This is to acknowledge that in the recent elections the pro-choice side has been victorious everywhere, and the pro-life side has been defeated comprehensively. To all supporters of choice: congratulations.
In one final day of voting:
- Joe Biden, a pro-choice Catholic, was elected Vice-President of the United States of America.
- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, another pro-choice Catholic (who has expounded unorthodox doctrine supporting her pro-choice politics), was strengthened with an increased majority.
- The Democratic party, with a stronger-than-ever pro-choice Democratic National Committee 2008 platform "Renewing America's Promise" (link) (link), also gained in the Senate, smoothing the way for President Obama's choice of judges.
- John McCain (pro-life with exceptions) and Sarah Palin (about as radical a pro-lifer as Barack Obama is a pro-choicer) were defeated, and the Republican Party was placed in a serious state of disarray and internal conflict.
- In California, Proposition 4, the Abortion Waiting Period and Parental Notification Initiative, was defeated. (link)
- In Colorado, Amendment 48: Definition of Personhood (defining personhood as beginning at conception) was defeated. (link).
- In South Dakota, Initiated Measure 11 (abortion ban) was defeated. (link)
- In Michigan, the Stem Cell Initiative (allowing human embryo experimentation) passed. (link)
- In Washington, the Aid In Dying Initiative, Initiative 1000 (2008) (allowing physician assisted suicide) passed. (link)
Hat tip to Jill Stanek, for Life will not go on (link).
"Obama's election means Roe v. Wade has been taken off the table for the next 20 or 30 years. Throughout his four- to eight-year tenure, Obama will nominate at least two or three young Supreme Court justices to ensure the majority continues to agree with that decision, forcing the continued legality of abortion on all 50 states for decades."
"So the holy grail for many pro-lifers is now gone. Just get used to thinking of pro-life strategy without it."
Elections have consequences. Barack Obama has moved promptly to gratify the hopes of his pro-choice supporters. Ed Morrissey at Hot Air notes that Barack Obama is set on course as a pro-choice absolutist, and predicts outrage by pro-lifers (link).
Not necessarily. That is what Michelle Malkin would recommend (link), and she'd be right. But with no obviously viable endgame left to play for and no doubt about what America has voted for, pro-lifers may simply be shattered.
Sounds fine by me, if you want children, don't kill them.
But If I have to pay for them to kill their children, that is another matter. I really think if folks want to kill their children, that they should pay for it themselves. Now I may have an opinion that is slanted a bit here, since I have had to watch two of my children die, whom I wanted to live quite badly. So it seems a bit unfair that my tax dollars would go to pay to kill someone else's child. Sort of rubs salt into the wound.
Like many issues supposedly ignored, approved, or at least tacitly condoned in this election result, I think the public's attitudes towards abortion and choice will be more complex.
The biggest cause for complexity is media complicity in masking Obama's extreme position on abortion. He can be no farther left, but many devout, practicing Catholics and evangelicals maintained an illusion that Obama was less extreme, more centrist, less doctrinaire.
They'll be proven wrong. They won't be able to interdict (much) via their Congressional delegations, but they may well harbor some extreme dismay at what they've facilitated.
It is also possible that a new generation of legal scholars of more rightward or originalist tendencies have gotten just as good at hiding their views and masking their intentions as their more liberal colleagues.
A great day for supposed Choice, perhaps. But that's the thing about overreach. If too extreme, we may not need to wait 20-30 years to see just as extreme a correction. And remember too the Roe effect. Fewer and fewer offspring of Pro-choice fanatics and GLBT cultural sycophants.
I'm sorry you had to suffer that, raven. Sorry for your children too.
May your children be blessed in death. May may they be found just, since young hearts are light with innocence; and may they endure forever in a better state, that we all can hope to join them in some day, if we are good. And I pray that you and your family may have abundant and complete healing.
raven, I am sorry for your loss; but on the substantive subject of this post, a blob of cells is not a child, and hence an early abortion (or even more extreme, taking the morning-after pill) is not killing a child.
I was directing attention to an important political event, which being distributed over several elections and three propositions lost and two won might otherwise have escaped notice.
I was not inviting a discussion or debate about the rights and wrongs of abortion itself, when is a human being human and when are they only a collection of cells and so on. If comments keep going in that bitter and useless direction, I'll close the thread.
That’s probably not what’s going to happen. Having people pay directly through their tax dollars would probably get shot down in Congress and provoke a needless confrontation because it’s easier to understand that you’re directly being forced to pay for it. The smarter way to do it – and Obama has already hinted at it – is to force insurance companies to pay for as “reproductive services” which Obama has already said he plans to do with his national “exchange” that would require that private health plans match the “generosity” of his new taxpayer funded health care plan which he said will cover “reproductive services.”
So yes, you’ll still be paying for abortions – through the cost of your health insurance – while he can truthfully say that he’s not forcing you to pay for them through your tax dollars.
Too bad it's only a good day for woman's choice. Men can still be trapped into a bad relationship/long term finance slavery simply by the girl he is dating going off birth control (I have had a number of friends trapped this way). She can choose to abort the kid, but he is trapped supporting it for the next 18 years. Where is his choice in the that?
Women don't deserve the right to choose until men are allowed the same right.
Give men the right to choose, don't allow Christians and feminists to enslave men.
There is a bit of incoherence in the theme of this post, respectfully. By that I mean if abortion seems to be protected quite well thank you at the ballot box, the odd logic employed by the supreme court to invent bad law seems unnecessary. I have a bigger problem with outcome based supreme court decisions than with abortion either way.
With the prospect of making abortion illegal receding, how about a serious bipartisan effort to reduce the number of abortions that take place every year?
I think you could get a lot of people on both sides to line up behind that. Particularly if you are willing to use every technique that works, without ideological filters. Including education about sex and sexual responsibility, increased availability of contraceptives, improved support for adoption, and so on. This would include discussions of the benefits of abstinence, but without saying that's the only possibility, because it just isn't.
If the problem is the number of abortions, then work to reduce that number.
Beard: I agree with you that those things should be pursued (that would be my preference). However, I don't think many conservatives agree with the measures you provide. Many see any adult acknowledgment of sex is part of the problem, so birth control, sex ed, condoms are all out. Therefore, the only solution is christian morals along with good family discipline. Many also think that even 1 abortion is too many. And if you're not outlawing abortion, you're condoning it, which feeds back into condoning sex.
"Other Grim": You're friends have several choices: they can buy condoms, they can choose to not have sex, or they can grow a womb and get to decide for themselves. Is it fair? No. But life isn't fair. If your butt created a child, your butt is also financially responsible. Deal with it.
Using Michelle Malkin as your rally leader is without question a poor choice.
As to pro choice policy, you seem to be of the opinion that women are having abortions as though they were taking a s@#$. You know that is not true even w/ the outlier.It is not a decision that goes away.
As a pro choice person I am so because I cannot make the decision to have one physically. For the women I have spoken whom have had one the choice was not a gleeful event as though one had won an unexpected prize. Nor was it done casually as if one were having a beer at a football game.
The vast majority of us whom support abortion want it safe and fewer of them through better sex education and birth control
Beard: Particularly if you are willing to use every technique that works, without ideological filters. Including education about sex and sexual responsibility, increased availability of contraceptives, improved support for adoption, and so on.
I thought that was Sarah Palin's position, including greater support for adoption, and pro-contraception and pro-sex education, including both contraception and abstinence.
And David says she's a radical pro-lifer!
I certainly agree with that part of Sarah Palin's position. I also (mostly) applaud her completely principled stand, opposing abortion under all circumstances. After all, even in cases of rape or inc*st, it isn't the baby who is guilty!
The situation where the life of the mother is at stake is the one that really clarifies my thinking here. A cousin of mine was diagnosed with cancer, shortly after discovering that she was pregnant with her fourth child. She held off chemotherapy until after the baby was born, and died two years later, leaving her husband with four small children. That was her (their) decision, and I honor them for it, but I wouldn't have the State force that same decision on others.
In the end, it seems clear (to me) that abortion is an evil. But it is not the worst of all possible evils. And sometimes it is the lesser of the evils facing a family. So, who makes that decision when a family is faced with it?
My position is that it is not the role of the State to make that decision. It is the role of the family involved. Where the family can't reach unity on a decision, in the end it is the woman's decision.
Surely, the State has a role in educating its citizens in morality and responsibility. It also has a role in providing supports for alternatives like adoption.
While there are some ideologues who are stuck on one side of the debate or the other, I think that most people these days can be both pro-life and pro-choice, with the understanding that everything should be done to avoid people having to face that final, awful choice. (And let me observe that, here in the real world, nobody is "pro-abortion".)
Re: #6 from Thorley Winston: thanks for that explanation.
Re: #7 from "The other" Grim: I was calling attention to a distributed political event, not trying to start a normative discussion about abortion.
Re: #8 from Mark Buehner: I don't see the incoherence you speak of. I was pointing to a distributed political event.
Whether or not the "odd logic" employed by the Supreme Court is now "unnecessary" from some point of view, it's thirty-five years old and it's the key feature of a well-understood political battle-space. I was not talking about its oddness or its legitimacy or otherwise, because I have nothing to say about either that hasn't been said before.
Re: #9 from Beard and #10 from Alchemist: this is also well-mapped rhetorical territory. The only new thing to discuss is the election result.
#10 from Alchemist:
This is a standard move pinning responsibility for a child without power to choose an abortion on men: "You should have kept your pants zipped so you're responsible. Deal with it." The standard counter-move is: "The same applies to women in at least every pregnancy that doesn't involve rape."
I give the standard counter-move not to score a point or claim a victory but only to show how well-explored this territory is. I don't believe that anything of value can be added here.
#10 from Alchemist:
This also is standard: it is a familiar rhetorical characterization or mischaracterization of those on one side of the debate by those on the other side of the debate. To put it mildly, there is nothing new here.
#11 from Robert M:
That's the only part of your post that might be relevant to the only thing that is new and worth talking about: a distributed political event that may be an important political / historical turning point.
While relevant it still doesn't seem helpful, as the only argument supporting the assertion that picking Michelle Malkin as the pro-life rally leader would be a poor choice is the rhetorical flourish "without question," and more to the point I never suggested that she should or could be.
I only pointed out that the attitude that Michelle Malkin recommended (summed up by the picture), and that Ed Morrissey at Hot Air took for granted as a reaction by pro-lifers to Barack Obama's actions, is not inevitable. In Life will not go on, important pro-lifer Jill Stanek expressed a different and equally natural reaction to the news.
I see more comments have been added while I posted, also in the familiar to and fro of "who chooses" and so on. I won't be able to keep up as the discussion continually rockets away from the focus of the thread, so I'm closing comments.
Re: #2 from dadmanly: thanks for the on-topic comment.