I intentionally didn’t post much leading up to the election because I was up to my eyeballs in work and because we have been bombarded by the various campaigns for the better part of a year. But that’s all over now. More accurately, it’s just beginning. So it’s time to address one of the first pieces of legislation we can expect from our new administration: the Freedom of Choice Act, or FOCA.
FOCA has probably been introduced in every Congress since Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1993, if not earlier. In its simplest terms, FOCA would codify Roe v. Wade, meaning it would be very difficult to pass ANY restrictions on abortion whatsoever, especially before the baby is viable, or able to live outside his or her mother’s womb. Moreover, the provisions in the Act are RETROACTIVE, meaning they apply to any legislation enacted after Roe.
Aside from its provisions, FOCA is also troubling because it’s findings are, frankly, absurd. For example Act opens with: “The United States was founded on core principles, such as liberty, personal privacy, and equality, which ensure that individuals are free to make their most intimate decisions without governmental interference and discrimination.”
This is complete nonsense. First, the US was NOT founded on “personal privacy.” It was founded on certain freedoms, such as the freedom of speech – especially political and religious speech – and the freedom to establish a religion or practice one’s religion without governmental interference. These are PUBLIC rights, not private ones. That’s not to say we don’t have a certain expectation of privacy – but it’s certainly not an absolute right…which is why people don’t have carte blanch to “make their most intimate decisions without governmental interference…” You only have the liberty to make those decisions as long as your “intimate decision” does not impinge on the rights of others. In this case, the “intimate decision” so vigorously defended in the Act results one person depriving another of his or her constitutionally mandated (if not always protected) right to life. (Yes, I know, it’s called “Freedom of CHOICE” but it’s all about one choice…namely the one that puts $$$ in the coffers of Planned Parenthood).
In addition, the right being defended is inherently discriminatory, in that it is only exercised against ONE GROUP of human beings – the unborn (or, constitutionally speaking, “our posterity”).
Even though the Act’s language says that certain restrictions on abortion are permissible after viability, the findings hold that the Partial Birth Abortion Ban “effectively overturns a core tenet of Roe v. Wade.” The authors argue that the Partial Birth Abortion Ban does not contain an exception for cases in which a woman’s health is at risk. But they fail to mention that the so-called “health exception” has consistently been expanded in the past to make any such restriction meaningless. “Health” has been used to encompass not only physical conditions, but mental, emotional, social, financial, and educational concerns. It is the quintessential example of the exception swallowing the rule. For this reason, the Partial Birth Abortion Ban contains a “life exception” rather than the ubiquitous health exception, meaning the Ban does not apply when the life of the mother is threatened.
The Supreme Court, in Gonzales v. Carhart, held that the life exception was sufficient, because the ban only prohibited one type of abortion procedure: the one in which a baby is partially delivered feet first and is savagely murdered by the insertion of a scapula in the back of its head before the skull is collapsed so the dead baby can be pulled from the womb. Other procedures are still available. Abortion providers are still free to cut up babies inside the womb and deliver them in pieces without fear of recrimination.
If FOCA is passed, the right of states to determine how to best exercise their interest in protecting the lives of unborn babies (a right, by the way, articulated in virtually every abortion case, including Roe) will be decimated. If the Partial Birth Abortion Ban – which prohibits only the most barbaric of post-viability abortion procedures – will not pass the FOCA test, NOTHING will. So you can forget about things like informed consent requirements or trying to protect young girls from being taken to abortion clinics without their parents’ knowledge.
Because the right to obtain an abortion is already the most widely protected of all rights, FOCA is unnecessary. It is a raw power grab. I can’t help but be reminded of Abraham Lincoln’s House Divided speech:
“A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved; I do not expect the house to fall; but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the States…”
FOCA is no less than an attempt to codify the tenets set forth by Justice Teney in Dred Scott v. Sandford: the abolishment of the rights of personhood for an entire people group based on arbitrary characteristics and the unfettered right of one group of Americans to determine the fate of another for no other reason than the Court said so.
How baffling, then, that President-Elect Obama should have promised to defend that right as his first act as Chief Executive by passing the Freedom of Choice Act.
“Well, the first thing I’d do as president is, is sign the Freedom of Choice Act.”
Barack Obama (July 17, 2007 speech to the Planned Parenthood Action Fund)
Why are you so dead set on solving this problem through legislation? What about prevention? What about working to make sure young women don’t become pregnant in the first place? Isn’t that a great idea? Shouldn’t some organization be using the most proven and effective methods to help reduce unwanted pregnancies?
Oh wait! There is such an organization: PLANNED PARENTHOOD! If you want less abortions, send them a check. They do more (paradoxically, in your mind, I know) to keep women out of abortion clinics than all of the religious right put together.
Or else you can continue your current course. Maybe one day you’ll succeed. And that’ll be great. Women dead-set on abortions will get the back-alley procedures they deserve, and millions more children will be born into the life they would have been previously denied, as unwanted spawn of unprepared and ill equipped parents. Sweet. That sounds like a way better country to live in.
That was a bit snarky, sorry, my fingers got to moving faster than my tactfulness could handle.