President Donald Trump is continuing his consistently inconsistent stance on abortion as his administration’s Justice Department has asked a federal court in Texas to dismiss a case aiming to increase regulations on mifepristone, an abortion pill shown in some rare cases to involve serious health risks. Trump has claimed many times in the past to be pro-life, even saying in 2016 that “there has to be some form of punishment” for abortions.
Lorien Hershberger checked every box: she grew up in poverty, was pregnant just out of high school and her boyfriend wasn’t interested in being a father. She had an abortion at twenty. When Vice President Kamala Harris talks about abortion, Lorien is not just the exemplar of reproductive freedom — she is the audience. Perhaps that is why she has received so many robocalls and text messages from Amendment 4 campaigners looking to enshrine abortion up until the moment of birth as a right in the Florida state constitution. They are mistaken. “This is a business,” Hershberger, now a pro-life activist, tells The Spectator. “That’s the most disgusting part of it to me. They do come [in] under the banner of, ‘We’re about women and we’re protecting women.
The pro-life movement has reason to be grateful to Donald Trump, even as it has reason to feel exasperated as well. For forty-nine years, overturning Roe v. Wade was its highest immediate policy priority. Thanks to Trump’s Supreme Court appointments, pro-lifers achieved their aim. But even in 2016, Trump often distanced himself from the pro-life cause — and now he insists that abortion will remain a question for states to decide, a legalistic argument which doesn’t fit with the principle that human life and the rights that come with personhood begin at conception. His campaign — even Trump himself — issued statements touting his support for “reproductive rights,” usually a euphemism for legal and readily available abortion.
Since Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Dobbs decision two years ago this month, pro-abortion activists have scrambled to prove that ensuing state laws restricting abortion are putting women’s lives in danger. Although the vast majority of abortions are performed for reasons of convenience, the new trope is that women are going to die en masse if they can’t have access to these procedures. There are a couple of angles to this argument: Abortion bans and restrictions will render doctors unable to provide life-saving care to women Because abortion is safer than pregnancy, forcing a woman to carry a pregnancy to term puts her life in danger In this edition of Culture Shock, we are going to dig into the first claim.
It was the elephants that were the problem. Pyrrhus loved them, of course — he had two dozen of the mighty beasts, outfitted with war towers and dressed to impress. But when it came time for an assault on the city-state of Argos, they wouldn’t fit through the small gates, leading to chaos and delays as the towers had to be taken apart and mounted again on the other side. When Pyrrhus finally realized he was facing stronger opposition than expected, he decided retreat was wiser, but a botched message to his son’s forces out- side the city led them to attack. The Pyrrhic elephants ran into each other on the streets. One fell and blocked a key gate, another went wild when its rider was killed. Amid the chaos, Pyrrhus was knocked from his horse and decapitated.
It’s been just over a year since the Supreme Court decided in the Dobbs case to overturn Roe v. Wade — and pro-life activists were right when they predicted that the fight against abortion was just getting started. Of course there was plenty for them to celebrate in the aftermath of Roe, which essentially kicked the issue of abortion back to individual states. Thirteen states had “trigger laws” in place that would almost immediately enact near-total bans on abortion, with some exceptions, in the event Roe were overturned. Other states reacted to the Supreme Court’s ruling by passing gestational bans on abortions ranging between six weeks after conception and fetal viability outside the womb. The new bans are already saving unborn lives.
Extremists have got to learn to take half a loaf. Just like the cheap labor-demanding GOP donors, pro-lifers need to be told: you can’t get everything you want. If Republicans give you this, they’ll lose their jobs, and the people who’ll replace them want you dead. Unlike a lot of people complaining about the anti-abortion zealots, I am an anti-abortion zealot. That’s why I’m begging them to stop pushing wildly unpopular ideas. These fanatics are going to get millions more babies killed when Democrats win supermajorities in both houses of Congress and immediately pass a federal law making abortion-on-demand the law of the land.
There’s a perplexing debate buzzing online about where babies come from, and liberals are highlighting the fundamentally warped way they view human life and relationships. Author Gabrielle Blair is making waves for her groundbreaking discovery that if men stopped ejaculating inside women, we would have fewer unwanted pregnancies and abortions (though Blair, herself a Mormon mother of six, believes “women that want or need an abortion should be able to get one whenever they want or need one”). In promoting her new book, Ejaculate Responsibly: A Whole New Way to Think about Abortion, Blair has been advocating for free vasectomies and for a “social campaign that talks about the reality of vasectomies.
When the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization in favor of the overturning of Roe v. Wade back in June, thus ending a woman's federal right to an abortion, the pro-life movement was jubilant. The decision was the culmination of decades of campaigning by conservative and anti-abortion activists to send the issue back to the states. Republican-controlled legislatures across the country moved immediately to place restrictions on abortion, and for the first time in decades, the pro-life movement finally felt like it had the upper hand. Fast-forward five months to the morning after the midterm elections and much of that optimism must have dissipated.
“After a recent experience caring for a patient receiving medical assistance in dying, I felt distressed and uncomfortable. How should I manage these emotions?” According to the website of the College of Nurses of Ontario, that’s a frequently asked question for healthcare professionals involved in euthanasia. Perhaps Canadian health science programs ought to have some mandatory classes on Shakespeare. He wrote quite a bit about coping with the pangs of conscience, particularly after having been an accessory to the unnatural death of another.
With the 2022 midterms now only a month away, there isn't a candidate anywhere who can avoid fielding questions about abortion. The issue is fair game thanks to the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade in its recent decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. And all the more so because, at least in theory, Congress could act to either federally legalize abortion or federally ban it. So it is that abortion has become a major topic of conversation in the US Senate campaign in Georgia, where NFL legend Herschel Walker and incumbent Senator Rafael Warnock are locked in one of the most pivotal races this year.
“Abortion distortion” has been a serious problem for decades. And in our post-Dobbs moment, it's grown worse than ever before. This topic somehow manages to transform conservatives into energetic supporters of the kind of powerful government necessary to protect prenatal children, while at the same time making progressives worship at the altar of government staying out of the lives of autonomous individuals. It has caused reputable academic physicians to describe the four-chambered heart of a six-week old prenatal child with Orwellian euphemisms like "cardiac pole vibrations." It has even pushed Republicans to propose significant social programs to support vulnerable women and families — everything from paid family leave to help with child care.
For nearly half a century, American politics has been defined according to the strictures of a single Supreme Court decision: Roe v. Wade. The 1973 case determined abortion policy for the entire nation, striking down state rules and creating a political movement in response which played out in unexpected and completely polarized ways. It drove southern evangelical Christians and northern Catholics into unorthodox political partnerships. It cut across the Democratic Party coalition, leading to constant squabbling even through the passage of Obamacare. It led directly to the creation of the conservative legal movement, the elevation of prospective judicial nominees as of the utmost importance in assessing presidential candidates.
When the Roe news broke, my thoughts — myopically — turned not to the millions of Americans who were rejoicing, or the millions of Americans who were mourning, but to a social engagement I had coming up a few days thereafter. The intimate dinner would be populated by a few friends and family on both sides of the aisle, with very different perspectives on abortion and, obviously, very different reactions to the news. I was dreading it. Imagine my surprise when, over steaks and haricots verts, the conversation was productive, the rhetoric thoughtful, and the passions cool... most of the time.
We don't really negotiate much in the US and so we're bad at it. The American style of negotiating is to demand everything and settle for nothing less. We ask for an outrageously large amount and "bargain down" after the other side offers an equally outrageous small amount. Starting anywhere near your actual number is considered a sign of weakness. We don't like gray areas and we don't like to feel like we've lost out on something. So being asked to support something that on its face seems reasonable, like allowing two people in love living together in a home they co-own to marry, means buying into a whole LGBTQIA2+ agenda that somehow includes forcing kids to listen to drag queens read stories aloud about sexually ambitious caterpillars and their same-sex tadpole pals.
Are abortion rights guaranteed in the Constitution? In 1973, the Supreme Court handed down a judicially creative interpretation of the 14th Amendment in the case Roe v. Wade, claiming abortion was like other privacy-based rights (such as the rights to contraception, same-sex marriage, adult sexual acts with a consenting partner, and interracial marriage). That is, unenumerated rights, rights inherent in the Constitution but not listed by name, like the right to free speech and the right to bear arms. So that's it. The current decision is illegitimate. Abortion is constitutional! The Supreme Court in its decisions creates precedents, meaning judgments they're supposed to follow in the future. That's the doctrine of stare decisis.
After a bit of a hiatus, my wife and I decided Thursday night to pick up where we left off with Seinfeld. As fate would have it, we ended up watching the episode “The Couch.” Jerry and Elaine go to a local restaurant. The owner, Poppy, swings by the table to assure them that the duck is succulent. Jerry tells Elaine he’d just as soon have stayed home and ordered pizza from Pokeno’s. Elaine tells him she refuses to eat Pokeno’s pizza because the owner donates to radical anti-abortion groups. Jerry, testing Elaine’s resolve, then calls Poppy over to the table and asks where he stands on the abortion issue. Poppy tells a story (heartbreaking in its content but hilarious in its delivery) of his mother undergoing a forced abortion in a Cuban re-education camp.
On a day many Americans on both sides of the abortion issue thought would never come, the Supreme Court reversed the "settled law" of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Justice Samuel Alito's finding for the court will have massive ramifications for American politics, culture, and law. The opinions are worth reading in their entirety — particularly the concurrences of Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Justice Clarence Thomas, the former for warning states that may seek to subvert federalism, the latter for its monumental achievement of criticism of substantive due process. It will take time to digest this ruling responsibly as a legal matter.
Set aside your opinions about abortion for a moment. Throw down the fluttering placards about "THE PRO-LIFE GENERATION" and "KEEP ABORTION LEGAL"; avert your eyes from the demonstrators praying outside Planned Parenthood. And ask yourself this: was Roe v. Wade good law? Was it sound that a "right to privacy" was conjured out of pseudo-constitutional dust and then used to overturn abortion laws in all fifty states? My guess is that even left-wing law professors have their doubts. Now, the Supreme Court has finally gone and rectified this hideous blunder. Pro-lifers rejoice: the day we've hoped for has finally arrived. The decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Center was handed down on a bright and sunny morning in Washington, DC.
When Cockburn took a rainy-day stroll past the United States Supreme Court on Thursday, he didn’t expect to see many people. To his surprise, there were several protesters outside, anticipating a decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which could overturn Roe v. Wade. Cockburn decided to stop and chat with both pro-life and pro-choice demonstrators, briefly catching interviews between shouting matches laced with obscenities and references to genitalia. “Roe is a barbaric remnant of a eugenic past. [It’s] responsible for the murder of 60 million babies," said Terrisa Bukovinac, the founder and executive director of the Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising.“I believe in equity, nonviolence, and nondiscrimination.
