February 09, 2010
 
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| A Pro-Choice President Will Never End Abortion |
| by Mark Stricherz |
| 9/19/07 |
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As a practical matter, the argument that a pro-choice president will end abortion is far-fetched. Never in American history has a laissez-faire chief executive ended a great moral evil.
Take slavery and de jure racial discrimination. Pro-slavery presidents did not end slavery; it was brought to its conclusion by Abraham Lincoln, who in his 1860 run for president opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Anti-civil rights presidents did not kill Jim Crow; it was killed by Lyndon B. Johnson, who, as senate majority leader in 1957, enacted the first major civil-rights bill in the 20th century.
Yet history is not an infallible guide in politics. An argument could be made that a pro-choice president will end abortion. Such an argument would appeal to the principles of laissez-faire and republicanism, and it would make the following case:
Suppose Rudy Giuliani became president. To appease the cultural conservatives in the Republican Party, Giuliani would appoint "strict constructionist" nominees to the Supreme Court, who, once confirmed, would overturn Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton. The issue of abortion would return to the states.
To unify cultural and fiscal conservatives, Giuliani would zero out all federal funding of abortion. The Hyde Amendment would be toughened so that federal Medicaid dollars would not fund abortion under any circumstances; the Mexico City Policy would be preserved (though if the law were overturned, technically the funds would flow to abortion organizations, not so that such organizations could perform abortions). Stem cell funding would be barred, and all bills to fund abortions would be vetoed.
There is no doubt that the scenario outlined above would represent a step toward advancing a culture of life. Yet this scenario would hardly protect small humans from violence.
One reason for this is that many federal laws dealing with abortion have nothing to do with spending taxpayer dollars. As law professor Hadley Arkes pointed out, military hospitals are barred from performing abortions; infants born alive that survive an abortion are recognized as persons under federal law; the National Institutes of Health is prohibited from making use of tissues from fetuses in elective abortions. Would President Giuliani enforce these laws or repeal them? If he stayed true to his principles, he would overturn them. Such steps would not exactly end abortion.
A related, and more important, reason that a republican and laissez-faire Republican president could not end abortion is that he or she fundamentally opposes the right to life. By definition, this president believes that unborn infants do not deserve a fundamental legal protection: the right to be protected from violence. Unborn boys and girls are not viewed as humans with the right to be born; they are sub-human or "non-human persons," as Ramesh Ponnuru notes.
The consequences of opposing the right to life are immense. Since Roe v. Wade was handed down in 1973, 45 million unborn children have been exterminated. The main reason abortion clinics exist and prosper is that unborn infants lack legal protection. As the late Governor Robert P. Casey of Pennsylvania wrote, opposition to the right to life begets "the ultimate act of violence, the ultimate exploitation of the weak by the powerful."
How would a pro-choice president tackle such an industry? Again, if he adhered to his principles, he could not do much. He couldn't ask Congress to spend money to persuade abortion-minded women to choose crisis pregnancy centers rather than Planned Parenthood. He could sponsor legislation that would impose tighter regulations on abortion clinics, but he could not sponsor a bill to prohibit them.
In short, a pro-choice president could not end abortion.
Mark Stricherz, a contributing editor to InsideCatholic.com, is the author of the forthcoming Why the Democrats Are Blue: How Secular Liberals Hijacked the People's Party(Encounter Books). He also keeps a blog at www.infrontofyournose.com Click here to read Elizabeth Scalia's piece, "A Pro-Choice President Can End Abortion." Readers have left 4 comments. Abortion is evil. Someone can get in a car accident and it is murder if the unborn is killed. Yet a baby can be killed or have its brains sucked out at an abortion clinic and it is legal. Baby? What baby? Wake up! Prayers for the unborn Prayers for the mothers to change thier minds Prayers for the abortion doctors to end the practice Written by Angela Some states have already taken major steps in redefining the unborn as persons. Alaska, in 2007, brought to force laws that state that unborn children can be assaulted, murdered, and abused, and are persons even before they are viable outside the womb. A woman who does not eat in hopes that her child will die is now committing abuse of an unborn child. A man who attacks a pregnant woman attacks her child as well, and now faces two charges; should she die, two murders. While this change to law has an exemption for medical procedure, which would include abortions performed legally, this law was passed by a fairly liberal state government. The obvious intent is to enable police to arrest wife abusers without the consent of the abused wife, since any person who can not complain can have the complaint entered by the police officer; an extension of the nanny-state mentality. But, despite this cynical use intended, it changes the legal perception of unborn children to that of children not tissue. Now that the law sees them as persons, it is merely a matter of time before a non-consenting father asks for a bar on an abortion by the child's mother on the grounds that, as a person, the child has a right to life.  Written by William Hostman When Abe Lincoln ran for President for the first term, he did not run on a platform of abolishing slavery in USA. Lincoln was nominated as a moderate Republican; he supported the Corwin Amendment to the US Constitution, explicitly protecting slavery in the states which already had it. His message was that slavery was wrong, and ought to be confined to the areas where it already existed, and placed on the course of ultimate extinction, but he had no plan to outlaw slavery in the South. Lincoln was elected into office on abolitionist votes, he was not even on the ballot in nine of the southern states. Many abolitionists, we may surmise, voted for him in the hopes that his moderate position would, in the long run, allow a majority of free states into the Union and enable the outlawing of slavery by Constitutional means. I know hindsight is 20/20, and of course we all know the war broke out and the issue was eventually resolved with the shedding of much American blood... The fact that hindsight is 20/20 is exactly the point -- at the time, conscientious voters were not at all certain Lincoln would not fold, especially when the stakes were raised to open warfare on our fellow citizens. The parallel to the abortion issue, in my opinion, is this -- slavery was also the defining moral issue of the time with no middle ground, and yet citizens of conscience found a way to vote into office a candidate who had the strength of character to stand firm on the issue, make hard choices, and see it through. They didn't refuse to exercise their responsibility as co-owners of the franchise. I am not implying anything more than that. Written by Bruce In baal worship there was a practice of human (child) sacrifice. It is hard not to think abortion is baal worship where an "inconvenient life" is sacrificed for the sake of me. What could this mean for us? It seems easy to consider Israel, their hardened hearts, and the Lord's judgment in the Old Testament and apply it to the U.S. Judges 2:10-15 (NIV) After that whole generation had been gathered to their fathers, another generation grew up, who knew neither the LORD nor what he had done for Israel. Then the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the LORD and served the Baals. They forsook the LORD, the God of their fathers, who had brought them out of Egypt. They followed and worshiped various gods of the peoples around them. They provoked the LORD to anger because they forsook him and served Baal and the Ashtoreths. In his anger against Israel the LORD handed them over to raiders who plundered them. He sold them to their enemies all around, whom they were no longer able to resist. Whenever Israel went out to fight, the hand of the LORD was against them to defeat them, just as he had sworn to them. They were in great distress. Pray for each woman considering abortion. Pray right now. Written by Jeff Honeyager |
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