I don't give a rat's ass what the majority thinks about murdering babies. It's what God says that matters. This isn't some paltry debate about tax rates. Yes, rape is a horrible crime, but what did the kid that resulted from it do to deserve being murdered?
"Now the word of the Lord came to me, saying, Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you."
"The Lord hates hands that shed innocent blood."
“I don't give a rat's ass what the majority thinks about murdering babies.”
YOU may not give a “rat's ass” about what the majority thinks, but in a representative democracy, it's kinda important. At least if you want to actually have any hope of changing laws. The Court's ruling, Roe, presents a major barrier to providing legal protection to unborn children. At all. But there are ultimately ways around Roe.
Getting around the fact that roughly only about 20% of voters believe that abortion should be illegal in all cases will ultimately prove much more difficult in the long run. You can't change the law through democratic processes if the new law that you propose is opposed by 80% of folks.
I've been following polling on questions related to abortion since about 1990. In that time, the percentage of folks who would legislate to ban all abortions has held pretty steady, even while the percentage of folks willing to call themselves “pro-life” has increased, and the percentage of folks willing to prohibit abortion except in cases of rape, incest, life of the mother and severe fetal abnormality is something around 60%.
The 14th Amendment route, or something that looks a lot like it, might be such a way. If done properly. If imposed by executive fiat, it really would cause a constitutional crisis. If imposed by the courts, it would be the bizarro-Roe, and doomed to the failure that Roe enjoys.
However, I believe that legislation that defined unborn children as human persons, and that took the question of the personhood of unborn children away from the jurisdiction of the courts, would open the way for laws that would provide protection for the unborn, to greater or lesser degrees. I also believe that we're not too far off from electing enough pro-life legislators that we could realistically pass such legislation.
But we're kidding ourselves if we think we'll get majorities in both houses of the federal Congress to vote for such a law if it wasn't understood that the law wasn't somehow constructed to permit abortions in extremis, that what people generally think of now as the extreme cases wouldn't find room in the law.
Why wouldn't we get majorities to vote for such a law that didn't make room for these "extreme" exceptions? Because you wouldn't get enough votes in Congress for such a law. And you wouldn't get the votes in Congress, because 80% of folks would oppose the law and thus not vote for folks who would vote for it. It would make passing Obamacare look like a walk in the park! A picnic! A day at the beach!
I'm all for banning all abortions. No exceptions. Not even in cases where the life of the mother is imminently at risk. As a Catholic, I firmly avow that one may never directly, intentionally kill an innocent human being, and abortion is just that.
But I kinda doubt I'll get a really big bandwagon going to support an abortion law that just bans all abortions, even in the extremely rare cases where the mother's death is imminent. So, I'll need to settle. I'll need to compromise.
Do you believe abortion should be banned even when the mother will die without an abortion (no matter how rare this circumstance may occur)?
How about you, xzins? No exceptions, even in the case of imminent death?
If you join me in my “purist” views, congratulations! But we may be very, very lonely, the three of us. We can hold our “purist” views until we die. I skeptical that the United States will ever change its laws to accommodate those views, at least, not in my lifetime.
So - what should I do? Give up? Curse America for her injustice toward the unborn and move on? No, I'd rather continue to fight for what is possible to achieve for now, then fight on to win more in the future.
So, until Roe is overturned, I'll count as pro-life anyone who works to overturn Roe. Once Roe is gone, I'll count as pro-life anyone willing to severely restrict legal abortion legislatively, say, to restrict it to cases of rape, incest, life of the mother. Once that's accomplished, once there is a rough consensus in our society that abortion is generally wrong, and should be prohibited in all but the worst circumstances, I'll count as pro-life anyone willing to restrict legal abortion further, prohibiting it in cases of rape and incest.
If I'm still on this earth, then I'll count as pro-life folks who understand that abortion is NEVER permissible, and should be entirely banned in law in all circumstances.
You want to climb the entire staircase in one step. I just don't see that our legs are long enough to do it.
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