Yeesh

If there’s one good thing I can say about the nomination of Scalito to the SCOTUS, it’s that it has revealed exactly how deeply entrenched real, old-school sexism is among conservatives. Enter the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto with his take on Scalito’s Casey dissent regarding “spousal” notification, filed under the headline Pro-Wife Extremism:

By 1992, when the high court decided Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the right to marital privacy had somehow morphed into a woman's right to abort her husband's child without telling him. The court's privacy jurisprudence has become simply a matter of five justices' policy preferences, unmoored from any limiting principle. You don't have to be a pro-life absolutist to object to this exercise in pro-wife extremism.

A woman’s right to abort her husband’s child without telling him. Not their child, and certainly not her child. Her husband’s child. If one was learning about the birds and the bees from Taranto’s column, one might draw the conclusion that a woman is nothing more than a vessel for a child her husband wished into existence, or that men plant their seeds in the back garden for their wives to dutifully water until they bloom into children.

Spousal notification is just a back door for conservatives to control women’s bodies and choices, granting permission to a husband that the government no longer has. What’s the difference between a government being able to force a woman to carry an unwanted child and her husband being able to force the same? The husband may have contributed to the pregnancy, but the inevitability of the woman’s necessarily having some association with that man via the child for the next 18 years (at least) outweighs his interest. That isn’t radical; it’s a recognition of the reality that most women who would seek an abortion without their husbands’ knowledge have good reason to do so. Exacerbating that problem by inextricably linking the couple together, not to mention bringing a child into the picture, serves no altruistic purpose.

The insistence of Taranto, and others like him, on pretending it isn’t only the most desperate women who abort pregnancies without discussing it with their partners is extreme—extremely dishonest, extremely unsympathetic, and extremely revealing. Giving a woman autonomous choice over her body isn’t pro-wife extremism, but giving a man control over his wife’s body just might be pro-husband in the extreme.

(Hat tip to Joshua Holland at The Gadflyer.)