Okay, if Bush gets reelected, he will probably have the opportunity to replace one of the Justices on the Supreme Court, therefore tilting the balance in favor of making abortion unconstitutional. There are government appeals wending their way forward poised to hit just about that time.
I understand the law being appealed makes abortion illegal in all cases after the first trimester. It doesn’t allow for rape or incest or the mother’s life or health in danger.
What absolutely makes me furious is that the senator from Pennsylvania said that he is against abortion because a few cells are a human being with the same rights as the mother and he basically believes this because he is a “stanch Roman Catholic”. He thinks those cells are protected under our constitution. His only answer to an unwanted baby was adoption. Of course it would be adopted: :smack: by the taxpayers in the form of welfare, mental health treatment, food stamps, etc. for it’s lifetime.
I think we should at least wait until we have perfect birth control before we make it a jail sentence to terminate an unwanted pregnancy for any reason. Or, we could outlaw sex altogether, except with permission from President Bush, and only when we had demonstrated our firm resolve to accept a pregnancy, should it result.
I’m tired of abortion being a political football. There should be a Constitutional Amendment explicitly affirming abortion as a civil right.
I long for a future when this isn’t even an issue, where everyone takes it for granted that a woman should have the right to choose, just like we take it for granted that blacks have the right to vote and no politician could even think of taking it away.
The gall of that senator! To subject the citizens to years of taxpayer funded social services when we can simply kill it is the height of irresponsibility!
That analogy is beyond the pale, and I would imagine would be highly offensive to millions of African Americans, who have seen their struggle co-opted for a number of things. Amazing.
Criminy. I guess we should just kill all those poor people who can’t land a job, especially if they’re sick and using public medical resources. After all, they’re a drain on society, and we’re the ones who are paying for them.
I believe he wants to make it constitutional for states to pass laws against abortion.
But I suppose it is possible for legalized abortion to be ruled unconstitutional. If you believe an embryo or fetus is a person, then the 14th amendment requires that all persons have the equal protection of the laws (including the laws against murder). Ergo, it is unconstitutional to leave unborn persons without protection of the law. Not an argument that I accept, but conceivably it could be used by an activist conservative judge.
Yes, my understanding is that he wants to put it back in the hands of the individual states to decide. However, it really would be helpful if he would provide some cites to back up whichever claim so we can work from the facts to debate this rationally instead of emotionally.
Not so fast. They don’t need to exact, but they sure need to be suffeciently relevent.
It has become popular to co-opt the struggles that African Americans went through as a means of legitimizing other causes. That is misguided at best, disengenuous at worst.
The central question, after all the shrill comments from both sides of the debate, is, “when does life begin?”
How that is relevent to the issue of civil rights (and specifically the civil rights of black Americans) is beyond me. I would imagine that the bulk of my black friends would take offense at using their struggle as political currency.
Raindog, BABY is Rick Santorum’s word; not mine. He’s the one that’s trying to prove a few cells have constitutional protection. Apparently you agree with him. And the bill to consider an unborn child (the Laci Peterson bill) as a homicide victim along with the mother is a veiled attempt to have this definition of what constitutes a child codified.
As far as killing it Raindog, yes I think the mother should have the right to kill it (if you insist) up until the end of the second trimester. For whatever reason. Doesn’t have to agree with you.
One of my relatives is a nurse and he sees the scum of the earth come into the emergency room; the pregnant, drug-addicted scum we are supporting with our tax dollars. And why are they there? To get taxpayer-funded drugs! and the hundreds of thousands of dollars it costs to medically support a baby born drug-addicted? and which increases the costs for the rest of us? Have you ever seen one of these babies cry for days and days from withdrawal? Nice. And that’s only the first pregnancy for many of them. but, murder the mother (extrapolating to the inth degree)? No. They aren’t microscopic cells. But sterilize them? Yes.
Perhaps ask them to post here, instead of speaking on their behalf in a vague and less than convincing manner? And how is the struggle of women to win freedom over their own bodies and futures so absolutely incompatible with the struggle of blacks to win freedom in their own country?
What was said originally was this: “I long for a future when this isn’t even an issue, where everyone takes it for granted that a woman should have the right to choose, just like we take it for granted that blacks have the right to vote and no politician could even think of taking it away.”
In other words, the relevant similarities of the analogy are the sets of people whose rights are restricted (blacks then, women who want abortions now) by other parties. I believe the point was that many folks used to think it unnecessary to even entertain the concept of blacks voting, yet today that right is granted to blacks without question (electoral purges aside). Thus Blalron hopes one day the situation for women will improve in a similar manner, and we will all look back with shame to the days when a group of people used to dictate to women what they could or couldn’t do with their own bodies. We find it incredible that not so long ago blacks could not vote; (hopefully, Blalron says) not long from today we will find it incredible that women had little or no choice over their own bodies, and we will find it outrageous that anyone should consider eliminating these rights.
That was tha analogy as I read it. Anything else, particularly the stuff about co-opting the struggles of African Americans, seems to have been tagged on to that by you.
Instead of tackling the abortion issue, or disagreeing with him, you tried to kick a poster off the sidelines by forcing bad form upon him. If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s the analogy-cum-PC police – mainly because this body demonstrates over and over that it doesn’t have an inkling of what makes a good analogy.
Once again: analogies are relevant because of similarities between two situations, and are not necessarily impacted by their differences. Here we have large groups of persons whose rights are restricted by other people; the analogy worked perfectly to describe the future Blalron longs for. That’s all.