Skip to main content

The exception of Scott DesJarlais

The news about Republican House member Scott DesJarlais just gets worse and worse. As it turns out, not only did he cheat on his wife with a patient and pressured his pregnant patient-girlfriend to have an abortion, he cheated on his wife six times, with patients and co-workers, prescribed drugs to one of his patient girlfriends, and successfully advocated for his own wife to have an abortion.

For a 'family values' and 'pro-life' conservative, that is quite a record.

The great irony in all this, of course, is that Representative DesJarlais was reelected, despite all of the things he's done, while Republican Senate and House candidates (Akin, Mourdock, Walsh, and Koster) lost their races not for what they did but what they said (inflammatory, insensitive, and just plain factually incorrect things about abortion and/or rape).

In this election season, words spoke louder than actions.

Is there anything to be learned from the utter hypocrisy of Representative DesJarlais? He could simply be a shameless liar, peddling family values while not much caring to live them himself.

Alternatively, considering abortion specifically, one could see here an example of the phenomenon of someone being pro-life except in their own self-justified situation:
During the trial, DesJarlais said the first time he urged his ex-wife to get an abortion, it was because she was on medication on which she wasn’t supposed to get pregnant. The second time, he said it was because “things were not going well between us and it was a mutual decision.” Both abortions occurred before the couple was married in 1995. (Source: The Washington Post)
Many pro-choice accounts describe this kind of "okay for me, but not for thee" behavior among people who are ostensibly pro-life. 

Now, the most likely explanation for Representative DesJarlais' behavior is that he is a narcissist and a sociopath. Still, the "it's okay for me in my situation" phenomenon recommends a type of strategy for the pro-choice movement, which is to get pro-lifers to put themselves in the shoes of a woman/family that might consider having an abortion. I think pro-choicers tend to win the argument when getting down to concrete and complicated real-life situations. For how horrible DesJarlais is as a person, his explanations for why his wife had two abortions are not all that different from those given by most women.

Links:

Article in the Washington Post (November 15, 2012): Rep. DesJarlais admitted to affairs with two patients during divorce trial  

Fact sheet created by the Guttmacher Institute (August 2011) that describes the most common reasons why women have abortions: Facts on Induced Abortion in the United States

Comments

Gebelik said…
I would like to thank you for the efforts you have made in writing this article. I am hoping the same best work from you in the future as well. Really the blogging is spreading its wings rapidly. Your write up is a fine example of it.
Gebelik

Popular posts from this blog

Medically necessary abortions: The battle of the experts

Apparently, Representative Joe Walsh is not entirely alone! The assertion that an abortion is never medically necessary has been floating around in the pro-life universe for at least a little while. We are now witnessing a battle of the experts. One the one side is Joe Walsh and friends. Walsh himself released a pdf document with quotations from several doctors-- including some historically prominent pro-choice doctors, like Alan Guttmacher-- making the 'never medically necessary' claim seem quite reasonable. Also on Walsh's side are several doctors  who particpated in a recent "International Symposium on Maternal Health" in Dublin. Ireland, despite a European Court of Human Rights ruling in 1992 , has a total ban on abortion. Irish pro-lifers want the country's politicians to resist pressure to implement even a life exception, so the question of medical necessity is directly relevant there. The "Dublin Declaration," released after the S...

Did "tax-funded abortion pills" cause the Newtown tragedy?

Of course not. But this is the kind of nonsense we get when people shamelessly piggyback on a tragedy to score political or culture war points. We also get this kind of analysis when someone is paid to analyze events on cue but has nothing of substance to say regarding something terrible and complex. Watch Mike Huckabee's statement here: I understand Huckabee is trying to make a larger point about the culture, rather than drawing a direct line from the ACA's contraceptive mandate-- which does not mandate taxpayer funding of abortion pills, by the way-- to the Newtown massacre. Still, this is what happens when a tragedy occurs: We extrapolate from an isolated event and determine that it encapsulates, or is the ultimate representation of, something about our society that must be addressed. It is possible, however, that an event is sui generis and cannot then serve as a platform for useful long-term policy reform.  We reduce the cause of a tragedy-- which may ultimat...