Why big government is offensive: the faster the state expands, the more likely it is to violate your values.

• Author: Welch, Matt
• Position: From the Top - Column

I WAS HOPING to make it through life without heating television commentators repeatedly utter the word transvaginal. Yet that intimate territory is where the country headed in February, and it is where we will increasingly return as long as the government keeps assuming a greater role in our private lives.

The case, which (like so many culture war skirmishes) may already be forgotten by the time you read this, involved Republican legislation in Virginia that originally mandated an ultrasound test on every woman scheduled to have an abortion. The resulting image, according to the Virginia Senate's initial version of the bill, must if possible "contain the dimensions of the fetus, and accurately portray the presence of external members and internal organs of the fetus," in order to produce an estimate of gestational age.

The idea was clear enough: Gals who see tangible evidence of a growing organism in their womb will probably be less likely to go through with its extermination. The problem, as Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell pointed out in his critique of the original bill after it had made national headlines, was that "mandating an invasive procedure in order to give informed consent is not a proper role for the state. No person should be directed to undergo an invasive procedure by the state, without their consent, as a precondition to another medical procedure."

Quite so, even without those "invasive modifiers. Still, that was not exactly the language used by the bill's biggest opponents.

"Most women will be forced to have a transvaginal procedure," wrote Slate legal analyst Dahlia Lithwick, "in which a probe is inserted into the vagina, and then moved around until an ultrasound image is produced." Transvaginal (a term not referenced in the legislation) became the horrified rallying cry for a pro-choice nation shuddering at the prospect of Republicans seizing what comedian/commentator Lizz Winstead called the "legal authority to force doctors to rape their patients."

The outrage softened the final bill's language: Now women would have the option to insist on an external ultrasound, and those who became pregnant through rape or incest could opt out altogether, though only after reporting the incident to police. But if McDonnell signs the legislation into law, it will be yet another demonstration that Republicans are reliably opposed to big-government health care only when they are not the ones implementing it.

Whether passing Medicare Part D...