A Terrible Anniversary

My fantastic readers, your beloved Peasant has written
about many subjects in the political realm, including
those touching on economic matters. But this time I shall
talk about a topic that I have but briefly touched on in
past postings, and this point in time is both an important
and appropriate one to discuss this very topic. I am
referring to the fortieth anniversary of Roe vs. Wade,
the United States Supreme Court ruling which made
abortion legal in most cases, sweeping aside then-existing
state and federal restrictions. And I am posting this piece
today, even though today is a Tuesday and as you all
know I normally post on Thursdays, but today is the
very day of the aforementioned terrible anniversary;
it is therefore fitting that I post this, your grim-faced
Peasant's remarks on same, this very day.

On January 22, 1973 the Supreme Court ruled 7-2
that a right to privacy under the due process clause
of the 14th amendment extended to a woman's decision
to terminate her pregnancy, but that very right must be
balanced against the state's two legitimate interests in
regulating abortions: protection of prenatal life and
of women's health. However, the Court later rejected
Roe's framework, while affirming the ruling's central
holding that a woman has a right to abortion until
viability, this being defined as being "potentially able
to live outside the mother's womb", thereby broadening
the time frame for ending a pregnancy from just the
first trimester to the second. Viability has been stated
in the case as generally being at seven months, but
sometimes occurring as early as six months. Roe
struck down many state and federal restrictions on
abortion in the process, and had reconfigured national
politics as well; the country had been divided into
pro-life and pro-choice camps, each side having
strong grassroots activism promoting their respective
stands.

In the years since this fateful ruling, we taxpayers have
been put on the hook for funding many of these
killings of innocent, unborn human beings, who have
never done anyone a lick of harm (indeed, how can
they?), yet have been in effect sentenced to death
by their biological mothers with the approval 
of the Supreme Court. Since then, Congress
has presented us with the bill for these butcherings
with the approval of some subsequent presidents.
And many of the proponents of this barbarism has
accused those of us, the opponents of sane of
"forcing (our) morality" upon the pregnant women
lest they decide to do away with their unborn
children, while they force us to pay with our tax
monies for impoverished women to have the
damnable procedure. Who's fooling whom here?

Now, to save both time and space for this piece, The
Peasant shall discuss the background of the case,
that is, what brought this case about, and shall comment
on the legal reasoning behind it in a future edition of
this blog, but for now just wants to decry this decision
by the Court as an open season on defenseless human
life and a corresponding cheapening of all human life in our
country. This decision shall, we can only hope and pray,
be rendered defunct, irrelevant, and obsolete one day,
much like slavery was in the nineteenth century.
Let us create a "culture of life" in which we once again
place a high value on human life, starting with the tiniest,
most helpless, most vulnerable of us. In an age where
our society sanctions doing away with yet-to-be-born
people for a shocking array of reasons for doing so
--- ranging from a woman fearing that she'll have
Stretch marks and won't look good in a bathing suit
to wanting to remain sexually active without a ten-
month interruption (nine months for gestation then
about a month to recover after giving birth) to sex
selection (this especially cold-hearted reason for
having an abortion is an all-too-regular occurrence
in China and other countries where babies of one
gender are more greatly desired than those of the
other!) --- we have taken our "throwaway society"
to a frightening extreme. Aldous Huxley, the author
of "Brave New World", a book in which he warned
the world of what could happen if we shed ethics and
compromised morality in our quest to fashion a more
efficient, egalitarian, and smarter world, could not have
envisioned a more horrible happenstance.

But in the meantime, let us continue to press our
elected representatives in Congress and the
president (even though our current president
is enthusiastically in favor of the awful status quo)
to chip away at this grave injustice by crafting
laws that will at least mitigate the slaughter of
unborn human beings and to work to make
a constitutionally allowed check against this
Court ruling. If you are able to attend a pro-
life rally at your state capitol, or the one held
in Washington D.C. every year on this tragic anniver-
sary, do come out to speak up for those who are
unable to speak for themselves. Visiting, and of
course writing and calling your representatives is
helpful too. Joining a pro-life assembly from a church
to go to an abortion clinic to peacefully picket in
protest of what transpires inside its premises is
also a good activity. Do whatever you can to speak
up for those who cannot speak for themselves.

And for a follow-up, take up a collection of baby items,
i.e. cribs, blankets, diapers, bassinets, food, clothing,
and toys to give to financially struggling mothers so
that they can better tend to their soon-to-arrive children
as well as to their already-born babies. Anything to show
these women that someone cares about both them and
their babies. Talk to the pastors at your churches, and
your rabbis at your synagogues about these collection
ideas and what else you can do to help expectant
mothers in penury in order to make it both possible and
easier to give their little ones an opportunity at life.

And finally, let us work diligently to draft and elect pro-
life candidates to public office, especially at the national
level --- although we failed to unseat the present occu-
pant in the White House we can still elect a pro-life
Senate and send more pro-life candidates to the House.
This will make it more difficult for the president to push
for further pro-abortion initiatives, including eliminating
existing restrictions on abortion and increasing funding
for abortion providers, starting with Planned Parenthood.
We can toss abortion onto the trash heap of history,
having it rot along with the tragedies of slavery and Jim
Crow laws. But we must not let up in our efforts;
the other side isn't letting up in theirs.

And one day, we will no longer be observing the anniver-
sary of the day abortion was made legal, but rather will
celebrate the day that we have done away with this grisly
practice and will have restored not a small measure of
worth to human life and therefore human beings, both
born and unborn.



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