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Cheap Seats 2022 By Rich Trzupek

To Have or to Have Not - 06-29


By Rich Trzupek
  News Flash #1: The Supreme Court of the United States did not outlaw abortion last week.
  News Flash #2: Abortion will continue to be offered and performed in many American states. People like me wish that weren’t true, but people like me understand that we live in a nation governed by laws, not by hysteria and hyperbole.
  News Flash #3: The essence of last week’s SCOTUS decision was not to say that abortion is inherently illegal, but rather to observe that the Constitution is clearly silent about this issue, and that when the Constitution is silent about an issue, it cannot rule on the issue, but is rather obligated to turn the treatment of such issues back to the individual states.
  The core reasoning of Roe v. Wade involved a threefold concept:
  1) The constitutional right to privacy shields a pregnant woman from any attempt by government to protect the interests of the life growing inside her womb. Essentially Roe postulated that at certain stages of gestation fetus’ have no inherent rights, only the rights that their pregnant mother chooses to grant them.
  2) A fetus is not and cannot be treated as a person under the Constitution.
  3) However, a fetus could assume rights as it developed. Justice Blackmun’s opinion essentially gave the fetus no rights during the first trimester, but left the door open for a fetus to have increasing rights in the next two trimesters.
  The idea that a fetus would have no rights until birth actually occurred was not part of Roe v. Wade. I’m pretty sure that most of the seven justices who signed onto that opinion would have been horrified to learn that their decision would eventually be used to justify murdering a fetus just before birth.
  That particular horror was only made possible by two subsequent judicial decisions: 1) Potential rights of the fetus included in Roe v Wade could not outweigh the rights of the mother when the health of the mother was at risk; and 2) a mother’s emotional distress can be cited when invoking the superior rights of the mother on health grounds.
  Many pro-choice advocates hold that science tells us that upon conception all a mother carries is a blob of cells that should not be referred to as human life. They may be right. But they do not know that they are right, just as I do not know that they are wrong.
  Me and people like me believe that humanity is granted at the moment of conception. That is to say that the miracle of reproduction involves a miracle unique to human beings: The creation of the unseen, unsee-able but all-important thing we call a “soul.”
  Most atheists, agnostics and many who believe in a Creator scoff at the idea that a blob of cells can have a soul. It is, to them, something akin to superstition. That’s OK. For my part, I take no offense. The journey of life does not demand “faith or science,” it must rather include “faith and science.”
  Believe what you will, the pro-choice person will say, but don’t force your beliefs on me! I won’t. More to the point, I can’t. However, we live in a democratic republic and “we” – not “I” – may pass laws that enjoin you to do certain things and that prohibit you from doing other things.
  You may choose not to pay taxes, but if you make that choice the government of “we the people” will use its power to compel you to do so. You may choose to strap a bomb to your body, enter your neighbor’s home and blow up everyone who lives there. But, if the government of “we the people” stops you from doing so it can and will then punish you for making the attempt.
  As has been simply put time and again, a person’s exercise of their personal rights may not infringe on the rights of others. That gives the government of “we the people” the power to compel you to turn your damned loud music down and to stop flashing your private parts to grade-schoolers.
  The question of abortion is really a question of whether a fetus has, at some point in the gestation process, the rights of a person that entitles the fetus the guarantees found in the 14th Amendment? In Roe v Wade the court answered: “sometimes.” In the years that followed, that answer morphed – in many states – to “never.”
  What the court has done now is to assert that the court should not be answering that question. We the people should, as provided for in the Constitution. No doubt many a blue state will continue to assert that a fetus never has rights, while many a red state will assert that a fetus always, or nearly always, has rights. It was a brave, honorable and correct decision and, I for one, honor those brave souls for having the courage to make it.
  Email: rich.trzupek@gmail.com




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