Libs and cons both hypocritical on abortion clinic regulations?
When any other industry is being discussed, most liberals believe the correct level of regulation, always, is: more.
… [Media] sensibilities have given us a seemingly endless train of special investigative series aimed at demonstrating how dangerously under-regulated we are….
[T]hanks to [Virginia’s] new clinic rules, progressives are discovering regulations really do cost real people real money. This, too, is a far cry from their usual stance, which entails hostile skepticism toward any claim that complying with a government rule might enfeeble business. Indeed, the public is often fed disingenuous drivel about what a great economic boon the new rules will be: If a factory has to install new equipment or a power company has to meet a higher green-energy standard, why, just think of all the new jobs that will create! The same nonsense could apply to the new clinic requirements, which are creating a lot of business for the construction trade. Funny how this argument hasn’t shown up in the abortion debate….
And yes, there is certainly a flip side to all of this. Conservative knees usually jerk in reflexive opposition to any new government regulation. The standard Republican line holds that most new regulations have little to do with health and safety and much more to do with anti-business attitudes. In this case, conservatives happen to be right — yet they vehemently insist otherwise.
~ A. Barton Hinkle, who believes the solution to all business regulation – including abortion clinics – is “to limit government power,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, August 5
[Image via stkarnick.com]
Jill Stanek is a nurse turned speaker, columnist and blogger, a national figure in the effort to protect both preborn and postborn innocent human life.
The standard Republican line holds that most new regulations have little to do with health and safety and much more to do with anti-business attitudes. In this case, conservatives happen to be right — yet they vehemently insist otherwise.
I didn’t think we made any secret of the fact that our push for increased abortion regulations was an incremental attempt–side-by-side with an All Out attempt–to put them out of business! I suppose, then, that the flipside is also true–their insistence on ever increasing regulations on, for example, the internal combustion engine, is an incremental approach to eradicating it! Come on now: Lay your cards on the table!
“Funny how this argument hasn’t shown up in the abortion debate….”
Funny how A. Barton Hinkle doesn’t seem to realize that abortion is the killing of fellow human beings.
I don’t know a whole lot of conservatives who think no regulations of any kind at all are a good thing. After all, if you can’t regulate against harmful trusts or monopolies, the market will stop working all together. What I usually hear is minimal regulations. So, while there are some conservatives who this is true for, I’m feeling like, once again, someone in the media is misrepresenting the conservative view. …Must be a day ending in “Y” then.
Alice, don’t you think that maybe the misrepresentation is going both ways?
“When any other industry is being discussed, most liberals believe the correct level of regulation, always, is: more.”
@Alexandra: Yes, I do agree that that is happening. I just don’t feel as confident talking about the liberal POV because I don’t agree with it and am therefore more likely to misrepresent it myself (which isn’t very helpful). So I figured I’d let our left-wingy regulars tackle that bit. ;)
Given that these are establishments whose purpose is to kill human beings, it seems reasonable to want to at least regulate them. I don’t think unregulated killing is somehow a conservative principle.
It’s only hypocritical if you lock yourself into a rigid political ideology (liberal or conservative) and refuse to endorse any policy that diverts from it. If you reject this dichotomy and consider whether or not the regulation will have a desirable effect on society (making abortion rarer and less dangerous for women), there’s no problem (even if you come to the conclusion that most regulations are bad and like to call yourself a conservative).
Hinkle states the obvious. Wile E Cyote, super genius.
Abortion is a bad business, in fact, it is a deadly business. Pro-Life Conservatives want to regulate the abortion industry because they wish it didn’t exist. They are not so much pro-regulation as they are anti-abortion.
That fact Pro-Life conservatives know that regulation, generally speaking, does help to put businesses out of business, and then applies regulations to the abortion industry they don’t think is a legitimate business, is not only logical, but it is the implementation of their sound understanding of how the economy works. Pro-Life conservatives, not even most libertarian conservatives, think every business is legitimate.
Progressives, on the otherhand, want to regulate every business, no matter what that business does. The fact that they don’t want to regulate abortion is an anomaly for them. I would argue that Progressives are being hypocritical, while Pro-Life Conservatives are being shrewd.
The conservatives hates big government except when it comes to women’s bodies. And the only reason why these regulations are passed (in conservative states) is because the pro-lifers want to limit access to abortions which those silly gals are just coerced into anyway…
Hospitals are regulated with regard to public safety.
Why should abortion clinics be less regulated with regard to safety than dentists, restaurants, hospitals etc?
I think the article is missing an important distinction. Liberals do seem to believe *all* regulations are good, the singular exception being abortion clinics. But I think it is very disengenious to say Conservations likewise believe *all* regulations are bad with the singular exception being abortion clinics. Conservatives (pro-life or not) tend to consider things more specifically. I don’t even know any hard core Libertarians, much less standard Conservatives, who think health care, hospitals, doctors, etc should be unregulated. Likewise regulations for police, fire stations, EMTs, millitary are understood to be necessary (although certainly they *can* be overdone!). It’s the messing with private businesses *just* to mess with them that Conservatives disagree with. It’s the pro-choice side that screams abortion is ‘health care’, abortionists are just another type of doctor, and that abortion clinics are ‘women’s healthcare clinics’. That Conservatives expect the laws that apply to *other* doctors, clinics, and health care practices should also apply to the abortion industry is being consistent with both what the liberals *claim* to believe and with the standard Conservative belief that areas of ‘business’ that directly manipulate/augment/alter/etc the human body (various medicinal, health care, or quasi-medical businesses plus things like tattoo or peircing parlors) or ‘businesses’ that put a few in great power over the many (which applies both to things like police and governmental social agents as well as many medicinal businesses like hospitals where informed consent must be agressively protected) *must* be subject to regulations for the protection of the citizens and their rights.
Good point, Jespren. Progressives by default give government the benefit of the doubt, conservatives by default don’t trust it. Progressives tend to think conservatives want government to disappear, and conservatives suppose progressives see no limit to government’s legitimate expansion into more and more areas.
I think this is pretty much the divide that characterized America in colonial days, which led to the revolutionary war. The loyalists really appreciated the rule of a strong executive ruling centrally from afar. The revolutionaries set up a form of government not to compete as the same kind of thing with England’s monarch, but to be a different kind of thing altogether. In some sense, progressives have been conditioned by lack of tyranny to trust government per se — whereas the reason we’ve had little tyranny is because the revolutionaries institutionalized checks and balances that assume government will be tyrannical, if given too much leash.
So progressives imagine that government is wonderful because our institutionally self-mistrusting government has not been tyrannical, and amid this wonder they hold for government they figure it’s now safe to give government more power — to disentangle government from its fetters and let it stretch its legs.
Conservatives wish to conserve the memory of why we tied this thing down with strong cords in the first place. And for preserving history’s lessons against those intent on repeating its mistakes, they’re deemed quaint, reactionary, right-wing, dangerous, or worse.
Then, of course, when government unleashed gets worse, the blame will fall on conservatives for holding it back from expanding its inevitable beneficence sufficiently to solve our problems.
Ya just can’t win with these people.
CC: You realize, of course, that your progressive pedigree owes a debt, in your neck of the woods, to Puritans who believed the purpose of government was to enforce virtue?
Just wondering how it feels to be the product of a theocratic worldview…