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Wednesday, May 15, 2019

The Rebirth Of The Abortion Debate

It's amazing how the abortion debate has been reborn in this country.  Forty-six years ago, the Supreme Court supposedly put the issue to bed by discovering a constitutional right to abortion at certain times during a pregnancy.  There is, of course, nothing in the Constitution that discusses abortion, but the Court didn't care; it found the right in the shadows of the Fourteenth Amendment.  I'm not making that up; they actually said they found the right in the shadow of that section of the Constitution.  Ever since then, the issue has been one which dealt only with when a woman could get an abortion as of right.  During the first three months of the pregnancy, there were no restrictions on abortion.  In the middle three months, there could be reasonable restrictions.  During the final three months, there were supposed to be very limited grounds on which an abortion could be performed.  People marched and screamed about abortion, but these were the rules.

Not all that long ago, things started to change.  This issue which the left thought was dead actually came back to life.  In some states like New York and Virginia, laws were proposed or passed that allowed abortion at any time during pregnancy for nearly any reason.  Those states even moved towards allowing babies born alive after a failed abortion to be left to die.  On the other side, states began adopting measures that prohibited abortion after the baby could feel pain or after a fetal heartbeat could be detected.  The states went back into the business of setting rules for abortions within their borders.  And all these new laws are forcing the issue back to the Supreme Court.

SCOTUS now has a chance to undo the damage it did in Roe v. Wade.  Our Constitution leaves the decision on issues like abortion up to the individual states.  By overturning Roe v. Wade, the court could go back to the structure that the founders intended.  Let Alabama prohibit abortion and New York allow infanticide.  We don't need a nationwide rule set by an overactive group of judges.

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