Blumenthal, Abortion and Morality

Blumenthal -- Pesci

Walgreens has aroused U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal’s ire, easily aroused during his 20 year reign as Connecticut’s Attorney General.

“Walgreens has succumbed,” said Connecticut’s U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal in a recent Hartford Courant news story, “it has caved cravenly, cowardly to this bullying and intimidation. Walgreens should know better. Walgreens has simply thrown up its hands and said ‘women lose, you win.’ That’s not the law. And that’s not moral (emphasis mine). It’s not acceptable.’

“On March 2, Walgreens announced that it would not sell mifepristone, an abortifacient, in 21 red states after threats of legal action from those states by Republican Attorneys General. Connecticut is not one of those states.

“Mifepristone is the first part of a two-drug regimen for a medication abortion, the most common way to end a pregnancy.”

As Attorney General of Connecticut for two decades before he moved on to the U.S. Senate, Blumenthal, with a bracing wind of 200 lawyers at his back, had engaged in a great deal of pushing and shoving, if not outright bullying.

“U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal and health advocates,” the story tells us, “are asking [emphasis mine] Walgreens to reverse what they say is its decision to ‘put profits and politics’ over people, by denying millions of people access to abortion pills in their stores.”

Walgreens’ position on the selling of mifepristone is legally proper and prudent. The company will provide the product in states that have not declared the selling of mifepristone illegal and punishable under state law, but the company, unlike many lawyer-politicians, does not wish to become embroiled in costly legal action.

Blumenthal, according to the story, “also said that 21 Attorneys General have said they’re going to sue not only Walgreens, but other pharmacies if they make mifepristone unavailable.”

Now, the use of the word “asking” in the above graph is hilariously imprecise and, in view of Blumenthal’s admonition that Walgreens may be brought to court by 21 pro-abortion Attorneys General for having aligned itself with state laws, it is also equally ironic, a prime example of pots calling kettles black.

To put it in clear language, if Walgreens persists in accommodating the laws of various states, the company will be sued by pro-abortion activists Attorneys General in the 21 states whose pro-abortion laws Walgreens has pledged to honor.

Who among all these pushers and shovers is the bully?

Blumenthal is simply wrong on both points he raised in the Courant story. The refusal by Walgreens to distribute mifepristone in states in which the distribution violates state law cannot be “illegal.”

Indeed, during his long career as Attorney General in Connecticut, much of Blumenthal’s effort as “the peoples’ Attorney General” was devoted to the prosecution of both people and businesses he determined to be non-compliant with state laws.

Neither is Walgreens’ compliance with state laws “immoral.”

For centuries, among Jews and early Christians in the Roman Empire, abortion was thought to be both legal and immoral. During the pre-Christian Roman Empire, the paterfamilias, the male head of household, could legally induce his wife or daughter to get an abortion, and the paterfamilias also practiced what was called “exposure” on unwanted born infants. The unwanted born child, often female, was taken by the father to a hostile environment, a snow covered height, for instance, and there left to die of exposure. It was the Christian ethical assault on paganism that eventually brought both practices to an end.

It simply makes no sense to imply that pro-abortionism is an ethic that must be defended by a state clothed in pre-Christian morality. Likewise, it is anti-scientific to claim that a fetus, at any stage of its development, is no more than “a part of a woman’s body,” as are the usual bodily organs, a diseased liver for instance or an extracted wisdom tooth.

But common sense, a rational understanding of history, the claims of an authoritative “science” worthy of its name, and a humanistic compassion for defenseless human life, are beyond the ken of politicians who must depend, as Blumenthal does, upon Planned Parenthood for their monetary support and moral unction.

If it is indeed immoral to oppose abortion at any stage of fetal development – roughly Blumenthal’s position on abortion -- why is it not equally immoral for scientists and historians and theologians and ethicists to oppose, let’s say, late-stage abortion on what they conceive to be scientific, historical, theological and ethical grounds? If killing a fetus, without sound medical reasons, is moral, does it not follow that silencing opposition to such anti-abortionists is also a high moral undertaking?

Planned Parenthood, which contributes more than a widow’s mite to Blumenthal’s various campaigns, may have found at last in Blumenthal a worthy pro-abortion high priest.