I understand that politicians flip flop. They change positions and pander for votes and money. I've worked for Democrats and Republicans and confess to nuancing an issue or two in my day. But Rudy Giuliani's crass pandering of my bodily integrity is not nuancing.
The New York Times' headline Giuliani shifts abortion speech gently to the right misses the mark. It's not as if deciding that women should be forced to bear unwanted children is comparable to softening his stance on the estate tax or funding for highways. When are women going to stop putting up with having our bodies
put on the bargaining table every election cycle? Or men, for that matter, since even with technological advances it still takes a woman and a man to make an unwanted pregnancy.
There's no way this turnabout can be passed off as a position of principle. It's about as transparent as Mitt Romney's decision to join the National Rifle Association last August. And Romney's "shifted" on abortion rights as well. He could really win over the right if he started packing heat around Planned Parenthood clinics scaring away women trying to make healthy family planning choices.
For some reason Giuliani's reversal bothers me more than Romney's. Giuliani had authentic moderate appeal. Widely known as a pro-choice, socially liberal Republican, you knew - or thought you knew - that he wasn't going to do anything crazy on the liberal or conservative side. After six years of leadership that trumped up wars and racked up record deficits, Rudy wasn't
such an ideologue that he would take the country down any dark alleys. But now, he's willing to send women and girls back down those alleys.
The history of abortion regulation in the U.S. is fascinating. I had the opportunity to study original documents relating to abortion laws at the Library of Congress, during a college internship in Washington, D.C. I read transcripts from state legislature floor debates in the early 1800s,
newspaper articles and medical journals. One thing I know for sure, those debates were rarely about the fetus. They were often about politics and power but mostly about the role of women. In the definitive book on the subject, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood, Professor Kristin Luker traces this history, showing how abortion used to be allowed - even promoted - for single women, how it was restricted for married women after the Catholic immigrants threatened to outnumber the Protestants, and how for hundreds of years in common law and the Catholic Church, early abortion was legal until
the time of "quickening" (around the second trimester). My Catholic friends are always surprised to learn the Church sanctioned early abortions for about six hundred years until Pope Pius and a group of hooded men issued some sort of edict in 1869.
Giuliani's smart enough to know all of this but he obviously doesn't give a hoot. His pandering includes a newfound desire to promote "strict constructionist" judges to the federal judiciary, which is code for judges against abortion. Strict constructionism holds that judges must interpret
the U.S. Constitution as the original framers intended. The conservatives argue that the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, based on the right of privacy, is not in the original Constitution. Technically, that's correct. However, abortion was legal at the time the Constitution was written and strict construction also holds that since the framers were silent on the topic of abortion, their intention was to uphold the status quo.
The whole strict construction argument is a red herring. The right to privacy does emanate from Constitutional protections, and there are many alternative legal theories in which to ground protection from restrictive abortion laws, including the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
The final straw in Giuliani's blithe about face on settled Constitutional protections is his statement that "I have a very, very strong view that .... Judges have to interpret, not invent the Constitution." Saying that judges should "interpret, not invent" the Constitution is neo-con speak for judges
who oppose abortion, along with countless other individual liberties. There is rarely one "right answer when interpreting difficult Constitutional questions, and it's dangerous for the right to foment the myth that any judge who doesn't agree with them is "inventing the law." What is Giuliani, a former respected prosecutor, doing wallowing with that brigade?
Giuliani chose an interview with the conservative Fox Channel's Sean Hannity to undertake to preach to women about ending unwanted pregnancies: "I hate it.... As a personal matter, I would advise somebody against it." Rudy Giuliani would advise women on their personal life choices. Interesting. This comes from a Catholic on his third marriage. After swearing out an annulment on the first 14-year marriage claiming he'd just "discovered" his wife was a second cousin, he notified his second wife via a public press conference that he wanted a divorce, in part because he was having an affair, while they had small children at home.
There's a great scene in the movie Miss Potter where Renee Zellwegger, playing the illustrator Beatrix Potter, grows impatient with a
publisher who doesn't take her books seriously and patronizes her attempt to have a career. Zellwegger interrupts him mid-sentence to say, "I have grown quite unaccustomed to being lectured to by men." Then she turns firmly and walks away.
It's time for women, and enlightened men, to turn firmly and walk away from politicians like Giuliani.