If advocates of “reproductive choice” would argue against “a woman’s right to choose” when that choice involved having kids like the mother of the recently born octuplets.

Look at this from Ellen Goodman.

Does anyone have a right to tell anyone else how many kids to have? Can only people who can afford them bear children? Do you need a husband to have a baby? These are questions that make us feel queasy when we are talking about old-fashioned families. But they take on a new flavor in the unregulated wild west of fertility technology.

* * *

This is more than an individual decision. Suleman's babies weighed between 1 pound 8 ounces and 3 pounds 4 ounces. They will cost at least $1 million in neonatal care and more if they have the typical range of disabilities for premature babies. The meter is running at the neonatal unit.

“More than an individual decision”? What about the “my body, my choice” rhetoric of the feminist movement over the last four decade? Is Goodman really advocating that childbearing is not a decision best left between a woman and her doctor? Does she now advocate that some government bureaucrat be able to step in and determine who can have children through in vitro methods, and how many? And when she defines the decision by Nadya Suleman to have eight embryos implanted as “mal-mothering” because of her unwillingness to abort, does she not recognize the implicit slippery slope that leads to China’s one child policy with its regime of forced abortions (or its functional equivalent)? For that matter, does this advocate of nationalizing medicine not see that her complaints about the cost of saving these babies presages eventual government decisions to limit and deny care that is “too expensive”, even if it leads to the deaths of some to whom government has magnanimously given “free healthcare”?

Odd, isnÂ’t it, how a liberal like Goodman becomes shockingly illiberal when she does not approve of how some exercise the freedom which she advocates. And amazing, too, that she does not appear to see (or care about) the Big Brother-esque implications of her own arguments. More proof that within every well-intentioned liberal there is a moralistic dictator trying to claw his/her way out.

H/T Don Surber

Posted by: Greg at 12:28 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 386 words, total size 3 kb.