That is not quite accurate. The dispute is with EV’s incorrect claim that the 14th Amendment *already requires* it.
Unlike most lawyers these days, I can read plain English, with comprehension.
To wit: "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."
He goes even beyond your points. This is the kind of judicial activist reading of the 14th that gave us Roe v Wade in the first place. It’s wrong, a bad reading of the Constitution that no Federal Judge, including Scalia, would go along with.
Earlier in the thread, I posted the views of the top judge on the Ninth Circuit, a Reagan appointee, who agreed with me explicitly. Even the author of Roe himself, Judge Harry Blackmun, in the text of Roe, agreed that if the child in the womb were a person, they would be protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.
The GOP platform advocates for a Human Life Amendment to address this issue. Why would the GOP Platform have that if the 14th amendment could fix it automatically? Reality is 14th cant and it wont be fixed/addressed without additional enabling definition of human life. HLA does that.
You're neglecting to mention that it also says that unborn children are protected by the Fourteenth Amendment already. Advocates of an amendment to the Constitution do so only because of the willful ignorance demonstrated on this matter by individuals like yourself.
The Reagan pro-life plank in the GOP platform:
"We must keep our pledge to the first guarantee of the Declaration of Independence. That is why we say the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed. We support a human life amendment to the Constitution and we endorse legislation to make it clear that the 14th Amendment's protections apply to unborn children. Our purpose is to have legislative and judicial protection of that right against those who perform abortions."
Note that the analogy with slavery fits - Just as addressing slavery finally did require constitutional amendment to have a national solution written in Constitutional Law, this Constitutional Amendment is a possible solution to abortion as well. Pretending that the 14th can be twisted into a pretzel to serve the pro-life cause rather than the pro-abort cause is — well, that’s smoking some mighty strong crack.
The original Constitution contained compromise language that allowed for slavery, unfortunately. However, that same Constitution has always had language, contained in the Preamble and in the Fifth Amendment, that offered protection for innocent human life. That language was predicated on the Declaration of Independence. So, the only reason we would even need an amendment is to overcome the unreasoning and illogical arguments of people like Blackmun and a good chunk of our current legal establishment. Of course, it would probably take them about five minutes to misinterpret that too.
I support a Human Life Amendment but I can do the math too - it will never happen because the Democrats are as pro-abort as possible and wont ever vote in numbers to make the 2/3rds bar get met.
Well, you're just full of solutions then, aren't you...
So, IMHO, the realistic next step is to take the issue out of the courts (who wrongly decided Roe v Wade) and put it back to the people to decide. Its easier to get 2 more votes on the Supreme Court than to get an amendment passed.
To advocate that is to surrender the very intellectual, moral and legal arguments that are required to even overturn Roe, much less outlaw it in the several states.
To suggest that you cant be prolife and hold this position (repeal Roe v Wade and return abortion to the states) is absurd.
Substitute the word "slavery" for the word "abortion" in all your arguments, and the foolishness of your position quickly becomes clear. And abortion is surely a much worse scourge on humanity than the awful horrors of slavery ever were. No state, no individual, has the right to deprive any person of their life, short of conviction on a capital offense, during the commission of justifiable homicide, or during the execution of just war.
Just tell me how many unborn children have been saved by EV’s position on the 14th (answer: Zero, because what he advocates never will happen), and you’ll have your answer as to whether this is really the effective pro-life position.
ALL children would be saved under my understanding, but none will be saved under yours. That's the simple fact.
EV’s the kind of guy who will call people who merely advocate for parental consent ‘RINOs’, and yet abortion rates declined significantly in states that implemented the (widely popular) parential notification and parental consent laws.
Politicians pay lip service to the pro-life cause every day. But they do little or nothing to bring this holocaust that continues to kill 3 to 5 thousand American children EVERY DAY to an end. I won't apologize for continuing to point that out. The good is the enemy of the best, and extremism is the enemy of effective political activism.
” Politicians pay lip service to the pro-life cause every day..”
As do you, with your crack-smokin’ advocacy of interpretations of law adn Constitution that have zero credibility and will never come to pass.
Well said!
"Abraham Lincoln recognized that we could not survive as a free land when some men could decide that others were not fit to be free and should therefore be slaves. Likewise, we cannot survive as a free nation when some men decide that others are not fit to live and should be abandoned to abortion or infanticide. My Administration is dedicated to the preservation of America as a free land, and there is no cause more important for preserving that freedom than affirming the transcendent right to life of all human beings, the right without which no other rights have any meaning."
~~~ President Ronald Reagan, From: "Abortion and The Conscience of a Nation", 1983