YOU REAP WHAT YOU SOW [View all]

[OneAngryDemocrat]

YOU REAP WHAT YOU SOW

Fanatical anti-abortion activists have only themselves to blame for the constitutional ramifications of the Supreme Court's landmark ruling in regards to Roe v. Wade.

Forty years ago, anti-choice activists attempted to play God by mandating that women seeking to have an abortion would have to go in front of a state-appointed panel who would determine for the patient whether the requested procedure was, in their eyes, a "good abortion" (a pregnancy that was the consequence of rape or incest, or would endanger the life of the mother), or a "bad" abortion (the consequences of poor family planning).

This was, of course, in total disregard of the reality that the actual medical procedure was the same, no matter what the moral decisions were leading up to the procedure's necessity.

The Supreme Court therefore properly ruled that government could not intervene, simply on moral grounds, between a patient and the private medical decisions they made in consultation with their physician. Government can not deny a women the right to have an abortion because they disapprove of how the pregnancy came about any more than they can withhold pain medication (such as morphine) from a criminal undergoing surgery who was injured in the act of committing a crime.

The Commonwealth of Virginia's recent legislation, passed into law under the ruse of looking after a woman's health, mandates that a patient seeking an abortion must now undergo a medically unnecessary nor requested ultrasound and simply throws gasoline upon the fire in the ongoing abortion debate.

The Illinois Agricultural Committee is now attempting to draft a similar bill down in Springfield.

Virginia's ultrasound law and Springfield's proposed bill will, most likely, fail to pass constitutional muster because it does not mandate that all expectant mothers in Virginia and Illinois undergo a similar procedure - revealing the law's anti-choice partisan roots, and violates the 14th Amendment rights of the citizen seeking to terminate a pregnancy. All expectant mothers have the right to choose an abortion - not just those sitting in an abortion clinic's waiting room.

Furthermore, if found to be constitutional even in part, the anti-choice ultrasound legislation adds new and powerful support to President Obama's Affordable Healthcare Act: another law most anti-choice advocates today oppose for purely partisan and political reasons.

If state government has a legitimate interest in protecting a citizen's health - which both Roe v. Wade and Viriginia's ultrasound advocates say they do - then so too does the federal government.

Anti-choice conservatives should rigorously consider just what it is they are doing when they choose to dress up and play the nation's Morality Police: You reap the political consequences of the partisan seeds which you sow.