Jonah Goldberg: Republicans Want to Leave Healthcare Choices Up to Women

 

 

 

How is it possible to get so much wrong about the right? Writing for National Review, old white man Jonah Goldberg delves into What ‘Women’s Health’ Really Means.

He’s perplexed that “women’s health” is often code for “abortion” when:

The biggest killer of women is heart disease, followed by cancer, then stroke. I couldn’t find “lack of a timely abortion” on the CDC list.

That could be because Republicans’ repeated attempts to restrict abortion have been mostly unsuccessful. According to the Guttmacher Institute, unsafe abortion is a significant cause of ill-health among women in developing countries, where highly restrictive abortion laws are positively associated with negative health consequences from unsafe abortion.

Goldberg is upset because President Obama is smearing Republicans. “President Obama — and nearly every other abortion-rights supporter — blithely accuses Republicans of wanting to make women’s ‘health-care choices’ for them.”

Conservatives want to leave it to women to make their own choices.

Once you get beyond abortion, conservative public policies treat women like autonomous human beings capable of making their own choices — about health care or anything else.

I’m not sure how to describe forcing women who have miscarriages to report them to the state, forcing women to get a transvaginal ultrasound before abortion, or forcing women to get an ultrasound before they can get birth control as anything other than “wanting to make women’s ‘health-care choices’ for them.”

I don’t know, maybe these particular Republican lawmakers don’t represent Republicans as a whole. But if they don’t, isn’t it then up to Republicans to actually cry foul and actively distance themselves from these terrible laws? I haven’t seen Jonah Goldberg repudiate these infringements on women’s liberty. Pretending your party is down with women’s healthcare choices and then claiming it is doesn’t come anywhere close to making that true.