If a government can force a woman to have a baby when she wants to have an abortion, why cannot that same government force a woman to have an abortion when she wants to have a baby?
If the government should be empowered to do the former but not the latter, I ask, why? What legal principle distinguishes one from the other?
When the issue is put this way, it becomes plain that there is no legal or constitutional issue here. There is only religion.
Life, the anti-abortion crowd yammers, begins at conception! But what does that mean? Do they hold that a zygote is a person? No one could be so daft. A zygote is not sentient. It does not feel pain. It does not think. It cannot in any way care for itself.
But apparently a certain sort of religious dementia teaches their adherents that a zygote is ensouled. Ah, there it is! It has nothing to do with constitutional principle or even personhood — it has only to do with the fact that people believe in non-existent souls! And because of this stupid belief, we are going back to the coat-hanger confederacy that existed pre-Roe v. Wade.
That stupid belief is driving us back there, and the equally stupid and sinister belief that women are appliances for men to use as they see fit.
The Democrats are now talking about passing a federal law to permit abortion, even though they know that it cannot pass the current evenly divided Congress. Hmm? Why the hell did they not do that when they had actual Democratic majorities under the corporate-bought milquetoasts Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama?
Meanwhile, Moscow Mitch McConnell is talking about a federal ban on abortion if the GOP regains Congress, meaning the ban on abortion would be nationwide. A house divided against itself cannot stand, warned Lincoln in 1858, predicting that the house of the union would indeed stand, but only because it would soon become all free or all slave.
This Supreme Court decision, if it comes down as leaked, will be the most infamous decision since Dred Scott and must awaken the Blue State majority — not just because of this, but as the culmination of all the other Red State aberrations imposed by Red upon Blue, including the election of two Republican presidents in sixteen years who lost the popular vote but were elected because of the reactionary anachronism of the Electoral College. Confederate secession occurred a few years after Dred Scott, even though the decision went their way, because Lincoln and his fellow Republicans (the opposite of today’s Republicans) would not bow before it — Dred Scott, Lincoln said, was not a “Thus saith the Lord.”
Blue State secession must be contemplated now, not only because of this decision but for myriad other reasons. The Blue and Red states are two different nations de facto and perhaps it is time to recognize this fact de jure. Even Lincoln, who opposed secession, conceded that peaceful divorce was possible, that the two sides in a dispute could agree to dissolve the contract between them. Maybe peaceful separation is the way to go.
