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| "What we have here is a failure to communicate" |
I don't know when a fetus/baby in the womb is a person. My religious beliefs tell my it's at conception. That being the case, abortion is tantamount to, if not literal murder. But since I believe this is based on my religious beliefs, I have been loathe to impose the belief on other people. Oddly, though, aren't most of our laws predicated at some basic level upon religious beliefs? Lying, stealing, and murder. Aren't those based on religious law? At least originally? I think so.
But hey. We can't talk about that. The uproar and furor from abortion advocates this morning is about women's rights, specifically, a woman's right to choose. The arguments are parallel and never intersect. Only if you agree to both, one way or the other, is there harmony. If one does NOT believe abortion is murder, then one can with a good conscience agree that a woman has a right to choose whether to abort "it" or not. And if one DOES believe abortion is murder, then one can only agree a woman does NOT have a right to choose. This is what I'll call a "nary the twain shall meet" situation.
Back in the day, not all that long ago, there was a viability discussion. At least this put down a marker that one could argue that before viability it's NOT murder, and afterward, then it IS murder. But abortion activists have pushed and pushed and pushed, and now we're talking abortions all the way to term. I've even seen some advocating unwanted children should be allowed to perish AFTER birth. That's evil, I don't care what you believe. On the other side of the coin, medical science continues to advance, and babies in the womb further and further from full term can be kept alive. This has created a continuous shortening of the length of time a woman would have to choose before the point of viability is reached.
As long as we stay on 'nary the twain shall meet streets', this issue will never be resolved to the satisfaction of one side or the other. It becomes win-lose or lose-win ONLY. When is the baby a person? At conception: it's hard to argue that this belief is predicated on something other than religious morality. Full term: there is no argument for full term/late term abortion that can be justified as NOT murder. So why did they walk away from viability? I don't know. I really don't. I guess it is simply that enough is never enough. Once the idea that it is a woman's right to choose is fully embraced and worn as a protective shield, then consideration for the rights of the baby becomes a non-subject. The lines don't intersect.
I will be very interested to read the Supreme Court ruling, whatever it is in the end. Will the decision reside solely on one street, or strictly on the other, or will the court have found an intersection that I can't see or foresee?
Parting note: Leaking a draft Supreme Court ruling as a means of influencing or swaying the ruling is unprecedented and at odds with the process. Saying it is acceptable because Merrick Garland was not seated by the Republican led Senate is NO DIFFERENT than justifying interference with the Electoral College on Jan 6, 2021 was acceptable because Donald Trump was cheated in the election of 2020. There is no difference and if you say one is OK but the other is not you're acting as a partisan. In that regard I do mean either. They're either both OK or both NOT OK. There's no in between.
Pretty spot on as usual. I read the salient points of Alito's proposed decision earlier. He doesn't make a moral case at all, but a legal case. He correctly states there is nothing in the Constitution. I think the decision concerning abortion and the original Roe V Wade decision twisted the meaning of the Constitutional right to privacy to mean a right to abortion. His argument is that this put the court in the business of legislating which is the role of the elected representatives of government which previously was the state governments.
ReplyDeleteI don't think there is anything preventing the federal government via Congress from passing a law that says a woman has a right to an abortion except those who want it know it's a tough fight and would rather just have the court just sanction it.
This gets right to the heart of "legislating from the bench" which in my opinion allows laws to be passed by unelected officials and allows Congress to avoid responsibility and from doing the hard work the Constitution intended. That entire corruption of the process has been a cancer on our democracy for years.