Americans are rather stupid people, as is the norm among humans. This stupidity is manifest in a general lack of knowledge or understanding of the goings on in the rest of the world. And just as dull elementary school age children many think of Africa as one amorphous country, it seems quite often public policy pundits like to use Europe as one amorphous example, rest assured of the public’s ignorance of reality. Whether as a shining City on the Hill in the case of the Left, or as an object lesson in sclerotic decadence in much of the American Right, a dream Europe lives on in the imaginings of the American punditocracy. A few years ago I encountered total surprise when I mentioned to a conservative friend, who has a medical degree, that France is in fact a nation of immigrants, and has been since the demographic transition in the wake of the French Revolution. The logic behind the surprise was clear; Europe is the opposite of the United States (we are Good, they are Bad), and so it must not<\/i> be a nation of immigration because we are<\/i> a nation of immigration. Q.E.D.<\/p>\n
But I come not to discuss the Right in this case, but rather the Left. In The American Prospect<\/i> Dana Goldstein has a piece up, A “Uniquely American” Abortion Debate<\/a>, which is part of what I like to term the “it’s better in Europe” genre. Goldstein describes her utopia of taxpayer funded abortion in Europe in naturally glowing terms. Fair enough. Let’s put aside the objections that large numbers of Americans have to abortion which is of the first moral order (objections I do not personally share, but which I do not feel it necessary to dismiss as beyond the pale in a democratic republic). This section of Goldstein’s piece caught my attention:<\/p>\n That’s not to say these other nations are utopias for reproductive rights. Reflecting fears of crashing birth rates, many European countries infantilize women by forcing them to undergo counseling before abortions, wait several days, or get two doctors to sign off on the procedure. Yet even those laws are less stringent abroad than they are in some American states, where doctors are required to deliver a scripted speech to women seeking abortions, sometimes including medical misinformation about supposed risks to the pregnant woman’s mental or physical health.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n First, I think Goldstein is wrong about the point that stringency in Europe’s abortion laws are due to fears of their low birthrates. Those restrictions have long existed because of the power of the Catholic Church and Christian Democratic parties on the Continent, restrictions which have only been rolled back after<\/i> the demographic collapse across Southern Europe.<\/b> The historical sequence of facts simply falsifies the contention that current abortion regimes are as they are because of the context of pro-natalist hysteria (Communist abortion laws were strongly responsive to these concerns, and certainly demographics did matter in Western Europe in terms of attitudes toward contraception or eugenics, but in the post-World War II “Baby Boom” Europe this was not an issue and abortion laws were stricter than today). But the second part is also I think arguable. Europe is a diverse continent with many local regimes in regards to abortion, but it is simply the case that European constraints upon abortion on demand are more thorough than those in the United States<\/a>, on average. This does not mean that women can not get abortions, but it does mean that the right<\/i> to abortion is balanced against guardrails which disabuse anyone of the idea that the act is a pure autonomous individual act which has no relation to the political community in which an individual is embedded.<\/p>\n This is one of those “counterintuitive” facts which must confront Americans on the Left or Right who wish to use Europe as an object lesson. European abortion laws were influenced by the democratic process, and so they exhibit the same variation and complexity of attitudes of the populace as a whole, as opposed to the clean and hard rules imposed by judges from on high. One reason that Europeans are perhaps less agitated over their tax dollars going to fund abortion is that to a great extent their collective will shaped the legal availability of this morally fraught medical procedure (see the referendum in Portugal 2 years ago).<\/p>\n So here’s a solution which might allow for a path to public acceptance of taxpayer funded abortions: overturn Roe vs. Wade<\/i> and allow for abortion laws to be hashed-out on a state-by-state basis through representative democracy in place of judicial fiat.<\/b> Ah, but that’s not the lesson that Dana Goldstein wanted to take away from the reality of European taxpayer funded abortions, so the details on the ground had to be obscured so that the dream could live on….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Americans are rather stupid people, as is the norm among humans. This stupidity is manifest in a general lack of knowledge or understanding of the goings on in the rest of the world. And just as dull elementary school age … Continue reading