Tag Archives: dobbsvjacksonwomenshealthorganization

by - 2 Comments

Daily Broadside | One Year On From Reversing Roe v. Wade

A new week and the last of June 2023. Thank God “Pride Month” is nearly over.

You know another thing to thank God for? The overturning of Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2022, in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that “The Constitution does not confer a right to abortion; Roe and Casey are overruled; and the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives.”

One thing to note is that the the SCOTUS ruling did not outlaw abortion. It simply returned the question to the jurisdiction of the individual states. It did, however, undo a grievous judgment of a prior Court that essentially made up a detailed law, far beyond its stated legal power to do so.

Now the decision is back in the hands of state legislatures, meaning that there are 50 fronts for pro- and anti-life forces to fight.

Over the last 12 months, 13 states have enacted near-total bans on abortion, while at least a dozen more have approved new laws curtailing access. In one state, Wisconsin, abortion services are suspended due to uncertainty about the status of an abortion ban from 1849 that remained on the books after the Roe decision. Wisconsin’s top officials are challenging the pre-Roe ban in court, arguing it should be unenforceable.

But we should be gratified with the huge “win” and the downstream impact that it has had.

Another great after-effect of the demise of Roe is that donations to abortion access groups have fallen off.

The “ rage giving ” did not last. Abortion access groups who received a windfall of donations following the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade one year ago say those emergency grants have ended and individual and foundation giving has dropped off.

After the Dobbs decision, some major funders of abortion access also have ended or shifted funding from organizations working in states where abortion is now banned, said Naa Amissah-Hammond, senior director of grantmaking with Groundswell Fund, which funds grassroots groups organizing for reproductive justice.

Women’s health and foster care nonprofits, who expected increased demand in areas where access to abortion has been eliminated or restricted, say they also haven’t seen increased support.

What this tells me is that abortion is no longer a front-and-center issue for the culture at large, which is a detriment to Democrats, who fund-raise off of, and get voters to the polls from, the spectre of not having “safe and affordable” abortion services available. If abortion isn’t screaming for attention then there is less for the enemies of life to gin up fear over.

John Zmirak at The Stream wrote a good piece the other day and made these points:

The Unbridgeable Chasm
The point I was making, and which we should all insist on, is that the Life issue finally isn’t negotiable. It’s the Great Divide, the Grand Canyon, as slavery once was. Across it, no lasting rope bridge is possible. Either you think human life is fundamentally good and hence sacred, or you don’t. Either you believe that sexual convenience is a basic human right like life and liberty, or you don’t.

I’ve written here before about how quickly pro-aborts dropped the pretense that “abortion rights” are somehow grounded in the unwritten implications of this or that part of the U.S. Constitution. Justice Samuel Alito’s brilliant, historic majority opinion demolished the rickety, Rube Goldberg constructs of every pro-abortion precedent.

The Pretense Dropped Like a Towel at a Bathhouse
Now leftists have stopped citing “privacy” and “liberty,” which is handy — since they’ve made it clear that they actually believe in neither. If they did, they wouldn’t support secret FISA warrants aimed at Trump supporters and mandates for experimental vaccines. The same people who claimed for decades that “privacy” protected abortions up through nine months were happy to have the hostess at TGI Fridays demand women show their vaccine passports.

Now things are easier for them, in a sense. They can be honest and admit that they don’t care about “choice.” (You can’t choose your vaccine status, your kids’ public school, or what you say on the Internet.) They just care about abortion.

They’re willing to rally with Satanists who claim that it’s their “sacrament.” They don’t want abortions “safe, legal, and rare.” They never did. (When Bill Clinton said that, he was just as sincere as when he promised Hillary that he would “forsake all others.”) They want them easy, plentiful, and profitable — and they want to gaslight women who’ve had them into “shouting” them proudly in public.

To Face the Party of Death, We Need a Party of Life
We should help the left to make this point, that it’s unambiguously the Party of Death. It’s also the party of crime in the streets, child castration, chaotic open borders, racist “diversity” mandates, gun grabs, massive debt, election fraud, censorship, mass indoctrination, torn down statues, Antifa, mob rule, and defunding the police.

I particularly like his cut that the Democrats are “the Party of Death.” It’s true and I long ago came to the conclusion that I’d rather be an American than a Democrat. Their party is nothing but anti-Americanism draped in the red, white and blue.

Abortion may no longer be considered a constitutional right, but that fight, and many others, are far from over.

by

Daily Broadside | Justice Sotomayor, Not the Fetus, is Braindead

Daily Verse | Galatians 5:14
The entire law is summed up in a single command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Friday’s Reading: Ephesians 1-6

Happy Friday, Broadsiders. I’m learning to say “crochet” in 35 other languages because you never know when you might need it.

A short post this morning as we head into the weekend in follow up to the arguments yesterday in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health. In particular, I want to point out that Justice Sonia Sotomayor was not only hostile to Mississippi Attorney General Scott Stewart, who challenged Roe’s standard of viability; she was illogical in her responses.

I mentioned yesterday that Sotomayor questioned the State of Mississippi’s compelling interest in the viability of an unborn baby by asking, “How is your interest anything but a religious view … that’s a religious view … because it assumes that a fetus is life.”

First, no where does our Constitution say that religious motivations or views are not permitted when considering a decision. Second, her accusation that “a religious view … assumes that a fetus is a life” can be applied to her secular view that assumes a fetus is not a life.

That wasn’t the only thing Sotomayor said that got a strong reaction. She compared a fetus feeling pain to a braindead person responding to stimuli.

Mississippi Attorney General Scott Stewart challenged Roe’s standard of viability: that the state does not have an interest in protecting the life of a child until 24 weeks (six months) into pregnancy. Stewart argued that babies’ ability to feel pain before viability should play a role in determining whether the state should protect their lives.

“I don’t see how that really adds anything to the discussion, that a small fringe of doctors believe that pain could be experienced before a cortex is formed,” Sotomayor said while interrupting Stewart repeatedly.

In response to Stewart’s assertion that babies recoil from surgical instruments at as young as 15 weeks, Sotomayor argued that braindead people, who are considered officially dead in most states, can still sometimes respond to stimuli such as being touched on the feet.

“I don’t think that a response by a fetus necessarily proves there’s a sensation of pain or that there’s consciousness,” she said.

Her full comment comparing a live baby in utero and a braindead person in a hospital bed was, “Yet, the literature is filled with episodes of people who are completely and utterly brain dead responding to stimuli. There’s about 40 percent of dead people who, if you touch their feet, the foot will recoil. There are spontaneous acts by dead brain people. So I don’t think that a response to — by a fetus necessarily proves that there’s a sensation of pain or that there’s consciousness.”

Is that your opinion, Judge? This woman is showing how weak the arguments are for Roe.

It isn’t a “small fringe of doctors” who believe a fetus can feel pain. Senator Lindsey Graham tweeted, “It is well-established medical practice to provide anesthesia to the unborn child regarding medical procedures performed before 24 weeks because the nerve endings, which generate pain, are well-developed.”

Sotomayor is uninformed and biased, allowing her political views to color how she views this case. Not very smart for “a wise Latina woman.” In fact, sort of “braindead” if you ask me.

Have a good weekend.

by

Daily Broadside | The End of ‘Roe’ May Be Approaching

Daily Verse | 2 Corinthians 12:10
That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

Thursday’s Reading: Galatians 1-6

Welcome to the Daily Broadside, my friends.

If there’s one thing that deserves a ferocious broadside, it’s the scourge of abortion in our country. There’s a few things in my life from which I cannot be moved, and one of them is that abortion is not just wrong, it is a barbaric evil that is symptomatic of just how far into the gutter our culture has sunk.

But arguments at the Supreme Court began yesterday that may determine whether the court will reverse its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision declaring that women have a constitutional right to end a pregnancy and send that determination back to the states where it belongs. The case is Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which involves a Mississippi ban on almost all abortions after the 15th week of pregnancy. It’s been called the “biggest abortion case in decades.” The question is “whether all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortions are unconstitutional.”

While I have not listened to the first day of arguments, reports and analysis suggest that SCOTUS may be leaning toward a reversal, which is sure to cheer pro-life forces and to set progressive’s hair on fire.

As for Kavanaugh, he “gave abortion rights supporters little to cheer in his comments and questions.”

He presented a list of cases in which the court had overturned long-held precedents and said that perhaps the best solution for the court was to be “scrupulously neutral” on an issue about which he said the Constitution is silent.

That sounds like a good idea. And if Kavanaugh adopts this “solution,” it likely means Roe v. Wade will be overturned regardless of what the Chief Justice decides.

Some believe the key votes are those of Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kavanaugh (true), but Michael Walsh makes the case that “this is the case that Justice Clarence Thomas, now the Court’s senior justice, has been waiting for since he was appointed in 1991.”

Thomas, the liberals’ bête noire, has long been an outspoken opponent of Roe: “Our abortion precedents are grievously wrong and should be overruled,” he wrote in a dissent in a different case just last year. “The Constitution does not constrain the States’ ability to regulate or even prohibit abortion.”

Further, Thomas is no fan of stare decisis, the absurd notion that once the Court has decided something, however incorrectly, that precedent should heavily influence later cases. Were that true, Dred Scott and Plessy v. Ferguson would still be on the books, respectively barring blacks from U.S. citizenship and upholding state-imposed segregation.

“In my view, if the Court encounters a decision that is demonstrably erroneous — i.e., one that is not a permissible interpretation of the text—the Court should correct the error, regardless of whether other factors support overruling the precedent,” wrote Thomas in Gamble v. United States¸ a double-jeopardy case.

Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council seemed upbeat in his post:

Many are hopeful after this morning’s argument. The justices were mostly quiet when Mississippi’s Solicitor General Scott Stewart defended his state’s law outlawing abortion after 15 weeks. Only Justice Sonia Sotomayor showed serious antagonism to Stewart, and at one point was downright hostile with her abortion apologetic, absurdly asking him: “how is your interest anything but a religious view?” Stewart ably argued the state’s case, however, pointing out that Roe and Casey are without solid footing and do injustice to what the Constitution says about a right to abortion, which is nothing.

Next up was the abortion advocates’ attorney Julie Rikelman, joined by the Biden administration’s Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar. At this point the justices turned up the heat a bit. When Justice Samuel Alito quizzed Prelogar about whether Plessy v. Ferguson (an 1896 case that upheld racial segregation laws) was an erroneous ruling, Prelogar agreed it was “egregiously wrong.” The abortion advocates were also forced to acknowledge that they don’t want to settle on any middle ground; they not only want to retain the undue burden standard from Casey, but admitted they want to keep Roe’s viability standard too. But as Chief Justice John Roberts observed, “we share [the viability] standard with the People’s Republic of China and North Korea” – hardly countries we should be comparing ourselves to, a point made in a newly released FRC report on abortion around the world.

Apart from Justice Sotomayor’s snarky and absurd question, Psalm 139 affirms that you and I and every human being is made by God:

13 For you created my inmost being;
    you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
    your works are wonderful,
    I know that full well.
15 My frame was not hidden from you
    when I was made in the secret place,
    when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.

These are hopeful signs, although don’t underestimate Roberts’s ability to be a squish. If you’re a praying man or woman, keep the court in your prayers now and in the next few months. The decision won’t be announced until mid-2022.