Saturday, May 2, 2009

Good News, Bad News on Abortion

The good news on abortion was that, despite Barak Obama's presidential campaign pledge that the first thing he would do once he were sworn into office as president would be to sign the radically pro-abortion Freedom of Choice Act, he did not sign such a bill in his first one hundred days in office. The proposed law would eviscerate state abortion-control laws, such as parental notification provisions, end the federal ban on partial birth abortion, and require all hospitals to perform abortions, even over their moral or religious objections. However, Congress did not pass such a bill, which Obama did not focus his attention upon urging it to do.

The bad news, on top of the executive orders Obama did sign to require federal taxpayer money to fund groups that advocate abortion in foreign states and to end the moratorium on federal taxpayer money for embryonic stem cell research, is that Supreme Court Justice David Souter will retire soon, leaving Obama the opportunity to replace the pro-Roe v. Wade Justice with another. Had a pro-life candidate been elected president, any liberal like Souter or other older Justices would have been replaced by a strict constitutional constructionist who would likely have overturned the anti-federalist Roe v. Wade opinion. In other words, by just a few hundred thousand votes in a few states, instead of eliminating the federal requirement that states permit abortion, Obama will be able to continue to require that states permit abortion indefinitely.

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