Matt Yglesias had a great post yesterday on the complexity of Americans' views on abortion. And it made me think of my recent visit home to the Midwest, where I had the opportunity to visit with an old friend and retired clergy member. We had a nice chat about a variety of things and, in particular, he had some good questions for the "pro-life" crowd.
One of the explicit goals of both the anti-abortion movement and the Republican party is to outlaw abortion - to make it criminal behavior. Since we're moving toward a political climate where this idea has a bit of currency (with freshman Senators if not with the public) as well as a legal climate where some of these precedents may come into questions (Roberts' wife is a member of an anti-abortion group and it seems fair to say that his briefings indicate that he leans that way), now may be the time to ask our opposition two important questions:
If abortion becomes a crime, who would be the criminal?
And what, specifically, would the crime be?
More on the flip...
Would the woman having an abortion be a criminal? Or would the doctor performing the abortion be a criminal? Would they both be guilty of the same crime? Would one be designated as a conspirator? Would the crime be "infanticide" and the punishment consistent with that? Could more than one person be arrested as an accessory?
That's more than two questions, but you see where I'm going with this. Asking these sorts of questions might help to illuminate the sorts of things that reasonable people might give pause to. As Matt's findings indicate, Americans don't generally think of abortions as a day at the beach, but most believe that women and doctors should make these sorts of decisions. The same women and doctors that, ostensibily, would be guilty of serious crimes in the anti-abortion paradigm.