PrintFebruary 11, 2011
The Myth of the Infallible Woman:
A Note on Public-Funded Abortion and Forcible Rape
Some of the meanest, nastiest, self-serving, lying low lives I have known have been women. And I mean that as a compliment. A premiere benefit of women's liberation was that the myth of woman's higher nature, her innate refinement, was debunked, and woman were bumped off that pedestal and fell into the swamp of human nature that is as much her rightful destiny as the next guy's.
Not that the myth was all nice. The treacherous, seductress is as old as the Madonna, but at least in the new era the good and the bad are scrambled together and a woman is as free to be a plain, old jerk once in awhile and still hold her place as a decent person nonetheless. It's great. The only problem is that the abortion rights groups still cling to the pedestal, except that the pedestal has been elevated to the heavens. Woman are no longer merely refined and virtuous; they are even better: they are infallible.
A fundamental tenet of the abortion-rights movement is that every woman who is experiencing an unwanted pregnancy gains a magical ability to make the infallible and correct choice about the pregnancy every time. Now, these same women in their regular lives when they are not bogged down with a pregnancy do not get to choose which laws they prefer to follow. Women under normal circumstances (pregnancy is an abnormal condition in this context) are not cookie-cut-out little Caesar getting to poke their thumbs up or down in judgment over who gets to live or die. That would absurd! Macabre! Barbaric! With that kind of freedom, some women would be rubbing out anyone who got in their way. I would.
Given my experience with normal circumstances, I would have a long list of people whose deaths my infallible and innate sense of it-just-seems-like-the-right-thing-to-do-right-now caused. No, clearly such a right is too random and potent and no civilized society could tolerate the immediate abuses such privilege would generate. Only when a woman is experiencing the duress of an unwanted pregnancy does a woman's judgment become infallible and anything she decides to do is the right thing to do.
It is all very fair and sensible. That is why abortion-right groups sensibly denounced a new bill sponsored by Republicans requiring "forcible" rape as a precondition to public-funded abortions. Those Republicans did not fully appreciate the infallibility of the pregnant woman. A woman who has been raped, but did not as a result seek a public-funded abortion, becomes the center of an investigation and judicial process that closely adheres to the due process of law so that the alleged perpetrator's guilt is established beyond reasonable doubt. That's because not all charges are rape are indeed rape. Those rules do not apply to the woman with an unwanted pregnancy who seeks a public-funded abortion. This woman gets to bypass due process. Her claim of rape is infallible. She never lies. She never acts out of self-interest. Her judgment is true. Due process, that bygone constitutional right, be dammed.
S.K. Caranicas is an attorney in New York City interested in your thoughtful comments. Please contact her at skcaranicas@yahoo.com
