The SCOTUS news is exposing a madness in Rhode Island.
As Anchor Rising readers know, last week a Providence Journal headline proclaimed, “RI’s record-shattering baby shortage could spell trouble for state’s economy.” This week, Lieutenant Governor Sabina Matos proclaimed her aspiration for the Ocean State to kill more:
I’m confident RI can become a national leader for reproductive rights at a time when these rights are coming under attack. We can not go back.
I can understand the reasoning of the pro-abortion side and the complexity of the moral issues should one acknowledge the life of the baby. We must also be compassionate about the implications for women who have had abortions as science and law clarify exactly what abortion is.
Still, the rhetoric we’re hearing from Matos and others reveals fanaticism in the face of reality and an unwillingness to grapple with complexity.
Another glimmer of this madness appears in the legislation (H7442 and S2549) that would force taxpayers to fund abortions for state employees and people who receive subsidized healthcare. That policy shift would be bad enough on its own, but the legislation takes the additional step of disappearing the word “women” as the category of “persons” who can actually become pregnant.
Not long ago, this would have been recognized — indeed, lampooned — as the anti-scientific madness that it is. Yet in Rhode Island, we’re letting these people control our government and news organs.
Matos’s notion that “we cannot go back” is being proclaimed up and down the political hierarchy, but it’s yet another example of the delusion. Backwards is exactly where these radicals are taking us, and we’re not going to like the society that they impose on us. Although, they will naturally leverage their propagandistic power to find others to blame.
Featured image by Dawid Zawila on Unsplash.
I almost agree, but I think it’s just a good idea in general to make laws as gender-neutral as possible, even if its unimaginable that the law would apply to one of them. I mean, if a man did find himself pregnant, no one is suggesting that these laws wouldn’t apply to him, it would just create a weird ambiguity and unnecessary hurdles. The same would go for any other law.
I make the same argument about excessive reliance on human biology because I think the law should be more universal than that. If we have an alien ship crash land in the desert, I want those people to be able to become citizens and participate in society as easily as anyone else. If an AI achieved personhood, I don’t think they should have to wait until they’ve been active for eighteen years before they get the right to vote.
I’m not sure how to respond to that. It’s a good idea for the law to reflect reality, and the ability to give birth to human children is about as close to the core definition of “woman” as it is possible to get. Your strange counterfactuals are actually a great illustration of the point. The circumstances in which an actual biological man would find himself pregnant are so outside of the possible that we can’t possibly know whether birth-related laws that apply to women ought to apply to him. If we enter into a parallel universe in which that happens, we’ll probably have many reasons to revisit and modify the laws accordingly. By contrast, if we plan for the impossible, the law loses all credibility. How can judges apply “reasonable standards” when the law implicitly is built to accommodate the unreasonable?
I’m not sure how you can possibly make the assumption that unknown creatures from outer space ought to be absorbed into the citizenry immediately. It’s worth evaluating things when they arrive. The same goes for AI. I don’t think AI will ever “achieve personhood,” but we really should know what that means. It may, for one thing, prove to be the case that “personhood” begins almost exactly like infancy, in which case 18 years of waiting might be appropriate.
It’s simple. Laws should be robust, not fragile. The whole point of laws is that they should be stable over time, since you don’t know where things are headed you should write them broadly and try to cover as many possibilities as you can. Writing a law that gives women maternity leave is fine and does what you want it to do most of the time, chaging it over to parental leave is better — it gives people more flexibility without compromising the original goal at all.
We must be talking past each other or something, because it seems to me that while I disagree with your statement of principle, your explanation serves my point.
We should absolutely not write laws to cover as many possibilities as we can. We should write laws to do exactly what we want in narrow circumstances we can define. Absolutely every law involves tradeoffs, so writing broadly ensures that somebody will unexpectedly have costs imposed or their rights infringed.
Your example illustrates the point. While writing a law for maternity leave, one can make the case that parental leave is better, and maybe it is. But if you promote a law as maternity leave but write it such that it can become parental leave, you’re pulling a fast one on anybody who thought we were talking mothers.
If you want taxpayers to fund abortions for men who mysteriously become pregnant, write that in the bill. Make it explicit. Don’t smuggle it in with terms that make no sense in current reality.