Post by Walter on Jan 14, 2004 20:21:53 GMT -5
Can the Left be any worse than this on the basic issue of the right of a child to live?
Abortion for all:
Will life ever begin for Democrats?
Manchester (NH) Union Leader, Editorial, January 12, 2003
THE ISSUE of abortion doesn’t come up much in the Democratic Presidential Primary. A practice that has killed millions of unborn babies since the Roe v. Wade court decision is couched solely in terms of a woman’s “right to choose.” Any of the major candidates who is perceived to waffle at all on that absolute right is immediately pounced upon by his foes.
So it shouldn’t have surprised us when Gen. Wesley Clark, latecomer to the campaign (and latecomer to the Democratic Party itself), spoke like a robot when the subject did come up with this newspaper’s editors last week. Still, it was disappointing that, asked when life begins, a man who would be President told us that, “life begins with the mother’s decision.”
As far as Gen. Clark is concerned, the baby’s head could be crowning and it would still be the mother’s right to kill it. The law, he said, should have nothing to do with it.
Wow. Even within the “pro-choice” establishment, that seems an extreme position. But is it, really? Wall Street Journal columnist William McGurn notes that the National Abortion Rights Action League acknowledges that in Roe v. Wade, “the court rejected the argument that the right to choose is absolute.”
“That’s true in theory,” says McGurn. “But in practice, judges have been ready to rewrite even themselves to find even the most modest limits unconstitutional.”
Those modest limits include attempts to end the hideous practice of partial-birth abortion and, here and elsewhere, attempts to have parents at least notified when their minor children are about to undergo an abortion. Much to New Hampshire’s shame, our own federal Judge Joseph DiClerico put the kibosh on a new parental notification law just last month.
In the old days, Clark might have gotten an argument for when life begins from Sen. Joseph Lieberman. The latter actually acknowledged, also in an interview with this newspaper, that scientific advancement has allowed for the survival of unborn babies as young as 24 weeks. That, in turn, means that the Roe-specified time of a state interest in at least some regulation of abortion may have to be revised.
But that was before poor Joe was running in a primary dominated by the far-left. Our headline shorthand suggesting that Lieberman would look again at Roe v. Wade so rattled him that he rushed out with a new statement.
Yes, he conceded, he had said that “viability” may now come earlier in a pregnancy, but he bizarrely added that this also meant that this had “lengthened the time of a woman’s clearly protected right to choose in Roe from the first trimester to 24 weeks.”
Thus the state of the Democratic Party’s candidates for President in the primary two weeks hence.
Abortion for all:
Will life ever begin for Democrats?
Manchester (NH) Union Leader, Editorial, January 12, 2003
THE ISSUE of abortion doesn’t come up much in the Democratic Presidential Primary. A practice that has killed millions of unborn babies since the Roe v. Wade court decision is couched solely in terms of a woman’s “right to choose.” Any of the major candidates who is perceived to waffle at all on that absolute right is immediately pounced upon by his foes.
So it shouldn’t have surprised us when Gen. Wesley Clark, latecomer to the campaign (and latecomer to the Democratic Party itself), spoke like a robot when the subject did come up with this newspaper’s editors last week. Still, it was disappointing that, asked when life begins, a man who would be President told us that, “life begins with the mother’s decision.”
As far as Gen. Clark is concerned, the baby’s head could be crowning and it would still be the mother’s right to kill it. The law, he said, should have nothing to do with it.
Wow. Even within the “pro-choice” establishment, that seems an extreme position. But is it, really? Wall Street Journal columnist William McGurn notes that the National Abortion Rights Action League acknowledges that in Roe v. Wade, “the court rejected the argument that the right to choose is absolute.”
“That’s true in theory,” says McGurn. “But in practice, judges have been ready to rewrite even themselves to find even the most modest limits unconstitutional.”
Those modest limits include attempts to end the hideous practice of partial-birth abortion and, here and elsewhere, attempts to have parents at least notified when their minor children are about to undergo an abortion. Much to New Hampshire’s shame, our own federal Judge Joseph DiClerico put the kibosh on a new parental notification law just last month.
In the old days, Clark might have gotten an argument for when life begins from Sen. Joseph Lieberman. The latter actually acknowledged, also in an interview with this newspaper, that scientific advancement has allowed for the survival of unborn babies as young as 24 weeks. That, in turn, means that the Roe-specified time of a state interest in at least some regulation of abortion may have to be revised.
But that was before poor Joe was running in a primary dominated by the far-left. Our headline shorthand suggesting that Lieberman would look again at Roe v. Wade so rattled him that he rushed out with a new statement.
Yes, he conceded, he had said that “viability” may now come earlier in a pregnancy, but he bizarrely added that this also meant that this had “lengthened the time of a woman’s clearly protected right to choose in Roe from the first trimester to 24 weeks.”
Thus the state of the Democratic Party’s candidates for President in the primary two weeks hence.