Trump and Abortion

Vincent J. Curtis

30 Mar 2015

Earlier today, Presidential candidate Donald Trump submitted himself to an interview by MSNBC host Chris Matthews.  In the course of the interview, Matthews bored in on Trump’s thinking on abortion, a topic Matthews would never think to raise with Hillary Clinton.

Disregarding the implausibility of it, Matthews asked Trump about a hypothetical anti-abortion law passed by Congress, making abortion illegal.  Matthews asked whether a woman who had had an abortion be punished.  Trump’s simple answer was yes.

The Republican world exploded.  My preferred candidate, Ted Cruz, launched an excoriating rebuttal that ought to embarrass him.  The Fox News panel tonight proved that those hot-house plants have lost all normal human sensibility.  They condemned Trump for his answer and for this demonstration of a lack of political sophistication.  Both Cruz and the Fox News Panel of Hot-House Plants thought that a woman should absolutely not be punished for having an abortion.

These folks are so sophisticated the obvious eludes them.  And they have given no thought to the implications of their answers.

Let us examine more carefully what was said, and that passed very quickly.  The question Matthews put to Trump in the context of that interview was, “should a person who committed a crime be punished?”  The question was otherwise unqualified, and a direct answer to that question therefore would also be unqualified.  Trump’s answer was the dialectical equal to the unqualified question, an unqualified “yes.”

Observe that - like the unqualified question left open - Trump’s answer did not say how.  He only said yes.  Within the universe of how’s that Trump’s “yes” left open was the perpetual psychological torment of knowing that the woman had killed her child.  We know that women can and do suffer from this torment after abortions, save for the psychopaths.  This is one kind of punishment that fits Trump’s yes answer.

It is likely true that Mr. Trump has not thought much about the implications of legislating the matter of abortion, but his instincts are sound enough that when asked whether a person who committed a crime should be punished, he said yes.  He did not give a mealy-mouthed answer to a straightforward question.

We leave it to the law to decide the mens rea of the guilty, the state of their sanity, of their mental fitness to make such a judgment.  These are the details we leave to the experts.  But when a simple, straightforward question is asked and the answer is highly lawyerly, one is right to wonder about the truthfulness of what one is hearing.  (see Clinton, Hillary; and Clinton, Bill)

I don’t think that Trump should be wounded by his answer.  He said what he thought.  It is not a wrong answer; it is a perfectly defensible answer.  The politically correct noises made by Ted Cruz and the Fox News Panel signify nothing but a defensive cover-up.  Both Cruz and the Panel said that, of course, the woman should not be punished, but neither said why a person who committed a crime should not be punished, or what makes the particular crime of killing your baby absolutely legally excusable.

We will see next week what effect, if any, Trump’s straightforwardness on the issue of abortion has on the Wisconsin primary, and whether the mealimouthedness of Ted Cruz’s condemnation starts people to wondering about him.

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