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No Matter How You Feel About Abortion, Roe v. Wade Was a Terrible Decision

You may think that abortion is okay anytime. You may think it is never okay. I happen to think it is okay in very rare circumstances--much more rare than the million or so abortions that are occurring each year in the US.

However, regardless of your or my position on whether abortion should be legal or not, it is impossible to make a case that the Roe v Wade decision of the US Supreme Court in 1973 was constitutional. I personally think the Roe decision was a huge blunder from a social perspective, but that's not the point. The point is that the Supreme Court should have never heard the case.

It has nothing to do with how strongly you feel about the rightness or wrongness of the issue. The question is, did the United States federal government have the constitutional right to decide on the issue of abortion?

Constitutionally, the answer is no.

George W. Bush has made a mockery of the Constitution. Do you care about that? If so, you must care about the mockery of Roe v Wade.

So regardless of your position on this issue, you must admit that we have been living at least one constitutional lie since 1973.

Even many of those who supported abortion were embarrassed by the illogic of Harry Blackmun and the other justices who voted in favor of Roe. Ruth Bader Ginsburg criticized it from the perspective that it short circuited an evolution of abortion law in the states, where it belonged. John Hart Ely said:
[Roe] is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be. What is frightening about Roe is that this super-protected right is not inferable from the language of the Constitution, the framers’ thinking respecting the specific problem in issue, any general value derivable from the provisions they included, or the nation’s governmental structure.
The issue was really a simple one--until the court complicated the issue by creating a much bigger problem than the one it was trying to create. The federal government has no constitutional jurisdiction over the issue of abortion.

The problem of Roe can be solved--perhaps not easily, because we seldom "think" in America anymore with anything other than our emotions--by Congress' doing the following:
  1. Invoke Article III, Section 2 of the Constitution to prohibit the Supreme Court from deciding on issues of abortion.
  2. Enact legislation turning responsibility for legislating abortion back to the states (Congress could even specify that until such legislation is created--or brought out of mothballs--states are bound by the decision of Roe.
It doesn't even matter whether we think abortion is a woman's choice or whether it is murder. It is a matter of legal and constitutional integrity.

If you're worried that your state may make the "wrong" decision, then you might as well seek for world government to decide the issue once and for all--and then hope that decision agrees with you.

You and I have every right to influence the decision of whether abortion should be legal or not. It's just that we don't have the right to expect to influence such a decision that is made in Washington D.C.

How do you like living a constitutional lie? Does it even matter? George W. Bush has made a mockery of the Constitution. Do you care about that? If so, you must care about the mockery of Roe v Wade.
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Comments

  1. Urban Koda5/08/2008 01:43:00 PM

    I saw an interview with Ron Paul about a year ago... I liked his take on abortion and other similar issues...

    He said that the more complicated the problem, the more localized the solution needed to be. For abortion he suggested the state, and for education local government.

    Perhaps Healthcare could fit this model too, and be handled on a community level.

    All of these would be highly preferable to letting the feds get their sticky little fingers into the mix.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Frank Staheli5/08/2008 01:47:00 PM

    I'm reading Ron Paul's book The Revolution: A Manifesto right now, and that was the impetus for this article. I could write about 10 articles based on the fabulous information in his book.

    He did talk about health care, back when it was cheaper, and back when doctors provided service for free to indigent people. But that was before government, like you say, got "their sticky little fingers into the mix" and caused the cost of health care to go up and the quality to go down. Now a lot of people go to Mexico or overseas for their surgeries, etc. because it's cheaper.

    ReplyDelete

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