Coyote Blog

Theresa Bonopartis writes at the Federalist, "If Abortion Providers Cared About Women, They Wouldn’t Fight Abortion Safety At The Supreme Court."   The article is about what one would expect, an abortion opponent wondering why women who support abortion would oppose reasonable health and safety regulations to protect women from dangerous medical practices while receiving an abortion.

This should be super easy to explain to Conservatives (and vice versa) because there is an exactly parallel question that folks on the Left ask of Conservatives.  My New England liberal mother-in-law often asks "why do gun advocates oppose very reasonable and incremental measures to make gun ownership safer?"

And the reason in both cases is exactly the same:  That strong advocates of certain practices (gun ownership, abortion) are often worried -- and frequently with just cause -- that incremental regulations are not aimed at safety but are meant as ways to constrict the practice on the road to eventual elimination.  They fear these are eliminationist rules in the Trojan horse of "reasonable regulation."   This is why the Left, which generally advocates regulating the hell out of most every service offering, resists abortion regulations that are in some cases less stringent than those put on tanning booths.  And this is why the Right, which is generally happy to deny all civil rights to any criminal and put them in a hole for life, is resistant to background checks for gun ownership.

The funny thing is that as obvious as these parallels are to me, they almost never work with strong partisans.  "That's not the same at all, we are talking about protecting women, not letting wackos carry handguns to shoot up preschools." "That's not the same, we're just trying to protect ourselves while they are killing babies."  But the point is that while the issues are not the same, the reason for skepticism about "reasonable regulations" is exactly the same.