Hillary’s Abortion Surprise

The candidate touched upon our abortion problem.

Hillary Clinton had a stop-the-presses moment recently on Meet the Press, when she talked about abortion. She was responding to Donald Trump’s missteps and was full of surprises herself.

The chief one is that she referred to an “unborn person.” That phrase is not typically in the script of those who support legal abortion, and who oppose most of the reasonable restrictions that polls find a majority of Americans are warm to. Dehumanizing language is key to those who support the abortion industry. It also avoids trigger words, as they say, for the far too many women who are the walking wounded, having had an abortion they now regret.

The language she used did, in fact, set off a bit of a firestorm among her usual allies. As the New York Times put it in a headline: “Hillary Clinton Roundly Criticized for Referring to the Unborn as a ‘Person.’”

But the more interesting — or jarring — thing to me, which was rather more underappreciated, was that she used the word “mandate.” She said things that one might expect: That Roe v. Wade is the law, and she supports it. As for Republicans squabbling over exceptions, she caricatured them in a broad-brushed way. This happens in election campaigns. But then she said: “My view has always been this is a choice. It is not a mandate.”

File this under “Thank you for small favors”? Or: “When ever was this a question?” Or “How did we ever get this far along?” The comment should have sounded alarms.

It didn’t, because she went on to say: “You know, I have traveled all over the world. I have seen what happens when governments make these decisions, whether it was forced sterilization, forced abortion in China, or force childbearing in Communist Romania. So I don’t think that we should be allowing the government to make decisions that really properly belong to the individual.”

I suppose that came close to a condemnation of China’s brutal one-child policy. But the word “mandate” was timely in unintentional ways, and not only because the Little Sisters of the Poor just went to the Supreme Court to get back their religious-liberty rights, which the government had taken away by its mandate that insurance coverage include abortion drugs, contraception, and female sterilization. The government is not forcing the usage of such things, but it is forcing these religious sisters who serve the elderly poor to indirectly participate in these things that their consciences hold to be evil.

And the government does so in a culture that dictates these things as mainstream and even expected — perhaps even preferred in some situations.

#share#Then–Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor exemplified this when she wrote, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, that women had “organized intimate relationships, and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society, in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail.” George Mason Law School professor Helen Alvaré cited O’Connor’s opinion in congressional testimony a few years ago, before referring to “evidence from a growing body of sociological as well as law and economics literature that more easily available abortion is associated with women’s ‘immiseration,’ and not their flourishing.”

As Alvaré put it: “According to leading scholars, it certainly appears that more easily available abortion has led to expectations of more uncommitted sexual encounters — a situation which itself contradicts women’s demonstrated preferences — and thereby to more sexually transmitted infections, more nonmarital pregnancies and births, and more abortions.” She added: “Women of color, poor women, and recent immigrants are suffering these consequences in disproportionate numbers.”

When Clinton hit on the word mandate, that should have opened a Pandora’s box of questions, concerns, obstacles, and, yes, evils.

If Hillary Clinton wasn’t directly grappling with this, it does seem to be on her mind or heart. She may be struggling with how to address these issues without frustrating her base, which includes the abortion industry. She may want to be honest about women’s health and what real freedom is. Would that it were that she heard the rallying cry of a law student at the University of Notre Dame who reacted to a speech there by Wendy Davis. Davis, a former member of the Texas State Senate, had spoken on campus about her “sacred” choice to abort a child of hers with a disability. The student responded with a plea to the young women of good will on campus who went to Davis’s talk. There’s a better way, Laura Wolk said, to protect human rights and women’s dignity. She went on: “You will realize your freedom not by denying part of what makes you essentially a woman, but instead by embracing your womanhood, allowing it to blossom into its full potential.” And she urged: “Critically question the dominant cultural narrative that being born a woman means being handicapped by a fertility problem that you must ‘rise up’ against.”

When Clinton hit on the word mandate, that should have opened a Pandora’s box of questions, concerns, obstacles, and, yes, evils. Her use of the word could have become a door to honest conversation about the lack of choice so many women find themselves with. I’m writing from Hershey, Pa., where for 20 years women have been working as counselors to women seeking alternatives to abortion. The counselors at the Real Alternatives program here see this day in and day out: women who feel that circumstances and even law encourage abortion, even if they do not quite mandate it. But women who want another way have these women from Real Alternatives to walk with them, and in long-term ways to help them not only give birth but flourish as mothers and responsible women living in the world.

Hillary Clinton could inspire all kinds of reflections and examinations of conscience, however unintentionally. She also could opt for leading in ways that could bring about some real freedom, not this faux one her party’s client base mandates.