#Dems’ #TexasTaliban slander of pro-lifers is downright obscene

A new Texas law that drastically restricts abortion didn’t just spawn outrage from progressives. It also created a Twitter hashtag — #TexasTaliban — that trended as liberal celebrities and their followers vented their outrage at the prospect of the end of legal abortion in the Lone Star State. They spared neither the state’s legislators nor the conservative US Supreme Court majority that declined to stop the law from being implemented.

Part of this is just business as usual in American politics in 2021. We’re long past the point where civility was a concern on either side of the aisle. Too many Democrats and Republicans tend to consider their opponents evil, rather than merely mistaken. Calling each other abusive names is how both sides react to every controversy.

But the analogy between the Texas law and the Taliban — who, thanks to President Joe Biden, have returned to power in Afghanistan — isn’t just a stray epithet. It’s an obscene moral equivalence that delegitimizes one side of a debate over which reasonable Americans disagree.

As important, it also demonstrates that liberals haven’t a clue about the difference between the real war on women being waged by Islamist groups like the Taliban, on one hand, and their fellow citizens who think an unwanted or inconvenient pregnancy isn’t a sufficient reason to snuff out a human life, on the other.

Ironies abound in the abortion debate. The same people who say that no one should have the right to tell a woman what to do with her body also think that the “our bodies, ourselves” motto doesn’t apply to those who don’t want to take COVID vaccines. Others argue that anti-abortion efforts are an example of male oppression — ignoring that women have been leading the pro-life movement throughout its history; pioneering feminists like Susan B. Anthony were militantly anti-abortion.

The moral inconsistency of abortion advocates is also glaring. Thanks to advances in prenatal science since the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade in 1973, some of those who demand an absolute right to abortion also post pictures of fetal sonograms on social media and have gender-reveal parties, in effect conceding the humanity of unborn children.

Still, many Americans have qualms about a statute that restricts most abortions after six weeks. The Texas law, which calls for private citizens to enforce it via lawsuits (so as to make it easier for the courts to uphold), also raises serious constitutional questions.

Most of the advocacy on this question has always come from either those who believe all abortions should be banned or those who insist on abortion on demand until birth (and sometimes beyond it). Meanwhile, polls have consistently shown that a plurality of Americans are in the mushy middle. They don’t want a complete ban but favor strong restrictions, including parental consent for minors.

That won’t change. Liberals think the Texas law will transform American politics, but the college-educated women who are the angriest about it abandoned the pro-life GOP for the Democrats a few election cycles ago.

The left believes that conservatives dream of living in the Gilead of “The Handmaid’s Tale” novels, a dystopian fantasy in which religious Christians tyrannize women. But it fails to see that the only real-life analogy to that vision is what is happening in Islamist societies like Afghanistan. There, the religious oppression of women is total. Women are treated like chattel, forced to wear burqas, refused the right to an education and even to reject marriages. That many of those using this hashtag didn’t bat an eye about the victory of the actual Taliban renders their talking point especially risible.

By contrast, American pro-lifers merely argue that unborn children shouldn’t be killed. One can disagree with their belief that life begins at conception, though the science is on their side. Many Americans insist on the mother’s autonomy as a priority, though, again, most also support some restrictions.

But to assert that opponents of abortion are oppressors of women or in any way comparable to the Taliban is both unfair and trivializes real misogynistic tyranny.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of JNS.org.

Twitter: @jonathanS_Tobin