ABORTION After Roe vs. Wade
Personal Liberty vs. Personal Responsibility
By Bob Beanblossom
4 August 2022
The Supreme Court revisited abortion as a federally guaranteed right in Dobbs vs. Jackson and, on 28 June 2022, announced that the question of abortion must be settled as a state’s rights issue: the “right” is simply not found in the U.S. Constitution as the Court had declared in Roe. The decision is simple based on Constitutional law, but complex both in social implications and in the sorting out what will be an ongoing panoply of statehouse debate and lawmaking over the next several years. Anticipating the various state solutions, President Biden has donned his lawmaking hat and issued an executive order that the Fed will pay for travel for any mother who intends to abort her baby from a non-abortion state to an abortion state. Since the President does not have the constitutional authority to enact legislation or appropriate funds, this should also be interesting.
Abortion rights were not settled by the recent Supreme Court ruling that overturned Roe as some folks thought. In fact, the question of abortion as a legal means to terminate the life of an unborn American citizen was not considered. The decision simply returned consideration of the legal question to the States where it belonged on Constitutional grounds. This has nothing to do with the moral question that should dominate the discussion but does not. Moral values, simply stated, should outweigh acts of physical pleasure by actions designed to produce human children. The ability to engage in an act that produces children does not suggest a right to destroy the children produced by those indiscriminate acts. Responsibility should come into play here.
The words and phrases used to describe abortion are always interesting. "Abortion rights," "the right to decide what happens to the (mother's) body," "mother's right to choose," etc. The author of a recent AOL article cited "reproductive rights."
Increasingly, these words and phrases are acknowledging the obvious: abortion is the killing of an unborn baby, the product of (statistically) a willful and intentional act by the mother and father that is known and physiologically intended to produce a human offspring. There is no other outcome than a human baby, no matter what words or phrases are used to obscure that fact.
This makes abortion a bit different from an appendectomy. The courts acknowledge this when an expectant mother is murdered by charging the killer with an additional count of homicide when the unborn baby is also killed. This dichotomy is not rational: either it is a living human baby, or it isn't. Holding that the baby in the womb is incapable of sustaining itself as grounds for in-womb murder is incredulous--neither can that same baby sustain itself for the first few years of its life, but this is not grounds for killing it.
Where was this same outcry by abortion-rights advocates when the government mandated COVID shots--what became of the right to choose? Yet another inconsistency. And, since it takes a male (a real one) and a female (a real one) to produce a human offspring by natural means in the womb, what about the rights of the father--the unborn child carries his DNA, too? So many contradictions.
Well, the court did good this time. As President Biden’s job is not to legislate or appropriate funds, the Court’s job is not to decide issues based on popular opinion. The "right" for a mother to kill her unborn child rather than carry it to term, give birth, and raise and nurture that product of her recreational activity is not found in the US Constitution and should be considered with any subsequent legislation enacted on the state level. As for the moral discussion--that does not seem to interest the pleasure at any expense crowd. But then, neither does the Constitutional basis of Supreme Court decisions.