Posted on 12/03/2016 6:16:13 PM PST by ReformationFan
President-elect Trumps reconfirmation recently on 60 Minutes that he will nominate pro-life judges has sparked some unprecedented media focus on what will happen when Roe v. Wade is overturned. This focus is long overdue. The notion of Supreme Court justices acting as public-health officials ranking the priority of abortion as health care, deciding what standards should apply to the practice in clinics from coast to coast, and deciding what credentials are suitable for abortionists would have astounded the great justices of the past. Thats why it has to be dressed up as some solemn constitutional right that obscures the Courts actual role as the de facto National Abortion Control Board. Justice Sandra Day OConnor recognized what the justices were doing back in 1983, warning of our continued functioning as the nations ex officio medical board with powers to approve or disapprove medical and operative practices and standards throughout the United States.
But no one should jump the gun. There are three huge political hurdles to the Supreme Courts doing the right thing and returning the abortion issue to the democratic process in the States. First, it will take at least the replacement of Justice Scalia (with a like-minded Justice), plus the replacement of one or two of the Justices Breyer, Kennedy, Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan who threw out health and safety standards for Texas abortion clinics last June, claiming the need for evidence of a public-health crisis in abortion clinics.
Second, the U.S. Senate, with a 5248 (possibly shifting) RepublicanDemocratic split, will be a high hurdle when it comes time for a vote during the confirmation process. Third, Planned Parenthood and 30 allied organizations, and their billionaire population-control funders, like George Soros and Warren Buffett, backed by numerous billion-dollar foundations, will all be working 24/7 to pressure the Senate and prop up Roe v. Wade, backed by a media bullhorn featuring all kinds of horrible myths about the implications. They will work to hide the reality that in the U.S. today, abortion is legal through all nine months of pregnancy, for any reason whatsoever, and sometimes with taxpayers subsidies, putting our nation in the company of North Korea, China, and Canada as the only nations that allow abortion for any reason after fetal viability.
But once those hurdles are overcome and Roe is overturned, there are three essential conditions that will maintain the status quo for at least the short term and ease the transition back to the states.
First, overturning Roe does not mean that the Court makes abortion illegal. Overturning Roe will return the issue to the states, where legislators can act in accordance with the views of their citizens. And no federal law exists that would make abortion illegal. (Congress might try to legislate a national law, but Congresss constitutional authority to do so, in the absence of Roe, is doubted by legal scholars and judges.)
Second, if Roe were overturned today, abortion would be legal in 40 to 45 states tomorrow, up to 20 weeks and possibly to fetal viability, for the simple reason that there are no enforceable prohibitions on the books in those states before that time. The state legislatures and governors would have to act affirmatively. State regulations that are on the books on the day that Roe is reversed would likely be enforceable parental-notice or consent laws, clinic regulations, etc. subject to specific legal factors in each state that may prevent enforcement. Third, women wont be penalized. The actual practice of the states for nearly a century before Roe (1973) was to target abortionists (the actual practitioners) and to treat the woman as the second victim of abortion. The states will undoubtedly follow that effective practice when Roe is overturned.
What would the states actually do? Based on the data in Americans United for Lifes annual publication, Defending Life, and AULs Life List, showing how the states have legislated (or not) on the life issue for the past 40 years, a fair prediction might be that in the short term a dozen states would maintain abortion on demand, a dozen states would try to enact and enforce broad prohibitions, and about 25 states in the middle might try different limits. That diversity is called federalism, a bedrock of the American constitutional system, which prevents Congress from dictating a single national law (in some areas) and leaves important issues to be decided at the local level, by local representatives accountable to the people at regular elections. It would be wise to leave the abortion issue to the states where Americans can make their voices heard and where it was addressed since colonial days unless 37 states act through constitutional amendment to enact a national rule.
In the meantime, the Court should delegate the broadest possible discretion to the states to address abortion, a serious public-health issue that state legislators and public-health administrators can handle better than unelected judges in Washington. A public-health crisis exists in America today as under-monitored, rarely supervised abortion centers operate as the red-light district of medicine. Abortion advocates increasingly claim that abortion is the supreme right that has to be publicly funded and guaranteed by voters and their tax dollars. But consider the Second Amendment, containing the right to bear arms, which is actually protected by the text of the Constitution: Taxpayers dont have to subsidize the purchase of guns or ensure that people drive less than 30 minutes to have access to a gun dealer. The existence of that express right does not include federal or state responsibility to facilitate a sale.
But public opinion has long shown that the majority of Americans have rejected an extreme view of abortion and want limits on abortion. As the National Abortion Control Board, the Court has failed to protect women and their unborn children from the dangers of abortion and the sometimes deadly conditions inside rarely monitored, poorly supervised abortion clinics. This dangerous public-health vacuum could be filled by the states if the Justices would get out the way.
Clarke Forsythe, an attorney, is the acting president and senior counsel at Americans United for Life (AUL) and the author of Abuse of Discretion: The Inside Story of Roe v. Wade (Encounter Books 2013).
I think the intention of a conservative SCOTUS will be to make effectively ending Roe v. Wade a “sour” decision, to take away any celebration or conversely, to not “rub the noses of the ‘pro-choice’ people ‘in it’.”
And this is how it has been going for years at the state level, with states gradually pushing back against abortion, limiting more and more in the face of push back from the pro abortion side.
This is how wars often end, not with a sudden cease fire but with a gradual tapering down of hostilities as the word gets out that it is over. That, to the SCOTUS, would be the ideal.
Good one!
I'm tired of people pronouncing opinions as if they were certitudes.
You'd think folks would have learned from all the failed oracles of the last two years.
I think we’ve heard that before. “Wait till we get the house, senate and presidency....” Still nothing happens.
Its not going to be overturned.
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You’re right about that. It’s a done deal.
should be
we need the gov’t ‘rights’ pared back down to the original - very few -
States Rights need to be vigorously reinSTATED”...
Our Founding Fathers - none had ever lived in a free country. They had no idea how to start.
They relied heavily of the model of The Six Nations, which had been a successful Federation already for 600 yrs (still going strong and independent) - We took the Bald Eagle symbol from them, the eagle clutches a bundle of arrows - from the Six Nations Federation idea that separate tribes (states) were stronger together, in mutual support, than separate, which would be more vulnerable to outside attack.
Where we got it wrong was adding a central gov’t - that morphed into a overruling beast that could, unconstitutionally, interfere with states rights.
The Six Nations are STILL a sovereign Federation - within our borders.... they even travel on their own passports, not USA. Teeny don’t pay taxes to, for example, New York state. Their method of gov’t, separate rule individually, but with mutual protection against others, has worked for 800+ yrs.
WE are NOT a democracy. Democracies always fail - (and we are on that 200 year cusp)
We are a FEDERATION REPUBLIC - ‘for which it stands’ - and need to get back to the Constitution. Each state has enough intelligent citizens to make the rules they live under. NO ONE ever sent to DC is an Omnipotent being more capable of making laws for the states than the people within them.
Foggy Bottom needs to be pared back to their original LIMITED governing rights. (And if citizens within any given state doesn’t like certain laws of that state = they are free to move to one they feel better in.)
I think the cultural revolution was due in part at least to, what some money minded liberal overpaid Ted Baxter type called, the “greatest generation’s” prevalence of PTS. People ask all the time, why do other war vets not have PTS? The answer is they did. The first baby formula using parents had kids one after the other, believing advertising, not making decisions, without the natural spacing breast feeding provides them the women drank and more than previous generations, many of the fathers were zoned out with PTS the kids were numerous and closely spaced. Brokaw didn’t talk about the parenting.
The kids were so numerous and in suburbia, we sort of took over. That’s at least a part of it.
Trump is a first round baby boomer, btw, born in 1946. It’s fitting that he should usher out the stuck in the sixties group.
Anyone suggesting a religious imperative to overturning Roe V Wade suggests a theocracy. It doesnt take Christianity to tell the government that murder should be against the law.
Forget it
Proponents of abortion negate the personhood of the victim. slavery thrived in this mentality. It didn’t take the pope or any evangelical leader to overturn it. It was when logic was applied. All people have the right to life liberty and the rest. Fetuses are people. The woman’s right to privacy does not logically overrule that. So we are still fighting over rove wade because it leaves out a huge hunk of logic. That the baby is a person
It would mean that the whole. Upturn of sex as recreation would need to stop. But that is against natural law anyway. Look at all tge trouble it’s causing. And the Catholic Church itself has stated that in the year of the sex revolution, 1968, in Humanae Vitae, that if you foster a sex as recreation culture with the use of birth control that you will have abortion, promiscuity, hypersexuality, child molestation the destruction of the family and many other logical predictable outcomes. But a majority of Catholics don’t know of this teaching and wouldn’t read it nor heed it if they did know of it
But it’s the truth Most people calling themselves christians and pro life haven’t read it and it’s the most reasonable argument against abortion But one, people don’t want to be associated with Catholicism, two, they don’t want Catholics telling them what to do, after all, if we’re going to be a theocracy it wont be Catholic, and, three, they won’t give up birth control and the sex is recreation culture. But that’s what’s got to happen if abortion is to be done away with. And that’s because abortion is birth control. Just one more form of birth control
So the catholic teaching sits on a shelf not revered by even much of the Church hierarchy, but we are not a theocracy
Yet, as a Catholic I can see that Gods grace cannot shed on America as long as we refuse to see that fetuses are people and that people should have sex not as animals but monotonously as God intended
Can’t say that to the government nor even the culture. It’s an individual decision in a free country
It would mean that the whole culture of sex as recreation
“not as animals but monotonously as God intended”
Well now THERES your Freudian slip monogamously
No idea
Current law needs to be replaced with the 50/50 rule. Anyone wanting an abortion has to agree with giving the child an even chance. Flip a coin and heads we keep the child and abort the mother. Tails the mother gets to walk out alive. Anything that doesn’t give the child fair/equal chance at life is a no go with me. I am being sarcastic a little but damn give the kid a shot at life. Also I am for fathers rights to have a say in this also. In addition men need to stand and be counted and be men.
Glad you’re kids are doing well.
I was born 4 weeks premature myself in a small town in 1950. One of the nurses, trying to prepare my mother, told her that I probably wouldn’t survive, but I did.
I will bet you a million dollars it dies not get overturned.
Are you giving odds?
Anyone who thinks it would be easy to overturn is not considering stare decisis.
Have a good week.
Problem is, our time-honored laws and legal traditions come from Old Mother England, many of them from Old Catholic England. Our legal system could not have developed as it did if secularism had been the operative principle all along. Secularism promises personal liberation, but it delivers social dissolution. IMO we need to look critically at that momentum toward dissolution, and we need to ask what must have been different about the “old times.”
What little I know factually about the founding principles i do know that secularism was not the prevailing force
When people say things have changed I disagree.
We, in the contemporary western world, do not get to take 5,000 years of human history, with rules and regs from God Himself on health, happiness and the path to eternal life, which encompasses family and gender norms, and throw it out in favor of a secular, Godless, morally relative world which has gone so far as to promote parents killing their own offspring
A society that has gone that far afield can not be brought back with religious argument. And theocracy is not the answer.
I think it’s a matter of getting back TO the roots of our foundation, which include classical western views, which certainly recognize God as our Creator. When we get rid of accepted abortion with those nuances in mind we will have become more sophisticated
Fewer babies will be slaughtered in the womb. That’s what will happen if Roe is overturned.
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