Posted on 05/17/2022 1:36:38 AM PDT by Kaslin
Though few could have imagined it could just a decade ago, Roe v. Wade, the infamous 1973 decision which invented a federally protected constitutional right for a woman to kill her child while in the womb, is poised to be overturned by the Supreme Court.
The desperate defenders of the ruling are now surrounded on all sides, hunkered down and near defeat after having passionately engaged in the ill-founded and unjustifiable legal war that they began decades ago.
The decisive blow is about to be struck, and it hinges on a plain answer to the fundamental, bedrock question in the conflict: does the Constitution actually enshrine a legal protection for a woman’s right to intentionally kill her unborn child?
The simple answer to that question should not be controversial.
The Constitution, it should first and foremost be noted, is explicitly silent on this issue. Even upon the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, which is often cited as the chief bulwark supporting the Roe decision, three-fourths of the states already had laws on the books making abortion a crime at all stages of pregnancy. These laws were not struck down for a hundred years more, and only then at the discretion of seven very creative justices who conveniently identified a woman’s “right to abortion” in 1973, relying not so much upon the verbiage of the Constitution or intention of its framers, but upon a “mysterious trinity of privacy, penumbra, and emanations” that “had eluded legal scholars for the then 176 years of our constitutional history.”
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
I guess the precedent is alcohol prohibition. Your constitution should preserve individual rights and limit federal rights; restrictions and crimes are separate issues.
For my part, I can’t see why anyone ever thought the constitution should be used to limit the consumption of alcohol. If states want to enforce teetotalism, pinitive drugs laws, or religious constraints, that’s for the states to decide. Ditto abortion, same sex marriage.
Sorry but as a Quaker I profoundly disagree with any federal imposition based on religious convictions. And, banning ALL abortion ENTIRELY - like it or not -is ONLY ever done on the basis of religious fundamentalism.
I’m actually anti abortion. No healthy fetus should ever be aborted for convenience or emotional reasons. But I have a VERY hard time understanding how a state can say to a rape victim with a completely unviable fetus or one that’ll need lifelong medical care costing millions of dollars that she cannot possibly afford herself, must always carry it for nine months AND bear all those costs.
“Thou shalt not kill; but need’st not strive officiously to keep alive” is poorly used by por abortion arguments. But it is true to say there are unhappy circumstances where God has Himself ordained a life to be unviable, and just because we can stick a baby on a ventilator for decades for no reason other than to prove we can delay the inevitable, doesn’t mean we should.
In short - when a state ban on abortion is intentionally unilateral and intentionally universal, the state takes all responsibility for the consequences of its uncompromising imposition.
You want to live in a state where even a likely unviable fetus has to be live born even if that threatens the life of the mother? Great. Fill yer boots.
But if you expect that state to pull out all the stops to ensure that baby is born. you are also making the state morally responsible for keeping it alive AFTER birth.
After all, what’s the point of ensuring a live birth at enormous cost and risk if you know in advance that the baby’s going to die within hours of birth regardless?
That’s the conundrum. I’m all for a total ban on abortion IF the state is willing to puck up every last cent of the cost of keeping that baby alive AFTER birth if the parents can’t afford to do it.
And that’s probably where I part company with the “once it’s born, Social Darwinism takes over, if they can’t afford it yhe baby dies, so sad never mind” crowd.
There are four books I’d recommend, if you wanted to understand the alcohol attachment to America, and how Prohibition came about:
- Drinking in America: Our Secret History (Cheever, 2015)
- Every Home a Distillery (Mecham, 2013), covers the colonial era
- The Prohibition Hangover (Peck, 2009)
- The War on Alcohol (McGill, 2015)
Most are NOT at your local library, but available via Kindle.
From the day that the Mayflower arrived...we’ve been heavy drinkers, and most of our history until 1920...was triggered/caused with a liberal amount of booze in our system.
Prohibition was designed to be the last ditch effort to rid the nation of open saloons. Some will say that probably did occur, but illegal and underground bars took their place. Eventually, everyone was finding ways to get around the rules.
Fascinating period in the fifty years prior to Prohibition, and the dozen-odd years that we faked our way through Prohibition.....least talked about subject on history (my humble opinion).
The source of a persons convictions cant disqualify them Moreover an atheist can be as opposed to abortion as a bishop. Besides that the founders had a religious conviction that men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.
Thanks, I’ll add them to my reading list!
I look at it this way, the unborn baby is a separate person and should therefore be entitled to the same protections as a new born as per the 14th amendment.
As for a baby conceived due to rape, I disagree with allowing an abortion as this effectively imposes the death penalty on a child who is innocent of any crime. People would be up in arms if the victim of rape was sentenced to death so why is it ok to kill another completely innocent person (and in the most barbaric manner that wouldn’t pass muster under the 8th amendment)?
The founding of the United States and its Constitution is based on the idea of God-given rights.
True, but one person’s convictions shouldn’t be enough to set the policy for all fifty states.
If a pro life state administration with a huge majority in office at all levels in the state put a proposition to institute a total ban on abortion WITH prosecution of abortion practitioners under all circumstances to a plebiscite, how binding would the result be?
1. Say two thirds of the state supported the motion, the moral argument to go ahead with it would be bulletproof and the issue would be settled for a generation at least.
2. But, what if that exact same administration got a two thirds REJECTION?
That’s not a loaded question. The reason I ask is, where I live, devolved administrations cannot bind their successors to its own moral mandate or view on a very specific issue, without a plebiscite on that issue. And a referendum result cannot be overturned easily without another referendum.
So, here, if an administration banned abortion arbitrarily and without a referendum then the next administration is empowered to bin that ban on day one if it was openly committed to scrapping the ban as part of its election campaign.
The danger is, that the pro abortion administration could go so far as to make it a manifesto commitment to undo the ban prior to holding a referendum.
And if the pro abortion camp won that referendum decisively, it’d be very difficult for another administration to overturn it without holding another referendum.
Examples in the UK: Brexit (yes vote stands despite the referendum being nonbinding), Scottish Independence (twice voted no but the nationalists think third time lucky).
Really? A popular pair of “God given rights” at the time of the Pilgrim Fathers were the divine right of kings and the Papal Seal, and I’m pretty sure the Founding Fathers didn’t enshrine either of them in the Constitution.
There are many who argue “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” applies equally, to the mother of an unborn child AND to the fetus.
Therein, they say, lies a moral dilemma. They say, if the fetus has no chance of exercising life or liberty BECAUSE IT’S NOT GOING TO SURVIVE ANYWAY, and the mother loses both liberty and happiness because if a futile and being forced on them, AND if she risks losing her life as well if you force her to continue with a futile pregnancy, then tearing up one person’s three entirely achievable rights to preserve (on paper only) three rights that are totally undeliverable doesn’t actually seem very consistent.
Exactly how far down the road of Frankenstein Science can you go to preserve that which God Himself has ordained not to be (a nonviable fetus), at the risk of that which he HAS ordained to be (the mother)?
That is where a total ban on even medically justified abortion begs a range of constitutional, philosophical and ecumenical questions that nobody has an easy answer to.
Because Congress in 1917 was still operating under the Constitution and they understood that they lacked the authority to ban alcohol unless the States granted them that power by amending the Constitution.
By 1971, when they decided to ban marijuana nationally, the restraints which Congress acknowledged in 1917 by ratifying Amendment XVIII were long gone.
The Roe v Wade decision did not just decide that women have a federally-enforced right to murder their children. The ruling proclaimed that state governments have no right to make criminal acts illegal.
What do you mean?
It would be binding like steel.
I agree.
I’m actually the product of a child rape - my mum was 14 when she had me after being raped at 13. That was back in the day where her dad, a Jehovah’s Witness, couldn’t tolerate the personal knock to his halo of having of his friend raping his daughter... so he had her carted out of the county for the duration of the pregnancy, holed up in a juvie style hostel for unwed mums until she went into labor, was taken 60 miles from there to a hospital for the birth, and I was taken off her an hour later. I then spent 5 years in orphanages until I got fostered. Years later i reconnected with
I later found out that my ‘Gramps’ disowned her before she hit 16, and she died a few years after I hit 18 having never recovered from it. But hey, I’m still here, and Grandaddy remained a rich pillar of his community, and his rapist pal never even got a police interview, so it’s not ALL bad.
That’s why I’m adamant, if you want to preserve the life of the unwanted child, you MUST look after that mother as well - throughout the pregnancy and afterwards. Especially if the pregnancy was forced upon her in the first place.
My specific quandary is where the unborn child demonstrably has no chance of exercising “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” even if carried to full term, AND where the continuation of a pregnancy even God has ordained won’t succeed puts the mother’s life at risk.
To me that is a test from God: do we choose to submit to His will and focus on saving the mother, do we defy His will by attempting to prove we have the capacity to overrule Him but only to the point of birth, or are we fulfilling His will by stepping up not just to ensure the birth but then preserve life from birth onward.
Therefore if we fight to bring an infant into the world knowing that infant will need 24/7 medical care for the rest of their life, the continued care of that infant is OUR obligation. We choose it, when we choose to be pro life.
I see two reasons to have an exception for rape. First, the pregnancy was forced on the women; She had no choice in the conception. Second is the psychological toll inflicted by the rape and forcing the victim to live with the result every day. My daughter was raped and suicidal afterwards. If she had gotten pregnant from it, I would have paid for her abortion and told her so. She asked how I could be pro life and still do that. I told her I’d rather have a dead grandchild than a dead child and a dead grandchild.
<>The Constitution, it should first and foremost be noted, is explicitly silent on this issue. <>
Not so. Read the Preamble. We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union . . . and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity . . .
Roe established a nonsense right to ‘off posterity, the entirety of the next generation. As such it empowered women to end our republic.
They did a pretty good job. With 60+ million fewer Americans, the rats have made up the difference with illegals.
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