"É legal? Não. Pode-se fazer? Pode-se."

Durante algumas horas, Donald Trump defendeu que, se o aborto fosse ilegalizado, as mulheres que abortassem deveriam ser punidas; parece que pouco depois alguém lhe explicou que a posição pró-vida é que só os fornecedores de abortos devem ser punidos, não as clientes (uma curiosidade: a direita pró-vida e a esquerda escandinava anti-prostituição convergem em considerar que as mulheres são seres incapazes de tomarem decisões e que devem ser, perante a lei, tratadas como tal).

Um exemplo interessente dessa posição e as suas implicações é o artigo "Trump Attempts To Abort Candidacy", de Rod Dreher, em The American Conservative. Quer o artigo (onde o autor expõe a clássica posição pró-vida de só punir os "técnicos"), quer sobretudo os comentários, em que a maior parte dos leitores (tanto pró-vida como pró-escolha) demonstram que essa posição não faz grande sentido.

Alguns comentários:

- "A nice illustration of the vacuity of the pro-life movement. Of course banning abortion requires punishing at least some women who attempt or get abortions. That’s what it means to outlaw something! But more to the point, that’s what happened when abortion was generally illegal. Some women who sought abortions were prosecuted. Many women who sought abortions were ostracized by their communities and families. Expelled from schools and churches, fired from jobs. (...) Banning something – whether legally, morally, or socially – requires that offenders be punished. Without punishment, there is and can be no ban, no taboo, no norm. We need to face up to the moral accounting honestly, and be certain that the good we hope to do outweighs the harm in terms of lives derailed and families broken by prosecution, imprisonment, ostracization, and the like. If outlawing abortion is worth the costs to women who will in point of fact be prosecuted and shunned from their communities and families, fired from their jobs, expelled from their schools, fine. But to say that there will be no such costs, only benefits, is a lie"

- "I’m glad Trump said what he did regarding women being punished for having an abortion. He exposed the pro-life movement as a movement that doesn’t really think abortion is the deliberate killing of an innocent child or they never would treat the poor little women as victims."

- "Let me get this straight. Pro-life candidates are perfectly fine with robotic abortion factories. Its just the manually operated ones they object to?"

- "From what I’ve read a lot of abortions these days–particularly early in pregnancy–are pharmaceutical and not medical procedures. So there’s no doctor performing a procedure to hold responsible. So who do you go after for violating the law–the medical professional who wrote the prescription? The pharmacist who filled it? The person who smuggled the drug into this country if the drug was banned here? The woman who sought out, sourced, and voluntarily took the drug, understanding full well what the known and recognizable consequences of her actions were–in actuality, seeking out those known and recognizable consequences? (...) Telemedicine is rapidly advancing. It will be possible in the near future to set up “remote” surgical centers where doctors who are miles away–say, in another country–perform the abortion. So how do you handle a surgical center, one where a multitude of operations are performed (scoping knees, colonoscopies, removing cancers, etc) that also had doctors residing in locations where abortion is legal accomplishing the teleoperating? When you can’t swoop in and arrest them, but the individual demanding the illegal procedure, who set up the whole thing, does reside in the jurisdiction where that procedure is illegal to perform?"

Também sobre isto, "Trump's Politically Incorrect Abortion Comments Complicate Republican Narrative", por Elizabeth Nolan Brown, na Reason:

But here's what neither Camosy, Hemingway, Scheidler, or any of the major pro-life voices have addressed: What happens when there is no abortion doctor? No sketchy clinic. No nagging or coercive partner. What happens when a woman decides to terminate her pregnancy and takes matters into her own hands?

Women have been self-inducing abortions for time immemorial. Herbs. Coat hangers. Mifepristone. It's that last one, used in conjunction with another drug (misoprostol), that's likely to be most common for illegal 21st Century abortions. This two-pill regimen, referred to as "medical abortion" (as opposed to surgical abortion), is currently a common method for legal first-trimester abortions in America. (...)

Trump's original statements on abortion might not have been politically correct from a conventional conservative perspective, but they were the closest to honesty or authenticity we've gotten from a pro-life politician in a long time.

Na verdade o que eu suspeito é que muitos pró-vida defendem é sobretudo o chamado "papel pedagógico da lei" - a ideia de que ao se proibir algo (mesmo que nunca ou raramente a proibição seja aplicada e os infratores punidos), está-se a enviar um sinal de que esse comportamento não é aceitável, e assim se reduza significativamente o comportamento em questão (não tento por os potenciais infratores fazerem um cálculo intelectual custo-beneficio, e chegarem à conclusão que os custos da punição conjugados com o risco de serem apanhados são mais altos que os benefícios de empreender a ação em causa, mas sobretudo pela relutância intuitiva que grande parte dos seres humanos têm em fazer algo que vá contra as regras "da tribo"). Diga-se que eu acho que a ideia do "papel pedagógico da lei" é algo pouco conciliável com a filosofia de base de uma sociedade democrática (pode ser que algum dia escreva algo sobre isso).