Sunday, May 08, 2022

NYT Compares Abortion to Interracial Marriages

NY Times editorial:
Imagine that every state were free to choose whether to allow Black people and white people to marry. Some states would permit such marriages; others probably wouldn’t. The laws would be a mishmash, and interracial couples would suffer, legally consigned to second-class status depending on where they lived.
Suffer? No one wants to ban those interracial marriages anymore, but there is a real cost to them. I found these statistics online:
>82% of of white mothers with multiple half black children had the children with multiple fathers

>89% of white women with half black children receive 0 financial support from the father

>97% of white women with half black children are on government assistance

>97% of half black children to do not have their father active in their life.

>94% of half black half white children don't have a good relationship with their father

States that discourage interracial childbearing are probably a lot better off for it.
The draft opinion relies heavily on the lack of a mention of abortion in the Constitution, and therefore argues that the document cannot be the basis for the right to terminate a pregnancy. The Constitution also says nothing about interracial marriage, but that didn’t prevent the justices from finding in the 14th Amendment the guarantee that no couple may be treated differently because of the color of their skin.
That decision was from a time that the Warren Court just invented polities without any legal basis.

At least one could say that the 14A was passed to prohibit racial discrimination, and a ban on interracial marriage is thus a target. But no one ever thought the 14A had anything to do with abortion.

One of the Supreme Court justices has an interracial marriage, and soon there will be two. Another has an interractial adoption.

The principle is clear: Women and men should have equal control over their own bodies, as many Americans believed in 1973 and a majority believe today.
That is not even the principle behind Roe v Wade. Although no one is exactly sure. The Roe opinion is vague and confused, and the subsequent Casey decision was unable to get a majority to agree on what Roe held.

The rights of men and women are not currently equal at all. A woman can decide on her own to bear the child, and the man must pay much of his income for 18+ years. He has no right to terminate his obligations, as a woman does.

I don't think most people realize how radical these decisions were. They made abortion a constitutional right to the mother for the whole 9-month pregnancy. There is some verbiage about possible regulation, but that has never been approved.

Roe held that the mother does not have to give anyone a reason for the abortion. Casey held that she does not even have to notify her husband.

If the sexes are supposed to have equal control, then why isn't the husband even notified?

No other country in the world has such radical pro-abortion laws.

Now I am not arguing that abortion is right or wrong. People have legitimate opinions on both sides. The draft Alito opinion does not say either. It simply says that it is a legislative matter.

There has been tremendous liberal and feminist outrage at the draft Alito opinion, but hardly any discussion of the legal merits. Alito convincingly argues that no free society can allow such extreme opinions to be imposed.

As the NY Times editorial explains, Democrats have had plenty of opportunities to pass pro-abortion laws. They had to figure that Roe/Casey was untenable and would eventually be overturned. The simple explanation is that they could never get a legislature to pass something so radical.

Happy Mothers Day.

Update: Bill Maher says that he learned a few things about abortion. That Europe has abortion laws that are much more restrictive than the USA, and even more restrictive that most Red state proposals. That most women getting abortions are mothers. That most abortions are done with pills, and those pills are likely to be readily available. That most pro-lifers are women. That Leftist dogma is that men can get pregnant too, so this is not really a women's issue. Maher says he is pro-abortion because he likes women more than babies, and never believed that life is precious. He had two guests supposedly representing opposite views on abortion, but they agreed on abortion being legal during the first eight months, and only disagreed about it in the ninth month.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

In researching the history of the Roe v. Wade case, I discovered Struck v. Secretary of Defense. Some of what follows is a c&p from USA Today fact check.

Struck joined the Air Force active duty on April 8, 1967. She became pregnant while serving in Vietnam in 1970.

At the time, Air Force policy forced officers who became pregnant to either have an abortion or be discharged. When military leadership learned Struck was pregnant on Oct. 16, 1970, they recommended she be honorably discharged from the Air Force.

Struck was Roman Catholic and did not want to get an abortion. Instead, she arranged to place the child for adoption and use her leave for the pregnancy. But she was dismissed and began a legal battle with the military.

Ginsburg argued the Air Force policy discriminated against women
Ginsburg, who was working with the American Civil Liberties Union at the time, represented Struck in her legal battle.

Apparently, the Air Force was persuaded by the Justice Department to wave her discharge & change the pregnancy regulation. The case was therefore moot I believe. Interesting because Ginsburg wanted this case to the case before the Supreme Court & not Roe v. Wade.

https://casetext.com/case/struck-v-secretary-of-defense

Roger said...

Interesting case. RB Ginsburg disagreed with the Roe v Wade reasoning, and wanted different reasoning. Her view is probably obsolete today, as I don't think she ever accepted that men could get pregnant.