Women's Rights

The Trump administration on Friday set up new obstacles for women seeking abortions, barring taxpayer-funded family planning clinics from making abortion referrals. The new policy is certain to be challenged in court.

It's impossible to revisit the history of America's quest for racial purity without thinking of the contempt for weakness and failure and foreigners in the public discourse today.

“Roe v. Wade,” Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote in 1992, “stands as a sort of judicial Potemkin Village, which may be pointed out to passers-by as a monument to the importance of adhering to precedent. But behind the facade, an entirely new method of analysis, without any roots in constitutional law, is imported to decide the constitutionality of state laws regulating abortion.” Rehnquist was dissenting in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, the landmark case in which the court “reaffirmed” the “essential holding” of Roe. The word “reaffirm,” to a three-judge plurality, meant “completely rewrite.” Casey replaced Roe’s strict protection of choice as a “fundamental right” with a standard that no one can honestly claim to understand.

WHEN SHE WAS 20 YEARS OLD, Renee Chelian began every Friday with a predawn drive to an airplane hangar outside Detroit. There she met an abortion doctor, and a pilot who flew them to Buffalo, New York. This was 1971. Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that established a woman's right to an abortion, was still a year and a half away, and New York was one of the few places in the country where abortion was legal. Chelian was the doctor's assistant. She cleaned instruments and made appointments for women who hitchhiked or drove from all over the Midwest and New England to reach the clinic.

Where do Americans stand on abortion? Well, they don’t so much “stand” as they do muddle in the middle. The latest Gallup poll says 50 percent of Americans call themselves “pro-choice”; 44 percent “pro-life”. (That’s a slight change toward the “pro-choice” position.) But probe a little deeper, and it depends on how you ask the question. A CBS poll last March found 38 percent saying it should be “generally available”, 34 percent favored “stricter limits”, and 25 percent said it should be not available at all. A recent Pew summary found Americans were “roughly divided” on the issue—51 percent saying it should permitted in “all or most cases, with 43 percent saying it should not be allowed in all or most cases.

In the United States, our most successful demagogues have often become so by making skillful use of whatever the newest media was at the time. Charles Coughlin, the Catholic priest who railed against Jews and capitalism in the nineteen-thirties, did most of his railing via the radios that the American masses had just recently acquired. In the early fifties, Joseph McCarthy took advantage of television’s advent to attract gavel-to-gavel attention for his congressional hearings. Donald Trump is a celebrity demagogue, and, for the moment, anyway, the leading Republican Presidential candidate, because of reality television and Twitter.

For Democrats, the most important thing that happened at Thursday's Republican presidential debate had nothing to do with Donald Trump. It was the way the candidates raced to stake out tough positions on abortion that could hurt the GOP in the 2016 general election. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker said there's no case in which an abortion is medically necessary, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio said he does not support rape and incest exceptions to laws restricting abortion, and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee said a simple change in the law could make an outright abortion ban constitutional.

Republicans are back at their five-year fight, preparing this week to vote to yank tens of millions of federal dollars from enemy No. 1 – Planned Parenthood. But the abortion-defunding fight wasn’t always waged this way. In fact, Republicans used to have a more ambitious line of attack, one that aimed to take on all providers of the procedure. But since 2011, they’ve shifted strategy. Instead of focusing on a hazy notion of abortion providers, they created a clear enemy in Planned Parenthood.