Posted on 01/02/2005 5:02:17 AM PST by Liz
A Supreme Court vacancy may soon ignite a controversy involving two entangled issues — abortion, and the role of courts in this constitutional democracy. Herewith a statement the president might usefully make sometime, somewhere, to disentangle the issues:
"Because I think it is improper to ask how a prospective judicial nominee would vote on a specific question, I shall not know how my nominees would rule in the event — an unlikely event — that the court revisits the constitutional foundation of abortion rights established by Roe v. Wade in 1973. However, I will seek judicial nominees disinclined to concoct spurious constitutional mandates for their policy preferences, as I believe the justices did in Roe. On the other hand, the orderly development of constitutional law requires that justices be generally disposed to respect precedents, even dubious ones, if they have been repeatedly reaffirmed for decades.
"I believe abortion is wrong, but also that states should have, as they did until Roe, the power to set abortion policy. If states come to conclusions different than mine, so be it. But remember: Were Roe overturned, that would not make abortion illegal; it would merely re-empower states to regulate the practice. And restoring the legal conditions of 1973 would not restore the social context of 1973.
---SNIP---
"......Roe, which discovered a right to abortion in the emanations of penumbras — or was it penumbras of emanations? — of other rights, was judicial overreaching, indistinguishable from legislating.
........the only policy choices possible in the context of Roe — about, for example, late-term abortions, parental notification, public funding — people can be pro-choice with nuances. That is one reason why in 2004 one-third of pro-choice voters supported me.
--SNIP--
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Written by George Will....syndicated columnist.
So now the NYPost thinks it should advise the President on what he should do?
How presumptuous or them! And Idiotic!
Looks like Bush is taking the emotion out of the argument. Once that happens Roe is dead.
I had to look through a couple of times before realizing this is really George Will speaking fancifully about what I suppose he wishes the President would say.
-- Joe
Abortion is a ritual murder before an idolatry of one's own vanity upon an altar of conceit...
A pre-natal summary execution...
Nicely put. Good analogies.
Whenever the Left protests an adjudicated execution, we should respond by carrying giant placards of aborted babies before the news media...
You would never see capital punishment protests on television with unavoidable big pictures of abortions mixed in, would you???
when my children were growing up, there were times when I supported 'post-birth abortion" up to the 54th trimester (18)--but that was rooted in annoyance because they were doing something that bothered me.
What made my impulsive thinking moot were the overwhelming gratifications I got when they smiled at me or did something that made me proud to be their dad.
The truth is that MOST abortions are also rooted in the psychology of the mother that the impending birth of a child is an annoyance. Unfortunately, the presumptive mother doesn't have the gratification of a smile from her unborn child to curb the annoyance impulse.
Abortion has aleays been about convenience notwithstanding all of the deceptive high-sounding humanistic arguments posited by pro-aborts.
Re: "Abortion must end or America will lose her moral voice in the world."
Too late. 40 million and counting. Hitler would be proud.
George Will is a sellout of whom real pro-lifers should be completely ashamed.
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