- she is "in an existing relationship" with the fetus that is protected by
the U.S. Constitution
- "her existing constitutional rights with regards to that relationship
will be terminated."
- "abortion increases the risk of suicide ideation and suicide."
- and abortion "will terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique living
human being."
Abortion rights advocates filed for and obtained an injunction against the script. The Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit (a federal appeals court) lifted the injunction, making the script 'operational' as of last Friday.
I've been through all of these arguments before many times, so I won't rehash them here. Suffice it to say that fetuses and mothers both have serious arguments on their sides and that advocates on both sides have been caught up in the politics and emotion of this debate for so long that they aren't really even dealing with each other any more.
I'll limit my comments to political ideology: Conservatives generally favor personal rights, states' rights, and limited government. The recent 2d Amendment ruling was lauded precisely because it championed individual rights and less regulation. This is the polar opposite - and yet it gets the same support from the same supporters. Which means that this is a question of social agenda, not political ideology. If so, has small government conservatism left the Republican party altogether, leaving limited government concerns to the third-party dregs of the libertarian movement?
Also - my political ideology is generally "live and let live." That, to me, jives nicely with classic conservative values. Why have they abandoned it?
3 comments:
I'm a Federalist - that is, I'm in favor of more local/state governance than federal governance.
One weird thing about the script is that this is a STATE law which is citing the US constitution - rather than the STATE constitution. I can't figure out what they're trying to say with that at all.
The third point is either factually correct or not - if it is, then it's a warning label, and if it's not, then it's a false scare tactic. The fourth point is a slightly garbled true statement - if you remove "whole, separate" from it, it is unarguably true, and does get to the point of exactly what abortion is. (the "whole, separate" bit is arguable because it depends on definitions, and their inclusion weakens the sentence tremendously).
I've gotta say - I really don't have a problem with the idea that as part of obtaining "informed consent" we would have to actually inform the patient about to undergo a procedure. We require lots of assorted scripts in a variety of professions - law has a lot, as does policing.
I don't know about the truth of the third statement at all - it's plausible, but I have seen no evidence.
If the law only required the last statement, as I amended it, would you object to that?
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