SUNDAY, MAY 15 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A33P
atience might not b e among the
special skills possessed by those
harassing Supreme Court jus-
tices outside their homes. But a
little more patience could prove more
productive for abortion rights advo-
cates as well as for our fragile republic.
Our Supreme Court is part of what
separates us from the barbarians who
settle differences not by the rule of law
but b y violence. We’re not t here y et, but
we appear to be closing in on the last
barricade between civility and anarchy.
Protest is an American staple, but
the harassment of Supreme Court
justices at their homes should frighten
all Americans.
For some protesters and commenta-
tors, however, this is no time for
“civility.” CNN anchor Laura Jarrett,
daughter of former top Obama adviser
Valerie Jarrett, said that talking about
civility “misses the mark” when repro-
ductive freedom is at stake. Defenders
of these neighborhood demonstra-
tions charge the high court with
hypocrisy in allowing antiabortion
activists to protest near abortion clin-
ics while demanding privacy at their
homes.
There’s an obvious difference, but
I’m not immune to the point: Demand-
ing respect for one’s own domain while
blocking a woman’s autonomy over her
own body could trigger some fairly
strong resentment, to put it mildly.
If Roe v. Wade i s reversed, more t han
half of the states already have laws on
the b ooks that would trigger some kind
of ban on abortion. Between January
and early May last year, 549 abortion
restrictions were introduced in
47 states, according to the pro-choice
Guttmacher Institute. Since then, re-
strictions have only increased. Texas
has banned abortion after six weeks
and allows anyone to sue anyone else
who performs or helps a person obtain
an abortion.
By now, most people are familiar
with the arguments for and against the
procedure, which boils down not to
when human life begins but: When
does it matter? When the fetus is
viable? When it feels pain? When it is
ensouled? Welcome to the head of a
pin.
These aren’t the issues before the
Supreme Court, nor are they of most
urgent concern to women (and men)
who value their bodily autonomy
against government intervention. The
question is whether the Constitution’s
privacy protections extend to women’s
reproductive organs.
To the strict textualists, they do not.
In the leaked draft opinion, Justice
Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote that “ Roe was
egregiously wrong from the start” and
that “its reasoning was exceptionally
weak, and the decision has had damag-
ing c onsequences.” N o argument on the
last part.
But shouldn’t Alito & Co. also con-
sider whether the Founding Fathers
were really capable of wrestling with
women’s rights or privacy in the 1780 s,
much less women’s reproductive
rights? Given that women weren’t
allowed to vote until 1920, my safe
guess is: not so much.
Most Western societies, including
most European countries, settled this
along reasonable lines. A majority of
European Union countries allow abor-
tion within the first trimester of preg-
nancy. Sweden, the most liberal among
them, allows abortion until the
18 th week. Compromise has been im-
possible here in part because the
pro-choice side argues that the female
body (and all parts and attachments
thereto) is off limits to government.
I’d rather we find a middle ground.
We now have a country in which
various practices are banned in some
states and legal in others. Through
better education, we should tell the
complete story of abortion. It isn’t only
about a woman’s right to choose but is
also an avoidable death in the human
family. May your conscience be your
guide.
Soon enough — by late June or early
July — we will know where this court
lands. The court’s conservative majori-
ty might well decide that Roe was
wrongly decided, toss the precedent
and send the abortion question back to
the states to sort out.
But another possibility hovers in
the near distance: Brett M. Ka-
vanaugh, considered a swing justice
by some, might settle for a narrow
compromise, allowing Mississippi to
keep its 15 -week limit on abortion but
stepping back from a complete rever-
sal of Roe. He has surprised us before,
as when he sided with liberal justices
in a lawsuit against Apple over app
prices — a move that prompted some
to question his conservative bona
fides. He could surprise again, siding
with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.
on this issue.
Unfortunately, the protests outside
his house make it more difficult for
Kavanaugh to join Roberts as a moder-
ating force. No o ne likes t o be b ullied or
seen as bowing to the rabble. For
everyone’s sake, patience and, yes,
civility might be the better strategy for
preserving Roe — and the future of the
republic.KATHLEEN PARKERStay awayfrom myhouse — andmy wombLetitia James, New York’s attor-
ney general, recently told a rally
supporting Roe v. Wade that
when she got her abortion, “I
walked proudly into Planned Parent-
hood.” How did we descend to the p oint
where an abortion is, for some, what?
An achievement? A statement? Some-
how an occasion for pride?
In 1992, candidate Bill Clinton, cu-
rating his persona as a moderate, said
abortion should be “safe, legal and
rare.” Seeking reelection in 1996, his
party’s platform said, “Our goal is to
make abortion l ess necessary a nd more
rare.” The 2004 platform said, “Abor-
tion should be safe, legal, and rare.”
Hillary Clinton used that formulation
in her campaign for the Democrats’
200 8 nomination.
In 201 2, however, the word “rare”
was expunged from the platform and,
soon, from many progressives’ rheto-
ric. Many of that persuasion consid-
ered it unprogressive to wish for abor-
tions to be rare because to wish this is
to suggest, however obliquely, that
abortion might not be a matter of
complete moral indifference. That,
even within America’s extraordinarily
permissive (see below) abortion re-
gime, there is something about abor-
tion that should occasion at least
ambivalence.
Douglas Murray, associate editor of
the Spectator, recently explained to his
mostly British readers “What America
Gets Right About the Abortion Debate.”
Many Europeans, although most of
them live under much more restrictive
abortion laws than all Americans do,
consider the mere fact of the U. S. de-
bate to be evidence of America’s back-
wardness — tardiness in getting on
“the right side of history.” Murray
thinks:
“The fact that America still regards
abortion as a serious moral issue seems
to me to be a demonstration that
America is still a serious moral country.
It recognises that here is one of the
great moral issues: the question of life,
and the encouragement or otherwise of
its cessation. It is not settled on the
matter, nor does it imagine there is a
clear direction of moral travel directed
by the passage of time.”
With the exception of the tiny
minority who are as morally cal-
loused, intellectually obtuse and polit-
ically motivated as James, most Amer-
icans surely think as Murray does:
“Why walk ‘proudly’ into an abortion
clinic? Surely under any circum-
stances it is a situation that is sad, to
say the least?”
The admirable American debate oc-
curs within s ome nondebatable param-
eters, beginning with this: Human life
begins at conception, a conclusion not
of abstruse philosophy or theology but
of elementary biology. But this is not,
as many abortion opponents think,
where the debate about abortion ends.
Rather, for most Americans it begins
here: When is it reasonable — in some
sense objective, because visible — to
see a human person?
This is why technological develop-
ment has done much to stabilize the
politics of abortion by enlarging and
solidifying the ambivalent majority in
the middle. Vastly improved sono-
grams present vivid pictures of small
persons in utero, with beating hearts,
and sucking their thumbs. Persons
who, in the formulation of one anti-
abortion activist, can hear their moth-
ers’ heartbeats.
Americans who believe in a “right to
life” are right that, absent a mishap or
an abortion, the life that begins at
conception becomes, in utero, recog-
nizably a person. But when?
The abortion debate that the Su-
preme Court’s calendar has ignited is
compelling Americans to consider
what abortion policy ought to be but
first to recognize what the United
States’ policy is: an extreme outlier. In
39 of the 42 European nations that
permit elective abortions, the basic
limit is at 15 weeks of pregnancy or
earlier. In 32 of the 39, the limit is at
12 weeks or earlier. Worldwide, fewer
than a dozen countries allow abortions
after 20 weeks of pregnancy on any
grounds.
In 1 975, two years after Roe was
decided, Archibald Cox, Harvard law
professor and former U. S. solicitor
general under President John F. Ken-
nedy, said in a lecture at Oxford
University: “The [ Roe v. Wade ] opinion
fails even to consider what I would
suppose to be the most important
compelling interest of the State in
prohibiting abortion: the interest in
maintaining that respect for the para-
mount sanctity of human life which
has always been at the center of
Western civilization.” That interest,
although perhaps unintelligible to the
likes of James, is important to the
broad American majority.
This majority might soon have the
dignified task of instructing their e lect-
ed representatives to codify, state by
state, community standards about the
onset of personhood. An acorn is not
an oak tree; an oak sapling is. The
burden of intelligence, and self-
g overnment, is that distinctions must
be drawn.GEORGE F. WILLThe abortiondebate hasnondebatableparametersBY NANCY PELOSIOn June 4, the world will mark
33 years since the Tiananmen
Square massacre.
On that day — a date that is
seared into the consciousness of all
freedom-loving people — we remem-
ber one of the greatest acts of political
courage in modern times. Beijing’s
horrific slaughter of its own citizens
crushed the protest but could not
extinguish the flame of freedom that
burned in their hearts.
Yet, a generation later, Beijing is
fighting harder than ever to extin-
guish that flame. Indeed, over the
past 30 years, the Chinese Commu-
nist Party’s appalling human rights
record and repression of political
freedoms have only worsened.
On Wednesday, Beijing launched
its latest assault: ordering the arrest
of 90 -year-old Cardinal Joseph Zen,
bishop emeritus of Hong Kong. Zen
was charged with “colluding with
foreign forces,” after serving as a
trustee of a now-disbanded relief
fund providing criminal defense to
those charged in cases involving free-
dom of speech and expression. Four
colleagues — barrister Margaret Ng
and singer-activist Denise Ho, schol-
ar Hui Po-keung and former Legisla-
tive Council member Cyd Ho — were
also rounded up under the same
pretext.
Zen is an outspoken champion of
democracy in the Catholic communi-
ty, advocating for religious liberty in
Hong Kong and, in 20 16, urging the
Vatican to reject an agreement that
would give the People’s Republic of
China say over the ordination of
bishops. But he is not only a leader of
Hong Kong’s and other Chinese Cath-
olics. To a broader audience, he is acritical voice of conscience: an em-
bodiment of moral fortitude, who has
been a constant presence as Hong
Kong has led a decades-long pursuit
of the freedoms promised with the
handover from British rule.
These arrests are part of a severe
crackdown enabled by the 2020 so-
called national security law, designed
to eliminate all dissent in Hong Kong.
Beijing has used this law to crush
freedom of the press, assembly and
speech, arresting activists including
Joshua Wong, Benny Tai, Jimmy Lai,
Lee Cheuk Yan, Gwyneth Ho and
Carol Ng. Now, empowered by the
installation of another staunchly pro-
Beijing leader in Hong Kong, the
Chinese Communist Party has
trained its sights on Zen and his
colleagues.
In the lead-up to the 1997 transfer
of sovereignty from Britain, the Chi-
nese government promised “a high
degree of autonomy” f or the territory:
with an independent executive, legis-
lature and judiciary; freedom of
speech, press, assembly and religion;
a path to universal suffrage; and an
assurance that the PRC would not
interfere in the affairs that Hong
Kong administers under the Basic
Law. B ut nearly 25 years later, China’s
pledges have been utterly abandoned.
Any pretense that Hong Kong’s rights
would be respected has been shat-
tered by violence and intimidation.
Zen’s arrest is one of the clearest
signs yet of Beijing’s w orsening crack-
down as Hong Kong fights for its
freedoms — and of Beijing’s growing
desperation and fear that it is losing
this fight. Indeed, this act of persecu-
tion is a sign of weakness, not a show
of strength.
As speaker of the House, I have
been blessed to witness CardinalZen’s courage and commitment up
close. When I met with him in Hong
Kong in 20 15, he warned that “one
country, two systems” was in great
peril. And when we met most recently
— in 2020, in the U. S. Capitol, where I
awarded him the Wei Jingsheng Chi-
nese Democracy Champion Prize —
he again spoke powerfully about Chi-
na’s broken promises.
Zen and three of his colleagues
have been released on bail, but the
charges remain in force, with each
facing the prospect of life in prison.
We must all condemn their arrests,
which are an affront to religious
freedom, political freedoms and hu-
man rights. As I h ave said before, if we
do not speak out for human rights in
China because of commercial inter-
ests, we lose all moral authority to
speak out on human rights anywhere
in the world.
Congress, on a bipartisan, bicamer-
al basis, has always supported Hong
Kong in its fight for its freedoms. In
20 19, a bipartisan Congress passed
the Hong Kong Human Rights and
Democracy Act, which is now law. We
have held Beijing accountable for its
human rights abuses, passing legisla-
tion to counter horrific campaigns
against Uyghurs, Tibetans, activists
on the mainland and many others —
and we will continue to do so, until
these abuses cease.
For the people of Hong Kong — and
for all yearning for freedom around
the world — the entire international
community has a responsibility to
forcefully speak out against these
arrests and demand that the CCP end
its abuses. The world is watching.The writer, a Democrat from California, is
speaker of the U.S. House of
Representatives.China’s arrest of a 90-year-oldcardinal reveals its fearJEROME FAVRE/EPA-EFE
C ardinal Joseph Zen, the bishop emeritus of Hong Kong, in April 2021.Let’s put the best face possible on
French whispers that the United
States is too aggressive toward
Russia. Let’s avoid the easy (and
tempting) jokes about a Gallic flair for
surrender. Likewise with any observa-
tion that it’s easy — perhaps a bit
decadent — to take a moderate view
concerning Russia from behind a barrier
of Eastern European democracies that
find Moscow’s r avaging of their neighbor
Ukraine to be an immediate and urgent
threat to their own safety.
Let’s assume that France is trying to
play good cop to U. S. Defense Secretary
Lloyd Austin’s bad cop in a joint effort to
bring Vladimir Putin’s brutal war to the
earliest possible conclusion. In t hat case,
how might a good-cop, bad-cop scenario
play out?
Austin took the hard line in remarks
to reporters on April 25. He was in
Poland with Secretary of State Antony
Blinken after t he two men visited Kyiv to
demonstrate U. S. support for Ukrainian
independence. With Russia reeling and
regrouping after the failure of its Febru-
ary invasion, Austin called on the West
to further sap Putin’s s trength. “We want
to see Russia weakened to the degree
that it can’t do the kinds of things that it
has done in invading Ukraine,” he said as
the United States’ top diplomat looked
on in apparent agreement.
Since that time, Russia has indeed
become weaker. Although its indiscrimi-
nate bombing of Ukraine continues, the
Russian air force has given up any
pretense of achieving air superiority.
The army has pulled back from Kharkivand is struggling to protect its supply
lines to Izyum. The navy, after the
sinking of the Moskva, its Black Sea
flagship, is cowering out of range of
Ukrainian missiles, thus ending any
realistic prospect of an amphibious
assault on the port of Odessa.
Those are a few of the tactical failures.
At a strategic level, Russia is faring even
worse. Major Chinese tech firms are
reportedly shying away from sales to
Russia, signaling that Beijing won’t be
bailing out its errant ally. Finland has
asked to join NATO, with S weden likely to
follow — adding further strength to the
alliance the Russian dictator had hoped
to shatter. And Putin’s Victory Day dis-
play of muscle was a dud amid reports of
Russian soldiers refusing to join the f ight.
Enter the good cop. In a speech
shortly after Putin’s Victory Day fizzle,
French President Emmanuel Macron
offered an olive branch to Moscow while
gently, and obliquely, scolding Austin.
“We must, together, never cede to the
temptation of humiliation, nor to a spirit
of revenge,” Macron said, adding: “We
are not at war with Russia. We are
working in Europe for the preservation
of the sovereignty and territorial i ntegri-
ty o f Ukraine, and for the return of peace
on our continent.”
The point of a good-cop, bad-cop
routine is to give a bad guy an illusion of
control, a sense that he is choosing his
destiny. The bad cop drives home the
hopelessness of the miscreant’s situa-
tion. Then the good cop says: Let me
help you keep your dignity. You don’t
have to deal with the tough guy overthere. You can choose to deal with me.
Make no mistake, however: The good
cop is still on the side of the cops. France
has supplied self-propelled artillery and
thousands of shells to help arm the
Ukrainians. It promises to send more.
France has condemned the Russian
invasion at the United Nations, has
joined the stiff sanctions that are chok-
ing Russia’s economy and has sent
forensic experts to help collect evidence
of Russian war crimes. The alliance
remains strong.
The good cop is offering Putin a way
out. A graceful exit. The problem is
Putin’s bloody-minded recalcitrance. He
can’t bring himself to admit that he has
blundered on an epic scale, at the cost of
many thousands of lives, many ruined
cities and t he future of Russia as a global
power.
The curse of totalitarian governments
is that they kill people for telling the
truth; do that enough times, a nd you end
up with a nation of liars. Putin was lied
to about the readiness of his military,
lied to about the strength of the Ukraini-
an government and lied to about the
weakness of the West. Now he is lying to
himself about having viable alternatives
other than surrender.
Whether to weaken Russia further is
not principally a question for the United
States. It’s a question for Vladimir Putin.
Every day he continues to fight in
Ukraine, h e weakens Russia. Putin would
be wise to accept the French invitation to
negotiate the terms of his capitulation.
Unfortunately, there’s no evidence re-
maining that he is capable of wisdom.DAVID VON DREHLEGood-cop France is giving bad-guy Putina way out. If only he’d take it.