Posted on 08/23/2008 7:40:52 AM PDT by WilliamReading
Good morning, this is John McCain, speaking to you at the end of an eventful week in the presidential campaign. All the talk today is about my opponent’s selection of his running mate. To his new running mate, my congratulations and I’ll get back to you real soon on your debating opponent.
The week began with a debate of sorts between Senator Obama and me at Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California. In case you missed it, the discussion yielded the line of the week, and maybe even of the campaign, when Pastor Rick Warren asked my opponent a very serious question. He wanted to know at what point, in my opponent’s view, does a baby have human rights? Senator Obama thought about it for a moment, and came back with the reply that the question was, quote, “above my pay grade.”
Here was a candidate for the presidency of the United States, asked for his position on one of the central moral and legal questions of our time, and this was the best he could offer: It’s above his pay grade. He went on to assure his interviewer that there is a, quote, “moral and ethical element to this issue.” Americans expect more of their leaders.
There seems to be a pattern here in my opponent’s approach to many hard issues. Whether it’s the surge in Iraq that has brought us near to victory, or the issue of campaign reform, or the question of offshore drilling, Senator Obama’s speeches can be impressive. But when it’s time for straight answers, clear conviction, and decisive action, suddenly all of these responsibilities are – well, as he puts it, “above my pay grade.” As mottos of leadership go, it doesn’t exactly have the ring of “the buck stops here.”
Often, too, Senator Obama’s carefully hedged answers obscure more than they explain, and this was the case in his conversation with Rick Warren. Listening to my opponent at Saddleback, you would never know that this is a politician who long since left behind any middle ground on the abortion issue. He is against parental notification laws, and against restrictions on taxpayer funding for abortions. In the Illinois Senate, a bipartisan majority passed legislation to prevent the horrific practice of partial-birth abortion. Senator Obama opposed that bill, voting against it in committee and voting “present” on the Senate floor.
In 2002, Congress unanimously passed a federal law to require medical care for babies who survive abortions – living, breathing babies whom Senator Obama described as, quote, “previable.” This merciful law was called the Born Alive Infants Protection Act. Illinois had a version of the same law, and Barack Obama voted against it.
At Saddleback, he assured a reporter that he’d have voted “yes” on that bill if it had contained language similar to the federal version of the Born Alive Infants Protection Act. Even though the language of both the state and federal bills was identical, Senator Obama said people were, quote, “lying” about his record. When that record was later produced, he dropped the subject but didn’t withdraw the slander. And now even Senator Obama’s campaign has conceded that his claims and accusations were false.
For a man who talks so often about “hope,” Senator Obama doesn’t offer much of it in meeting this great challenge to the conscience of America. His extreme advocacy in favor of partial birth abortion and his refusal to provide medical care for babies surviving abortion should be of grave concern to reasonable people of goodwill on both sides of this issue. There is a growing consensus in America that we need to overcome narrow partisanship on this issue for both women in need and the unborn. We need more of the compassion and moral idealism that my opponent’s own party, at its best, once stood for. No one is above the law, and no one is beneath its protection.
Upholding these principles, and bringing Americans together on the side of life, is the work of leadership. And I can assure you that if I am president, advancing the cause of life will not be above my pay grade. Thanks for listening.
Because of the right to not be forced into surrogacy which increases mortality risk, coupled with the inability to immediately transplant a living being from a womb without killing the newly conceived, we are at a point which requires the principle of self-defense to play a role in the issue.
After decades in the Congress, John McCain has probably had occasion to think on these things and to think upon the actual difficulties in changing the perspectives and the policies.
John McCain has taken two irreconcilable positions.
Either the right to life is a matter of human choice or it isn't. If it is, as McCain's position suggests, then its sole claim to protection is positive law -- not natural law.
If this is true, then there is no objective standard by which the degree of misfortune can be consistently judged -- giving credence to the notion that the right to life ought to be subject to the choice of the mother, and not the government, and certainly not God.
It may be impossible for your mind to reconcile the fact that individual life begins at conception and the self-defense rights of a woman or girl who has been raped, and such either or mentality does fashion the irreconcilable, but courts and natural law deal with this sort of thing often, in reality.
Our technology has not reached the point of being able to successfully transplant an implanted embryo, yet. We will reach that point if civilization continues for another twenty years. At that point the way society deals with what you deem irreconcilable will change from the reality of today, if we adopt perspectives now which value the little ones from conception onward. But that doesn't relieve the reality of today's conflicting rights of the woman/mother and the rights of the newly conceived.
Presently, the debates over embryonic stem cell exploitation, which Mitt Romney has just as convoluted in his supposedly 'now' pro-life mind, are heading in the wrong direction under democrat, liberal demands. Even men like Orrin Hatch are using an unclear definition to exploit the situation and authorize the dissection of alive human embryonic aged humans who have not been implanted in a human body. [And to illustrate how complex the issues can get, I referenced 'human body' instead of female body because the sexual degenerate class are already trying to get embryos implanted in homosexual male surrogates. And some research technology has tumbled off in that direction!]
If our culture does not now take the perspective that even embryos conceived in petri dishes are humans at an earliest age, then the resolution of conflicting interests, the rights of the newly conceived and the self-defense rights of the impregnated will not be correctly resolved because one class is becoming more disenfranchised rather than more enfranchised. Fighting embryonic exploitation now works to enfranchise the newly conceived and thus move our technology/research int he direction of learning how to protect even an implanted embryo while recognizing the right of a raped female who becomes pregnant from the crime of another to defend her life by not being forced to continue a pregnancy which increases her mortality risk through no fault of her own.
You may not wish to consider the above reasoning, for whatever reason you hold privately, but that is a more in-depth look at the complexity and the conflicting compelling interests. The idea way to deal with pregnancy from rape or incest is to save both innocent parties, but our technology has yet to relieve courts of that enigmatic case, so the courts settle such problems by assigning greater or lesser interest/right based upon the societal values, and our current direction in values is into the democrat/liberal gutter. You won't change the trend by demanding and either or of extremes, but many continue to harbor that dream.
As I explained before, the principle of self-defense does not apply to the baby, because the baby is not attacking the mother. The baby is completely innocent in the matter that left the woman with the baby inside of her.
The time for self-defense is at the point of offense, and against only the person attacking.
Your argument rests on the premise that the baby is an "object" to be discarded and not a "person" with unalienable rights. However, what started this discussion was that McCain himself said that life begins at conception, which makes treating one as an object under certain circumstances (e.g., the woman was raped) logically problematic.
Just because the answer is difficult to bear (for the mother, et al) doesn't make the logic invalid.
1) Does being pregnant increase mortality rsik at all?
2) Is it pro-life to force a female impregnated by rape to carry the baby to term?
3) Are the rights of the female of zero consequence to you? ... Please note, she is an innocent also, being put at risk by the crime committed against her, so she does have self-defense rights where she has been forced into risk she did not ask for.
I'm sorry that your effort to present this as ONLY an either or with your carefully crafted either and or is not sufficient to define the real issues, but there it is.
Until the entirety of the complexity is addressed--since the self-defense parameter is real and has merit--there will not arise a meaningful end to this assault on the alive unborn because it is incorrect--a false trail--to address only the rights of the alive innocent unborn. But remember, this effort must be focused upon the earliest age of the newly conceived for dealing with the rights of the impregnated innocent. Courts call these 'compelling interests'.
Please FreepMail me if you want on or off my Pro-Life Ping List.
The mortality risk was forced upon her by the rapist, not the baby. Thus, the baby cannot be held accountable for the actions of the rapist.
But if you hold a "pro-life" position, you should really check your argument anew. For if the baby CAN, in principle, be held to account for the risk not of his or her own making, then whether the baby comes as a consequence of rape or incest is not important to determine if the baby can be killed at the whim of the mother whose mortality rate has increased.
The mortality rate of the mother only marginally increases anyway. Abortion results in close to 100% mortality rate for the baby -- and has other detrimental effects on the mother. Therefore, even by that standard, justice demands that the risk effected by the pregnancy on the mother does not warrant the ultimate response against the innocent baby, as you suggest.
‘In the abortion debate, McCain, Ron Paul and others take the exact same position.”
I’ve never believed that McCain was pro-life, but I think that yours is a very superficial (and self-serving) analysis of RP’s (and Baldwin’s) position on abortion.
If Congress declares that life begins at conception, is it not true that states (such as SD) can immediately begin to pass legislation abolishing murder of the pre-born? What power have the states delegated to the federal government which would permit the executive branch to directly prosecute abortion doctors? Here is RP’s HR2597 which is the starting point - where are all the “conservative” co-sponsors?
http://www.covenantnews.com/abortion/archives/034987.html
The abortion holocaust did not drop from a meteorite, and it will not go away until many steps are taken at many levels of government (civil, church, individual and family). The very first step to end abortion - NOT to regulate it - is to declare the personhood of the pre-born. The next steps involve the state legislatures and state level prosecutors.
But nothing will change in the long run unless faith and family are restored. That will require a return to preaching the Gospel in our churches, the defunding and shuttering of pagan academies also known as communist government schools, the winding down of the welfare state, the end of confiscatory taxation etc. The federal gov’t - its size, its unconstitutional power grabs, its judicial tyranny, its aiding and abetting of the destruction of the family - is an almost insurmountable obstacle to the goal of restoring the right to life of the unborn.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.