Rudy Giuliani Confronts His Abortion Stance With Naming of Nussle

LifeNews.com ^ | January 17, 2007 | Steven Ertelt

[Nevernow]

I wouldn't support him if he was pro-choice and pro-Roe, I'd just trust him a bit more.

I wouldn't support him if he was pro-life and pro-Roe at all, because that's contradictory, the same way that being pro-choice and anti-Roe is.

[TET1968]

"Just think how cool he'll look, hunting in his pink strapless sequined gown.... :"

"Careful, that smacks of bitterness." Pride & Prejudice 2005

[zbigreddogz]

Being pro-life and pro-Roe is indeed contradictory. Being pro-choice and anti-Roe is not contradictory at all. It's entirely reasonable to believe that abortion should be legal, but that it isn't a Constitutional right.

[Nevernow]

I suppose, if you believe that making abortion constitutionally legal based on the right to privacy is ridiculous, but if you believe abortion is a woman's rights issue and making it illegal is taking away a right, which Giuliani has said it is, then wouldn't it be contradictory to say that you're against it being a constitutionally protected right, unless you're against men being unable to make their own decisions about their bodies as well?

[zbigreddogz]

I suppose, if you believe that making abortion constitutionally legal based on the right to privacy is ridiculous, but if you believe abortion is a woman's rights issue and making it illegal is taking away a right, which Giuliani has said it is, then wouldn't it be contradictory to say that you're against it being a constitutionally protected right, unless you're against men being unable to make their own decisions about their bodies as well?

Uhh, you really, really don't understand the issue.

There is a difference between a Constitutional right or a statutory right. We have all kinds of rights in America that have nothing to do with the Constitution, but are granted to us by statues. Example: Everyone has the "right" to visit public parks, assuming they aren't committing crimes while there, etc. That has nothing to do with the Constitution, and if they wanted to change the law, they could do so tomorrow.

I personally believe that people should have some sort (depending on how its defined, I'm pro-life and think Roe v. Wade was an atrocious decision) of right to privacy. But its not in the Constitution. I would favor some sort of statutory right to privacy, depending on how you worded it, but it's not a Constitutional right.

Likewise, Giuliani could say, I think that people should have the right to have an abortion, but I don't think that has anything to do with the Constitution, because it isn't in the Constitution.

[Tarpon]

dittos

[Kryptonite]

Excellent response. Thank you. Abortion sickens me to my core, not just because of the baby-killing, but also because of the horrible messages it sends to young females and males alike. *Go ahead, indulge yourself with this person or that, without care as to whether such indulgence produces a baby, cuz you can always have an abortion (kill the baby).* That's just one example -- the adverse effects of dehumanizing and devaluing life stretch into all areas of society and culture.

I'd agree with you about not pledging to cast an anti-Hillary vote if (1) she wasn't certain to be the demonrat candidate or (2) we didn't have the excrement that we have all over the face of this country as a result of the last demonrat's Presidency.

Given that she WILL be their nominee, and the best way to repudiate her and her hubby is to vote her down, hard, I am absolutely going to vote to defeat her in 2008. Then I plan on working hard as I did to defeat her with the new Republican President.

[BlackElk]

I certainly don't expect to vote differently from you. We are, as implicitly recognized in your excellent first paragraph, suffering grave moral slippage. One of our fortresses has been the consistently pro-life platforms of the GOP since Reagan was nominated in 1980. There is a substantial effort by libertarians (charitably speaking) or worse to undermine that commitment.

Objective history will not judge our nation, our party or ourselves by the track record on appointments to the Federal Trade Commission, or to the Civil Rights Commission or to the Border Patrol or other relatively insignificant issues which may stir passions but count for little in reality. We will be judged by the ever-mounting death toll of Roe vs. Wade, 50+ million and counting. If conservatives and Republicans will not make abolition of legal abortion an irreducible minimum, who will?

Odds are that I am older than most who post here. Any differences of opinion which you may perceive are probably attributable to that. If I had to live a lot longer with the results of a Hildebeast presidency, I might see stopping her as first priority. I hope instead (as much as I want her political career burned and her fields salted and not a stone left lying upon a stone until future generations will not be able to identify where she had been, as some brilliant Roman said of Carthage before the finality of the Third Punic War) that the abortion holocaust will end and, secondarily, that the GOP will take the historic opportunity to be the instrument of the end of abortion. It may mean that we must change the party by bringing in large numbers of blacks and Hispanics who are more inclined to be pro-life than many others, even at the cost of slippage on less important issues such as money. It would be worth it.

God bless you and yours.

[Nevernow]

The fourteenth ammendment guarantees not to deny any citizen the equal protection of the law.

If you believe that abortion is about a woman doing what she wants with her own body, which it is to Giuliani, then you should believe that abortion is constitutionally protected based on the fact that in all states, men are able to decide what to do with their own bodies, and to say abortion should be denied to a woman would be unequal protection.

If there is a law in one state which says, men are not allowed to remove foreign objects from their bodies, then why should you believe that it is not constitutionally protected because there would be no violation of equal protection, however, since there is no such law in any state, no matter where you go, illegalizing abortion should be a violation of the 14th ammendment.

Even if the fetus has personhood status, there is no law that states a citizen must use his or her body to keep another citizen alive, we saw that in McFall v. Shimp. If a woman is forced to do it, however, it is unequal protection of her rights.

I don't agree with any of this reasoning, but that's how it is.

It is personal opinion that makes me say I believe that being against constitutional protection of abortion but for abortion is untrustworthy. The way I see it, it means a politician cares less about women and their rights and more about votes, which means, I won't trust him. I'm not trying to convince you to trust him less because of it.

What I am saying, though, is even though RvW was ridiculous in my eyes, it was a major victory for the pro-abortion crowd (OH NO! NO PC! Pro-abortion! That's what people are when they support abortion being legal. Just like I'm anti-abortion.) and to try and overturn it is foolish, unless it's to try and nullify it in favor of a constitutional protection based on equal protection of all citizens.

[zbigreddogz]

You are wrong about your rational for Roe. There is no Constitutional right to "Do what you want with your own body," that's just words that pro-abort people use that don't hold up to even the most remote scrutiny. If there were, drug laws would be unconstitutional, as would laws prohibiting suicide. But there are drug laws, and there are anti-suicide laws, and neither are unconstitutional.

Roe was decided on the "Right to Privacy" that was essentially created in the case "Griswald v. Conneticuit," when they ruled that a state couldn't ban the sale of contraception.

Now, I agree with the outcome of the decision, I don't think the state should be able to ban something like that either, but the "Right to Privacy" as they found it was, and is, mythical. They claimed to have found it in the "prenumbra" (their word, not mine, that means essentially "shadow") of several parts of the Constitution. It's nonsense, and the definition of judicial activism.

So it is not unreasonable to say "I don't think that there is a real life inside a pregnant mother, it's just a blob of cells," or whatever, but still think "The right to privacy, as invented by the Courts, doesn't exist, and certainly doesn't include abortion anymore then a right to privacy allows you to take heroin in your own body."

Even if the fetus has personhood status, there is no law that states a citizen must use his or her body to keep another citizen alive, we saw that in McFall v. Shimp

You are making two mistakes here:

1. You are assuming that actively destroying someone is the same as not saving someone. If a child is already born, you can't take a knife and cut it up, nor can you dump chemicals on it to kill it. That's what abortion does to unborn children. A person may not have to rescue a drowning child at risk to themselves, but that doesn't mean they can go out and kill one.

2. You are assuming that a child is just like any other person, it isn't. A mother has a responsibility to her child. If a mother has an already born child, and refuses to feed it, for example, she'll be in jail so fast it'll make your head swim. She is forced, by law, to take care of the child, and protect it if she can. Now, she isn't required to attack someone trying to kidnap her child if the man has a gun and might kill her, or something like that, but that would be more like an exception to outlawing abortion being when the life of the mother is in danger, and virtually no pro-lifers I know oppose that exception.

[Nevernow]

As I said, I can understand being against the right to privacy argument.

But I can't understand being prochoice and being against abortion being constitutionally protected, because a fetus is parasitic. It isn't a parasite, but it is using a woman's body and causing negative effects, though they are not permanent. Men have the right to remove foreign objects from their body, as I said. Women being denied that right isn't equal protection, again, I said that.

You are arguing with me from a prolife standpoint, not a prochoice standpoint. Let's put it this way...if a ten year old girl needed to be hooked up to her mother for nine months in order to survive, a court could not order the mother to agree to it. It is not the same as having to save someone, because the person is only alive because you are keeping them alive when you are pregnant. I agree that using this reasoning, they'd still have to take the fetus out alive and not kill it before removing it, I've argued that many times with other people and no one has managed to give me an excuse for killing first other than "Abortion is safer than a C-section!", but the fact remains, there is no other case where one citizen is granted the right to use another citizen's body to survive. A mother with a born child has the option of putting the child up for adoption. A pregnant woman can't go, Here, I don't want this in me, someone else can incubate it.

If you are prochoice, you believe in the mother's bodily integrity being protected. If you do not want it constitutionally protected, even though a man's bodily integrity is protected in all states, you are not being consistant.