Bloomberg View’s Megan McArdle is perhaps one of the worst living writers. For more than a decade, McArdle has been the go-to columnist for publications who need a right-wing perspective but aren’t quite ready to cosign the gauche mannerisms of the conservative movement. Her writing alternates between nauseating banality and Gilded-Age social darwinism. With McArdle, you never know quite what you’re going to get, but you know it will be bad. One day, she’ll write a defense of good old-fashioned pie; the next, she’ll say that Wal-Mart’s wages are too high.
If she were satire, she would be part of a long tradition of works — American Psycho, The Virgin Suicides, Breaking Bad — that reveal the incredible sociopathy that festers underneath the pleasant affectations of certain suburbanites. Unfortunately, she’s real, and she writes five columns a week.
McArdle made her entrée into media in 2001, when she started the blog Asymmetrical Information under the pseudonym Jane Galt (a reference, of course, to Ayn Rand’s arch-capitalist manifesto Atlas Shrugged). Her commentary, which included her scoffing at claims that the Iraq War would end up costing trillions (it’s estimated that the total cost of the war will exceed $6 trillion) and fantasizing about anti-war protesters being clubbed with two-by-fours, impressed the dullards at The Economist enough that they hired her to write for their website in 2003.
In 2007, she moved to The Atlantic, where her very first column, titled “Don’t Panic,” downplayed fears of the recession that was to commence five months later. “So while I wouldn't say you should be exactly sanguine about the mess in the markets, it's not time to panic yet. Save that for the Yankees' pitching lineup,” she wrote. In 2012, The Daily Beast hired her, and a year later, she moved to Bloomberg, where her libertarian bloviations have reached new heights of absurdity.
McArdle’s ability to keep her Ayn Rand sophistry just subtle enough not to offend the ostensibly liberal publications who employ her is her greatest — and possibly only — strength as a writer. One of her latest columns for Bloomberg, titled “We Didn't Normalize Trump.
We Normalized the Left's Violence,” is a pointless and disjointed attempt to understand and discount the anti-fascist movement known as antifa. McArdle uses the fact that UC-Berkeley recently spent $600,000 on police protection when conservative douchebag Ben Shapiro gave a speech on campus to launch into a willfully naive rant about protesters’ supposed stranglehold on America.
“I really began to notice [antifa] around the time of Trump’s election,” she writes, proudly professing her ignorance of the decades-old movement she chose to write about. According to McArdle, their stated purpose of opposing fascists is fallacious, because “It’s not as if the police are unable, or unwilling, to deal with white supremacists who commit violent acts.”
Yes, take it from a white, middle-aged Ivy League grad with a masters degree (McArdle is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and got her MBA at the University of Chicago): the police are doing a bang-up job!
So, since white supremacist violence isn’t a real problem, what really motivates these protesters? According to McArdle, they intend to “steal our constitutionally guaranteed freedoms,” such as the right to say extremely racist shit in public. McArdle conveniently neglects to acknowledge that police are often the perpetrators of racist violence, hence the existence of Black Lives Matter, or that the entire Berkeley controversy was concocted as a publicity stunt by alt-right provocateurs, or that spending $600,000 to crack down on protesters is the last thing from “normalizing” them. It doesn’t matter that she barely understands the subject, or that her argument is based on a bunch of conjecture. She doesn’t care.
McArdle’s most iconically wrongheaded effort for Bloomberg this year was a June column on the Grenfell Tower fire in London, which killed 60 people and left hundreds homeless. Titled “Beware of Blaming Government for London Tower Fire,” McArdle flippantly attempts to concern-troll one of the most cut-and-dry examples of the human cost of post-recession austerity.
McArdle correctly acknowledges that Grenfell might not have claimed as many lives if regulators had required sprinkler systems in the tower, but then proceeds to brainstorm bizarre hypotheticals in which installing sprinklers might have actually killed more people. “Every dollar [the government] spends on installing sprinkler systems cannot be spent on the health service, or national defense, or pollution control.
Would more lives be saved by those measures or by sprinkler systems in public housing? It’s hard to say,” she writes. It’s worth noting that this abomination of an opinion piece was published before many Grenfell victims were pulled from the smoldering rubble that was, literally, their entire lives.
“It’s possible that by allowing large residential buildings to operate without sprinkler systems, the British government has prevented untold thousands of people from being driven into homelessness by higher housing costs.” I would like to deem McArdle a Sociopath of the Highest Order for writing this column, but sociopaths are typically more clever with their sadism.
McArdle’s opposition to any policy that might possibly help the poor tends to overshadow her writing itself, but make no mistake: she cannot construct an argument, even after 16 years of practice in the highest echelons of media.
In another recent column, titled “Don't Pretend Your Dog Is a Service Animal,” she invents a scenario in which a fellow restaurant-goer (terrible columnists are required to write about restaurants at least once a week) tried to pass off their dog as a service animal.
At first, it appears to be a typical example of upper-middle-class nosiness, akin to judging a stranger’s EBT purchases, but no, there’s a twist. “One obvious answer,” she writes, “is that we could establish a certifying body for service dogs.” Okay, probably unnecessary, but I guess it makes sense.
She continues: “But it might be more effective to tweak another part of the legal code: the health regulations that currently keep non-service dogs and cats out of so many public spaces.” Of course! “If Americans weren’t completely barred from bringing their pets out with them to so many places, they might not feel so much need — or entitlement — to exploit loopholes.”
To prevent people from buying fake service dog vests and bringing untrained dogs into restaurants, a problem that does not exist, we should allow everyone to bring their untrained dogs into restaurants. I can only imagine two origin stories for this mess of an article: either her dog is secretly sentient, Toy Story-style, and he hijacked her byline while she slept in order to lobby for his own interests — or, more plausibly, McArdle has brain worms.
McArdle’s crushing inanity is displayed, sans evil, in her 2014 nonfiction book The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success. Up Side is the Platonic ideal of a vapid self-help/pop-psych bestseller.
In just the first chapter, McArdle mentions TED Talks, quotes an analytics CEO on the subject of neuroscience, repeatedly brings up her Ivy League education, quotes Alain de Botton, denounces “participation trophies” and opines on “the plight of poor kids in failing schools.” She even coins the term “groupidity,” which means “doing something stupid because other people around you seem to think it’s safe.”
Between convoluted metaphors about “the brain,” McArdle affects a self-deprecating tone and inserts her own tales of woe. “I am a spectacular failure. I am the Mozart of misfortune, the Paganini of poor luck,” she writes in the preface. These “failures” include: doing a summer internship at Merrill Lynch, but not really liking it; not getting a good job right out of college; and having to work for her dad, who was head of a New York City trade association. How inspiring that she survived all that and lived to tell the tale!
McArdle is right to put faith in the power of failure, but not because it allows inner-city teens to regrow neurons with the power of Big Ideas, or however it goes. She looks to failure because people in her social class and with her skill level fail upwards. No matter how insipid your prose, wrong your predictions or noxious your views, a life of general affluence and a willingness to debase yourself will always get you work. But that work isn’t always prestigious.
Just as McArdle’s experience bouncing between jobs in Manhattan as an Ivy League grad wasn’t “failure,” writing for Bloomberg View as a 44-year-old with degrees from Penn and the University of Chicago isn’t exactly success.
She ended up somewhere between failure and success, which is evidence both for and against the existence of media meritocracy — she should be working in retail, but she also could have a New York Times column. Thank God she doesn’t.
Addressing New York’s New Abortion Law By Angelo Fichera
Posted on February 4, 2019 | Updated on May 23, 2019
19.2K Q: Does the new New York law allow full-term abortions? A: The law permits abortions after 24 weeks if a health care professional determines the health or life of the mother is at risk, or the fetus is not viable.
FULL QUESTION Does the new New York law allow full term abortions?
FULL ANSWER New York’s Reproductive Health Act was signed by Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Jan. 22, the anniversary of the landmark Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that guaranteed a woman’s right to an abortion. It’s a measure that abortion-rights advocates in New York have long sought to pass but couldn’t previously get through a Republican-controlled state Senate. Democrats now control both chambers of the Legislature.
The new law codifies a woman’s right to access abortion in New York — and has also prompted speculation and claims.
Readers have sent us a number of questions, including: “Is it true that the NY state abortion law allows an aborted infant who is born alive to be killed?” and “What are the facts about the new abortion laws in New York state?”
We address those and more here.
What the law says
The RHA permits abortions when — according to a medical professional’s “reasonable and good faith professional judgment based on the facts of the patient’s case” — “the patient is within twenty-four weeks from the commencement of pregnancy, or there is an absence of fetal viability, or the abortion is necessary to protect the patient’s life or health.”
In other words, women may choose to have an abortion prior to 24 weeks; pregnancies typically range from 38 to 42 weeks. After 24 weeks, such decisions must be made with a determination that there is an “absence of fetal viability” or that the procedure is “necessary to protect the patient’s life or health.” That determination must be made by a “health care practitioner licensed, certified, or authorized” under state law, “acting within his or her lawful scope of practice.”
Previously, abortions after 24 weeks were justified only in cases where the mother’s life was at risk — which was inconsistent with a part of the Roe decision, as we explain later.
Change in criminal statutes
Under the old law, New York criminalized abortion unless it was a “justifiable abortional act” — meaning it was within 24 weeks of the commencement of pregnancy or necessary to “preserve” the mother’s life.
The RHA removes abortion from the state’s penal code altogether; the homicide statute still defines a “person” as “a human being who has been born and is alive.” Killing a baby once born was and is still considered a homicide.
Proponents of the bill argued that abortion should be treated as a health care matter, not as a criminal one. Some pointed to examples of women being forced to travel out of state to terminate pregnancies with fetuses that doctors said would not survive outside the womb. Opponents, on the other hand, said the change removes an important prosecutorial power — such as being able to fully charge a domestic abuser for ending a woman’s pregnancy.
Defining ‘health’ and ‘viability’
Roe v. Wade held that states may limit abortions after fetal viability, except in cases “necessary to preserve the life or health of the mother” (New York’s old law, which predated the decision, only allowed for late-term exceptions to protect the mother’s life.) Fetal viability was defined as being the point when a fetus was “potentially able to live outside the mother’s womb, albeit with artificial aid.”
New York’s new law does not explicitly define “health.”
In what is considered a companion case, Doe v. Bolton, the U.S. Supreme Court held that “medical judgment may be exercised in the light of all factors — physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman’s age — relevant to the wellbeing of the patient. All these factors may relate to health. This allows the attending physician the room he needs to make his best medical judgment.”
National data on ‘late-term’ abortions
“Late-term” abortions are defined in different ways; some states ban abortions after 20 weeks. National data indicate such abortions are relatively rare.
According to a 2018 report by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, based on 2015 data, the majority of abortions in the country — 65 percent — were performed within the first eight weeks of pregnancy. Only about 1 percent were done after 21 weeks.
Those national statistics incorporate data provided by New York City, which accounted for about two-thirds of abortions reported by New York state in 2015, but do not include abortions outside of the city. In New York City, 2.3 percent of abortions were performed after 21 weeks.
The CDC also noted that, between 2006 and 2015, less than 9 percent of abortions were performed after 13 weeks.
As of Jan. 1, 43 states prohibited “some abortions after a certain point in pregnancy,” according to the Guttmacher Institute, which conducts research on sexual and reproductive health and rights.
Change in public health code
New York’s RHA also repealed a section of the public health law that required the following: that abortions after 12 weeks be performed in a hospital; that an additional physician be present for abortions after 20 weeks to care for “any live birth that is the result of the abortion”; and that such babies be provided “immediate legal protection under the laws of the state of New York.”
There appears to be very little in the way of statistics about such scenarios.
A spokesperson for the Guttmacher Institute, for example, told us she was not aware of any data on the topic “because if it happens, it would be extremely rare.”
Asked about the rationale for removing the section from the law, Justin Flagg, a spokesman for New York State Sen. Liz Krueger, who sponsored the new law, said that “the requirement that a second physician be present … did not reflect medical realities of abortion later in pregnancy nor modern standards of medical care, and was legally redundant and unnecessary.”
“Modern abortion techniques do not result in live birth; however, in the great unlikelihood that a baby was born alive, the medical provider and team of medical support staff would provide all necessary medical care, as they would in the case of any live birth,” he wrote in an email. “The RHA does not change standard medical practices. To reiterate, any baby born alive in New York State would be treated like any other live birth, and given appropriate medical care. This was the case before the RHA, and it remains the case now.”
New York defines a live birth as “the complete expulsion or extraction from its mother of a product of conception, irrespective of the duration of pregnancy, which, after such separation, breathes or shows any other evidence of life such as beating of the heart, pulsation of the umbilical cord, or definite movement of voluntary muscles, whether or not the umbilical cord has been cut or the placenta is attached; each product of such a birth is considered live born.”
Other states
The abortion debate continues to be waged on a number of fronts, including in state legislatures. In Virginia, for example, Democrats have moved to ease the requirements for late-term abortions by reducing the number of doctors required to certify such an abortion, from three to one.
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