For The Left, Children Are Either Obstacles Or Tools

In the aftermath of a leaked Supreme Court draft majority decision prospectively overruling Roe v. Wade, the Left in the United States has gone into full-fledged panic mode. That outsized panic has manifested as a variety of unconvincing or blatantly immoral arguments: the argument that abortion is a necessary adjunct to women’s freedom – as though contraception doesn’t exist, and as though women are never responsible for their own sexual decisions and the consequences thereof; the argument that unless society provides for any number of government programs, abortion should not be prohibited – as though the solution to lack of universal child care is the death of the child; the argument that conservatives will next attempt to outlaw interracial marriage – an absurd slander on its face.

Underlying all of this is a perverse and inverted view of children’s role in society. To the Left, children in the womb are utterly disposable; at best, women may choose to preserve their lives, but if not, they have no separate interests to be considered. In fact, children are to be treated as potential obstacles: as Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said this week, “access to reproductive health care, including abortion, helped lead to increased labor force participation; it enabled many women to finish school. That increased their earning potential.” This explains why the Left has now embraced the language of “forced birth” to describe laws protecting the unborn: pregnancy is no longer seen as the possible biological outgrowth of sexual activity, but as a dramatic foreign imposition on women. The default, for the Left, is childlessness; pregnancy is somehow unnatural. Thus, the entire Democratic Party apparatus now refuses to countenance even the mildest restrictions on abortion all the way to the point of birth.