Sunday, May 22, 2022

Abortion Revisited - What Others Have To Say (A Critical Look)

(This is a follow up to the two 5/15/22 posts on abortion, which followed the leaked Supreme Court opinion in the Dobbs case.)

Here is Jackie Calmes (columnist and author) in the 5/4/22 Los Angeles Times:  "Congress' Republican leaders likewise (along with Chief Justice John Roberts) decried the leak, not the trashing of a longtime constitutional right...The court's integrity has been undermined, all right, but not by the leaker."  This is rather typical of leftist thinking.  It is only the outcome that matters.  If decisions go their way, that is all that the left cares about.  Not the process.  Not the violation of professional obligations.

But here is Professor Jonathan Turley in the 5/4/22 USA Today:  "It was an inviolate rule that members and clerks do not leak either the deliberations or decisions of the court...This was clearly a politically calculated act by someone who was willing to abandon every ethical and professional principle for a political cause."  But when the ends justify the means, as for so many on the left, this violation is completely irrelevant.

An article in the 5/12/22 USA Today discusses the failure of the Senate to pass proposed legislation that they say "would have made Roe v. Wade the law of the land."  But Democratic Senator Joe Manchin was opposed, saying the bill was not a "codification" of Roe, but rather an "expansion."  Yet the authors of the article seemed intent on blaming the 60 vote filibuster rule, when, without Manchin's support, the measure failed by a 49-51 vote.  After acknowledging that the measure did not get even a simple majority, later in the article they still asserted that "...Democrats lacked the 60 votes necessary to overcome the filibuster."  Always better to blame the Republicans and the filibuster.

A 5/9/22 editorial in the Wall Street Journal made this interesting point:  "The notable feature of abortion in Europe is that each country has tailored its laws to local mores after political debate."  Political debate is exactly what the leaked draft decision had in mind - a political debate within each of the 50 states.  "European voters by and large have chosen to permit it (abortion) in a way that would disappoint American pro-lifers.  But even liberal and largely secular Europeans impose the sort of limitations on abortion that America's pro-choice left claims to find intolerable."  And the editorial makes this assertion:  "Keeping abortion politics in the democratic sphere rather than the courts has prevented it from becoming a destructive front in the culture war."

Here is Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank:  "Roe's impending reversal is a 9/11 attack on America's social fabric."  The left seems to revel in making comparisons to truly horrific events when things do not go their way.  Often, it is a reference to the Holocaust.  This was a highly inappropriate reference to 9/11.  Shame on Milbank.

As readers of the blog know, I often read letters to the editor in various papers.  Here are excerpts from a few, without commentary by me, for your consideration.  These are from the 5/5/22 New York Times.  

"I am a proud pro-life Democrat who has long supported overturning Roe v. Wade...A child is a blessing and life is precious.  Ours is a civilized society, and we should be protecting life, not wantonly stamping it out on demand."

"They can make any law they want to make, but they can't make any woman have a baby she doesn't want to have," wrote an 80 year old mother and grandmother, who had an abortion at age 20.  The abortion was performed by a veterinarian, but after hemorrhaging she ended up in the ER.  "I was lucky.  I survived."

And a 22 year old wrote this:  "As I watch the world around me change and convulse in the face of climate change, Trumpism, a global pandemic and everything else that seems to be going downhill, I need to be able to control my body.  I can't imagine choosing to bring a child into this world, and am appalled by the idea of being forced to carry and raise a child that I didn't plan for and have no idea how to raise.  I am scared."


   

 

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