The Supreme Attack

[elfs]

There has been a lot of impassioned writing around the Internet about the latest case to come out of the Supreme Court. I understand all of the anger and outrage. It is a painful issue to deal with, and all of the fury I've seen recently is completely valid.

But here's what gets me about the ruling: the wording of it has nothing to do with the actual rights that are key to abortion issues. This is a ruling in favor of nanny statism, of the kind of socialist thinking that people like Alito, Roberts, Scalia, and Thomas are supposed to abhor.

From a strictly libertarian standpoint abortion is a human rights issue versus a property rights issue, with the former trumping the latter. Ignore the facts of this current procedure for a moment and think about the central issue: Either a fetus is a person and therefore his right to life trumps the property right of mother to control over the territory of her own body, or it is not and the mother's property right to do what she will with her body overrides everything else. I am personally in the latter camp: I am firmly convinced that personhood is a quality that can be ascribed only to someone who is born.

(I will delete any response to that last sentence: I am not interested in debating abortion per se with this post.)

What I find distressing in this ruling is that it has nothing to do with the central issue of abortion. It is not about whether a woman can get an abortion; it is about by what procedure a woman may acheive the result required. This ruling attacks the pro-choice movement without a hint of principle for the actual letter of the law or the actual issues involved in abortion. It creates in the public's mind the notion that there is a valid issue without actually addressing the real controversy that needs to be addressed. It is an ugly ruling with all the moral worth of a grocery list.

This is a consequence, mostly, of the liberalization of the commerce clause of the Constitution; we have weakend its definition to the point where Congress no longer needs to find even the flimsiest excuse within the Constitution actions it takes that affect citizens directly. As concerned as we are with the current Dominionist strain within the White House, we should be equally concerned with our slow slouch toward a federalized and representative totalitarianism. Most of the cases that have weakened the commerce clause have been "liberal" issues, such as pollution control and the endangered species act. You wanted a powerful federal government, you got one, and now it's in the "wrong hands."

Now what are you going to do?

Comments

[srmalloy.livejournal.com]

It would be interesting, in a sick sort of way, to see how long a legal decision giving a fetus human rights would last before it was reversed because it crushed the justice system. On my sister's birth certificate, there is a box labeled 'Fetal Deaths', with the number '3' in the box. If a fetus is legally human, with all the rights therein, then the police would be required to conduct an investigation into every miscarriage as a possible homicide. That alone, ignoring the amount of people needed to enforce laws such as the ones against 'reckless endangerment' in order to keep pregnant women from doing anything that has been proven to be potentially harmful to a developing fetus, or prosecuting them once apprehended.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_candide_/]

…'reckless endangerment' in order to keep pregnant women from doing anything that has been proven to be potentially harmful to a developing fetus, or prosecuting them once apprehended. Oh, the Dominionists are already trying to shove through laws that do just that.