As I've noted before, all it takes for a liberal to detest business-stifling regulation is for that said regulation to infringe on the Left's most sacred cow: abortion.
Readers of The Daily Beast were witness to that Monday with Michelle Goldberg's September 9 Women of the World blog post, "The Triumph of Bureaucracy Over Abortion Rights." But Goldberg was not merely lamenting regulation of abortion clinics but how "boredom has become a powerful weapon" with "the anti-abortion movement has been making epochal advances using regulations that are as tedious to read about as they are to describe":
The story of how clinics are being regulated out of existence isn’t exciting. It’s about laws that specify the size of procedure rooms and the width of clinic hallways, passed specifically to force abortion providers to undertake costly renovations or to close. It’s about the rules requiring abortion providers to have admitting privileges at local hospitals, passed knowing that the hospitals won’t grant them.
As I write this, I can imagine the rejoinders from anti-abortion activists claiming that these laws protect patients. To answer them, I could explain why medical associations have called these regulations “onerous and unnecessary,” and get into the details of the 1986 Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, which already entitled patients to hospital transfer if something goes wrong. Or I could discuss how some hospitals grant privileges only to doctors who admit three or even 10 patients a year, which no abortion provider does, because abortion is so safe. By then, however, most people will have stopped reading, and I can’t really blame them. In this respect, bureaucracy is proving far more effective than right-wing terrorism.
Yes, you read that right. In Goldberg's nutty version of reality, the pro-life movement is like an al Qaeda trainee giving up flying lessons and suicide bombs for a desk job at the FAA or ATF. Her nutty comparison says a lot more about Goldberg than it does the pro-life movement and its policy and political successes of late.
Try as she, Wendy Davis, and MSNBC might, thus far the radical left's alarmist rhetoric about abortion clinic regulation isn't working is intended magic on the body politic. Goldberg's lament reads like an early sign of panic ahead of the 2014 midterms, where liberals desperately need to turn out their socially liberal base and get independents to lean their way. Look for more of the same as we get closer to next year's elections.
