Posted by
Tracey O'Donnell on Wednesday, October 31, 2007 7:38:04 PM
In an attempt to remind us of the complexity of the abortion issue in
the US today, George Will winds up oversimplifying it. He elucidates
the current legal situation as if there were nothing more to it.
In his column
“Supreme Control of Abortion Policy,”
Mr. Will rightly points out that even pro-life’s best case scenario -
the reversal of the Roe v. Wade decision - would not outlaw abortion,
but only return the issue to state legislatures, some of which would
presumably adopt legislation similar to the federal rules now in place.
As the most a president can do is to choose justices who then
might overturn
Roe, Mr. Will convincingly deems presidents relatively powerless to
determine abortion policy. Therefore, he reasons, a presidential
candidate’s position on the issue is relevant only insofar as it
signifies “the candidate's sensibilities and sympathies, and … his or
her notion of sound constitutional reasoning.” And that’s that. Any
change would be slow and incomplete, so no one should get too worked up
about any candidate’s view one way or the other. Is the issue really
no more complex than this?
First of all, that a candidate
should consider Roe vs. Wade badly decided is more of a one-step IQ
test than it is an indicator of his “sensibilities.” Even if one
accepts the dubious notion of a constitutional right to “privacy,” to
stretch the concept to include abortion is to debase its very meaning.
To expand the boundaries of
my privacy to overtake
your body entirely is to effectively negate your privacy.
But
not everyone who rejects judicial activism respects life from the
moment of conception. And certainly many defenders of life care less
about the Constitution than they do about babies. The
anti-Roe/anti-abortion and pro-Roe /pro-abortion alliances are
politically rather than intellectually necessary.
There is
much more to the question of abortion than its legal parameters. More
than simply changing the law, the Court’s aggressive intervention
wrested at one fell swoop a moral question from its proper arena. And
most importantly of all, it armed to the teeth one side over the other.
Without
the bulletproof armor of a constitutional “right” to protect them,
abortion advocates would again have to advance their cause on its own
merits – or lack thereof. Though no court of men could ever be endowed
with the power to either grant or withhold anyone’s “right” to kill an
innocent, the pro-abortion side simultaneously wields this phony right
like a weapon and hides behind it like a shield.
Depriving
post-Roe abortion supporters of this key weapon in their arsenal would
do a lot to restore the even playing field of ideas, from which no
battle over social policy should ever have strayed.
Tracey O’Donnell
SwimmingUpstream.org