What’s Ahead
October 31st, 2005 | by Tony Steidler-Dennison |Here’s a quick indication of what we’ll face with Samuel Alito as a Supreme Court Justice:
In 1991, Alito argued that the state of Pennsylvania could prohibit married women from obtaining abortions without telling their husbands first — and he made the argument not as a city council candidate looking to please an interest group or as a lawyer representing a client. He made it as a sitting judge. In a lone dissent in a case that would ultimately become the Supreme Court’s Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Alito said that a state did not impose a constitutionally impermissible “undue burden” on abortion rights unless it outlawed abortion altogether or had the “practical effect of imposing severe limitations on abortion.”
I think this points out Alito’s view of abortion quite clearly. It indicates that, short of outlawing abortion altogether, there’s very little he’d consider an “undue burden” on abortion rights - including severely limiting a woman’s right to choose. In other words, though it’s unknown whether he’d actually vote to overturn Roe v Wade, it’s pretty clear that he’d rule in favor of restrictions on abortion so tight as to render Roe meaningless.
9 Responses to “What’s Ahead”
By Erik Weibust on Oct 31, 2005 | Reply
Sounds good to me. That means that the unborn child has a better chance at making it into the real world.
I’ll pray that when Alito becomes the next member of the Supreme Court he does his best to make sure NO woman ever kills her unborn child.
Erik
By Tony Steidler-Dennison on Oct 31, 2005 | Reply
Hey, Erik. Good to see you around.
I’m always genuinely interested in knowing if there’s ever a case in which folks on the right find abortion acceptable. Is the life of the mother a consideration? Is it acceptable if a woman is raped? How about if amniocentesis reveals a life-threatening disability in the child?
I know that the right also advocates adoption for unwanted children. Have you adopted or are you willing to adopt to back up such a position?
How does the right reconicle continuing funding cuts for sex education with this position? Or for contraception? Or for sex education programs that mention contraception as an alternative? Or, for that matter, cutting well-children programs for those low-income mothers who bring the children to term? Or, as they’ve done this week, cutting 300,000 people out of food stamps - most of whom are the children of low-income families?
I’m sure you understand my confusion. It seems that the far right is deadly serious about making sure an unborn child comes to term, while completely ignorant, or (worse) uncaring of the situation into which they might be born. They seem more concerned with the moral message of “the unborn child” than with the moral responsibility of helping to assure a high quality of life.
It’s always seemed inconsistent to me. I hope you can clear it up.
By Erik Weibust on Oct 31, 2005 | Reply
Howdy Tony…
First let me say, that I am a card carrying member of the Right, but I’m speaking for myself. These are my opinions.
I see NO reason in aborting a baby. None. If a woman is raped and does not want to raise the child there are long lists of people wanting to adopt. If a child is sick or has a life-threatening illness let it fight.
I AM a supporter of adoption. I know multiple people that have adopted and plan to adopt again.
I don’t believe in spending ANY public money on teaching children about using contraception or giving them contraception.
I’m not defending anything the Right says or does that seems inconsistent to you. I am just telling you exactly how I feel.
Erik
By Tony Steidler-Dennison on Nov 1, 2005 | Reply
You didn’t address the question of the life of the mother, Erik. That’s an important one.
As always, I think the fundamental difference between us is in the definition of life. I believe that life is an accumulation of cognitive experience. You seem to believe that life is defined as the potential for that experience. That’s why the question of whether you see an exception to protect the life of the mother is an important one.
By Josiah Ritchie on Nov 1, 2005 | Reply
Tony, your point is certainly the one that the average conservative doesn’t even catch and as a result, rarely adresses. Frank Merenda was the one who first helped me understand the perspective. For background, I’m unapologetically coming from a biblical base.
I think it starts down around humanism and relativism. First, humanism cuts off the right for God to affect such a case. Frankly, humanism disregards God and stands up men as god while also saying that men are just another animal. We are at the same time nothing and everything. I have other disagreements with humanism, but that’s a start. There are humanists who are pro-life. I don’t honestly know how someone can defend the life of a child from a humanistic perspective. It seems at odds with the philosophy.
When we add relativism, which I don’t claim to understand fully, I don’t know how anyone can argue anything. Basic debate skills include defining terms. How can terms be defined without absolute truth?
The gift of life for any of us is precious. We, being created in the image of God, are a reflection of Him. He has perscribed that those who desecrate this image by murder are to be killed. There is a distinction between the governments responsibility to perform justice and the individual to submit to government authority. Somewhere I have a school paper I wrote on that. Understanding the weight of the image of God stands in direct contrast to a mother deciding the importance of a child. God already made that decision.
In the issue of birth where either the mother or the child will die and a choice can be made, well, that’s a hard one and one I haven’t been able to come up with a solid answer for, nor have I really wanted to think deeply on it. It is a gruesome situation that I’m sure I can’t understand without being in it, and I don’t wish that on anyone. My God puts an equal weight of importance on each life, even if they are handicapped mentally or physically. I’m left with hoping I never have to make the decision. I don’t think this decision should be in the hands of the government.
I do think the law of the land should reflect God’s communication on the sanctity of life. This sanctity is not an issue in the concern you express because it is equal for the mother and child.
Looks like I opened up several cans of worms.
I do so because I trust a solid constructive conversation can exist around here. I would never start all that in an IRC chat room. It would be pointless.
By Tony Steidler-Dennison on Nov 1, 2005 | Reply
Thanks, Josiah. You’ve clearly taken the time to think this through.
Clearly, conservatives and Christians from the middle to the far right do not favor the personal choice of abortion. As a person who tries to live a reasonably spiritual life - a view that only lightly brushes up against questions of theology - I don’t believe I could personally make or support that choice myself. I’ve been in one of the situations I raised in the response to Erik, and we chose to carry the pregnancy to term. 17 years later, we have virtually no regrets about the decision, despite the fact that raising a profoundly handicapped child has, at times, been difficult on many, many levels.
The issue I have is more straightforward. In theory, we’re a country founded on religious neutrality. That’s the only plausible model for success if your goal is to allow your citizens to broaden and deepen their own understanding of God. The State simply cannot and should not impose a particular religious view on the citizenry. The system works when you trust it enough to leave it untampered with. And, oddly enough, religion works best when it’s a personal decision arrived at without the help of the government. It’s much more personal and much more meaningful.
The push to overturn Roe represents a primarily Christian view. If, as a country, we’re really not about endorsing one particular religious view or another, we should always fall on the side of individual choice. I don’t know if that humanist or relativist - it’s just the principle that we were founded on.
I know Christians don’t like that. However, it’s not really Christians that overturning Roe would be aimed at. They’re not likely to choose abortion to begin with. So, it’s a position that’s inherently intended to govern the choices of others outside the theological scope of Christianity. Boiled down to its essence, it’s a legal imposition of Christian beliefs on non-Christians.
I think the push to overturn Roe also reflects a view that people who choose abortion do so on a whim. At least, that’s one of the emotional arguements that the “right to life” movement conveys. In our personal circumstances, we made the decision we made based on what we felt was right for us. It was an immeasurably personal decision that was guided not only by our own beliefs, but by what we could, at that moment, envision as the future, both for ourselves and our daughter. The decision was (as I believe it should be) the sum total of our personal insight, not that of some entity outside our own little world. It was an agonizing process - easily the toughest period of our life together. Had we made the decision to end the pregnancy, it’s reasonable to think that it would have been even more agonizing. But, it would have been based on the same criteria - from as informed a position as we were capable of at that time. In other words, we wouldn’t have made the decision lightly, regardless of the outcome. I tend to believe that the majority of people take a similar level of care in making that decision - ultimately arriving at the choice they can best live with over the long haul.
Finally, I find the conservative position shameful in providing for children and the poor, in general. This administration in particular has made it it’s mission to disassemble the very support network that might allow a low-income mother to make the decision to complete a pregnancy. It’s where the comingled values of the far right conflict the most clearly, in my mind. “You cannot have the right to choose to terminate a pregnancy, and, if you’re low-income, we will not support the child we’ve forced you to carry to term.” There’s just no other way, to me, to describe that other than as shameful.
That’s more than I’d intended to say, but there it is.
By Josiah Ritchie on Nov 1, 2005 | Reply
Thanks for sharing Tony. If at any point you want to take the discussion to email for privacy sake, I’m okay with that.
I wasn’t aware of the situation with your daughter and I most certainly respect the pain of being forced into such a position. You will undoubtedly understand that area of things far more than I.
In my normal style, allow me to respond to the end of your comment and work my way up. The conservatives are definitely split on many things. There are a lot of things that fall under the conservative position that I’d rather not be associated with, but we have a 2 party system. Honestly, the difference in conservatives socially and economically will probably be its downfall in the near future simply because of the split. Right now, each side needs the other.
My ideal government puts the aid of people in need in the hands of the church. This is what happened with Katrina. The government admittedly fell on its face. Churches were loosely organized internationally far quicker and much without prior association that included such planning. The fact is the government has taken this and it isn’t my expectation that this will change.
So, what the average conservative opposes in the hands of the government is picked up elsewhere and I’d argue handled more efficiently on that level without paying for the overhead of massive administrative leadership.
On to that major attraction here :-):
What most catches my attention in what you say is that the basis of this decision is the individual. Certainly one of the most upheld values of our culture is the power of the individual. I’d say this goes to a fault. We are so interested in protecting our own interests that we forget the importance of our neighbor. There was a time when our culture was highly dependant on our neighbors. Now we rarely know them. It took me a year to learn the name of the neighbors on one side and their door is 5 feet from mine. Anyway, out of this comes humanism. The humanist is so important that he is the source of right and wrong. If we follow that, we have to solve the problem of you “wrong” and my “wrong” no agreeing. That is where we get statements like, “Whatever is right for you…”.
Then we have to say that there is no absolute right or wrong. When our wrong’s clash, let the government decide who gets to be right. So on what does the government decide what is right and wrong? We ultimately base it on a document that was written by a few men and accepted as the law in 1776. So they were absolutely right? Well, no, their words are no longer entirely applicable and so we have to have judges divine the intention so that it applies to the current day. Everything is relative to something else.
I argue that back when we decided that the individual was central we really messed up. Again, many Christians lost their thinking cap at birth and buy into some of this not realizing the contradiction they adopt by mixing philosophies. Don’t worry, I’m slowly working on them.
We have 6.8 billion standards of right and wrong according to the relativist; one for each person. As an aside, a relativist has to make an absolute statement to state relativism as absolutely true.
I’m saying that 6.8 billion platforms for morality is unweidly and ignores that this world as beautifully organized as it is has a creator who set the laws that put us at exactly the right position to be warm enough to sustain life and created this bizarre molecule out of Hydrogen and Oxygen that moves differently than any other. (For example, it expands when it freezes unlike anything else.) His law stands above the law of human government and his communication with us says that he regards human life highly. In a phrase, God trumps Government.
If I was relative in my thinking I could agree that I’m a Christian and I can do things my way and let others have their head, but I see morality as an absolute.
Let’s toss another base issue in, I expect your perspective consider’s humans to be basically good, or if they are left to their own devices, they will move toward good. I find people to be evil at heart. They require a change. I’ve never seen a kid who had to be taught to lie. It is hard to hold to humanism when I believe individuals are going to mess things up without some enforced organization.
To bring this to a wrap, we do have a document that strongly affirms the rights of the individual providing our governments structure, but it doesn’t state that one individual has rights over the other. I see an absolute moral position that comes from an authority far more authoritative than me. I can’t ignore that and it’s not okay to let everyone else ignore that becaus it isn’t just as wrong for them as it is for me.
So, yes, I’m pushing my faith on others, but it is because it is what I believe to be right. I will do so with respect to you and others. Again, I’m working on getting that message out to some rather misguided Christians. I’m very concerned that the prejudice against the Christian church in our country will result in what I am saying here being labeled “hate speech” in my lifetime. Similar things have already happened in Canada over gay rights.
The great thing about our government is that despite my disagreement with the law, I still have the option of working towards its change.
For the record, I may disagree with you, but I will stand in support for your right to disagree with me. It will be a sad day when we loose that.
Look at me going on and on . . . I hope this isn’t so long that you skim over it.
By Tony Steidler-Dennison on Nov 1, 2005 | Reply
I think we will agree, for now, to disagree on the issues. We can agree, though, that the right to do that is a great thing. And, I’m especially glad that we can exercise that right here in a way that is both challenging and civil.
By Josiah Ritchie on Nov 2, 2005 | Reply
Thanks for the discussion Tony.
I learn something each time I discuss something like this with people such as yourself who talk instead of get mad.