When Raul Labrador defeated conservative Democrat Walt Minnick to become my new congressman in 2010, I prepared to endure plenty of affronts from the right-wing ideologue.
Dishonesty wasn't one of them.
At least, I told myself, this guy doesn't hide who he is and where he wants to take the nation. Since he joined the Idaho Legislature, he has been clear about his policy agenda, to get the government into regulating Americans' private lives and out of nearly everything else.
But that was before the United States Supreme Court threw out state laws making it much harder for women to end unwanted pregnancies by requiring clinics performing abortions to jump over ever-higher hurdles. When it did that the other day, Labrador adopted the claim from Texas, the state whose law came before the court, and other opponents of legal abortion that the laws sought primarily to protect women's health.
"I am deeply disappointed that the Supreme Court has sided with the abortion industry and erased health and safety protections for innocent women and unborn children," Labrador said in a prepared statement. "The decision means abandoning common-sense clinical standards and the perpetuation of abuse and negligence."
The precautions and standards Labrador referred to are those that required much more from doctors and clinics performing abortions than from those offering other procedures that sometimes pose far greater risk to the people undergoing them.
Take as just one example colonoscopy, something that most adults of advanced age - men and women both - have experienced once or more, four times in my case. Although laws do not require the doctors performing the procedure to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital, or their clinics to meet certain hospital standards as the Texas law did, the risk of death resulting from colonoscopy is many times greater than that from abortion.
Specifically, it is 40 times greater, Jeanne Conry, former president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, told Kaiser Health News.
Abuse?
Negligence?
In short, then, the claim by proponents of the Texas law and others like it that they are aimed mainly at protecting women's health is demonstrably false. It is a lie, one so obvious that even Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, a Catholic and no fan of abortion, could not let it justify laws that have caused many clinics offering abortions to close. So Kennedy joined four other justices to scrap the laws.
Yes, the decision was a victory for legal abortion, but it was also a victory for truthfulness, something you would think those who say morality dictates their objection to abortion on moral grounds might be concerned with. Lately, however, I wonder about that.
I wonder why, for example, the so-called pro-life community reacted so strongly against presidential candidate Donald Trump's assertion that if abortion is again criminalized, women paying to get one should be penalized. Abortion is murder, many pro-lifers say, so why shouldn't people ordering one - including not just pregnant women, but prospective fathers and anyone else contributing to such an order - be prosecuted?
Consider Ruth Coe of Spokane, who sought to hire a hit man to kill the judge presiding over her son's trial for serial rape. She didn't succeed, but she was still imprisoned for her attempt. Did she not deserve it?
I know, anti-abortionists say women are not the guilty parties in abortions; they are somehow victims of the evil doctors they hire. But what sense does that make? I have yet to hear of any doctors forcing women to enter their offices and submit to a procedure the women oppose. As a matter of law, anyone participating in an illegal act is customarily held accountable for it.
Most Americans would strongly reject any attempt to prosecute such women, of course, just as the Constitution now rejects any legislation imposing an undue burden on them, according to the Supreme Court. And that explains this second whopper from opponents of legal abortion.
One final point: If Labrador and other critics of the Supreme Court's support of legal abortion are truly motivated by what they say they are, when will they stop trying to junk the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, which has provided health insurance to some 20 million people - about half of them women - who otherwise would go without it?
Until that day arrives, the least they can do is spare us the crapola about seeking to protect women's health.
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Fisher is the former editor of the Tribune's Opinion page. His email address is cfandjf@frontier.com.
