Posted on 11/26/2012 7:42:24 PM PST by VitacoreVision
Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) asks for your support of the National Pro-Life Alliance and the Life at Conception Act to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Sign the Petition
http://nationalprolifealliance.com/rlacaa_petition.aspx
background:
Rand Paul Cosponsors Life at Conception Act
Rand Paul - Press Release
24 January 2011
WASHINGTON, D.C. – This week, Senator Rand Paul will join Senator Roger Wicker as an original sponsor of the Life at Conception Act. This legislation declares that the unborn are persons, as prescribed in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.
This legislation does not amend or interpret the Constitution, but simply relies on the 14th Amendment, which specifically authorizes Congress to enforce its provisions.
From Section 1 of the 14th Amendment:
“No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
By following the powers offered to Congress in the Constitution, passage of the Life at Conception Act would reverse Roe v. Wade without the need for a constitutional amendment.
In a statement today, Sen. Paul shared his thoughts on today’s March for Life and on co-sponsoring this important piece of legislation.
“The right to life is prescribed to all Americans in the Declaration of Independence. Ensuring this is upheld is the Constitutional duty of all Members of Congress. I am doing my part by joining my fellow pro-life colleagues in sponsoring the Life at Conception Act, which will protect the sanctity of human life.
Protecting Americans – whether it’s balancing the budget or ensuring no child will be denied the right to life – is my priority now – as it has always been. As a medical student, I was one of a small group of students who opted out of learning abortion procedures. My regard for the sanctity of life has carried me throughout my career as a physician and I am proud to join my new colleagues to continue this fight for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all Americans, born and unborn.”
Pro-life is a libertarian issue too.
At least it is not inconsistent with libertarian philosophy of using State power to protect the innocent weak from the aggressive strong.
The dims always insist that repubs are ‘anti-science’, but any (honest) student of high school biology knows a unique organism is formed at conception.
Thank you, National Pro Life Alliance and Senator Rand Paul.
Signed, but it cost me $10.
Hey, the election is over, it is now safe to pander to conservatives since it has absolutely no chance of happening
The same reporters who will ask a Republican how old they think the earth is will never ask a Democrat when they think life begins.
Libertarianism is only pro-life if one arbitrarily defines it that way. There is no higher power to make it so. A lot of Christians think they are libertarian when they are really conservatives.
What are you conserving at this point?
Paul is wrong. The Constitution nowhere specifies that Congress has the power to redefine terms used in the Constitution.
Such a law, if it passed, which it certainly won't due to a Democratic Senate, would be of advisory force only to the Supreme Court, which is the logical and traditional, though also not specified, body to define terms used in the Constitution.
I think Roe was an atrocious decision, but it is not going to be overturned. The odds are Obama will nominate two or more Justices, locking in liberal domination of the Court for decades.
Elections have consequences, and this one is really going to screw us over.
What Congress could do is pass a law similar to this, and remove any review of it from the Court's jurisdiction.
This law would also certainly be vetoed by O, so passing it into law would require 2/3 in both houses.
If brainwave activity (or lack thereof) can be the criteria for death, then why not also life?
Seems like a pretty bright line.
I would hope that if there still is an America and we still elections in 2016 that Rand Paul would throw his hat in the ring for Pres. This guy can speak and make his point and I have yet to see him step in it.
This legislation does not amend or interpret the Constitution, but simply relies on the 14th Amendment, which specifically authorizes Congress to enforce its provisions.
Similarly there's another FReeper whose name I can't recall who has a thought provoking tagline...suppose the Mars Explorer found a freshly fertilized egg on Mars. Would scientists be able to claim they found evidence of life? If it's evidence of life on another planet, why not on earth?
Considering Personhood was easily voted down in Mississippi, it has no hope anywhere else.
So, as I asked then:
1) Should every miscarriage be investigated as a possible murder?
2) Should there be some sort of monitoring and testing system imposed to detect the millions of fertilized eggs that fail to implant, again as part of potential murder investigations? Do we include all of those in child mortality statistics?
Paul is wrong. The Constitution nowhere specifies that Congress has the power to redefine terms used in the Constitution.
Your premise is 100% wrong. No where in Paul's statement did he say anything about 'redefining terms used in the Constitution.'
>> Pro-life is a libertarian issue too.
Damn straight.
And further, you can't own another human being.
One thing that is remarkable is the astounding stupidity of the Pro-Life movement in not pursuing incrementalism.
The same approach was used against slavery - first banning the import of slaves, then preventing new slave states - of course, that wasn’t incremental enough for the South, but Lincoln was savaged by Radical Republicans for not moving faster. The Emancipation Proclamation just freed slaves in states in rebellion, not everywhere. It was pursuing politics as the art of the possible.
The correct way to go after abortion is to whittle away a tiny bit at a time at the latest legal time in the term an abortion is allowed, and getting enough Republican Presidents elected to get enough justices to overturn Roe v. Wade.
An important additional strategy is to get EVERYONE in the movement and every associated candidate to STFU about their true feelings about abortion in cases of rape and incest, and simply flat out lie - for now. If you feel that strongly about abortion the ends justify the means, and if shutting up about opposing rape and incest abortions (which are rare) helps you win office and whittle down the total number of abortions, it’s a win.
That strategy, I suspect, still won’t work, but it has a chance.
What DOESN’T have a chance is going for the whole enchilada at once persuing Personhood stuff. Once the full implications of it become known, it has no chance politically.
You’ll never, ever, convince the majority of the population that a fertilized egg they can’t see is a baby.
I like your statement, but it’s not quite accurate - Obama was asked, and his answer was, “that’s above my pay grade.”
Those whose self-image is bolstered by maintaining a position of no incremental change....allowing a million babies to be killed each year until somehow it just all stops instantly, at once....will never admit they are mistaken in even the tiniest degree.
I didn’t see the words of the proposed legislation anywhere in this.
S. 91: Life at Conception ActS 91 IS
112th CONGRESS
1st Session
S. 91
To implement equal protection under the 14th article of amendment to the Constitution for the right to life of each born and preborn human person.
IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES
January 25 (legislative day, January 5), 2011
Mr. WICKER (for himself, Mr. INHOFE, Mr. ENZI, Mr. BURR, Mr. VITTER, Mr. COBURN, Mr. THUNE, Mr. RISCH, Mr. COATS, Mr. BLUNT, Mr. MORAN, Mr. BOOZMAN, and Mr. PAUL) introduced the following bill; which was read twice and referred to the Committee on the Judiciary
A BILL
To implement equal protection under the 14th article of amendment to the Constitution for the right to life of each born and preborn human person.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This Act may be cited as the ‘Life at Conception Act’.
SEC. 2. RIGHT TO LIFE.
To implement equal protection for the right to life of each born and preborn human person, and pursuant to the duty and authority of the Congress, including Congress’ power under article I, section 8, to make necessary and proper laws, and Congress’ power under section 5 of the 14th article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States, the Congress hereby declares that the right to life guaranteed by the Constitution is vested in each human being.
SEC. 3. DEFINITIONS.
For purposes of this Act:
(1) HUMAN PERSON; HUMAN BEING- The terms ‘human person’ and ‘human being’ include each and every member of the species homo sapiens at all stages of life, including, but not limited to, the moment of fertilization, cloning, and other moment at which an individual member of the human species comes into being.
(2) STATE- The term ‘State’ used in the 14th article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States and other applicable provisions of the Constitution includes the District of Columbia, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and each other territory or possession of the United States.
See also...
S. 91: Life at Conception Act
“Pro-life is a libertarian issue too.”
As long as the Libertarian in question acknowledges that an unborn person is a full person.
Most don’t.
It is consistent for them, though, assuming the personhood of the unborn.
“1) Should every miscarriage be investigated as a possible murder?
2) Should there be some sort of monitoring and testing system imposed to detect the millions of fertilized eggs that fail to implant, again as part of potential murder investigations? Do we include all of those in child mortality statistics?”
A miscarriage, by its very definition, is involuntary. So, obviously, no.
A failure to implant also involves no action on the parents’ part, unless you are speaking of “birth control” that actually prevents implantation (the pill, morning after, IUD), which can easily be made illegal.
I think we have pursued incremental change, with court cases, making late term abortions very difficult, defunding, the Hyde Amendment, waiting periods, parental consent, regulating abortuaries to death, giving conscience clauses to health professionals, etc.
Abortions went down 5% last year. There is a reason for that.
!
An abortion-free society is not going to arrive until most of us really want it. But what most of America really wants today is a mostly abortion-free society.
Therefore, we should move as quickly as possible to a mostly abortion-free society and work for as long as it takes to change America's "wants" regarding the remainder of abortions.
Tax the abortionist AND the “patient” for each abortion by dividing the entire cost of breast cancer from the previous years.
>A failure to implant also involves no action on the parents’ part, unless you are speaking of “birth control” that actually prevents implantation (the pill, morning after, IUD), which can easily be made illegal.
Birth control can “easily be made illegal”?
Yeah, there’s a winning ticket to elections. Now just throw in mandatory birthing requirements for rape and incest victims and it’s a cakewalk for any candidate espousing such a plan.
After the landslide win, the new president can appoint akin and mourdock to their rightful positions that were “stolen” from them.
There are four years before 2016 to begin selling this winning strategy.
Au contraire.
The Supreme Court, in the Roe v Wade decision, interpreted the term “person,” as used in the 14th Amendment, to not include a fetus. Whether this interpretation is correct or not is beside the point, they did make that interpretation.
So for Congress to pass a law specifying that the fetus IS a “person” protected by the 14th Amendment, it would necessarily involve Congress overruling the SCOTUS interpretation and substituting its own. Which, as I said, the Constitution does not give them the power to do.
The whole discussion is moot, of course, since Congress will pass no such law, not even the House.
The party has almost nothing to do with the philosophy.
There’s also that unfortunate first sentence in the 14th Amendment.
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
I’m as pro-life as anybody, but it’s tough for me to extract from this that a fetus, which has not yet been either born or naturalized is somehow a citizen of the United States.
It also doesn’t say that the fetus is not a person. It doesn’t address that issue. But it does say only persons “born or naturalized” are citizens.
Other libertarians are more true to it's historical leftist roots.
Libertarians are stupid. Nice discussing this with you.
“Birth control can “easily be made illegal”?
Yeah, there’s a winning ticket to elections.”
IUDs and pills are not birth control. They are abortifacients.
If you think they are just birth control, you are believing a lie. The left repeats things over and over, and eventually, they get accepted. They shouldn’t.
I don’t know how large people have to get until you find their murder unacceptable. Myself, I don’t care how small they are. Once conceived, they are people, and should not be legally killed.
Barrier methods such as condoms and diaphragms actually help prevent conception and as such don’t kill anybody.
I know the majority of America doesn’t care. But the majority of America is not always right.
“Therefore, we should move as quickly as possible to a mostly abortion-free society and work for as long as it takes to change America’s “wants” regarding the remainder of abortions. “
I agree with this sentiment, and will take any help for the unborn we can get.
I use the analogy of slavery. I don’t believe it should be legal to own another person, period.
Still, I’d push for laws that forbid killing someone you ‘own,’ whipping people you ‘own,’ selling off children from parents you ‘own,’ or that required days off and good food and what have you. Of course that is an improvement.
But I would never go along with the idea that it’s ok to have a little bit of slavery. It isn’t ok until it is all totally illegal.
Abortion, similar. I’ll take what progress we can make, but I will never behave or speak as though it’s ok to just kill the handicapped ones, or the ones who haven’t implanted yet, or the ones whose fathers are rapists, or whatever.
When the majority is wrong, what is to be done?
Do we take what the majority will accept as a starting point (I'm in favor of that) or do we let babies die by the millions whilst waiting for the majority to come around to a 100.00% position??
“Do we take what the majority will accept as a starting point”
I take it. Then I try for more, attempting to educate and reason with all I can communicate with. As I posted previously, I’ll go along with incrementalism. I am just not going to pretend that’s all I want.
Once again your premise is 100% wrong. Roe v Wade did not interpret anything existing in the Constitution leading to their decision.
Roe v Wade: FULL Text (The Decision that wiped out an entire Generation 33 years ago today - 2006)
Your premise that Congress can't pass a law that overrules a prior SCOTUS interpretation of the Constitution is also 100% wrong. And utterly ridiculous.
It's a long-standing legal doctrine that, when interpreting a word in a law or contract, you need to use the commonly-accepted definition of that word at the time that the thing was written.
The notion of legislative "incremental change" is ludicrous, because the whole abortion fiasco arose and continues in the Federal Court system. Short of a cataclysmic change in the Congress and the growth of some very large brass gonads to remove any jurisdiction over abortion from the purview of the Federal courts (a power the Constitution SPECIFICALLY gives the Congress....though it has never been used), ANY legislative approach, incremental or not, is simply doomed.
What the Pro-Life community is doing (successfully) is fostering MORAL incremental change (which was the REAL first step in getting rid of slavery.....convincing a sufficiently large number of people that slavery was morally wrong). The number of people who support abortion has decreased regularly.
Roe v Wade did not interpret anything existing in the Constitution leading to their decision.
A. The appellee and certain amici argue that the fetus is a "person" within the language and meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. In support of this, they outline at length and in detail the well-known facts of fetal development. If this suggestion of personhood is established, the appellant's case, of course, collapses, for the fetus' right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by the Amendment. ...
The Constitution does not define "person" in so many words. Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment contains three references to "person." The first, in defining "citizens," speaks of "persons born or naturalized in the United States." The word also appears both in the Due Process Clause and in the Equal Protection Clause. ... But in nearly all these instances, the use of the word is such that it has application only postnatally. None indicates, with any assurance, that it has any possible pre-natal application. 54
All this, together with our observation, supra, that throughout the major portion of the 19th century prevailing legal abortion practices were far freer than they are today, persuades us that the word "person," as used in the Fourteenth Amendment, does not include the unborn.
>>>In other words, I'm right and you're wrong. The SCOTUS interpreted the term "person" as not including the unborn. Therefore, any attempt by Congress to pass a law using the language of the 14th Amendment to protect the unborn would be invalid, since the 14th (as interpreted by SCOTUS) authorizes Congress to pass implementing language as needed to protect the rights of "persons," not any other group.
Your position that Congress makes the final decision about who qualifies as "persons" under the Constitution makes just about as much sense as deciding that an animal-rights Congress could pass laws proclaiming certain animals (dogs, cats and horses) but not others to be persons entitled to all the protections of the 14th Amendment and other parts of the Constitution. Congress would also by definition have the power to define other groups of humans as "not" being persons: gingers, short people, the unattractive, those over 85 years old, for instance.
The Roe v Wade decision was improperly decided, IMO. But the actual decision itself is not nearly as bad as what it has morphed into, an absolute constitutional right to abortion right up to the instant of (complete) birth.
But saying the Constitution says something it doesn't say is exactly how we got into this mess in the first place. Roe v Wade was not wrongly decided because it said the fetus wasn't a person under the Constitution. That was correct. It was wrongly decided because it unilaterally found new rights in the Constitution that were never intended by the Founders, and used these newly discovered rights to invalidate all state (and federal) laws against abortion.
If the 14th Amendment applied to the unborn, then the fetus would have an absolute right to life, once again taking any authority to legislate on the subject away from the states. In 1973, when Roe was decided, such a decision would have invalidated more state laws than Roe did, arguably every single one of them.
Since, as the SCOTUS correctly ruled, the fetus is not a person under the 14th, the decision about abortion should have been left where it was from the earliest days of the country, with the individual states.
That's the proper Constitutionalist position. If one wants the Constitution to protect the unborn (or not), the correct cure is not for either Congress or the Court to re-interpret the Constitution to suit one's whims, it's to pass an Amendment that properly changes the Constitution.
In Roe the Court produced the equivalent of an Amendment without all the fuss and bother of actually passing and ratifying one. That's why the decision was wrong, not because it decided the fetus is not a "person" under the Constitution.
In this it exactly duplicated a previous SCOTUS decision whereby black people were declared to not be "persons" under the Constitution. According to the Dred Scott decision no state or federal law could change this. Persons of African ancestry were not and could never become citizens of the United States.
Both decisions were produced because a majority of the Court thought they could bring controversy over an extremely divisive issue to an end by removing it from the political arena. Both failed, though Scott, to date, more spectacularly than Roe.
Exactly! It doesn't define 'person' in any words at all. Congress is free to do so.
Right.
The Constitution doesn’t define “natural born citizen” in so many words, so Congress is free to do so.
The Constitution doesn’t define “shall not be infringed” in so many words, so Congress is free to do so.
Be careful what you wish for.
The meaning of those phrases are self-evident.
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Good for him and hope it works. People have to keep trying. Hearts and minds are changing due to constant heroic efforts.
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