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Kamala Harris’ Laughable Abortion Sophistry

The [study] show[s] that close to 70 percent of women who had abortions described them as coerced, pressured, or inconsistent with their own values and preferences.  A majority experienced pressure from other people – belying the dangerous assumption that abortion is strictly a matter of “a woman’s choice.”

Many Women Who Had Abortions Felt Pressured by Others

Charlotte Lozier Institute, May 25, 2023

Men exerted “considerable” influence … to seek an abortion or continue a pregnancy.  Some men paid the woman to terminate the pregnancy. 

“Men’s involvement in women’s abortion-related care”, National Library of Medicine, Mar 4, 2022

In the absence of any positive accomplishments in the Biden administration, but instead a bad economy, a record number of deaths (at least 853 in 2022) at the southern border, wars across the globe and chaos all across the country, the Democrat News-media Colluders have little choice but to demagogue the 2022 Dobbs decision that overturns the poorly argued 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision (that enshrined a woman’s right to an abortion in the Constitution).  Naturally, VP Kamala Harris, lacking entirely in subtlety or authenticity (Kamala is no Cate Blanchett), gave, with the usual scripted anger and sanctimony, a false and misleading speech on the subject. 

Kamala begins by reciting the script that we are “cleared eyed” about the “harm” resulting from overturning of Roe. She was not concerned about the harm abortion does to all the “children” (Joe Biden’s word) killed in abortion. 

She next, following the advice of leftist propagandist Saul Alinsky to “pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it,” claims that Donald Trump is “responsible” for appointing the 3 SCOTUS judges that helped overturn Roe.  Her Alinsky-strategy of making Trump personal the target of her attack is designed to evoke hatred for Trump to enable a plethora of Appeal to Emotion fallacies against Dobbs.  Since it is difficult to feel hatred for a proposition or argument, making it easier to discuss the issue rationally like grown-ups, she foments hatred for a person, Trump, to deceive her audience with irrational emotion.  Kamala wants to “play” her audience for fools, not inform them. 

Her outrage is directed at Trump for saying that he is “proud” that he appointed 3 SCOTUS judges that helped overturn Roe.  Trump, she claims, “intended to take away your freedoms.”  This is wrong.  First, Trump did not take any freedoms away from the children (Joe’s word) who might have wanted the freedom to live.  Are we still allowed to defend the children or are they collateral damage now for the Left?

Second, the overturning of Roe does not take away any freedoms because it merely returns the decision about rights to abortion to the states where is can be decided democratically.  Several conservative states, Kansas and Ohio have, after the Dobbs decision, voted to enshrine the right to abortion in their state constitutions. 

Third, overturning Roe did not take any rights away from women.  Since SCOTUS is the ultimate arbiter of such decisions, and since it decided that this alleged “right” is not present in the US Constitution, this means that Roe’s view that women had this right was wrong to begin with.  Since women never had this right, overturning Roe could not take it away.  The only thing overturning Roe did was return this issue to the states where it will be decided democratically in these things called “elections”.  If, therefore, anyone grants or denies the right to an abortion to women, it will be these things called the voters.  Remember them Democrats?  Since Kamala has a J.D. from the University of California Hastings School of Law one would assume she should understand this elementary point.  But maybe not. 

Finally, Dobbs can protect the freedom of some women not to be pressured by their partners to abort their child.

Although Democrats talk constantly about “saving our democracy” they would appear not to like democracy very much and have no clear idea how it is supposed to work. 

Kamala next attacks Trump because he is “proud” that he “intended to take your freedoms,” “proud” that “young women today have fewer rights than their mothers and grandmothers” and “proud” that Doctors could be thrown into prison” for performing abortions for caring for their patients”. 

In fact, if one can pass a first-year community college critical reasoning course, one can verify that Kamala gives no evidence whatsoever that Trump is “proud” of any of these alleged consequences of Dobbs.  In the first place, as pointed out earlier, Dobbs determined that women never actually had these freedoms or rights and, therefore, it did not take any actual freedoms or rights away from women.  Since Dobbs means women never had these rights Trump cannot be “proud” of taking them away. 

Second, whether women will have abortion rights in the future will be determined, not by Trump or his 3 SCOTUS appointments but by these things called voters in each of the states in this thing called the democratic processes.   As Kansas and Ohio show it is not even clear women will not enjoy the same rights they had under Roe. 

Third, Kamala’s Alinsky strategy involves an elementary logical fallacy.  The fact that Trump is proud he appointed 3 SCOTUS justices that overturned Roe does not mean that he is proud of all the consequences of overturning it.  If Jack is proud of doing A and A has consequences C, it is not necessarily true that Jack is proud of C.  For example, Biden precipitously pulled out of Afghanistan resulting in the deaths of 13 US military people and a hundred more injured.  Perhaps Kamala, if she can find her first-year critical reasoning text, can let us know if the fact that she and Joe are proud of the decision to pull out of Afghanistan means that she and Joe are proud of 13 US military people blown to bits as a consequence of that decision.  Please let us know, Kamala, how proud you and Joe are of all these dead Americans! 

As Samuel Alito puts it in his opening remarks in the majority opinion,

Abortion is a profoundly difficult and contentious issue because it presents an irreconcilable conflict between the interests of a pregnant woman who seeks an abortion and the interests in protecting fetal life. The interests on both sides of the abortion issue are extraordinarily weighty.

As Alito points out later, Dobbs is designed to give due consideration to both sides,

[These] difficult moral and policy questions will be decided, as the Constitution dictates, by the people and their elected representatives through the constitutional processes of democratic self-government.

That is, these difficult questions will be decided, not by Donald Trump, conservatives, Republicans, “white men” or by SCOTUS itself, however much Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren’s tribe and other fanatical demagogues want to misrepresent the meaning and logic of Dobbs. 

As Kansas and Ohio show, neither the conservatives nor the Left will get everything they want.  Since Dobbs returns the question to the voters, the eventual policy will be a moderate balance of the two sides.  Moderation is the whole point the democratic processes and Kamala’s dishonest squealing will not change that. 

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Richard McDonough

Richard Michael McDonough, American philosophy educator. Achievements include production of original interpretation of Wittgenstein’s logical-metaphysical system, original application Kantian Copernican Revolution to philosophy of language; significant interdisciplinary work logic, linguistics, psychology & philosophy. Member Australasian Debating Federation (honorary life, adjudicator since 1991), Phi Kappa Phi.

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