I do not think I can endure hearing another woman repeat the hackneyed slogan, My body, my choice. This phrase has become the universal excuse for butchering 65,000,000 children in utero like herds of cattle since 1973. Any person’s body autonomy has certain legal limitations, such as public nudity, use of hard drugs, public drunkenness, prostitution and abuse of a child or spouse. In an abortion, just which part of her body is being expelled? I say this because it sounds as if a woman is excising an organ or even a limb.
However, we all know that the part of her body expunged is not a real part of her body. It is just a temporary appendage, who in scientific reality is a tiny human being, or a fetus, which in English simply means, little one. While this little human being shares the same DNA with her parents, she has a unique set of genes that are different from any other human in the universe. Each little one is completely human, of and in herself, no matter what a mother may say.
I will admit the unborn have a Constitutional problem. In an early stage of human development, the unborn are like abortions, not recognized in our governing document, the Supreme Law of the land. Therefore, they have no explicit legal rights, though I would submit they qualify under the self-evident truths included in life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in the Declaration of Independence.
I am confident that abortion was never considered as a right at any time in our history until the Women’s Movement in the late sixties. Unlike slavery, the constitutional absence of the unborn was more of an oversight because human life had more value in those days, out of religious and moral fervor and necessity, since many pregnancies resulted in death by natural causes, like disease and even plague. So, to abort them would have hurt society.
Since the aforementioned Women’s Movemdent, an unwanted baby has become a threat to a woman’s individuality, employment advancement and life aspirations. The moral guide to medicine, the Hippocratic Oath, which dates back at least to the Third century, B. C., proclaimed that the first duty of a physician is First do no harm. Liquefying or cutting a fetus into little pieces certainly does severe harm to the other patient in a pregnancy. I think the medical establishment removed the Oath from any code of moral and medical ethics many years ago. Legalized abortion became too lucrative for many doctors to resist.Â
Abortion is now considered a part of Women’s Health Care. This is as ridiculous as it sounds. On the surface, this makes the baby sound like a parasite and pregnancy a disease. This thinking, in effect, made the unborn just another target in the Culture War. It also likens them to the blacks slaves, who populated the South during the antebellum period in our history.Â
I think the second most unpopular Supreme Court ruling was the Dred Scott Decision, in 1857. Chief Justice Roger Taney, a Catholic from Louisiana wrote that the slave was personal property or chattel and thus could accompany its owner into any state, even if they had outlawed slavey within its boundaries. This lasted until after the Civil War. Thanks to the dedication of Abraham Lincoln and the abolitionists, Congress removed the property stain from all slaves. Lincoln did not live to see his dream fulfilled in the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments which gave freedom, citizenship and the right to vote to all slaves.Â
I think the status of the fetus in 2024 is the same as it was for black people in 1857. They have no real constitutional protection. If women really have a right to an abortion, their unborn babies are nothing more than chattel and they can dispose of them as property anytime they want.
To try to understand why this attack on the most innocent and defenseless of human beings on this planet has happened, I thought a recent essay for the USA Today might be helpful in explaining some of its nuances. Written by Sara Pequeno, it was entitled, Why Young Women are more liberal? The author erroneously answers her own question when she writes in an addendum that may be construed as a subtitle: It’s Politics.
If not politics, what could be the explanation? Pequeno does not keep the reader in suspense as she answers her unintended question in her first paragraph. The day after the 2016 election, my Women and Gender Studies professor, at the University of North Carolina gave us space to discuss our feelings.
As I had written in a prior essay, by this time in history, the idea of reason and critical thinking had already given way to feelings as the ultimate arbiter of thought and truth. Reason had lost its place at the table of reverence and esteem and had been relegated to the antiquities building if there was one. I doubt little truth came out of Pequeno’s exercise in relative thinking, and reality creation.Â
After reading the first half of her essay, I knew where she was going with it. These young women had been indoctrinated in her class that the presence of Donald Trump would endanger their rights engendered in the 1973 decision, Roe v. Wade. This she described as a clear turning point in my adolescence and…for the nation. For the young women in my study class, it would mean fundamental changes in our lives.Â
Pequeno failed to realize it was not Obama and politics that made her liberal but the indoctrination she received in her feelings course that opened her to Obama. Had she studied history, government or something with reason and depth, Obama would not have held as much attraction. I can say without equivocation that the battle for the nation’s soul has been fought and lost for millions of our young people behind the Ivy covered walls of our nation’s most prestigious schools, such as UNC. So, the fact that she states 40% of women 18-29 described themselves as liberal/very liberal makes perfect sense. Class indoctrination seems more important than politics, which mostly provides the field of play.
Pequeno attributes her angst to her naivete on how the world works. I would substitute ignorance and understanding for her inexperience because of the failure of her professors to provide her with a real education. She unwittingly proves her point with the statement that many of us were worried about the future Roe v. Wade and democracy as we knew it.
I believe Roe v. Wade stands alone as the most undemocratic decision in the history of the Supreme Court of the United States. It was a bad decision, conjured out of the dark shadows of the imagination of three liberal justices, who were legitimately added to the Court by the president of the United States. This decision, however, was a blatant attack on American democracy and free choice in all 50 states.Â
It was more a balanced decision than a decree. I doubt Pequeno understood what the Dobbs decision meant. Dobbs did not make abortions illegal but merely returned the issue back to the states where they could decide by democratic means. Dobbs was much more open than the secretive Roe with its shadow right to choose. In other words, it restored democracy to the states, which the people could decide as opposed to the dictates of seven white men.Â
Yet she blames Trump’s presidential duty to appoint new justices to fill the three vacancies that occurred during his four years in office. They were as legally approved as were the liberal judges of the Warren Berger court that decided Roe. Both sides of the aisles are subject to the same rules and regulations.
The Berger Court’s members decided Roe on the legal philosophy of a living constitution, which means that the application of the law was in the subjective eye of the agenda-driven justices, Harry Blackmun, William O. Douglas and William Brennan. They reasoned that the times were ripe for legalized abortions. The Berger justices conjured a dubious right to abortion in the penumbra (shadow) of a right to privacy. Neither abortion, nor the right to privacy are in the Constitution, prompting them to use legerdemain and dark imagery to construct this right.
In stark contrast, Trump’s three justices, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Barrett were all strict constructionists, in that they found the application of the law in the original meaning of the words in the Constitution. According to the 10th Amendment, if it is not in the Constitution, it is reserved to the states, precisely the conclusion of Dobbs. (For the record, Justice Douglas was appointed, by FDR, Brennan, by Eisenhower, and Blackmun, by Nixon.)
Roe had always been a threat to democracy and the Democrats knew it. The truth is that the Democratic Party is a misnomer, a fraud. They no more believe in Democracy than Hitler, Stalin or Mao Zedong. Look what they did to Biden. If the Harris ticket wins in November by hook or by crook it might very well signal the end of American democracy as we once knew it.
Nobody knows what Harris really stands for. We do know she has been a foe of the Catholic Church for most of her career. Her recent failure to attend the annual bi-partisan Al Smith dinner for Catholic Charities in New York City underscored her lack of respect. She preferred campaigning in Wisconsin to trading barbs with her presidential opponent.
In her place, Harris sent a pre-recorded video that was endured by all the guests in actual attendance. It featured a guest performance from SNL actress, Molly Shannon, who briefly reprised her stock character as a quirky Catholic school student. I think it was her futile attempt to produce some sort of manufactured humor. Emcee comedian, Jim Gaffigan made fun of Harris’ absence after the captive audience gave a dismal applause to Harris’ weird video.Â
For many her absence was illustrative of her antipathy toward practicing Catholics. According to New York Postcolumnist, Isaac Schorr, it is a fact that Harris does not enjoy the company of Catholics and religious Christians. Her record of antagonism toward Christians speaks for itself. She is much more than pro-choice. Harris has weaponized the government against pro-life activists, who exposed Planned Parenthood’s barbarism in undercover work and provided pregnant women in need of support with an alternative to abortion.Â
As attorney general in California, Harris zealously enforced a state law requiring crisis pregnancy centers to also provide free advertising for abortion clinics. This is similar to a law forcing Coca-Cola to provide free advertising for Pepsi. While in the Senate she grilled Catholic nominees on their memberships in radical organizations, such as the Knights of Columbus.
According to the October 18th issue of the New York Post, Harris tried to shut down the Little Sisters of the Poor for their failure to abide by her Woke policies of abortion and other violations of Catholic teachings. As the state’s attorney general, she drove six Catholic hospitals out of business for similar offenses. These bigoted actions in California are just a foretaste of what she can do to all Catholics if elected the 47th president.
I truly believe that a Harris presidency will thwart and eventually silence the millions of faithful Catholics, who have spent decades of their lives, lobbying, marching and praying for the end of abortion. I think this prejudice is in her nature since so many of her radical beliefs militate against Catholic teachings. I believe more than half the states will embed abortion amendments to their state constitutions and there might even be a Federal Law, which will codify abortions.
If that happens, every unborn child will be at risk. Climate Change radicals might even try to lobby for birth limitations, such as Communist China had for many decades. I do not like what I am saying, but my understanding of history compels me. The United States leaders have been running on this same track since Watergate. Donald Trump has been the only Republican to stand up to their Swamp since Ronald Reagan.
Over the last 30 years, I have read several books on the end of Western Civilization and the American Experiment. Most have focused on our cultural institutions that have been under assault for more than 50 years. I am thinking of the banks, our currency, our schools, the legacy media and universities that do not teach their students how to think but only how to feel. Add to these our churches, medicine, law, capitalism and government. Most of them have been infected with a toxic way of thinking that has led many other countries into ruin.
Pequeno has every right to be frightful of the next decade but it is not a Trump threat to democracy or the planet burning up because of climate change. Without America’s traditional institutions, the next generation will not understand logic, ideas, and critical thinking. They will do nothing beyond what their schools and the mainstream media press tells them.
In a Harris presidency we will likely see a combination of 1984 and a Brave New World, an American dystopia that will be nothing like we have ever experienced. I know I am not a prophet but I have studied the past and recognize the fact that the ideas that came here from revolutionary France and Russia have been germinating here for several generations and have turned our own people against their heritage. This invokes the prophetic words of an obscure lawyer from Illinois, who warned in 1838 if we lose are freedoms, it will be because we have destroyed ourselves from within.