not depravity. It doesn’t matter how much ad hominem is deployed. Erickson, in the midst of attempting to condemn abortion through association with the ignoble arguments for slavery, has instead bolstered the argument on the pro-choice side of the issue because of unclear thinking, a faulty analogy, an eagerness to employ ad hominem, and a dependence, conscious or not, on confirmation bias.
This is why it’s so hard to take Erickson seriously sometimes.
