Chelsea has always been our favorite Clinton, ever since she was going to school here, and keeping her family together through the Washington years. We remember wincing one Saturday night in the 1990s when SNL made fun of her looks, and we hoped the young lady hadn't been watching. We found out from the papers that Chelsea--still in her teens--had been, and her mother called NBC to give them a piece of her mind. Call it Hillary Clinton's finest hour.
Even though she is, as we say in these latitudes, a full-growed woman now, there's still a special place in the hearts of many Arkies for Chelsea Clinton. We hope she takes this criticism as constructive:
Don't bring up economics when extolling the benefits of abortion. It's unseemly.
Chelsea Clinton was at something called a Rise Up for Roe event, which is an unfortunate name to begin with. The kids killed by that decision will never rise up. They'll never awake. Most won't even cry.
At this meeting of the (pro-abortion) minds, Chelsea Clinton gave a speech, explaining the correlation between Roe and the number of women entering the workforce since the early 1970s:
"Whether you fundamentally care about reproductive rights and access, right, because these are not the same thing, if you care about social justice or economic justice, agency--you have to care about this," she said.
She added: "It is not a disconnected fact ... that American women entering the labor force from 1973 to 2009 added three and a half trillion dollars to our economy. Right? The net, new entrance of women--that is not disconnected from the fact that Roe became the law of the land in January of 1973."
We'd say nice try, but it really wasn't. It was an awful try.
Those who oppose abortion do so on moral grounds, not economic ones. Didn't Jonathan Swift write "A Modest Proposal" in the 18th century? It was satire back then, to sell poor kids for meat to help the Irish economy. Today, it's an American argument.
If abortion is murder, and not just the removal of some tissue like any other unwanted growth, then no amount of money is going to make it right. And as for the trauma that a woman might feel years after the procedure . . . maybe she could look at her 401(k) and make it all better.
Some might argue that the 600,000-plus abortions in this country--every year--might have produced a lot of workers who would have added something to the economy as well. But as soon as you take that step, you're making an economic argument and you've fallen into Chelsea Clinton's premise. Let's not.
This state's official Board of Health voted last year to use the word "death" when describing an abortion. That is, the board decided to use the language to accurately describe what's going on. Which is unusual enough in the abortion debate.
Surely even Chelsea Clinton's most excited supporters at the Rise Up for Roe event would admit that the kid involved in any human abortion--excuse us, the fetus involved--is human itself, right? It's not an elephant or caterpillar or mushroom. And it is alive. So to snuff it would make it dead, right? Thus the word "death." And thus the debate--on moral grounds.
Those who support this American way of death have always tried to shield it from view. To abort a child is called Pregnancy Related Services. To support the Supreme Court's abortion decision is called being Pro-Choice. The abortion offices are called Clinics, the better to make the places sound more like places where health care is provided, instead of exactly the opposite. Don't even get us started on Planned Parenthood.
We suppose it might save the state of Arkansas a lot of money to deep-six every state inmate, foster child, nursing home resident or anybody else who pays fewer tax dollars than it takes to support them. We could take out any gold fillings, too. But there's a word for that: murder.
For some of us, our principles won't allow it. We have our souls to think about.
Chelsea Clinton is young. As a wise man once advised, everybody should make their mistakes while they're young. For who learns from success? It may be from mistakes that we learn our greatest lessons.
So we're going to chalk this up to a bad day, a bad speech, a bad case made for an unsound opinion. And no doubt it was all welcomed with applause at the event. Which says a lot about modern America. But nothing good.
Editorial on 08/19/2018