Here's the actual quote from The Corner:
Former Fetus Barack Obama [Ed Whelan]
Nearly 48 years ago, a young woman, not yet 18, became pregnant in her freshman year of college. Living in a time and place in which abortion was generally illegal, she proceeded to marry the father of her child and gave birth to a son. Perhaps she would have done so irrespective of the abortion laws at the time, even if, say, she lived in a legal culture that celebrated abortion as a fundamental right. Very possibly not. (I haven’t found any statistics on the percentage of pregnant college freshmen who abort their pregnancies, but indirect indications suggest that it’s very high.)
Barack Obama may actually believe, as he stated yesterday, that Roe v. Wade “was rightly decided.” But it may be very lucky for him, as the son born of that woman, that it hadn’t been decided a dozen or so years earlier.
That Obama may owe his very life to a pre-Roe legal regime that banned abortion is, to be sure, not necessarily a reason that he should favor that regime (though I can’t help noting that Justice Thomas’s critics recklessly accuse him of hypocrisy for opposing racial-preference plans that they say he benefited from). But it ought to lead Obama and others to think more carefully about the valuable role that protective abortion laws play.
Here's my shorter version:
Argle bargle bargle bargle umph...
I mean, I'd like to cleverly deconstruct this, but words fail me. Obama should condemn other women, including his wife and daughters, to hypothetical forced pregnancy and motherhood out of solidarity not with his mother, who loved him enough to raise him under difficult circumstances, but out of self love and a sense of the overwhelming importance of his own life over all others? Huh? As our sometime commenter Interrobang has pointed out it takes a weird kind of self love and entitlement for an adult to take the position that his own existence was worth any amount of suffering to his mother. And something which strikes me as even more grotesque is the assumption that Obama's mother should have/would have normally *wanted* to abort him because he wasn't going to be white. In the Palin version of this story the two "crazy kids" just get married and that retroactively makes them good people. But in the right wing version of Obama's mother's life she is forced by circumstance to marry the black guy and give birth to the black baby. That's a good thing because at least she doesn't get to choose abortion, like all those other slutty college girls, but they kind of leave it hanging out there that aborting your child because he's non white actually looks like the rational thing for her to do--to them. Because racism and selfishness are, to them, normative.
aimai
|