In a truly just world, Barack Obama’s
position on abortion would be of far
greater interest to the media than the fact that Sarah Palin’s 17-year-old daughter is pregnant. This is because Obama has a record on abortion that no decent person would want to embrace, however pro-choice in other respects. As a member of the state’s legislature, Obama rallied opposition to the Illinois Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, a bill that would have given legal protection to babies who somehow emerged alive from unsuccessful late-term abortions. That late-term abortions are sometimes necessary to protect the health of the mother is a regrettable reality, but what happens when the baby somehow lives ? Human decency should intrude at this point to recognize the baby as a human being entitled to protection in the same way that the other newborns are protected, but common medical practice in Illinois and elsewhere was to allow it to simply die due to inattention, which usually occurred within an hour or two but sometimes took considerably longer. The Illinois bill was designed to protect such babies and was a virtual facsimile of a federal bill with the same purpose passed unanimously by both houses of Congress. Not even the fanatical folks at the National Abortion Rights Action League opposed it. But the Illinois bill had to wait to become law, and who knows how many babies had to die, until after Obama left the Illinois Senate in large part because he repeatedly rallied opposition to it from a key committee while a member. Although he has recently done his best to obscure that earlier role, Obama’s bizarre reasoning at the time was that giving legal protection to such newborns might someday be used as a wedge with which to whittle away at the broader abortion right enshrined in Roe vs. Wade. In other words, rather than run even the slightest risk that Roe might in some ways be theoretically imperiled at some distant point in the future, Obama committed himself in the present to practices virtually indistinguishable from infanticide.
This is the strange conundrum in which abortion extremists now find themselves. Fearful of even the slightest infringement of Roe, they refuse to countenance any regulation of the abortion right, even if doing so drives them into positions that are vastly more morally abhorrent than a world without legal abortion.
All of our rights, including those about which there are fewer constitutional doubts such as speech, press and assembly, are restricted in some important ways on the assumption that none, however cherished, is absolute. But for Obama, the fact that abortion rests on such shaky constitutional ground makes necessary an overzealous defense that elevates it above all other rights; hence, no limits on the repellent partial-birth procedure, no parental notification laws and no waiting periods of any kind.
In a reasonable world, one in which Roe had never short-circuited the democratic process and spawned 35 years of culture wars, the people themselves would be left to decide the abortion issue. Shorn of its dubious status as a constitutional right, abortion would be debated openly by the voters and most likely regulated in different ways to reflect their preferences. Some states would place few, if any, restrictions on the practice; others probably would ban it altogether. Most probably would end up somewhere in between in a manner appropriately representative of the people’s ambivalence. That middle likely would constitute the kind of reasonable compromise that pro-life / pro-choice dogma prevents us from reaching. Abortion in most states probably still would be legal in the first trimester, illegal thereafter except when a clear threat to the health of the mother was present. Parental notification would prevail, and so probably would reasonable waiting periods. Would such circumstances really be worse than what we have ? And would not pro-choice groups feel relieved by no longer having to defend the tortuous legal logic of Roe, or, as Obama has, practices that border on infanticide ? Even for those of us who tilt toward the pro-choice side, there are worse things than the repeal of Roe, included among which would be a society that endorsed allowing newborn babies to die. For anyone with an even rudimentary moral conscience, this is only a short step or two from the brave new world of Auschwitz. Obama recently said that the question of when life begins was “above [his ] pay grade.” Apparently, he was better paid as a member of the Illinois Senate.
—–––––•–––––—Free-lance columnist Bradley R. Gitz teaches politics at Lyon College at Batesville.
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