Which is why I will never, under any circumstances, support a presidential candidate who supports abortion. Anyone who is unable to understand an issue as fundamental as the right to life is unfit for office.
Precisely. The 14th Amendment protects human life from being taken by anybody, including the states, without due process. If the Supreme Court rules that human life exists at conception, then from that point onward it cannot be taken without due process.
Now, a court could still rule that doctors deciding to abort is “due process”, which is why it won’t do to get a subterfuge victory. We need strong pro-life judges, not strong “constitutionalists” to abolish abortion. A constitutionalist might look and say that all that is required is “due process”, and a doctor and mother agreeing to slay the child, who is admittedly human, meets that standard.
This battle is about principle, and the whole strict constructionist/penumbra’s business, or states’ rights arguments, are all subterfuges. The two issues in conflict are the sanctity of human life versus the convenience of post-conception birth control. That’s what’s at stake. Plenty of people acknowledge that a fetus is a human life, but think that the mother ought to have the right to terminate anyway.
Sadly, I don’t see a victory on this issue, ever. The lure of sex and the need for a quick exit to unwanted consequences is too great. And, absent a cholera epidemic at the Supreme Court, building an activist pro-life court would take years and years of a party winning election after election on an overtly pro-life, judicial activist stance.
I think we are fighting the long defeat here, and in a sense it’s a shame that folks like me simply will not compromise with electoral reality and stop holding Republicans’ feet to the fire on the abortion issue. But I won’t. Sorry, Rudy.