1. Misstate the position of the other side,
2. Pretend to be a dispassionate neutral observer,
3. Misapply and misinterpret science
As she casually plugs her book, Kolb concludes her article as follows:
As I have argued in my book, When Sex Counts: Making Babies and Making Law, a prohibition against abortion amounts to a government-imposed requirement that women remain pregnant. Prohibiting the morning-after-pill or the I.U.D., however, would go one step further: it would require that women who are not pregnant actually become pregnant against their will.The essence of Kolb's argument is as follows: Assuming pregnancy does not begin at conception, but rather when the fertilized egg attaches to the womb, prohibiting a woman from willfully destroying the fertilized egg requires her to become pregnant against her will.
Before we even address her assumption, notice her charged rhetoric comes close to equating such prohibitions as equivalent to rape. Do zygotes magically fall from the sky and enter women's reproductive organs through means of CIA technology developed by Bush and the neo-cons? I wonder.
To deceive her reader that a fertilized egg is morally and legally duplicitous depending on whether or not it is attached to the woman's womb, Kolb pulls out her copy of Gray's Anatomy and pulls a fast-one on the reader. Simply because the medical community chooses to define pregnancy as the point when the fertilized egg attaches to the womb has absolutely no bearing on whether the legal or moral definition should be the same.
Most consumers know how deceptive and immoral it is to twist and contort definitions from first hand experience. We've all deposited a check with a bank at one time or another and been told the funds won't be available for ten days (sometimes longer), even after the signatory's bank has assured us the check has cleared. What happens is that our banks try to define "deposit" as meaning an indefinite period of time after you make deposit, rather than the instant they receive the money from the signatory's bank. They do this to give themselves a few extra days of interest on OUR money. The correct legal and moral definition of "deposit" should be the exact moment the signatory's money hits your account.
Kolb's irrational approach treats the fertilization of an egg as a non-event. "No, no" she says, we must wait until the fertilized egg attaches to the womb...because the medical book says so!
Kolb uses this illogic to imply that anti-abortion proponents who also accept birth control are intellectually confused. In her world, condoms are equivalent to the after-morning pill because both prevent a fertilized egg from attaching to a woman's womb.
Earth to Kolb! Stop lying to your readers about what anti-abortion advocates believe. Many (if not all) believe life begins at conception and do not differentiate between attachment to a womb or not. What matters morally to them is that the life force of the male and female have joined to continue the image of G-d anew. Condoms and other anti-conception devices are moral to all but a very few extremists, who have absolutely no objections to contraception.
Kolb knows this, but in her furor to sell books and portray women as victims incapable of controlling their sexuality, Kolb distorts and deceives her readers.
Kolb is one of the many liberal legal authors who know Roe v. Wade does not guarantee a right to abortion but instead spreads the alternative gospel. Roe discussed a woman's right to privacy versus a baby's right to live. Like all laws made by man, Roe may not have been perfect and in need of tweaking as society and science shed new understanding on the issue. Read it yourself, and don't let Kolb hide the ball. Society does have the right to protect babies in the womb.
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