Connecticut has plenty of abortion fanatics too

Raising taxes and the minimum wage, imposing highway tolls and increasing business regulation are not the only weird elements of Governor Lamont’s economic development strategy. This week the governor wrote an open letter to women business owners in Alabama, Georgia and Missouri, arguing that the recent efforts of those states to outlaw abortion should prompt those businesses to relocate to Connecticut, which “supports the rights of women.”

Since Connecticut confronts far bigger problems than the abortion policies of other states and since the governor will not face election for three years, he should stop this pandering to the abortion-rights absolutists who dominate his party.

Enforcement of those new anti-abortion laws will be blocked by the federal courts pending any appeal to the Supreme Court, and any reversal of precedent by that court is far off. Further, of infinitely greater bearing on the profitability of business in Connecticut is the insolvency of state government, particularly its unfunded state employee pension obligations, estimated at $70 billion or more. Since, with his budget proposal, the governor has proclaimed that state government will never economize, any business knows that locating in Connecticut will mean that its costs will rise every year indefinitely.

Extreme as the new anti-abortion laws are, they are no more extreme than some pro-abortion laws recently enacted or proposed elsewhere, as in New York, which has just authorized infanticide.

Full of abortion-rights fanatics itself, Connecticut long has allowed minors to obtain abortions without notice to and the consent of their parents or guardians, though such abortions end pregnancies caused by statutory rape and are arranged by the rapists themselves to avoid detection. Now the General Assembly is about to pass a law denying freedom of speech to abortion opponents who do mere counseling.

While the governor and Connecticut’s other abortion-rights absolutists don’t understand it, much of the rest of the country does not consider abortion to be the highest social good. Nor do all abortion opponents fit the stereotype perpetrated by the governor and the abortion-rights absolutists.

That is, not all abortion opponents are Republican men seeking to oppress women. After all, abortion always has rescued men as well as women from inconvenience and embarrassment. It has rescued even male politicians who posed as opponents of abortion before the issue got too close to home.

Women are half the population of Alabama, Georgia, and Missouri and they have the right to vote. Extreme as the new laws in those states are, they would not have been enacted without the approval of many women. Alabama’s governor, who signed that state’s new law, is a woman, and the governor of Louisiana, who has pledged to sign anti-abortion legislation about to pass there, is a Democrat.

Some observers contend that if the Supreme Court had not commandeered the abortion issue with its decision in Roe v. Wade in 1973 the country would have reached a consensus policy by now. While compromise on anything seems unlikely amid the recent hatefulness of politics, it is possible to imagine a sensible abortion policy the country could live with — allowing abortion prior to the viability of the unborn child, prohibiting it afterward except to save the life of the mother.

But since, as James Reston wrote, all politics is based on the indifference of the majority, all of the fanatics may be able to sustain the abortion controversy forever.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.