KLAVAN: What Is The Principle Of The Pro-Abortion Movement?

On Monday’s episode of “The Andrew Klavan Show,” the host discusses how the Left hijacked the fight for women’s equality and have warped the principles to push the far-left agenda on abortion. Partial transcript and video below.

Think about this for a minute. Let’s talk about the principles because all of these arguments have a principle. And what is the principle of the pro-abortion movement? It is women’s freedom and equality, right? It’s not fair. This is not fair that men have sex and walk away, and women are stuck oftentimes carrying the burden which is a new life and that is an actual thing. And you know they are for women’s freedom. Guess what. So am I.

Despite all the jokes that I make, I am for women’s freedom. I believe in individuals. If you asked me … yesterday was Mother’s Day, I hope you had a lovely Mother’s Day. If you ask me, that’s the most important job on earth. Being an at-home mom building a home for your husband and your family. That to me is where all of life, all of principle, all of joy starts, and if you do that you know I hope you will have time to have the second half of your life after the kids leave and do other things as well. That’s great. But to me, that is the most important thing you can do.

But if you are an individual woman who says I choose a different way, I want to be the CEO of a company, I want to sit around … You know I hate all these, every single TV show has women posing like men with their hands on their hips looking like men looking grim the way men look. Women, if you watch them, women smile a lot more than men do. So, they’re always looking grim, and that’s supposed to get us to respect them like we respect men. That’s not the way I feel about life. I respect women as women. I respect women because they’re women because you know if they’re womanly I find that a great gift, a great enhancement to the world and to life. So that’s what I think.

But if you as an individual disagree with me, I’ve got no power over you. And not only that, I don’t care how you live. I’m happy for you to live out your life the way you want to live your life. I’m for women’s freedom. The problem is the principle doesn’t work because you can’t get your freedom by killing innocent people. It’s that simple. It’s that simple. A baby in your womb is another person. It’s a different person. It’s a human person. You can’t kill it. It’s as simple as that. So much of the abortion argument is about reframing what you’re doing and using different words to describe what you’re doing.

You know “reproductive rights,” a “woman’s right to choose.” You know it’s like they just never want to call it what it is and that’s why they want it. They’d knocked down … If you have put up a stand with pictures of what an abortion looks like, they’ll come and knock it down because they don’t want you to see, they don’t want you to know. They don’t want you to see what the truth of this issue is. And [The Daily Wire’s Matt] Walsh is making brilliant points. And my problem is here he is arguing principle. You have a right to come back and argue your principle a woman’s right’s a woman’s freedom all those things.

Again, I support those things. I just don’t think you can get them by killing innocent people. That’s my whole problem. That’s my problem entirely. But the Left has depended on pure, raw power. Roe v. Wade is pure, raw power. That’s all it is. It is five, I think it was, maybe six justices deciding that no you don’t get a right to argue this in your community. You don’t get a right to set the laws in your own state. The Constitution does not enumerate abortion as something that the federal government can control, and the way they got to that was saying that there is a hidden life, a right to privacy in the Constitution.

I have to tell you something: I actually agree with that argument. I think there is a hidden right to privacy, just like there’s a hidden right to cross state lines. It doesn’t say in the Constitution that you can cross state lines, but there is a hidden right for free travel, freely in the Constitution there is a hidden right emanating from the penumbras of the whatever the hell they say of the Constitution, a hidden right to privacy. I agree. But privacy does not include, “Oh well yes I killed my wife, but I killed her in private and she was in my home at the time. So, it’s fine.” You know that’s obviously not what privacy means. This is pure power versus principle.

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