Originally published on Medium on July 1, 2018.
First, the caveat. I’m a fan of thoughtful gun control proposals. I want them to be effective and consistent with legal understanding of the second amendment — otherwise, they are unlikely to withstand scrutiny. I accept the second amendment as the law of the land, although I would not object if it could be removed without tearing the country violently apart. However, I do not get the second amendment; arguments that guns are needed for liberty leave me unmoved. So when I make the analogy I’m about to make, know that I’m not making it as a gun rights advocate.
Abortion rights, pretty broad ones, are the law of the land. Yet there are women who get abortions for problematic reasons. Too many women get abortions because they feel that their economic or family situation does not allow them to keep a pregnancy they would otherwise choose to keep. We should all be able to agree that this is a problem. Pro-life legislation often uses these problems as a starting point. These laws are often passed with the stated intent of wanting to help women be medically safer or help them avoid making a decision they will regret.
However, those of us who are pro-choice see these laws as attempts to chip away at abortion rights. We see these as a way to make it so that the right to an abortion exists on paper but not in practice. We see them as an attempt at an end run around the law of the land. We know that, even if the stated goal is sincere, the end goal of pro-life activists is to ban abortion. With such an end goal, intermediate proposals are suspect even when linked to ultimate ends that we can widely agree need to be improved.
Gun rights and abortion rights have enough substantial differences that one can logically feel differently about them — that one, your choice, is a monstrosity and the other a fundamental right. However, from a perspective of how proposed regulations interact with the law of the land, they are very similar. So for those folks who bristle at attempts to nibble away at abortion rights, consider that gun rights advocate have a similar feeling about gun control. This does not mean that there isn’t room for improvement in both. It’s just that it’s hard to take at face value proposals from someone whose underlying goal is to ban rather than improve.
We have a living system of laws, so we should not look at the law of the land as a static ending point. Yet we should not completely ignore it when it goes against our desires either. Such an approach is impractical, especially for proposed laws with a constitutional argument against them. More fundamentally, such an approach dilutes the legal standing of rights, which should worry us all. We should feel empowered to challenge laws—even those with a Constitutional basis — but we should not try to chip away at laws in ways that we would consider deceitfully undermining if used against a right we support.