Quelle suprise! Our favorite Times columnist is confused!

I read the Thinker of Great Thoughts so you don't have to

Oh boy oh boy oh boy!  Our boy Ross Douthat can’t make up his mind what he thinks about the big victory his side scored when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade with Alito’s incomprehensibly argued Dobbs decision.  Fear not, folks, Douthat isn’t torn between celebrating the victory and worrying about how it might affect the way people will vote in the mid-terms and in 2024.  That would be too crass a thing to get all worked up about for the Vatican’s princeling on the Times editorial page. 

As usual, Douthat reaches for something far, far bigger.  It’s just that he has such a problem deciding what that big thing is.  Get this for an opening take: “In addition to granting new political hope to Democrats, the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade has clarified the ground of public argument about abortion.”  Douthat, bless his heart, proceeds to find his clarity in a fogbank.

Does he look at the clear line drawn by the Dobbs decision?  Alito overturned what had been a constitutional right to abortion and turned abortion law-making over to the states.  That would seem a good place to start, wouldn’t you think?

But noooooo, not for our boy Douthat.  What he’s got his undies in a wad over is “what conflicted Americans might fear most from an abortion ban.”  I don’t know who these “conflicted” people are, and Douthat doesn’t tell us, but they don’t show up in polling which has consistently shown that the backlash against Dobbs is real:  two-thirds of Americans did not want Roe overturned, versus one third who did.  That’s pretty clear cut, wouldn’t you say?  Either you’re happy with the new abortion ban or you’re not.  But not in the world inhabited by Ross the Thinker of Great Thoughts.  Douthat reaches down into the issues he finds left behind by Dobbs, none of which is the fact that women’s control over their bodies has been taken from them.  What he instead finds tearing the country apart is what happens with “pregnancies gone so terribly wrong that the mother’s life can only be saved at the expense of the unborn child.”

And what has “conflicted” people about this situation apparently unforeseen by what we may as well go ahead and call the Alito Court?  Well, Douthat admits “by limiting abortion strictly to medical emergency, they create situations where a woman with a doomed and dangerous pregnancy must wait and wait for her own health to worsen before intervention becomes legally possible — waiting on doctors and hospitals fearful of lawsuits and prosecution, waiting in a kind of torture for the situation to grow dire enough to act.”

What’s “conflicting” about that, you might ask?  Well, there is no conflict if you’re the woman experiencing a pregnancy gone terribly wrong, because in the anti-abortion states, you’re just shit out of luck.  But that’s not good enough for the pro-life side, which Douthat tells us calls this “misinformation.”  Their problem is this, according to the Thinker of Great Thoughts: “Just having a debate over the scope of a life-of-the-mother exception inevitably rebounds to the pro-choice side’s benefit,” Douthat laments, “because it focuses public attention on a fraught gray area, a zone of ambiguity in which even abortion opponents won’t all agree with one another about what pro-life principle requires.”

Ah-ha!  There it is!  We’ve found what’s causing “conflicted Americans” and who they are!  Even though they “won” in the Supreme Court, the pro-lifers have found that they can’t agree on practically anything about the new situation about abortion in this country, because…well…it’s complicated.

It turns out that what they thought was an argument with only two sides – pro-abortion and anti-abortion – now has a whole bunch of sides because the Thinkers of Big Thoughts like Douthat have suddenly discovered there is a fetus and a mother and sometimes you have to make a choice between the two.

My goodness, what a dilemma!  Oh, for the days when they could just champion the “life” of the fetus with the photos they carried around abortion clinics showing “babies” in various stages of development.  Douthat, of course, refers to this as the thing all the pro-life people have always denied existed with abortion:  a “gray area.”

So how does dear Ross negotiate this fogbank?    Observing that “once you’ve conceded gray areas in some cases, once you’ve deferred to women and doctors in the hardest situations, you don’t have a reasonable way to draw a line and forbid abortion anywhere.”

Double oh my goodness!  So how does the Thinker of Great Thoughts get himself through this terrible dilemma? You’re not going to believe this.  He spends practically the rest of the column “proving” that the argument doesn’t make sense because…right to die.

Got that?  All of a sudden Douthat moves from fetuses to adults and starts talking about suicide and assisted suicide and countries like Belgium and Canada and the 10 states and District of Columbia where physician-assisted suicide is legal while remaining illegal in the rest of the country.  Out of the blue he points out “that variation has proved politically sustainable,” apparently because terminally ill adults deciding to off themselves “don’t generate constant headline-grabbing prosecutions of doctors or hospitals dealing with edge cases and gray areas.”

So, what is the Thinker of Great Thoughts telling us here?  Well, among other things, what bothers him is the split inside the pro-choice movement that has emerged since Roe was overturned, maybe, just maybe, because some wives and daughters and girlfriends of pro-life males have been telling them they don’t want to die if doctors in, say, Mississippi, are too scared to save their lives in an emergency room because they’re pregnant and what the doctors do in providing emergency care might cause that pregnancy to terminate, which the law might define as an abortion, and they might get prosecuted.

See what happens when you’re a good Catholic boy who’s been a believer all his life and suddenly one of the bedrocks of his belief comes under scrutiny and causes…oh, my goodness...doubt!

That’s what the Thinker of Great Thoughts encountered:  doubt.  And we can’t have that!  Why, it caused him to divert all the way from the real issue, which is the right of women to control what happens when they get pregnant, to assisted suicide and other Dark Thoughts he attempts to throw over the issue like what we might call belief blankets.

Get this:  he’s promising to take up yet “another argument that’s circulated since the fall of Roe,” and golly-gee, I just can’t wait!