Harris believes abortion is a fundamental freedom …
… and doesn’t even seem to be supporting exemptions for religion-based health facilities.
Harris said, among other things:
I don’t think we should be making concessions when we’re talking about a fundamental freedom to make decisions about your own body.
I have a hunch, though, that Harris supported mandatory COVID vaccinations for the military, for example – an issue which certainly seems to have a much better fit with the idea of making decisions about your own body than a pregnancy does. After all, a pregnancy directly and absolutely concerns the body of another: a baby. And that right seems pretty fundamental, at least as a potential: the right to be born.
Whether a person supports abortion or doesn’t, any argument that the procedure only concerns a woman’s body seems obviously duplicitous to me. But it’s a standard argument used by many supporters of abortion. Also, if the right to abortion is such a “fundamental freedom,” it’s certainly not mentioned in the Constitution. The proper route for making it federal law and a protected freedom would be a constitutional amendment. But Harris and the left won’t go that route because they know it doesn’t have enough support right now to pass that way.
You’d think that somewhere along the line they’d figure out how babies get made…
Harris is intellectually and morally bankrupt.
She is as close to being a zero human as I’ve ever seen.
@neo:Also, if the right to abortion is such a “fundamental freedom,” it’s certainly not mentioned in the Constitution. The proper route for making it federal law and a protected freedom would be a constitutional amendment.
I don’t agree that abortion is a “fundamental freedom” for exactly the reason you give, that there are at least three people’s rights and lives involved. But if it WERE a fundamental freedom, we already have it through the Ninth Amendment:
I think it’s important to remember that the theory behind the American Founding is that our rights are not granted to us by a document, like they were under British monarchs; our rights pre-exist our founding documents. The “proper” route you suggest could be construed to have it the other way around, that we have no fundamental freedoms not spelled out in the Constitution. If that “proper” route is sometimes pursued we have to be very careful about the impression we leave about where the right actually came from.
I do think that if you wanted to create a right for Americans that involves power over other people, like a “right” to free health care (which would entitle you to force others to labor for you) you WOULD have to amend the Constitution because it would be taking someone’s rights away, in a way that the right to free speech does not. Just because I’m free to speak doesn’t mean you aren’t, but if I had a right to make you listen that would be taking away a right from you.
Similarly I think a “right” to abortion would fall into this category: you would be taking away the rights of some people to be alive and other people to have a say in the lives of their children.
All this is in kind of the background of the Constitution, the understanding of what words mean and what “rights” even are, and there’s danger in spelling it out explicitly in black-letter law, and danger of another kind in not spelling it out. Blackstone alludes to this danger when he discusses the settlement of the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
Abortion has been a solid gold issue for the Democrats, and they wouldn’t want it to be resolved. It helps keep a certain demographic on the reservation.
Seventies feminists, I think it was Robin Morgan, joked that if men could become pregnant, men would make abortion a sacrament.
Well, today’s feminists don’t need no men. These women have essentially made abortion a sacrament.
@huxley:Seventies feminists, I think it was Robin Morgan, joked that if men could become pregnant, men would make abortion a sacrament.
While men cannot get pregnant, many of them do wish to avoid any accountability (especially financial) for a pregnancy or the resulting 18-21 years of childhood, and those men have indeed helped make abortion a sacrament.
@Niketas Choniates
What you say is true about the theory. Rights are not all enumerated in the constitution. It is often said that in theory theory and practice are the same but in practice they are not.
Rights that you actually want to keep are best protected by being enumerated. The Bill of Rights was added by people suspicious that these obvious rights would be lost if they were not enumerated. Even with the bill of rights we struggle to keep free speech and assembly. Free association is at least somewhat overridden by a lot of Civil rights law. If the 2nd amendment wasn’t a thing you can bet we would not have the access to guns we have.
While men cannot get pregnant, many of them do wish to avoid any accountability (especially financial) for a pregnancy or the resulting 18-21 years of childhood, and those men have indeed helped make abortion a sacrament.
Niketas Choniates:
Really. Specifics? Cites?
Sure, some men go along with abortion, some for the crass reason you mention, but it’s overwhelmingly feminist women screaming for abortion and feminist men supporting them as allies.
@martin:Rights that you actually want to keep are best protected by being enumerated. The Bill of Rights was added by people suspicious that these obvious rights would be lost if they were not enumerated.
Certainly. But we have to be careful how we talk about it. Because if your answer to “Why does Joe Sixpack have the right to carry WEAPONS! of WAR! used in WAR!” and your answer is solely “It’s in the Constitution”, then you’re arguing on their terms: that your rights are based in some piece of paper that they get to help write and can change.
Likewise I would never argue that abortion is not a right because it’s not enumerated in the Constitution. I’d argue that it cannot be an unenumerated right because it actually takes away rights from some people and transfers them to others. Doesn’t mean we can’t put it in or make it legal some other way, or that we should.
@huxley:Specifics? Cites?
Let’s not make isolated demands for rigor. If you get to assert without cites, then basic fairness says so do I. Maybe you’ve never known any teenagers or college kids or criminals. But plenty of nice middle-class fathers have paid for their college-bound daughters’ abortions. Wouldn’t want to see them “punished with a baby” as one prominent male Dem politician put it.
feminist men supporting them as allies.
These men have reasons for being feminists and associating with feminist women in support of abortion. Feminism isn’t something you’re born believing, nor are you born with a pink hat on your head or a “Keep Abortion Legal” sign.
Let’s don’t mention Thomas Hobbes.
” . . . if the right to abortion is such a “fundamental freedom,” it’s certainly not mentioned in the Constitution.” [Neo]
I once read the following which I thought a very wise and profound observation: Anything that involves the work-product of another human being is not a right.
In that light, we may argue about the legality of abortion, its morality (or lack thereof) and especially the distinction of mother’s body vs. childs life, but under that above observation there is no “right” to abortion, or health care in general, for that matter.
Let’s not make isolated demands for rigor. If you get to assert without cites, then basic fairness says so do
Niketas Choniates :
This topic and its source are a cite.
Kamala Harris believes abortion is a fundamental right.
There’s no question whatsoever that feminist women have made abortion their supreme righteous cause. Must this be proven?
Cite a corresponding man who isn’t just a me-too feminist male supporting the sisters.
Extra credit: Cite an outspoken male who publicly supports abortion because he doesn’t want men to be stuck with responsibility — which was your claim.
Niketas Choniates makes a valid point about the 9th amendment. If you’re so inclined I’d highly recommend reading the reasoning of the founders who were against a Bill of Rights. They were not inimical of freedom, just the opposite. They thought enumerating rights would limit them, just as enumerating powers was supposed to do. I’ve always thought someone could write a damn good book just about the spirit of the 9th & 10th amendments alone, and someone probably has.
All that said, we conservatives should not shy away from the abortion discussion. It is among the enemy’s most powerful weapons, and there is no better place to have that discussion, among conservatives, than right here on this blog.
huxley:
Very few men would say it in such a crass way for public consumption. Much more noble to hide behind the rhetoric of a woman’s right to control her own body.
I have no statistics on how many men support abortion because they want to evade responsibility. I don’t think anyone has figures on that. But I certainly am aware, from people I’ve known, of pregnant women being pressured by husbands or men they’ve gotten pregnant by, to have abortions. It’s hardly an unknown phenomenon.
NIketas: Mike Plaiss, et al:
I certainly would not say that one can’t have a right unless it’s enumerated in the Constitution. However, I would – and did – say that a right to abortion, which does not just involve a woman’s body but involves the killing of a fetus – cannot be considered a right in the entire US, as a matter of federal law, without a constitutional amendment. Nor, by the way, could it be banned at the federal level without an amendment. The states can do either thing at the state level, however.
Roe found a nationwide right to abortion even though it was not mentioned in the Constitution. The judges who made the ruling in Roe were relying on a supposed “penumbra” that they felt was implied in the Bill of Rights but unstated, a right to privacy. Dodd said no; abortion is not a right guaranteed by the Constitution, implied or not, and it’s up to the states to make their own decisions to either allow it or prohibit it. Therefore, because it’s not in any penumbra of the Constitution, anyone who wants the right to abortion to be guaranteed on a national level must amend the Constitution, in my opinion. And likewise, anyone would wants an abortion ban on a national level must also amend the Constitution.
It’s hardly an unknown phenomenon.
neo:
Which I granted in my first response. But it’s not those men who have driven the abortion issue politically.
My point, again, is that the overwhelming political support for abortion is from feminist women and their fewer feminist male allies.
My impression is that Republicans did poorly in the 2022 election largely because of the Dodd decision and the consequent heavy mobilization of feminist women on the abortion issue.
Feminists say it’s a women’s issue and men have no say unless it is to agree. Most men, aside from those in the pro-life movement, would just as soon steer clear.
There is the men’s issue that many men want to have a say in their accountability for a pregnancy based on their paternity, which is only starting to get traction. Though that is another discussion.
Ask David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt about former California A.G., Kamala Harris’ views on the topic.
Medical care is one of the most regulated areas of life. The government prohibits many drugs and procedures. If the MSM were real journalists, they would ask anyone mouthing the “politicians shouldn’t tell me what I can do with my body” robotic cliché whether the FDA should be abolished, lobotomy’s performed or amputations in the case of body integrity identity syndrome done.
For that matter, why have physicians licensed? If you neighbor wants to practice surgery on you, it’s your body.
If you believe it’s OK to kill unborn children, have the integrity to say so.
Pete Buttigieg recently said that men are not truly free without readily available abortions for women. Doug Emhoff toured my state in a pro-abortion van saying much the same thing. That’s two in recent days.
And many, many women get abortions because the boyfriend threatens to leave them if they don’t abort. Often the boyfriend pays for it. Cheaper than child support. Again, I cite Doug Emhoff.
I notice that the Dems, who scream about Trump’s alleged intention to outlaw abortion nationally, also regularly vote for and advocate a national pro-abortion law.
@Kate:And many, many women get abortions because the boyfriend threatens to leave them if they don’t abort.
What I find sadder still, is the large proportion of women who get abortions because their parents will abandon them if they don’t.
It may be too old to easily find online but the New York Times had an approving editorial by a woman who, with her husband, successfully pressured their teenaged daughter into an abortion and explicitly gave the concern that they might be stuck with the burden of raising the child.
They believed in legal abortion, and they did not want the responsibility of a child, and they did not want their daughter to take on that responsibility because it might get in the way of the life they think she should aspire to.
Sometimes it’s not just the boyfriend or the husband who wants to avoid responsibility, it’s the woman’s own father.
Do not disagree with a single word of what neo says at 7:45. My interest in this particular topic, on this blog anyway, is political, not theoretical/constitutional. Illinois is throughly blue, but during the last election, in a district that is at least kind of up for grabs, I counted, I kid you not, seven conservative ads by the democrat hammering away at the Republican’s stance against abortion. Living here, I can assure you, these ads were highly effective.
I’m trying to encourage debate. Neo’s reasoning at 7:45, while entirely correct, is WAY too cerebral for a political message – not that she was suggesting it was one. So where does the conservative/libertarian coalition come to terms on this issue? Because if we don’t, we’ve got a problem, in my opinion.
Mike Plaiss:
Indeed, the politics are a big problem.
Anyone wanna talk about how the majority of OBGYN’s don’t actually perform abortions, and being forced to perform abortions might make many doctors leave the field or change their minds about entering… Wouldn’t that undermine “women’s health,” which the Democratic Party supposedly cares so much about?
@Mike Plaiss:So where does the conservative/libertarian coalition come to terms on this issue? Because if we don’t, we’ve got a problem, in my opinion.
Yeah, those infants are sure inconvenient to a lot of people, including Republicans who want to hold office.
Almost as bad, old people. Their medical bills, their insistence on living longer and longer but with fewer and fewer working people paying into the government programs that pay for those bills; fewer and fewer of them having any children with any interest in seeing that they are treated well. All the while the shifting demographics of the country meaning they will be cared for by people who feel no cultural connection to them and may not even speak their language, and the rising levels of government debt ensuring that there’s less to pay for it all.
Cormac McCarthy’s sheriff said it best, in “No Country for Old Men”:
Let’s just say it out loud! Abortion is basically child murder!
All well and good Niketas Choniates, and what happens to the infants in a Harris/Walsh administration with Democrats in control of the senate and house?
https://www.google.com/search?q=lincoln+movie+compass&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:b2f648c2,vid:PW6JYjJ6Scs,st:0
And while we’re at it, it is crystal clear that Trump is dancing around abortion being ok early in the pregnancy, and not ok late. Everyone on board with that? Or not?
@Mike Plaiss:and what happens to the infants in a Harris/Walsh administration with Democrats in control of the senate and house?
Leaving aside the moral question of whether it’s right for good people to do a little evil to stop bad people from doing more evil, do you really think that “Like the Democrats, but ten years later and half as much” has been a winning GOP strategy for the last thirty years it’s been tried?
As for Harris and Walz, I’m pretty sure they will be in charge in 2025, and it will be because their party has captured the important parts of the ballot-counting apparatus and the Federal bureacracy, not because they successfully fear-mongered on abortion.
One thing that has been a good thing to come out of the last 8 years is watching all the masks come off. Liz Cheney is revealed as someone who never actually believed in any of the pro-life fire-breathing she used to do. More Republicans like Liz Cheney sound like a smooth winning strategy?
it is crystal clear that Trump is dancing around abortion being ok early in the pregnancy, and not ok late. Everyone on board with that? Or not?
It’s not up to him. That would put him in the mainstream of American and European opinion. But as President he will not have power to make any such law. I personally don’t plan for anyone who has that power and has that opinion, which affects my vote for Congresscritters, certainly.
Right now, though, it’s actually up to the states, and if no Federal law or amendment is passed that is where it will stay.
I’m no expert but doesn’t morality play some kind of role. I hear the “who’s morality” sneering response alot. I don’t have a problem responding Judeo Christian morality. Killing babies or fetuses is immoral. But in order to enjoy unfettered sex severed from its purpose of creating families we have to eliminate morality to get that. Since we don’t have a culture we have a bunch of subcultures that substitute. Isn’t the Constitution, at least in part, based on morality?
Re:“Why does Joe Sixpack have the right to carry WEAPONS! of WAR! used in WAR!”
Is there any right more fundamental than the individual’s right to life itself? When our lives are mortally threatened, the means to effectively defend our lives is critical. Since we can’t know in advance of an attack what specific defensive arms will suffice, prudence requires that we have more than we are likely to need, since by definition, less than we need will not suffice.
neo states, “anyone would wants an abortion ban on a national level must also amend the Constitution.”
While I understand the desirability of societal cohesion on divisive issues, that’s essentially an argument that a Constitutional amendment is necessary to prevent the premeditated taking of another person’s innocent life…
Not a “person’?
In Jeremiah 1:5 God says, “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you; before you were born, I sanctified you; and I ordained you a prophet to the nations.” [my emphasis}
Relevant lyric from the Emerson, Lake & Palmer song, “From the Beginning”
“You see it’s all clear
You were meant to be here
From the beginning”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUx6pZiJprA
“He who has ears to hear, let him hear and heed My words” Matthew 11:15: