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Poor Attempt to Defend Abortion Rights

Poor Attempt to Defend Abortion Rights

August 14 - 2019
By: Alexandra Desanctis - nationalreview.com -
The Harvard Law professor has trouble with basic facts — or perhaps he prefers to disregard them to suit his agenda.A cherished myth of abortion-rights supporters is making the rounds again, this time peddled by someone who should know better: Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe. Despite having argued dozens of cases before the United States Supreme Court, Tribe evidently has difficulty uncovering basic facts. Or perhaps, like most blind defenders of the right to kill unborn human beings, he simply disregards them as needed to suit his agenda. On Sunday, the esteemed professor asserted that white supremacists oppose abortion. He then used this false claim to insinuate a sinister connection between racist and pro-life views:

Lawrence Tribe ✔ @tribelaw White Supremacists oppose abortion because they fear it’ll reduce the number of white infants and thus contribute to what they fear as non-white “replacement.” Never underestimate the way these issues and agendas are linked. This turns “intersectionality” on its head. 17.1K 12:23 PM - Aug 11, 2019

Here Tribe manages to get everything wrong but the part that undermines his argument. There is indeed a link between abortion and white supremacists’ concern about “non-white replacement.” It is precisely because of this fear that white supremacists and members of the alt-Right have long supported legal abortion, applauding the fact that minority women abort their children at disproportionate rates.
Nevertheless, assertions such as Tribe’s frequently appear among those who advocate abortion, most often in an effort to dismiss the entire pro-life movement as tarnished by the support of racists. It’s a nasty, dishonest campaign, and even Tribe has shame enough to know it. After facing criticism for botching the facts, he wrote another tweet yesterday morning, insisting he hadn’t implied that all abortion opponents are white supremacists. One would think a man who instructed current Supreme Court justices would be intelligent enough to develop a more convincing defense. It is one thing — and a heinous thing, at that — to privilege a woman’s right to autonomy so highly that it overrides even the rights of a distinct human being growing inside her. But it is another entirely to declare that those who favor protecting every human being’s right to life are, in fact, “pro-death.” In defense of abortion on demand, Tribe has little use for salient arguments and even less for intellectual rigor.
One need only do the barest amount of research to discover that Richard Spencer, a leading white supremacist, is highly supportive of legalized abortion, because, as he puts it, “the people who are having abortions are generally very often black or Hispanic or from very poor circumstances.” White women, Spencer notes, avail themselves of abortion “when you have a situation like Down Syndrome” — an acceptable use, in his twisted view. Meanwhile, Spencer says, “the unintelligent and blacks and Hispanics . . . use abortion as birth control.” Statistically speaking, the legal-abortion regime in the U.S. has lived up to white supremacists’ hopes. An African-American woman is nearly three times as likely as a white woman to have an abortion, according to pro-choice research group the Guttmacher Institute. Centers for Disease Control data indicate that African Americans accounted for 36 percent of abortions in 2015 despite being only about 13 percent of the population. To see the remainder of this article and others by Ms. Desanctis, click read more.
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Source: Laurence Tribe's Defense of Abortion Rights: Trouble with Basic Facts | National Review