Posted on 04/03/2016 11:30:33 AM PDT by rdl6989
Bush the Elder was not about to give up his POTUS ambitions by defending abortion further even for his mommy who was ripshit furious with him over it. The Donald does not really care about pro-life public policy but will try to toe the line and that may well be enough.
Trump had a bad week on this after being professionally sandbagged by Chris Matthews which caused The Donald to go on autogaffe. I have a lot of emotional and political investment in the pro-life movement but am willing to overlook these gaffes. Are you trying to find some talking point on pro-life to use against Ted Cruz? Don't do it. There is nothing for you to find. I prefer Ted Cruz but there is room out there for Cruz and Trump and we all need to lower our guns on issues that are permanent things and concede that a candidate who is not our very own may nonetheless be a decent fellow worthy of our votes in November and of our support at the convention if the GOP-E persists in trying to steal the convention. If that is the play at convention time, Cruz delegates should put a stop to it by voting for Trump and by cooperating with Trump on convention credentials, convention rules and platform each of which is more important than Trump may realize. At least he has the quite competent Paul Manafort working for him now just as Cruz has Morton Blackwell working for him.
If Manafort and Blackwell work with one another, K Street, Wall Street, the RNC, Priebus, M3R, Ryan, Kasich, Boehner, McConnell and the US Chambers of Crony Commerce will be helpless road kill. Roger Stone can handle the street theater outside the convention hall while the grownups run the convention. That way, in spite of everything to date, you may see a grassroots Republican Party united in November and destroying Her Royal Thighness once and for all and more likely for trump than for Cruz. Oh, and Charlie Black is on staff for Kasich and is a former partner of Manafort and Stone and well known to Blackwell. When the time comes, Charlie can be the undertaker who tells Kasich that his dream is gone.
I understand completely now; an unborn child in America does not have the same rights or protections as an ILLEGAL ALIEN or a known TERRORIST.
It is the abortionist and not the woman who is the strategic weak point in the baby-killing trade. Put five licensed doctors in jail for 30-40 years for illegal abortions and that will be it for doctors nationwide. No one but a mental defective endures 4 years of pre-med, 3 years of medical school. a year of internship and several years of residency, incur back-breaking student loans, etc. only to be permanently stripped of his/her medical license and lifestyle and be tossed in the hoosegow for decades.
Contrary to carefully cultivated Demonrat influenced public opinion, pro-lifers have never had an animus against the woman. The enemy is the abortionist, male or female. A threat of prosecuting the woman as an accessory or co-conspirator is merely a prelude to a grant of immunity to force her to testify against the abortionist. That's why prosecutions of aborted women to a conviction were so rare. Business as usual in criminal courts but hard for the general public to understand.
Cruz has the sense to stay relentlessly on message and Trump has less focus. Nothing fatal in either case.
You're correct that saner minds will hopefully prevail. I figure that it's over for the Republican backstabbing elite. If they steal the nomination, it's going to be hard for Republicans to win anything on the national level and the transition away from the current political structure will be ugly.
If Trump is the nominee, he should win since a majority of US citizens are mad as *ell. That's shown by the remarkable situation where BOTH political parties have winning candidates who want to totally upend the current political realities. A lot of Sanders supporters aren't idealogical purists and will vote for Trump. With a Trump presidency, Republicans who stop acting like jerks who think Republican voters are the enemy will stay in office and transition might happen in a way such that the US survives.
I just hope saner folks prevail. The establishment is over. They've taken off their masks. What's interesting is folks are talking about how weird Cleveland could get. How is it going to be in Philadelphia? The dem process is so rigged that Sander had lost before the first primary vote was counted.
It was a response to: "Ask her who determines these rights. I don’t know as we have a candidate that can articulate the argument."
In other words, a growing baby doesn’t have any rights.
If you chose the word “person” to describe this “unborn person” means you recognize this life as a person. If they are a person, recognized by the inclusion in that statement, then they have Constitutional rights.
Liberal logic at its finest.
I know that it seems strange or even somehow unjust to let the woman off the hook while prosecuting the abortionists, that many pro-lifers (myself included) resist even the slightest penalty for the woman. After all, she brings her pregnant self to the mill for the baby to be killed. The question, however, is what is our purpose and our priority? Always, the first priority is saving the babies. Prosecuting a few women may deter a few abortions but not many. Jailing an abortionist puts him/her out of that grisly business and really gets the attention of the other abortionists.
One of the worst Nazi actors in World War II was Dr. Joseph Mengele. It was important to stop his atrocities. So long as Hitler's government survived, Mengele was untouchable, We did stop the Holocaust and Mengele's involvement in it by defeating Hitler. Mengele escaped to Argentina and lived out his life there as an abortionist, eventually dying of natural causes. Justice is not perfect. Nor are we. Many other Nazi war criminals were brought to justice and many were hanged.
Sometimes lenience was shown to evil small fry in exchange for information necessary to get the big shots. Israel's crack security agency Mossad used such information to locate Adolph Eichmann in Argentina, kidnap him, bring him to trial in Israel as one of the worst of the worst and hang him. That did not happen without co-operation from some of his former colleagues who bought their own freedom by betraying Eichmann but Eichmann's trial and execution were THAT important. It is not pretty but it is how every effective civilized system of justice works.
We are used to watching one hour episodes of Law and Order (not very reflective of the actual courts) in which all loose ends are wrapped up in sixty minutes less commercials. Life is not like that.
As an attorney, I was the primary criminal defense attorney for those arrested interfering with abortion mills in Connecticut for more than fifteen years and 1130 clients. They did not sit on the sidewalk singing Kumbaya or On Eagle's Wings. They went right into the killing rooms, de-sterilized everything, broke raw eggs in the suction machines causing them to have to be rebuilt, putting ay such mill out of business for weeks and saving about 40 lives of babies per incident. 60% men 40% women. About 50/50 Catholic and Reformed. Many from out of state. My earliest Rescue clients were otherwise left wingers (which I never was) who were antiwar, anti military, anti-nuclear power, anti-nuclear submarine, Freedom Riders during the civil rights movement, etc. Connecticut was an exciting place to Rescue because of the militance of the leaders and the arrestees from the very beginning. Their first and overriding concern was as to saving the babies. All else was secondary just as with more conservative Rescuers who came later.
In representing those 1130 of whom at least 1100 wound up being convicted of nothing and most of the rest of nothing more significant than a parking ticket, I made a point of sitting individually and at length with each arrestee and inquiring as to their personal spiritual reasons for what they were doing, their circumstances of life, their families, their histories, what their "faith commitments" were, all so that I could represent each one individually before the court according to his or her reasons and not my own. The judges would have to hear their stories to the great discomfort of the judges.
The arrestees were the finest people I will ever be privileged to know. One frequent motivation was personal involvement with abortion in the past. Numbers of the women had had abortions. Numbers of the men had pressured girlfriends to have their children aborted. Then they had to live with themselves and, meditating on the nature of their own sins, came to the conclusion that it was necessary to prevent such sins by others and particularly by the abortion mills. Society had gone mad. They would help restore sanity. They had love for the women. Some even had love for the abortionists which I confess I did not share although I should have.
None of us wanted the women punished because they were already punished in many cases by the knowledge that they had killed their own child and NOT for $$$$$ like the abortionist.
I think that Cruz understands the pro-life issue better than Trump does and is more internally committed but his has been an intellectual or faith approach, not from experience. That makes Cruz also vulnerable to the Stephanopoulos/Matthews gotcha approach.
All of this is my long form way of saying to you that the "deeply pro-life" people I have known and I have known many, are close to unanimously opposed to punishing the mothers of the aborted. The abortion doctors are quite another matter.
God bless you and yours!
That's the crux of the "don't punish the mother" argument. But is it consistent? Does one have to financially profit from a murder in order to be punished for it? Is it enough to feel sorry? Of course not.
Perhaps the punishment for a woman getting a first abortion should be the same as what's done for a first-time drunken driver or first-time parent neglecting or abusing a child. That would be a series of classes which educate a person about why their behavior is very wrong. Maybe combine that with community service. Two or more abortions, charge the mom with murder.
Why? Often the mom isn't punished by the knowledge they killed their own child as much as they feel vindicated that they put their convenience above the life of a child.
No one has talked about this issue for so long now. It's healthy for the pro-life cause that Trump brought this up. Those who are pro-life have gone in such different directions that it will be tough to accomplish anything.
1. The right to life of the innocent unborn supersedes just about all other considerations.
2. The weak point in the abortion machine is the doctors and that is where our attack must be focused. Their supposed strengths are their weaknesses. Doctors enjoy a degree of status, income, and a certain degree of smug satisfaction. The woman going to abort her child may not enjoy such income, status or self-satisfaction. There will be a scarce few exceptions but they will be rare and we should not let hard cases make bad law.
3. My own life (and, I imagine, yours) will not be diminished in the slightest if no woman "patient," no matter how reprehensible, is ever punished by criminal law for her involvement. If we punish the innocent, we ARE diminished but guilty people get off scot free all the time and we survive.
3. Ending the Holocaust is the goal and the focus. Taking the scalpel and the suction machine and the ability to prescribe such as RU-486 away from the serial killer MDs will shut down far more abortions than any other action that may be taken by citizens or government.
4. There may be a few truly insane abortionists who abort for sick kicks. If they successfully make such a case for legal insanity and diminished moral capacity and can convince a jury, then they may get away with a time out in a straitjacket at Happy Acres, loss of medical license and draw the skepticism of friends and colleagues.
5. The reality of the abortionist is far more pedestrian in most cases. They want easy money and are willing to kill their consciences ad other folks' babies to get easy money unless and until it means loss of medical license, criminal prosecution, very substantial legal fees, loss of income, financial reversals and removal of the social status cover of "OB/GYN" instead of the grim reality: Serial Baby Killer for Money.
6. Jail some abortionists and the rest will run for cover and quit rather than suffer life ruin to kill babies for money. They will find some other gig.
7. While abortionists are fungible: Money grubbers who get their cash by killing babies, the mothers come in an infinity of varieties. Many are poor. Some are not. Some are physically or mentally ill. Many are not. Some want to obey a exploitative boyfriend to keep what they hallucinate is the emotional comfort of a relationship with him but who who will disappear soon enough if child support orders are not a threat because the child is dead and he did not love her in the first place. Some don't let the fathers know that they are pregnant. Some are nakedly defiant of civilizational norms and celebrate their ability to get rid of the unwanted child quite permanently by having it killed. They come in all shapes and sizes and social conditions.
8. Fully 40% of all the black babies conceived in this country are aborted despite the fact that ghetto churches are more likely to be socially conservative than many white churches. "Catholics" are regrettably as likely to abort as anyone. This is an indicator of an all too prevalent moral breakdown of society in which those with skin in the game tell themselves pretty little self-serving lies to justify killing their babies for their own convenience. "Clumps of cells, products of conception, choice...." Some may even believe the lies. Each and every abortionist absolutely KNOWS better.
9. If we could end abortion by prosecuting each and every woman who aborts to the fullest extent of the law, I would do so. If we could end abortion by prosecuting not a single woman who aborts, I would do so. If some intermediate and more selective solution would end abortion, I would take that route. The purpose is ending the killing of the innocent. The rest of the mess we can clean up later, if at all. All those choices of public policy are merely means to that end. Which is most likely to produce the desired result?
10. To put the direct killer out of business and in prison and strip him/her of the medical license and upper middle class lifestyle and perks and status, will reuire evidence and testimony. The gold standard of that is the aborting woman's testimony. However, she has the same Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate herself as anyone else. That problem is solved by giving her immunity from prosecution on her agreement to testify against the killer and her execution of an affidavit of facts to which she will testify that will be sufficient to produce conviction of the killer and her actual testimony at trial unless the killer pleads guilty under such pressure. The defendant is entitled to have the jury informed that the testimony was procured by a grant of immunity and that the witness therefore was no longer in jeopardy of prosecution but the jury will make the ultimate decision, accepting her testimony or not as the jury sees fit.
11. Whether the aborting mother feels punished is not the point. She can repent or not as she sees fit. She will have to face God when the time comes. Questioning His judgments is above my pay grade.
12. You are also making an argument for what is often called "the therapeutic state." Its model was the soviet union's criminal "justice" system which regarded any person who violated soviet "law" to necessarily be mentally ill or mentally deficient. After all, the soviet union was the perfect state and could do no wrong. The essential element of Trump's campaign is resentment against government know-it-alls who use the state to enforce their social, amoral, and intellectual notions on everyone in society because they just think they know better. That is the point of drunk driving educating classes, parental education classes, child molestation avoidance education classes. Some somewhat upper middle class smugly assume that everyone needs to think and act like them. We shall call them "liberals" for lack of a better term. They are a plague upon their fellow men and women.
13. "Community service" is another of their favorite "remedies." If a pro-lifer is arrested shutting down an abortion mill by Rescue, the liberals think it a good "remedy" (not that anything pro-life NEEDED to be remedied) to make the convicted pro-lifer perform community service by mowing the abortion mill's lawn and wash and wax the killer's car to publicly concede being wrong for having not knuckled under automatically to the priorities of the insufferable liberal busybody types.
14. Might my ideas not be consistent? Yes, but is is said that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds (that is not a personal remark or an insult just an often valid cliche). Consistency for its own sake can often serve as nothing more than a distraction from the focus. Better that we should be inconsistent than that we should continue to tolerate abortion and abortionists and more millions of innocent babies dismembered alive and parted out. Inconsistency? So what?
15. There is much less dissent over remedies among ACTIVIST pro-lifers than you suppose. That only TWO aborting women were actually prosecuted to a conclusion in the 2oth century prior to Roe vs. Wade shows a state and local government and judicial consensus as well. There are many more philosophical pro-lifers than activists. they do their thinking in a peaceful setting which fosters leisurely intellectual speculation and diversity of opinion which is engaging in a hobby not in a cause.
God bless you and yours.
The dilemma is that ours has become a trash society in which life, and not just that of the pre-born, has become less sacred. I don't believe that can ever change and we can regain our humanity if we don't do whatever it takes to protect life in the womb.
But you have opened my eyes. We need to look into the hearts and souls of women who choose to slaughter a child. Until society says protect life, all life, there is no good answer to who is ultimately responsible when an abortion occurs and how do we best protect life.
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