A Warning Bell on Hoe v. Jade by Gene Callahan

Recently, columnist Ellen Goodman sounded a warning bell because she fears a woman's "right to choose" might be overturned by the Bush administration. My mind wandered as I read her column, and I imagined another columnist, writing 50 years from now, sounding a similar warning:

Jan. 22 is the 30th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision legalizing infanticide. I'm usually wary of pro-choice alarmists whose message – the sky is falling and falling – plays on an endless loop.

But for the first time since Hoe, the White House and both houses of Congress are all securely in Republican hands, and all hands are ready to chip away at maternal rights – one law, one rule, one regulation, one case at a time.

Congress will begin no doubt by voting to outlaw the procedure heatedly if wrongly called "almost-teen infanticide," where a child is killed on the eve of her thirteenth birthday, the last day infanticide is legal. Then they'll take up a law against bringing minors across state lines to avoid spousal notification. Then more laws giving children rights that equal or surpass those of women. And more laws allowing hospitals to stop providing infanticide without risking federal funds.

Thirty years is a long time. It's long enough for an entire new generation to take for granted the right to decide. Young people don't remember a time when women had to carefully hide the fact that she had eliminated a child, or find a hit man who was the friend of a friend of a friend. For this generation, says one pollster, a bathtub is just a bathtub.

In some ways, the luxury of choice has given many the luxury of ambivalence. As Frances Quisling of Catholics for a Free Choice acknowledges, "Those opposed to infanticide have marketed prolife very successfully as a pro-children, pro-family, pro-nice, pro-flowers way of looking at the world. What a load of crap! I hate them. Hate hate hate hate hate."

Since 2045 there have been 335 state laws restricting a woman's right to choose what to do with her own children. These laws have affected mostly poor, young, rural women – women far off the political radar screen.

But what happens in the presence of a threat to the right itself? Thirty years of opinion polls have also shown that Americans consistently support legal infanticide for three reasons: "unruly brats, divorce, and me." Anti -infanticide activists play on the sense that someone, somewhere, is eliminating a child for frivolous reasons. But Americans believe that the women we know, the women we are, can be trusted to decide the fate of our own children for ourselves.

So the other side of this anniversary story is that "me" now includes an estimated 30 million women who have eliminated more than 39 million children since Hoe. "That's 30 million women who have been able to get on a bus, get in a car, go with a friend, eliminate an unhappy kid, and go home," says Quisling.

That's 30 million different stories with emotions ranging from anxiety to relief. "How does a president tell 30 million women that they did something evil? How can Congress say that to those women and their boyfriends, husbands, children, mothers – and get away with it?" she asks.

Until now, the politics have been easy. President George Z. Bush has been able to talk about "a culture of life." But he has also, carefully, repeatedly avoided saying that he wanted to overturn Hoe. He's curried to the right while trying not to frighten the suburban middle.

His "United States" has exported the most draconian family planning ideas. His "United States" has allowed the anti-infanticide, anti-sex education, anti-birth control right to rule our foreign policy.

Now on the 30th anniversary, push is coming to shove, foreign policy is coming home. Thirty years. Thirty million. This time we'll be watching.

January 23, 2003

Gene Callahan [send him mail], the author of Economics for Real People, is an adjunct scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and a contributing columnist to LewRockwell.com.