Goldberg: Herschel Walker may be lying about an ex-girlfriend’s abortion. Does it matter?
I think it’s worth considering this story even if it fails to end definitively.
I don’t think we have any evidence that Herschel Walker is lying about being with an ex-girlfriend when he shot and killed her. That’s a possibility. Her boyfriend was lying to her, and he may have been caught up in an elaborate lie that included a girlfriend with an abortion. I don’t know and I don’t think anyone knows for sure just what happened.
Walker’s father, a staunch anti-abortion Republican, had insisted that he not be shown any sympathy by the public about his decision not to have an abortion. He believes abortion is a sin. I don’t know what happened to that relationship, but I don’t care.
What I care about is that Walker is a murderer, and it doesn’t matter if he’s telling the truth about the boyfriend’s abortion.
What is it about abortion and lying?
The more I learn about abortion, the more I think we can generalize from the experience of women (or maybe women and men) who got abortions. We all know what happens when we have abortions, and we’d be surprised if we knew how it worked or how we felt or if we thought about it at all.
It isn’t like we know what we feel or think about abortion. We know people who get abortions feel horrible about it and often regret it, but we don’t know what they think when they have them.
A man who is telling the truth about an abortion is a very rare and dangerous individual. He’s certainly being extremely polite, and he’s not making up. He’s only describing what he felt and what he was thinking and what he says felt like. If he’s describing what happened and it’s true, he’s being honest. When he tells you he felt relief and guilt and sadness and guilt because he had an abortion that he chose to have but didn’t get to do it on his terms and with his partner’s blessing, he’s telling you it