Brody File Exclusive: Fred Thompson Abortion Questionnaire

The Brody File has in its' possession a Tennesseans for Choice questionnaire filled out by Fred Thompson. It was provided to The Brody File by a rival campaign. In it, he answers "no" when asked if he favors criminalizing abortion. This form was filled out by Thompson around 1996 though the exact date is unknown.

I know there are other questionnaires out there which Thompson filled out and which have already been reported. But this one is new.

Question: Please summarize your personal philosophy on the issue of reproductive choice

Thompson: The Supreme Court has attempted to delineate the constitutionally appropriate roles for individual and governmental decision-making on the issue of abortion. Beyond that, I believe that the federal government should not interfere with individual convictions and actions in this area

I would make an exception to this general rule of governmental non-interference in a very limited number of cases where government has a compelling interest in promoting the public welfare. For instance, I believe that states should be allowed to impose various restrictions if they so choose.

( http://www.cbn.com/images4/cbnnews/blogs/TennesseansForChoiceQuestionnaire.pdf )

The person from the rival campaign who furnished the document told me, "It's notable that in the entire questionnaire he never once says he's pro-life or says what he thinks about Roe."

It's an interesting point. Fred Thompson may have a perfect Senate score with the National Right to Life but when he enters the race, he'll need to explain questionnaires like this one and others. Where was the fervent pro-life talk? He will be challenged on this just like Romney was for his pro-choice comments in the 1990's. I'm not saying they are the same. I'm just saying that it'll be important for Thompson to show some passion for the pro-life cause in 2008. In the 1990's you don't see it.

He looks to be treating the pro-life cause as a federalism type issue rather than a deeply held conviction. That may not be the case but the questionnaire raises the question: Just how much of a priority will the life issue be for a President Fred Thompson? Or is it just another Federalism issue? Comments?

So what really is the difference between what we now have versus what you offer? Both are compulsory and antagonistic. You would force your personal views under the premise of “higher power” on those who don’t share nor want those same ideas. I don’t like their idea of “aborto-buses” rolling around my neighborhood anymore than I do not having the opportunity to choose. You being a soldier, I would have assumed you understood that liberty and freedom should not be infringed upon within the limits of the constitution or current judicious ruling regardless how much we may disagree with them.

“If a fetus is a person then so is a child. So do you believe that a child can be deprived of the right to vote?”

Several problems with that statement. A child doesn’t have a right to vote. Voting is a privilege anyway. Only adult American citizens have that privilege. It has nothing to do with whether or not we should be murdering either children or unborn children, or illegal aliens for that matter (though I think they should be sent home, they should not be murdered).

The courts have consistently held that there may be rational distinctions between people: those who can vote, those who can practice medicine (have a license) and so forth. It is rational to say that only adult American citizens can vote. But this doesn’t mean that anybody else can be axe-murdered. The first and foremost duty of government is to protect self-evident, and unalienable rights. And the foremost of that is the right to life. Equal protection means that no state can deprive the unborn baby of life without due process of law. Last I looked, nobody was giving the unborn baby any due process whatsoever. The only exception is the justification statute, that gives the mother a right to an abortion to preserve her own life, but ONLY IF she cannot save the baby’s life, too.

“I am SICK of you pie in the sky outlook. That is NOT going to happen!!

“I will take overturning Roe V Wade and saving SOME babies over your stupid “strategy” which ensures that nothing will be done EVER.”

When people figure out how much abortion hurts WOMEN, we will bring an end to it. This is already happening, one heart at a time. Calling surgical rape a “right” is ludicrous. And women are tired of letting someone commit axe-murder on their babies. Give them any kind of viable alternative and most of them will never choose abortion. I know that from experience.

I’ll take ANY technique that helps, including overturning Roe. Mothers and babies can’t wait.

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” — preamble to the US Constitution.

“Doesn’t say anything in there about protecting lives.”

The unborn are our posterity. We can’t provide these other benefits without protecting their lives. The Fifth Amendment says no life can be taken without due process of law, and the Fourteenth Amendment says that this applies to states as well.

No state has a right to ALLOW abortion.

"Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity" The unborn are our posterity.

But where does it say that posterity trumps the liberty of the pregnant woman? That's the trouble with trying to create law from the preamble, you can justify the federal government doing anything. The preamble mentions welfare. That's how the liberals justified cradle to grave welfare.

No state has a right to ALLOW abortion.

Do states have the right to allow birth control? That threatens our posterity too. The notion that it is unconstitutional for a state to NOT pass a law is ludicrous.

“But also careful reading of the 14th amendment shows that “no state” shall deprive any person of life without due process, nor deny equal protection.”

Exactly. No state has the right to declare open season on the unborn. No state has a right to permit abortion.

“I have read that at the time of the 13 colonies, abortion was allowed before the quickening which I believe is about 5 weeks. This was before modern science.”

Quickening means the mother can feel her baby move. The earliest that happens is 14 weeks. We have known for a long time that the baby moves long before the mother can feel her movement. I am aware that movement can occur as early as 3 weeks from conception. That’s before women know they are pregnant.

The bottom line is that when a state permits abortion, the state is depriving the unborn of life without due process. It is the government’s responsibility to prevent the private killing of innocent human beings. That is what government is FOR. The Constitution may not make it clear for some people, but the Declaration definitely does when it says that we are CREATED equal (personhood and all).

“That’s the point — the UN has no authority over defining what “murder” is or enforcing appropriate punishments for murder on its member nations.

“Likewise, the federal government has no authority to define what ‘murder’ is or to enforce appropriate punishments for its member states.”

In the case of the UN, it has no say because our nation has sovereignty. But the UN was originally established to prevent a sovereign nation from committing mass murder ever again. It failed in its mission. In the case of the federal government, it has the RESPONSIBILITY to make sure that unalienable rights are protected. The problem is that we think the federal government should not fulfill its mandate, in spite of the Fourteenth Amendment, which DOES mandate that no state shall permit abortion. It does this through the due process requirement. The state cannot permit an abortionist to take the life of an unborn baby without due process of law. In the case where someone attacks and someone else defends and falls under the justification statutes, the person who defends and kills may still go on trial, and can only be found innocent if he acted to protect life. There is the due process; the requirement that a person stand trial for having taken life. The person is only acquitted if he was defending himself or someone else. In the case of abortion, there is never such a proceeding.

While your argument makes APPARENT sense of this, in reality, it is the paramount responsibility of each and every government to prohibit private killings, aka murder. And when one government fails, another must step in and do it. The federal government has the responsibility to secure the blessings of liberty to our posterity, so it cannot neglect to protect their lives.

“The problem is, it is pro-lifers who are being divided and conquered with the fallacy that States have a right under our Constitution to kill babies.”

I think we have a semantic problem here. The question is not whether states have a right to kill babies. It’s whether states have a right to allow ABORTIONISTS to kill babies. They don’t. I can see why we are getting into this quagmire of argument. No state has the right to deprive people of the equal protection of the laws. If the states punish people who kill two year olds, then they have an equal duty to punish people who kill unborn babies. So as long as it is illegal to kill an innocent person, it applies to everyone, including the unborn. The problem is that the Roe court deprived the unborn of the legal designation of personhood. It had no right to do that. We have a duty to ascribe personhood to the unborn. We already HAD that quarrel in this nation, and it came down that we don’t have a right to deprive slaves of the designation of personhood. So the issue is that no human being can legally be deprived of personhood. It’s that simple.

“But, as I’ve argued all along, the assertion that abortion is a state issue, in complete abrogation of the basic principle that all are endowed by their Creator with the unalienable right to life, everywhere in America, is to lose the war before a single shot is fired.”

Fred Thompson can do something that would greatly advance the cause of protecting innocent life. If he declares that the federal government has no role in preventing a state from protecting the unborn and their mothers, he can simply tell the nation that he will NOT ENFORCE ROE. This is fully in keeping with his stand as I understand it, and would have the effect of nullifying this unjust decision. The problem is to get a president to do that. If he does, then state prosecutors can go after the abortionists within the state. This makes the most sense, because prosecutors have to do the most efficient thing to get rid of the crime, and without abortionists, there would be few abortions. So they should prosecute the abortionists. And they should prosecute them not only for mass axe-murder, but for medical rape of their mothers. Right now, mothers are accepting being medically raped, but that doesn’t make it OK. It could be like saying as long as a woman acquiesces to a rapist violating her, the rape is legal. It’s not legal even if she DOES acquiesce. A Supreme Court decision that is not being enforced is a nullity. The Supreme Court doesn’t have enforcement powers. The President does. So convince Fred Thompson (which should be possible, if you can get to him) that he should refuse to enforce Roe (which I think he would be willing to do because he thinks the decision is a travesty), and you have effectively returned it to the states. It doesn’t end there, as you have pointed out, because we have to act on all levels. But it means that some states can immediately ban abortion and prosecute the abortionists. And others will follow. Let the prosecutors prosecute under the homicide statutes. We should never have legislated abortion as a separate issue to begin with. If we prosecute abortion under the homicide statutes, then it can be prosecuted in every state in the union. What you need is prosecutors willing to do so.

“Unborn children are legally different from other children. Unborn children are not counted in the census, they do not require passports and they cannot collect welfare.”

Unborn children can also inherit property, and yes, they can collect welfare. It’s the WIC program, and a woman has to have a child to collect, so the child is part of the package. If she has other children, fine, but if she doesn’t, she’s still eligible on the basis of the existing unborn child. And whatever she eats, her baby benefits from. And the government also provides benefits that will help a pregnant mother obtain housing. This also shelters both of them.

Welfare is wrong to begin with, but that doesn’t mean that the baby has been prevented from receiving its benefits.

What you are talking about here are statutory rights, not unalienable rights. Yes, states have a right to define statutory rights. But they have a duty to enforce unalienable rights. They don’t have a right to deny unalienable rights to any human being. That was what was decided in the fight over slavery. The state has a duty to protect unalienable rights by prosecuting anyone who violates unalienable rights. There’s no unalienable right for a person to be protected against a search of his portion of the house by another family member. There is an unalienable right to be secure in his person and papers, etc. As long as a parent just searches the room as part of his enforcement of parental discipline, he is violating no one’s unalienable rights. But a state that stands by while th parent hires someone to kill his child is acting illegally.

Something most people are forgetting is that a pregnant mother and her child are a dyad. They’re NOT enemies. In fact, you can’t even do an abortion on a woman without harming her body, because our bodies are designed to protect our children. When we stop making mothers and their unborn children into mortal enemies, both of them will be better off. We have no right to drive a wedge between them. Seen in this light, abortion is also a violation of the mother’s rights, and her consent to be violated doesn’t change that fact. As I pointed out, the mere fact that a woman acquiesces to a violation by a rapist doesn’t mean we argue rape should be legal if she acquiesces. And the mere fact that a woman acquiesces to medical rape doesn’t mean medical rape should be legal, either.

“Abortion is an evil thing that we must fight. But what is the best way to fight evil? I say that securing liberty for a free people is much better way to fight evil. But when you give more power to government you diminish the liberty of the people.”

What you and many other people seem not to understand is that the erosion of the rights you mentioned was a CONSEQUENCE of Roe. Get rid of Roe, and nobody will be harassed by government for any of these exercises hou mentioned: protesting abortion, exercising free speech to condemn it, refusing to commit it, and so forth. By claiming that the erosion of liberty here is due to the attempts on the part of a free people to protect the life of the unborn and the bodily integrity of their mothers, you are turning the whole apple cart upside down. The right to life is paramount. It trumps the right to liberty. And when liberty is used to deprive others of life, it needs to be curtailed with respect to that action.

The whole problem is that people no longer discern. They think that if we curtail any destructive activity whatsoever, we erode liberty. But the Founders clearly showed that our Constitution was only sufficient to govern a virtuous people. There is no virtue in prohibiting people from seeking to protect the unborn and their mothers by whatever means possible. When we acquiesce to the travesty of Roe, we begin to think we don’t have to protect these other rights, either. So the best way to protect those rights is to get rid of Roe and start prosecuting the axe-murderers.

“Then what about liberty? That’s a right. If a child is a person can a parent deprive a child of liberty?”

Children are entitled to as much liberty as they can responsibly exercise. The unborn child has a right to liberty within the confines of her mother’s womb. The born child has a right to liberty within the confines of her home. (I would argue that compulsory attendance laws are a violation of the child’s right to liberty; only the parent has the authority to decide to infringe the child’s liberty in this way.) Since the right to life trumps the right to liberty, the parent may not use HER liberty to deprive her child of life. Ever. We do recognize that children have a special status. They have the right to the care of their parents. And the parents have a right to use reasonable discipline in pursuit of raising the child. But in no case does this extend to depriving the child of life itself, nor even to committing grave bodily harm to a child. Again, you’re trying to split a dyad. The parents and the child form a natural relationship, and when you divide them asunder, you violate everyone’s rights. It has consequences for all three of them. So don’t argue that a parent who loves his or her child should have his or her right to care for that child infringed. A parent only lacks the right to harm the child, born or unborn.

“But where does it say that posterity trumps the liberty of the pregnant woman?”

Again, you are forgetting that the mother and her child are a dyad. If you want to harm her child, you must first harm her. The “liberty” you are speaking of is the “liberty” to consent to medical rape, because that’s what it is. It is the deep invasion of a mother’s body for the purpose of harming both her and her child. If you truly understand what abortion is, you will understand why your argument here makes no sense. The mere fact a lot of people use this argument doesn’t make it any less nonsensical.

“That’s the trouble with trying to create law from the preamble, you can justify the federal government doing anything. The preamble mentions welfare. That’s how the liberals justified cradle to grave welfare.”

This is a bad argument because the Preamble speaks of the GENERAL welfare, and you cannot single out some people to be plundered to help the welfare of other people. You have to protect the general welfare of everyone, and plundering is not in furtherance of that goal. The people who use the word “welfare” to justify plundering schemes are misinterpreting the Preamble. We shouldn’t let them get away with that.

“Do states have the right to allow birth control? That threatens our posterity too. The notion that it is unconstitutional for a state to NOT pass a law is ludicrous.”

Yes, they do, provided it’s contraception. Why” Because contraception doesn’t kill anybody. We already HAVE laws against taking life. They’re called “homicide statutes”. If the states suddenly started repealing their homicide statutes, what would you do? I would think that you have a perfect right to argue that the state doesn’t have the right to repeal those statutes. Abortion really SHOULD be prosecuted under the homicide statutes instead of having a separate law of its own.

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