What I meant by realistic is that you have to play chess with making abortion 100% illegal in all circumstances, and a federal crime.
(I said this in another post somewhere on FR today.) Think about a situation where a woman is 3-4 months pregnant and with all the checkups in her life now, is found to have cancer. Or severely dangerously high blood pressure. Suppose she has other children at home who need her desperately, and the medical recommendation is to end the pregnancy and the unborn’s life in order to save hers. I am strongly anti-abortion but I am wondering whether such a woman and her doctor deserve to be put in federal prison if they proceed.
And imagine if a woman wants an abortion for convenience and her doctor thinks that is hunky dory. Tell me they wouldn’t come up with a scenario like the one above.
That is what I am saying about realism. Not that we have to go with the flow, but you have to imagine whether it would be possible to even find out about abortions.
Here’s another scenario. Many women miscarry very early, but the dead baby remains inside. After two weeks of waiting for the sad flow to start naturally, many doctors want to reduce the risk of infection to the poor mom and opt to give her a D&C in a hospital(scraping and cleaning out the uterus so it can proceed to make ready for the next cycle and the heartbroken couple can try again). This is a common procedure.
Imagine that if the woman and her doctor choose to abort, they could say that she miscarried and then do a D&C. No one would ever know.
An illegal alien is outside the body and can be seen and asked about his papers. An unborn baby is a little harder to determine. I am anti-abortion. But I do see some problems with making it a federal crime. Someone here said today, then it would make killing your unborn embryo a harsher crime than shooting your two-year-old in the head. We need to be realistic in that sense.
Should murder be a federal offense? Abortion is the same thing. Any party to an abortion should be subject to the same punishment as anybody who shoots a two-year-old (or any other person) in the head. Can we catch every one of them and prove them guilty in a court of law? No, but that’s no reason to give up before we start.
I’m not trying to argue with you. I think my views are pretty close to yours. I understand your “realism” argument, and I also realize that this country will never implement what I consider the perfect legal response to abortion. But that won’t change my opinion.
These are such utterly ridiculous red herrings that I can’t believe you put them forward as serious arguments.
All pro-lifers assume the legitimacy of exceptions for the life of the mother. (Ideally, an effort should be made to sav both the mother and the baby but double-effect may lead to the baby’s death and that would not be murder.) Can this exception clause be abused? Of course. But so can any law. If a law is not to be passed simply because you can think up some way people will abuse it, then no laws would ever get passed.
Your other examples are of the same type. Specious. A constitutional amendment does not write federal laws. The proposed one simply clarifies who is a person under the 14th Amendment. Specific laws about the cases you describe would have to be debated and passed by each state. Exactly what and how they criminalize which actions would be up to them and their legislation would be subject to judicial review at all levels. All an amendment would do would be to establish some parameters: an unborn child is a human person and enjoys the protections of the 14th Amendment. Exactly how that protection translates into state laws, well, that—in good federalist fashion—would be up to the states to decide, with judicial review as a check on any efforts to undermine or obstruct the Human Life Amendment.
Which, incidentally, is exactly the way it works with laws about violating any other person’s 14th Amendment rights.
The amendment has little to do with “criminalizing” and far more to do with protecting an as of yet unprotected and cruelly victimized class of persons. Something more or less like what the 14th amendment did for African American slaves. What’s not to like about that?