Business Insider uses activist as ‘expert’ in piece on Roe v. Wade
May 3, 2022
Business Insider treats us to that appearance of the mysterious expert. The one who happens to be more partial on the subject under discussion than we might desire.
Concerning the Roe v. Wade decision and leak, we get: “Undermining of abortion rights is extremely rare and ‘goes hand-in-hand with creeping authoritarianism’ experts warn” and the example of a specialist offered to us is “Rebecca Turkington, a University of Cambridge scholar.”
Well, yes. Turkington is actually a Ph.D. student at Cambridge University in England. The “scholar” part is that she’s on a scholarship – someone else is paying part of her fees and living expenses. In the English college system, a Ph.D. student is indeed a student, not a junior member of the academy. Also, from her previous work, she appears to be more an activist on this subject than an objective expert.
As we’ve noted before, this selection of the highly opinionated as expert commentary is in itself a form of bias.
On the same subject, Roe and the leaked opinion, Business Insider also gives us this: “Why a constitutional amendment enshrining abortion rights is next to impossible.” The thing missed in its explanation is that it is in fact supposed to be this way.
Their argument is that it would require a supermajority of Congress (of each house separately) then ¾ of the States and so on. This isn’t going to happen, therefore – this is exactly the point. The Constitution is for the things we all agree upon. No one should be allowed to do that, or to do that to us. There is a broad and wide societal agreement, which is why it’s in the Constitution.
It is possible to amend it (we’re up to 33 times now). The reason there’s no chance of an abortion amendment is that there isn’t that broad agreement. Please note: We are not taking sides here. We’re also not stating that yes, or no, or any of the interim stages about time periods and so on would be righteous or just. What we are saying is that there isn’t any one position, any one set of rules, exceptions, times and allowances that gains the supermajority support necessary to pass a Constitutional amendment.
That is the one rather important thing that Business Insider doesn’t say about it. The reason an amendment can’t pass is that the Constitution was written to make sure things still disagreed upon like this didn’t become part of the Constitution. If, as and when, an overwhelming consensus does arise then it could indeed be part of that basic law of the entire society. Although once there is such a consensus we’ll probably find that individual laws are changed making the amendment unnecessary.
Business Insider is ranked the No. 18 news site in the U.S. and gains 100 million visits a month.
Views are, of course, widely divergent on this particular subject. But using actual experts plus explaining why the Constitution is the way it is we regard as being useful additions to the debate – rather than missing both goals.