Posted on 04/18/2007 7:14:49 AM PDT by Spiff
Edited on 04/18/2007 8:48:59 AM PDT by Lead Moderator. [history]
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court upheld the nationwide ban on a controversial abortion procedure Wednesday, handing abortion opponents the long-awaited victory they expected from a more conservative bench.
The 5-4 ruling said the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act that Congress passed and President Bush signed into law in 2003 does not violate a woman's constitutional right to an abortion.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
The last sentence is patently false, as can be demonstrated by inheritance and probate laws. The very abortion statutes overturned by Roe are futher evidence of the falsity of proposition that prenatal persons did not enjoy the protection of the law. Furthermore, by your logic and interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment, non-naturalized aliens would not be persons either, because they were not born in the United States. It is pure sophistry. It's like saying that because the Constitution requires that a person must be at least age twenty-five to be a Representative, that human beings under the age of twenty-five are not persons.
Cordially,
“First of all, I did not advocate for Rudy”
Yes you are. You are trying to sell him as a viable option that you would vote for.
He isn’t. No sale, ever.
holy katz jude!
The same people that brought us the lottery, welfare and Louise Slaughter!
I'd rather leave it in Gods hands
The primaries are 10 months away. By then hopefully Rudy will have self-destructed and we can have a genuine conservative as our nominee. But Rudy is so off the deep end on abortion that no right to life advocate should be willing to compromise everything they believe in for the chance to have a pro-Abortion RINO selecting judges for the next 8 years,and if we lose in 8, then the next opportunity will be in 12 years. I'd rather have another shot at a conservative four years later than to compromise an ensure that we will not have anyone like that for another 12 or 16 years.
So don't go telegraphing your pessimism and your willingness to compromise. Others will see that as a sign of weakness or a lack of resolve.
If you are a true blue pro-life Catholic, you should be willing to take a hard stand now and stick to it. Rudy will not be acceptable next November and if he is elected the chances of electing a pro-life conservative to the presidency may be lost for another 16 years.
liberalnurse (1000+ posts) Wed Apr-18-07 01:11 PM Response to Reply #4 52. Relax..... Abortion technique has change. Dr. Haskell from Cincinnati, Ohio has perfected the technique in the 90's. No longer is there anything close to "partial-birth" abortions. http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph... They no longer use this so-called, "partial birth" technique. Briefly, let me tell you what I know. Today, the process is a 2-day or 3-day technique. Initially, the woman's cervix is dilated with seaweed and given medications too, I think pitocin. Next, the fetus is injected with Lanoxin, a heart medication...which stops the pulse...This then causing the body to trigger spontaneous abortion of a dead fetus. After a day or 2, depending on the cervical dilatation quality, the fetus is removed vaginally in a spontaneous abortion fashion...like removing a stillborn.
Relax we can still TORTURE then kill babies!! AND THIS WAS RECEIVED AS A GOOD THING ON DU!!
But this forces one to define at what point does an unborn child NOT deserve protection.
*******************************
Negative.. you can still kill a baby as it is being born full term , you just can’t do it by suctioning the brains out, you will have to inject it with poison, decapitate it or use some other similar method.. ultimately this means nothing except that we needs stronger margins of victory than 5-4 ...
> How old is Stevens? 85?
Yeah, but even if he kicks the bucket W is going to have to get a nominee past a Dim Congress.
Ok. Guess the baby killers will have to come up with another method but they’ll be able to do it.
Thank you Lord for prayers answered.
Those laws allowed children born within nine months of a predeceased parent to inherit. That did not give them any substantive rights, however, until such time as they were born! (That is ignoring, of course, any nasty rule-against-perpetuity problems!)
Furthermore, by your logic and interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment, non-naturalized aliens would not be persons either, because they were not born in the United States.
Under the Fourteenth Amdendments, they are not. Under other laws (generally treaties with their home countries), they are entitled to basic due process protections.
Good post, though. It contained more than bumper sticker witticisms or "You're a liberal!" accusations.
It ain’t happining. Rooty Ghouliani will never be an option.
He is to the LEFT of Hildabeast on both guns and abortion.
"Supreme" analysis, db.
What a load of crap. I've seen the 100% gambit before, but seldom in such an arrogant manner (I refused to post the rest of your personal attack on Beagle8U).
Check the latest FR polls. Fred is the overwhelming choice.
Fred, BTW, isn't perfect.
But he's conservative enough to appeal to the entire party. Rudy ain't.
So much for your claim that Rudy opponents are 100 percenters. Rudy opponents basically ain't 15 percenters, which is all Rudy offers conservatives. On a good day.
(((Thank you Jesus!)))
AMEN!!!!!!
If any Republican or Conservative Democrat has the guts to do it, they should run a television ad showing a partial birth abortion and state: “my opponent wants you to be able to do this. Five members of the Supreme Court and I think you shouldn’t.”
Game Over. Period. End of Story.
AFPhys>> “So, Seriously, now:
If it were to come down to a choice between Hitlery or a “moderate”... how do you vote? Are you going to dictate that another Ginsberg will be put on the USSC? Try to be realistic in your answer.”
SIGH.
Rudy is a 10-clothespin nose holder candidate. If I am forced into that choice, I will probably do it, much as I would hate myself every step of the way. BUT— I will not donate one second of my time or one penny of my money to such a liberal mess.
The choice is between a Ginsberg (from Hitlery) vs. a Souter (from Rudy) Honestly, both will be awful for America, one only slightly less so.
Pre-Roe, families were still largely intact, so going back won’t teach you much. The guesstimates today are 2 million legal abortions in the US every year, of which half are to the underclass. That’s where I got the 1 million more welfare babies per year from. Who knows what the real number is.
As to this: will abolition of abortion change attitudes about sex? No, I don’t think so. The horse is out of the barn. The sexual revolution is not going to be reversed any more than women are going to be put back into the kitchen barefoot and pregnant. People are going to continue to have a lot of sex, and use contraception to try and prevent pregnancy. Contraception fails, or people get drunk and don’t use it, etc., and there will be plenty of unwanted pregnancies, particularly among the underclass, who have less to lose anyway. I do not believe the sexual revolution can be undone, and I don’t think we’re going to save babies by trying. To save babies, we have to appeal to human emotion, to guilt, and to compassion: the very things that move so many liberals about the suffering of animals is what is needed to be harnessed here. Ultrasounds do that. Preaching at people like Cotton Mather about the evils of illicit sex? Most people know it’s evil. Everybody since the dawn of Judeo-Christianity anyway has known that masturbation is a serious sin too, but you’re never going to stop that either. Some vices are too strong. We can appeal to people over the lives and pain of babies. But we’re never going to save any babies trying to wrestle society back to eschewing sex before marriage. To save babies, I think we have to be realistic. Human chastity is something for after the parousia. We’re just not going to get there. I am confident, in fact, that in the context of a national security questioning in which I could put people on lie detector tests and grill them about sex, that a surprising number of the most stalwart Christians have Achilles’ Heels on the subject. We’re weak and we like sex. That doesn’t mean we have to turn into infanticides too. There’s a difference. Sex is good, but used sinfully, and it’s practically irresistible. Abortion is bad. It doesn’t feel good, physically or emotionally. There’s no natural abortion drive the way there IS a natural sex drive. In short, I don’t think it is strategically wise to try and use abortion as the “camel’s nose under the tent” to usher back in a Christian age. I don’t think it’s a good idea because (a) it’s going to be hard enough to give people a twinge of conscience about killing babies using ultrasounds, but the sort of folks who might commit abortions unless dissuaded are just going to laugh at you if you tell them that teenagers should stop having sex; (b) it’s unrealistic: teenagers are not going to stop having sex. It isn’t going to happen. Not now. Not ever. Teenagers in Saudi Arabia are having sex, but it’s boys with boys and girls with girls, thanks to the segregation of the sexes. Is THAT what we want? I am unpersuaded that causing teenagers to indulge in gay sex because heterosexual sex is less available is a good thing at all. And I think that the idea that there ever was a time when teenagers were not having sex with each other is a fairy tale. To quote Shakespeare in Measure for Measure: “Does your Worship mean to geld and splay all the youth of the City?” “No, Pompey.” “Truely Sir, in my poor opinion they will to it then.”
If it sounds like I’m condoning all of this, I am not. I think that millennialism is not going to save babies’ lives. We are not going to reverse the sexual revolution by limiting abortion law. If we try to, we will not limit abortion law.
On the other hand, by appealing to basic human compassion, quite a lot can be done to seriously reduce abortion. Take France, for instance. In France, abortion is legal. This decision was made by the Parliament, after much democratic debate. It is legal, but it is severely restricted: to the first ten weeks, only, with no exceptions other than to save the mother’s life or in the event of terrible defects found in the fetus. There is a one-week waiting period. Counselling about adoption services and social benefits if a woman keeps the baby to term are mandatory. Notification of the father is to be done under ordinary circumstances. Abortion mills are illegal. Abortions must be performed in hospitals, and no hospital which performs them can have more than 25% of its procedures as pregnancy terminations. It is the policy of the French state to allow abortion, but to strongly discourage it, and to encourage adoption instead. There are still abortions in France, of course, but nothing like the rate in the USA. And France has a (deserved) reputation of being considerably more sexually libertine than America. Why, then, the strict laws? Because the French people had a fair and full debate about it. They don’t LIKE abortion. They find it horrible. They allow it, basically as final birth control, but they have a whole network set up to discourage this. And this is the libertine French! My point is that even people who are libertine in their sexual mores can have very different moral impulses when it comes to children. Children are a very different thing, and even people like the French, who aren’t a bit squeamish about having adulterous affairs, are natively squeamish about aborting babies. I do not hold up France a paragon of anything in this regard. I merely note that even a sexually libertine society, if allowed to follow its own moral compass and debate abortion, comes to a far more restrictive consensus on abortion than the American court-imposed abortion right leaves the USA> I think THAT is possible: to cause people to come to dislike abortion, and be willing, democratically, to restrict it to the first trimester.
The key there will not be the restriction, it will be the debates that are had as the restriction is sought for. Lots of people will have that soft-spot for babies, and if the debate is had, although they will come down on the side of maintaining abortion rights, it will be an uncomfortable condition. And the country, having had the debate, will be conditioned by the arguments. If at that point a pro-life Supreme Court swoops in and finds the unborn fetus a “person”, the decision won’t provoke a revolt.
So, in a nutshell, I think that to restrict abortion we need to press on the emotional side, showing the ultrasounds, etc. And we need to get pro-life judges up there who will find inherent personhood in a fetus, and strike down abortion. To get the judges, we need to advance on the emotional front.
And when someone faces us with the social welfare costs, which will be high, we have to be able to unflinchingly look them in the face and say “Yes, welfare WILL expand. And we will pay for it.”
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