Damon Root points to a piece by A. Barton Hinkle slamming liberals for getting angry about Virginia's frivolous new regulations on abortion clinics, which were just a transparent attempt by Republicans to shut them down.
Abortion-rights supporters fume that the new rules really have nothing to do with protecting consumers and are, instead, part of an ideological campaign to "get" their industry. The same might be said about other industries fighting other regulations — e.g., payday lenders. Many people also find those operations morally odious and want to regulate them out of existence as well. Ditto the production of silicone breast implants, genetically modified crops, factory farming, and so on. That people with agendas exploit government power for political ends is not exactly news. Want to stop them? Limit government power in the first place.
This is cute, but it contains two false premises. One is that government involvement is always harmful, the second is that liberals almost always support government regulation in principle, even when it's dumb. Despite Governor Bob McDonnell's insistence that the new rules were necessary for "safety," as Monica Potts wrote in August, around .3 percent of abortion procedures in the U.S. actually have complications. The rate of complication is actually much higher with breast augmentation procedures, but for some reason Virginia Republicans aren't trying to implement similar regulations on those in the name of women's safety. What really "unsafe" is limiting access to abortion to the point where women start getting them illegally. So it's confusing that Hinkle seems to think the new regulations will "create converts" to conservatism when in this case, it's actually conservatives who are supporting needless and harmful overregulation.
But "limiting government power" in this context wouldn't solve the problem, at least as far as liberals are concerned. Liberals believe women have the fundamental right not to be forced to carry pregnancies to term. But that right is useless if you can't exercise it because you simply can't afford to do so. So they support government aid to organizations that can provide family planning services to women who wouldn't be able to afford them otherwise. If you simply removed government from the equation entirely, you'd still be left with women unable to terminate an unwanted pregnancy simply because they lack the financial means. This may all somewhat abstract at this point since the Hyde Amendment prohibits tax funding for abortion. It isn't though, because Title X facilities like the ones Republicans in Congress are trying to defund are millions of womens' only source for medical care.
So just "limiting government power" isn't enough. Limiting the arbitrary and frivolous exercise of government power would help, but in the context of abortion, a lot of people who ostensibly believe in "limited government" actually think the frivolous exercise of government power is really great.
