Why did so many women gather in Washington against the presidency of Donald Trump?

Why did so many women (and men and children) march in Washington days later in support of the unborn and their mothers?

It comes down to a battle over radical sexual autonomy.

Hearing the words of such profound moral philosophers as Madonna and Scarlett Johansson as they opined from the podium left no doubt that abortion was the central issue for their large collation of women. That pro-life women pointedly were excluded, even disinvited, from the event further makes the point.

The “Right” to Abortion

Feminism in our time is no longer about equal treatment under the law but about protecting the “right” to abort one’s child at any time throughout pregnancy. This is the source of rage and fear emanating with such profane vehemence from the feminist Left since Mr. Trump’s election in November.

Similarly, multitudes of people who streamed up Pennsylvania Avenue during the March for Life were there to protest the debasement of human personhood known as elective abortion.  They refuse to concede the fundamental argument of their opponents, that the child within the womb has no value apart from her mother. For this, they are castigated as “anti-women.”

It all boils down to this: Surgical and chemical abortion enable sexual autonomy. Birth control doesn’t work? There’s a “women’s clinic” nearby to take care of the “problem.” Abortion is the ultimate safeguard of unrestricted sexual volition.

A Supreme Court that reads the text of the Constitution as the document’s words require means that the “right” to an abortion will be terminated. The imaginary penumbraic emanation out of which this erstwhile right flows will be found to be no more real than the horsey or kitty my children, when small, found in the clouds.

A malignant kidney will never have a face, hands, feet, a brain, or a beating heart. An unborn child always does. 

Were abortion a mere surgical procedure, indistinguishable in moral value from the removal of kidney stones or the excision of an unsightly wart, the right of a woman to govern her own health and well-being through such medical actions would be undisputed. But abortion is not health care.

Moreover and once again, abortion is unique in the medical world in that two persons are involved. A malignant kidney will never have a face, hands, feet, a brain, or a beating heart. An unborn child always does. 

The Problem With Roe v. Wade

When, in 1973, Justice Harry Blackmun wrote in Roe that the Supreme Court was agnostic about the personhood of the baby in the womb, he employed intellectual legerdemain to make his case. As one scholar has written, Justice Blackmun said “the Court had no way of deciding whether or not an unborn child was a person to be protected by law, and then, in an incredible leap of illogic, declared that an unborn child could not be protected by law — a conclusion warranted only if one assumed a certain answer to the very question on which the Court professed to be agnostic.”

In other words, if the Court had no way of knowing if the developing person in the woman was a person, how could the Court rule it had no authority to declare the possible person’s possible life of no value?

The Selfishishness of Unrestricted Abortion

Constricting unrestricted access to abortion on demand is terrifying to women who feel relief that such an option is always open to them. Inherent in this sense of fear is not so much the threat of going under the knife of an unqualified abortionist in an illegal side-street “clinic” as the realization that carrying one’s baby to term would, with rare exceptions, be demanded by the law. 

This kind of demand would inhibit the combination of professional attainment and sexual preferentialism that the culture of radical autonomy heralds as central to a free and happy life. And this the Left cannot have. 

A society in which babies are welcomed into life is one in which families will be formed and the need for state intervention will be substantially dissipated.

A society in which babies are welcomed into life is one in which families will be formed and the need for state intervention — that is, federal programs whose benefits are addictive and whose protections become subtly suffocating — will be substantially dissipated. Competitors of state power, the churches and synagogues, myriad private charities, community organizations, and religious-based philanthropies, will thrive. The Left’s robust nurture of an ever-more powerful, centralized, invasive, and controlling government of the liberal elites will become weak. Leviathan will not die but its gigantism will shrivel.

The Harmful Effects of Abortion on Women and Society

The grand and tragic irony in so much of the “rights talk” of the recent Women’s March is the victimization of women by the abortion industry. So many “clinics” in inner cities; so much profit for abortion “providers;” so many women in crisis being persuaded that abortion is the best choice. 

Or consider a 2015 study by the Jacobs Institute on Women’s Health at the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Biotechnology Information. It concludes that “nearly one-third of women” reported feeling pressure from an “intimate partner” to have an abortion.  

If these things don’t spell pain and even predation, let us all become linguistic deconstructionists.

The “pro-choice community” can never speak honestly about abortion. To concede that the unborn child has any value, any smidgen of dignity distinct from her mother’s discretion would validate the claim that there is a baby in the womb, a fatal blow to sexual hyper-autonomy of his mother.

If Roe is corrected, a deep wound will be inflicted on the Left’s ultimate conceits: self-divinization and the usurpation of Deity’s throne by the state. 

The appointment of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court fevers the minds of abortion proponents. If Roe is corrected, not only will extemporaneous sexual intimacy be constrained and male unconcern with his partner’s potential pregnancy be jarred into a sense of caution, and not only (and most importantly) will the lives of about 3,000 unborn children a day be protected, but a deep wound will be inflicted on the Left’s ultimate conceits: self-divinization and the usurpation of Deity’s throne by the state. 

“You shall be like God,” the serpent promised Eve and, through her, Adam. The self-exaltation, the rush of power felt when we defy the Eternal and destroy the lives He creates through us, will be ended as chastity, duty, and the sanctity of life are again restored, in great measure, to American public life and personal conduct.

Lord, haste the day.