RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events Rethinking Abortion

WASHINGTON — After long defining itself as an undisputed defender of abortion rights, the Democratic Party is suddenly locked in an internal struggle over whether to redefine its position to appeal to a broader array of voters.

The fight is a central theme of the contest to head the Democratic National Committee, particularly between two leading candidates: former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who supports abortion rights, and former Indiana Rep. Tim Roemer, an abortion foe who argues that the party cannot rebound from its losses in the November election unless it shows more tolerance on one of society's most emotional conflicts.

Roemer is running with the encouragement of the party's two highest-ranking members of Congress, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco and incoming Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada. Dean, a former presidential candidate, is popular with the party's liberal wing.

If Roemer were to succeed Terry McAuliffe as Democratic chairman in the Feb. 10 vote, the party long viewed as the guardian of abortion rights would suddenly have two antiabortion advocates at its helm. Reid, too, opposes abortion and once voted for a nonbinding resolution opposing Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion.

Party leaders say their support for preserving the landmark ruling will not change. But they are looking at ways to soften the hard line, such as promoting adoption and embracing parental notification requirements for minors and bans on late-term abortions. Their thinking reflects a sense among strategists that Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry and the party's congressional candidates lost votes because the GOP conveyed a more compelling message on social issues.

But in opening a discussion about new appeals to abortion opponents, party leaders are moving into uncertain terrain. Abortion rights activists are critical pillars of the Democratic Party, providing money and grass-roots energy. Some of them say they are concerned that Democratic leaders are entertaining any changes to the party's approach to abortion.

A senior official of one of the nation's largest abortion rights groups said she would be concerned if the party were to choose Roemer to head the Democratic National Committee.

"We want people who are pro-choice. Of course I would be disappointed," said the official, who asked that her name be withheld because of her close alliance with party officials.

Gloria Feldt, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said Democratic strategists who were pushing for the abortion discussion had misconstrued the results of the November election by overstating the strength of "values" voters.

She said the party should remain committed to the "women of America, and their health and their lives and their rights."

Feldt said she had spoken to Kerry and Roemer on Wednesday, and that both had sought to allay her concerns. Both assured her that the party was not changing its stance on abortion, but merely wanted to be more "inclusive."

The debate among Democrats comes at a time when abortion rights supporters are feeling particularly vulnerable. Congress passed a ban on what critics call "partial-birth" abortion last year that Bush signed into law. Last month, abortion opponents were emboldened when four conservative Republicans were elected to the Senate. Also, anticipated retirements from the Supreme Court could give Bush the chance to nominate justices that would tilt the court against Roe vs. Wade.

The race for Democratic Party chairman remains wide open among Dean, Roemer and several other contenders, including longtime operative Harold M. Ickes, New Democrat Network head Simon Rosenberg and South Carolina political strategist Donald L. Fowler Jr. The field of candidates is likely to remain in flux until days before the February vote.

In an interview, Roemer said he would not try to change the minds of abortion rights supporters. But he also said he would encourage the party to eliminate its "moral blind spot" when it comes to late-term abortions.

"We should be talking more about adoption as an alternative, and working with our churches to sponsor some of those adoptions," Roemer said Wednesday from his Washington office. He said he was calling 40 to 50 delegates a day to make his pitch. Most of all, he said, he thinks that abortion opponents would be more comfortable if the party talked about the issue in a more open-minded manner.

"We must be able to campaign in 50 states, not just the blue states or 20 states," said Roemer, referring to the most Democratic-leaning states.

Dean declined through a spokeswoman to talk about the issue, but earlier this month he signaled that he would maintain the party's defense of abortion rights, telling NBC's Tim Russert: "We can change our vocabulary, but I don't think we ought to change our principles."

Votes will be cast by 447 members of the Democratic National Committee, many of whom are among the party's most liberal members. These members are thought to be friendly to Dean and less receptive to Roemer. But the former Indiana congressman is getting attention amid reports that Pelosi and Reid urged him to run.

Roemer has also highlighted his service on the independent panel investigating the government's response to the Sept. 11 attacks, saying that credential builds his appeal to security-minded voters. He noted that he was an elected official from Indiana, a "red state" where Democrats want to make gains.

A Pelosi spokesman said the House Democratic leader liked Roemer because of his national security credentials. But a senior Democratic congressional aide said Pelosi also thought that Roemer's stance on abortion could be an additional benefit.

"She is pro-choice and very staunchly pro-choice," the aide said of Pelosi. But at the same time, the aide said, "she supports showing that this is a big-tent party."

In the presidential election, Kerry, a Catholic, said he personally opposed abortion but did not believe in imposing that belief on others. He said he would not appoint antiabortion judges to the bench.

But after his election loss, the Massachusetts senator concluded that the party needed to rethink its stance. Addressing supporters at a meeting held by the AFL-CIO, Kerry said he discovered during trips through Pennsylvania that many union members were also abortion opponents and that the party needed to rethink how it could appeal to those voters, Kerry spokesman David Wade said.

On the other side of the debate, Wendy Wright, senior policy director for Conservative Women for America, which opposes abortion, said she thought it would be "very smart" for Democrats to elect Roemer chairman of the party.

"It would make sense for Democrats as a whole to recognize that Americans want protections for women and unborn children, want sensible regulations in place, instead of forbidding the law to recognize that an unborn child is a human being," Wright said. "To not pass legislation just to keep the abortion lobby happy is nonsensical, and it appears that some Democrats have recognized that."

Wright said it was too early to know whether Democrats would change their votes on upcoming antiabortion legislation, or would only change the way they speak of abortion. She said the comments of some party leaders led her to believe that "it would just be changing of wording, just trying to repackage in order to be more appealing — really, to trick people."

Some local Democratic leaders said they would be open to an antiabortion chairman under the right circumstances, but that it would be difficult to envision those circumstances.

"That would be a very large philosophical mountain for me to climb," said Mitch Ceasar, a Broward County, Fla., lawyer who is a voting member of the party's national committee.

Ceasar said he took note of Roemer's abortion stance when he received a letter recently from him. He said he was surprised to learn that abortion was an issue in the contest to succeed McAuliffe. "It never occurred to me before his candidacy," Ceasar said. "I never wondered whether Terry McAuliffe was pro-choice or not."

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PrincessElisa said:
I'll still stay Republican darn it ;P

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The two vacancies on the Supreme Court (search) have abortion activists on either side sounding the death knell of Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling overturning state laws that criminalized abortion.

But some legal scholars who support abortion rights say that may not be such a bad thing.

"Roe was terribly reasoned," said Scott Powe, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law. "I think there's some requirement under the Constitution that if you cannot explain a decision and its relationship with legal materials, it's not a valid decision."

Powe, who describes himself as "100 percent pro-choice," is far from alone in his criticism of Roe. Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas have made no secret of their revulsion toward Roe on legal grounds.

But what may have been lost in the often shrill battle over abortion is that even people who believe abortion should be legal are uncomfortable with the arguments in Roe.

Jack Balkin, a professor at Yale Law School, asked some of the nation's foremost constitutional law scholars to imagine how they might have written Roe. The results are compiled in "What Roe v. Wade Should Have Said: America's Top Legal Experts Rewrite America's Most Controversial Decision."

"Rights are most secure when they are supported by legislative enactment," Balkin told FOXNews.com. He said he believes the right to abortion would have been better settled if it had been articulated through congressional channels.

A case in point, Balkin said, was 1954's Brown v. Board of Education ruling that made racial segregation illegal. The decision was so unpopular at the time — even among anti-segregation legal scholars — that it inspired segregationist lawmakers to mandate congressional hearings for Supreme Court candidates, a process Judge John G. Roberts got to know quite well last week.

"Brown truly becomes law, really becomes something everyone's on board with after the Civil Rights Act of 1964," Balkin said. "At that point, Congress said, 'We are behind Brown.'"

In other words, he said, Brown was not considered by many Americans to be legitimate until its basic tenets were codified through the legislative process.

"Anything the court does that is controversial is going to be in danger as long as it's controversial," added Michael Dorf, professor at the Columbia University School of Law. "The reason why racial segregation in schools is not going to come back is not because all nine justices think Brown is right. It's because the country has accepted that it is right."

Most legal scholars agree that Roe and Brown are separate animals, a belief that has pushed pro-choice legislators to repeatedly try — and fail — to get a national abortion law on the books. Moreover, the death of the Freedom of Choice Act — a proposed legislative remedy allowing abortion — during President Clinton's administration was arguably a turning point for abortion politics in this country.

Abortion rights activists say they found themselves increasingly on the defensive after the Republican Revolution in Congress in 1994, and on red alert since President Bush's victory in 2000. The chasm between the pro- and anti-abortion camps has only grown wider, with right-to-life groups emboldened in recent years.

In the past decade or so, Roe's breadth has been chipped away by legislation and rulings on a host of "sidebar" issues: parental consent, late-term or partial-birth abortions and public health care funding.

But any real danger to Roe, which both camps claim exists, may be merely rhetorical. Even if Roberts, who cautiously evaded questions on Roe last week, is confirmed as chief justice of the Supreme Court, and even if an anti-abortion candidate like Judge Priscilla Owen (search) is tapped to succeed retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, the court may still not have enough votes to overturn Roe.

"[Justice Anthony] Kennedy is willing to restrict it but not overturn it," Dorf told FOXNews.com. Kennedy, a moderate conservative, is widely seen as O'Connor's successor as the court's swing vote.

In fact, the real fight over the political makeup of the court is likely to come when its eldest member, 85-year-old Justice John Paul Stevens (search), retires, say court watchers.

A Matter of Sexual Equality

Legal scholars who oppose Roe do so mainly because nothing in the Constitution or in the privacy rights spelled out in Griswold v. Connecticut indicates a constitutional right to have an abortion.

In addition, it has become increasingly clear that the way abortion is practiced and discussed today is not what the justices who decided Roe had in mind. In the 1970s, abortion was not "on demand" and the procedure was not accessible to most American women. Roe was in many ways more about protecting doctors from prosecution than granting a new right to women.

"Roe was written for doctors," Powe said, referring to the summer that the opinion's author, Justice Harry Blackmun, spent at the Mayo Clinic researching abortion. "It would have been more helpful if he tried to research law to do Roe rather than medicine."

Some legal scholars say they believe that if Roe is eventually overturned, the case for abortion could then be argued on due process or equal protection grounds.

"Criminalizing abortion requires women who have unwanted or nonconsensual pregnancies to go forward with the pregnancies, and there is nothing comparable with men," said Robin West of Georgetown University's law school. "The most straightforward constitutional argument is that mandatory or nonconsensual pregnancies impose a requirement of Good Samaritanism that is not required of men."

West, who contributed to "What Roe v. Wade Should Have Said," added that freedom from violations of autonomy was a more salient argument than the right to privacy.

"What strikes me as the most burdensome of this requirement of mandatory pregnancy is that it imposes on a woman that she use her body in a certain way. We're all required to pay taxes, etc., but we're not required to do with our body things we don't want to do. ... It is a striking anomaly in the law," West told FOXNews.com.

Arthur Caplan, director of the University of Pennsylvania Center for Bioethics, concurred: "We're not willing to go there when it comes to tradeoffs between any two people. We don't say no matter what happens, you are legally compelled to save people who are in peril."

But Columbia's Dorf said people are daydreaming if they expect the case for abortion beyond Roe would come back to the court as an equal protection claim.

The more likely scenario, Dorf said, is that Congress would move to pass federal legislation outlining abortion rights, to some an improvement over Roe, which does not lay out legislative parameters.

While "there's a decent chance" that today's Republican-dominated Congress would pass some kind of national ban that would trump state legislation, Dorf said lawmakers are more likely to end up following the cues of the majority of Americans.

According to a July Pew Research Center poll, 65 percent of Americans did not want to see Roe overturned, compared with 29 percent who wanted it gone. And only 9 percent thought abortion should be illegal in all cases.

Most Americans agree that the procedure should be available in cases of rape and incest or when the mother's health or life is in danger. More are comfortable with abortion early on; the later in the term, and the more viable the fetus, the more uncomfortable Americans get. Most agree 12-year-olds should not be able to get abortions at will, nor should women who refuse to use birth control.

If Congress did create a federal abortion law, "I am willing to bet there will be parental notification and there will be no taxpayer funding, but there will be abortions in the first half of pregnancies," Powe of the University of Texas said. "There would be room for nuance if it was a legislative matter because there would have to be compromises."

Another compromise may be needed: if the federal government creates a legislative remedy, states are likely to add their own restrictions to abortion laws, meaning access would vary across the country.

One scenario that interests legal scholars is the possibility Roe could come back as a commerce clause case. Powe said he could envision Texas and other similarly conservative states passing laws forbidding residents to travel to other states to have an abortion. But even if Congress also passed a law banning interstate travel for abortions, "the assumption would be it's unconstitutional," Powe predicted.

Powe compared the argument to residents in states that forbid gambling being able to travel to states like Nevada to gamble. Congress would be unlikely to pass such a law regulating interstate travel for activities that are legal in the destination state, he said.

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the G-man said:
The above article, however, postulates that even if Roe is overturned you won't have a national ban on abortions.

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The word abortion appears nowhere in the U.S. Constitution. Yet less than a week into Samuel Alito's nomination to the Supreme Court, abortion is already emerging as the flashpoint of the confirmation debate. It is an apt moment to consider how we got to where this single issue so dominates judicial politics.

The answer is Roe v. Wade, the Court's 7-2 decision that, in one fell judicial swoop, took this deeply divisive social issue out of the hands of voters and their elected legislators. The year was 1973. The consequences have distorted American law and politics ever since.

Go back to late 1960s and early 1970s, before Roe became the most controversial Court decision since Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. Numerous state legislatures had relaxed their hitherto absolute bans on abortion, making it easier for a woman whose health was endangered to obtain one. The burgeoning women's movement had made legalization one of its primary goals.

Attitudes toward abortion were shifting and Americans were engaged in serious public debate, amending state laws to fit new community norms. Sure, New York's law was more liberal than Texas', but that's the way our federalist system of government is supposed to work. And a Texan who wanted an abortion could--with the help of charity if she needed it--go across state lines to obtain one.

Enter the Supreme Court. In his Roe opinion, Justice Harry Blackmun purported to find in the "penumbras" and "emanations" of the Constitution the right to abortion. His ukase struck down 50 state laws, but, more destructively, he also stopped democracy cold. Without Roe, we likely would have had a decade or so of political battles in 50 state legislatures. Our guess is that we would have ended up with a rough consensus close to where every poll shows the American public stands on abortion: legal in the first trimester, with restrictions later in pregnancy and provisions for parental and spousal notification.

One of Roe's many paradoxes is that it instantly gave the U.S. one of the most permissive abortion laws in the Western world. Many European countries require counseling and/or waiting periods and most--including Germany, France and Sweden--forbid it after the first trimester or early into the second. Britain and Japan allow it only when the physical or mental health of the woman is at stake, and in Japan the husband's permission is required. By contrast, U.S. law falls into the same no-questions-asked category as China and the former countries of the Soviet Union.
Another paradox has developed with strides in neonatal technology: Our society now spends millions of dollars to save premature babies born at 25 weeks but permits abortion in the final week of gestation so long as the mother can find a doctor willing to say she will suffer psychological trauma if she gives birth. Such moral disparities will only become more acute as modern medicine lowers the age at which a fetus becomes viable outside the womb.

But the biggest paradox has been political, in that Roe has been a disaster for the Democratic Party that has made its defense a core principle. It took a few years as the pro-life movement organized, but by the late 1970s evangelicals and traditional Catholics--often middle- and lower-middle-class folks who voted Democratic (or didn't vote at all)--began to move to the GOP.

Jimmy Carter still won major chunks of those votes in the 1976 Presidential race, when he and rival Gerald Ford differed little on abortion. Then came Ronald Reagan, who made opposition to Roe part of his platform. Reagan trounced the then-pro-choice George H.W. Bush in the 1980 GOP primaries and went on to win the general election with the help of the "Reagan Democrats," whose opposition to abortion was one factor in their decision to vote Republican. The GOP has had a pro-life plank in its platform since 1980, and this cultural political realignment has helped bring the party close to parity with Democrats.


While criticism of Roe is now said to be "conservative," some of its most telling critics have been liberal legal scholars. Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox, writing in 1987, charged the Court with behaving like "a body of Platonic Guardians charged with bringing the Constitution up to date . . . without regard to the past or the long-run sentiment of the people."

The late Yale Law School Professor Alexander Bickel agreed with Justice Byron White, who in his dissent described Roe as an "extravagant exercise" of judicial power. "So it was," Bickel wrote in 1975, "and if the Court's guess on the probable and desirable direction of progress is wrong, that guess will nevertheless have been imposed on all 50 states."

But it is Justice Antonin Scalia who has said it best. "By foreclosing all democratic outlets for the deep passions the issue arouses," he wrote in his dissent to the 1992 Casey decision elaborating on Roe, "by banishing the issue from the political forum that gives all participants, even the losers, the satisfaction of a fair hearing and an honest fight . . . the Court merely prolongs and intensifies the anguish."

We have no idea whether a Justice Alito would vote to overturn Roe. But notwithstanding the scare tactics of the left, the right to an abortion would not vanish if Roe were overturned. The issue would return to 50 state legislatures, nearly all of which would quickly make it legal with some restrictions. In short, the country would arrive at the position favored by most Americans, voters would be less polarized over cultural disputes, abortion would stop dominating Supreme Court nominations, and our politics would be a lot healthier.

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the G-man said:
So you should stop whining about the Supreme Court.

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Wednesday said:
After long defining itself as an undisputed defender of abortion rights, the Democratic Party is suddenly locked in an internal struggle over whether to redefine its position to appeal to a broader array of voters.

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the G-man said:

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Wednesday said:
After long defining itself as an undisputed defender of abortion rights, the Democratic Party is suddenly locked in an internal struggle over whether to redefine its position to appeal to a broader array of voters.

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Wall St. Journal

Abortion, murder, and thermonuclear war are undesirable, it's true.

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r3x29yz4a said:
A baby's not alive until the third trimester, man
FYI

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the G-man said:
That sounds like a religious, not scientific, conclusion.

I'm surprised you'd want to bring any religion into medicine.

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the G-man said:
The fact that the anti-abortion crowd may wrongly bring religion into it would seem to be no reason for you to wrongly bring a different religion into it...especially when Ray and I were seemingly discussing the scientific aspects.

You point about the cost and difficulty in keep said child alive is more valid. However, at this point it is effectively impossible to use medical care to breathe life into the inanimate. Therefore, the fact that a fetus can survive at that point, at a great expense, tends to show existing life.

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magicjay38 said:
Well, according to th Navajo Tribe, who have way more interesting thoughts on life than a bunch of fucktard MDs in Minnesota, a child is not human until it is named.

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wannabuyamonkey said:

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magicjay38 said:
Well, according to th Navajo Tribe, who have way more interesting thoughts on life than a bunch of fucktard MDs in Minnesota, a child is not human until it is named.

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So you support abortion up untill the naming of a child? Gee, you're right, MDs have nothing on teh Navajo when it comes to sound biological reasoning.

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How old are you, WBAM. I support abortion until that age!

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magicjay38 said:

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wannabuyamonkey said:

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magicjay38 said:
Well, according to th Navajo Tribe, who have way more interesting thoughts on life than a bunch of fucktard MDs in Minnesota, a child is not human until it is named.

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So you support abortion up untill the naming of a child? Gee, you're right, MDs have nothing on teh Navajo when it comes to sound biological reasoning.

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How old are you, WBAM. I support abortion until that age!

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Laws that require minors to notify or get the consent of one or both parents before a teen can have an abortion reduce risky sexual behavior among teens, according to Jonathan Klick, Professor of Law at Florida State University, and Thomas Stratmann, professor of economics at George Mason University.

The researchers found that teen gonorrhea rates dropped by an average of 20 percent for Hispanic girls and 12 percent for white girls in states where parental notification laws were in effect. "This suggests that Hispanic and white teenage girls are forward looking in their sex decisions, and they systematically view informing their parents and obtaining parental consent as additional costs in obtaining an abortion, inducing them to engage in less risky sex when parental involvement laws are adopted," Klick said.

Planned Parenthood assailed the study as “another rightwing attack on a woman’s inviolable right to reproductive freedom.” “These people just don’t get it,” said Etta Young, PIO for PPA. “The Supreme Court has established a woman’s inviolable right to decide whether to have an abortion. No amount of research can change that ruling.”

“Even if it were true that such laws reduced sexually transmitted disease, the point is they interfere with a Constitutionally protected right,” said Young. “States have no authority to engage in social engineering once the court has spoken.”

Young said PPA is considering legal action to bar this type of “pointless and pernicious academic scribbling.”

A growing number of anti-abortion activists claim that women are traumatized by their abortions — and are trying to use this to reframe the abortion debate.

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magicjay38 said:
Well, according to th Navajo Tribe, who have way more interesting thoughts on life than a bunch of fucktard MDs in Minnesota, a child is not human until it is named.

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Animalman said:
It could be a very useful parenting technique. Never name the child, then threaten to abort them if they do something wrong.

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Captain Sammitch said:
My parents are still holding that over my head!

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The Supreme Court upheld the nationwide ban on a controversial abortion procedure Wednesday, handing abortion opponents the long-awaited victory they expected from a more conservative bench.

The 5-4 ruling said the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act that Congress passed and President Bush signed into law in 2003 does not violate a woman's constitutional right to an abortion.

The opponents of the act "have not demonstrated that the Act would be unconstitutional in a large fraction of relevant cases," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion.

It was the first time the court banned a specific procedure in a case over how — not whether — to perform an abortion.

Abortion rights groups have said the procedure sometimes is the safest for a woman. They also said that such a ruling could threaten most abortions after 12 weeks of pregnancy, although government lawyers and others who favor the ban said there are alternate, more widely used procedures that remain legal.

The outcome is likely to spur efforts at the state level to place more restrictions on abortions.

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the G-man said:
link
wouldn't an abortion solve the problem?

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