What a shameless demagogue.
I am immediately torn, because every Kamala Harris head-exploding utterance raises a Julie Principle issue: OK, an elected official who has conclusively proven herself to be dumb, irresponsible and ethically inert says something that is dumb, irresponsible and ethically alert. Why is that worth complaining about or criticizing? Nevertheless, some of Harris’s outbursts are just too despicable to be ignored. Like this one, today, as she visited abortion providers and staff members at a clinic in St. Paul, Minnesota to cheer on women putting the unborn to death for the crime of complicating their mothers’ lives:
“These attacks against an individual’s right to make decisions about their own body are outrageous and, in many instances, just plain old immoral,” she thundered. “How dare these elected leaders believe they are in a better position to tell women what they need, to tell women what is in their best interest. We have to be a nation that trusts women.”
Nice. Kamala had previously used the “How dare they!” stunt to condemn the U.S. Supreme Court for daring to do their jobs, which includes striking down bad decisions that made up constitutional rights that didn’t exist. The abortion-fanatic’s dishonest defense has always relied on pretending that only one life is involved in an abortion, though the state has a valid interest in protecting all lives, including unborn humans who their mothers want to kill. When does an abortion in Harris’s world suddenly involve more than just the woman’s body? Six weeks? 15 weeks? 9 months? Never, if her words mean what they appear to mean. “Plain old immoral” has always included “Thou shalt not kill”: what weird definition of “immoral” is Harris alluding to? It must be really old; Sumarian, maybe? Ancient Aztec?
And what is the right to do whatever you want with your own body? Does it have any limits? Could Kamala please state this right simply and concisely? The concept would seem to be an endorsement of anarchy, and an assertion that the rule of law is itself “immoral,” which is ironic, since legal codes are moral codes. Government and law necessarily dictate what a citizen can or cannot to “with their own body,” and Harris’s party has grand designs on that area even beyond its harsh measures to force Americans to get mysterious chemicals injected into their bodies as well as their children. It also wants to find ways to stop citizens from saying, writing and hearing words, ideas and opinions that progressives find “hateful” or “misinformation.”
Doesn’t using our mouths and brains to do what we want them to do bodily autonomy too?
The claim that abortion is opposed because elected officials feel it isn’t in a woman’s best interests is a flat-out lie. Abortion’s ethical conflict is that it pits a woman’s best interests against another human being’s right to exist. Fine: making the nascent life you carry disappear may be in your best interests, just as murdering your cheating spouse or stealing your sister jewels might be in your best interests. But the rule of law is about balancing valid interests, and making the hard choices that create an ethical society.
Isn’t Kamala supposed to know this? She went to law school, right?
“We have to be a nation that trusts women”—what does Harris think that means? Should women be subject to no legal restraints at all, since we trust these heavenly creatures? Women can’t be trusted to do the right thing when they have an interest in opposition to that conduct; in this respect, they’re no different from anyone else. Should we trust women not to get pregnant when they can’t care for or support a child? And if a woman violates that trust, what are the consequences? Should they be borne by her, or the innocent life her conduct created? We can trust women to be highly tempted to choose the latter, not because they aren’t trustworthy, but because they are human, and humans are frequently guided by non-ethical motives and consideration.
A complex ethics conflict like abortion can only be addressed by examining all factors and competing interests, and what we get from the Vice-President of the United States is hypocrisy, straw man arguments , appeals to emotion and “How dare they!”
An untrustworthy woman is calling for women to be trusted.
Ethics Alarms 
“though the state has a valid interest in protecting all lives, including unborn humans”
An interest, which ironically enough, was even explicitly recognized in the hallowed Roe v. Wade every liberal bemones.
Not necessarily. Many, many religions over the years have endorsed or required child sacrifices. There is no better way to show total commitment to your god or your ideology than to sacrifice your own child. This is completely moral in these religious and ideological system. You are just coming at this from a Judeo-Christian worldview that holds that human life has intrinsic value. When you look at this from a more multicultural viewpoint, abortion and other child sacrifices are completely moral.
When you insist that all ideologies are equal, anything goes.
As for “We have to be a nation that trusts women”, this is just part of the “believe all women” movement. Again, you can have such an ideology that women are superior to men and women have the right to do things like have men imprisoned for upsetting them or killing children. I would say that these things have been declared moral, if not laudatory in our current state religious system. Remember, there are several influential Democrats that are pushing the idea of abortion beyond birth.
The pro-choice argument boils down to something like this: women have the same right to autonomy as men, this requires absolute reproductive control; there is some interval between conception and birth during which there is no personhood; the burden of pregnancy is oppressive and uniquely borne by women, therefore, the choice to continue a pregnancy must be the woman’s.
Taken at face value, a woman’t choice must be honored throughout pregnancy. Attempts to insert a limiting principle rely on that interval before personhood, whether it be fetal heartbeat, viability, ability to sense pain, etc.
This comes at things from the wrong direction. Everyone alive at this moment will die in one of two ways: a natural cause, or some form of homicide. That is true of every moment from conception to death.
Abortion is, by inescapable definition, is homicide. All abortions, like every other type of homicide, ends a life before it would have ended by natural cause. Of course, abortions undertaken to prevent the mother’s death or serious injury are justifiable, self defense, homicides. The rest, which is almost all of them, are premeditated murders of convenience.
The essential element to dealing with ethics problems is to look at them for what they are.
Another element of the pro-choice argument is that pregnancy burdens women. Okay, fair enough. But that burden is shouldered individually. Pregnancy isn’t the only significant burden individuals are sometimes saddled with. Why does pregnancy get a pass when all manner of burdens heavier and longer than pregnancy don’t?
If human life has intrinsic moral value, then there is no justification for elective abortions. If some lives are less valuable because their existence imposes burdens upon women, then why doesn’t that reasoning apply to, say, an MS sufferer requiring very long term, expensive, and demanding care?