Tom Hoefling

The "pro-life" "Republicans" in the U.S. House, at the behest of the National Right to Life Committee, are slated to take up a bill today that would codify permission for certain professional killers to murder paraplegics, or to kill any person for that matter, if they are first given enough morphine to make sure that they don't feel any pain.

Okay, not really.

But they are offering legislation that is just as capricious, illogical, unreasonable, unconstitutional, and immoral. They are forwarding the "Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act" (H.R. 1797). This legislation recognizes the personhood of the child in the womb, and then specifically allows abortionists to kill them, if the child has not yet reached a certain stage of human development.

But the constitutional criteria is not whether or not someone can feel pain. It is whether or not they are a PERSON.

"No person shall be deprived of life without due process of law." - the Fifth Amendment

"No State shall deprive any person of life without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." - the Fourteenth Amendment

I will never support any politician who supports the codification of this sort of lawless law. I have so pledged, as has everyone I most closely associate myself with politically.

Every argument in favor of this bill is Utilitarian, not moral or constitutional, by the way. And I am not a godless Utilitarian. I am a Christian.

And Utilitarian fixes don't work anyhow. Not only are they wrong, in the long haul they always prove to be an abject defeat, not a victory. Because to buy into them, you have to first surrender all of the moral, constitutional, and legal principles that argue against the heinous practice of killing babies.

Gov. Beebe of Arkansas yesterday vetoed a bill that would have allowed abortions only if it was determined that the baby was less than 20 weeks old. His reason for the veto: the bill “would squarely contradict Supreme Court precedent” by imposing a ban on a woman’s right to choose an elective, non-therapeutic abortion before viability, Beebe said in a statement announcing the veto. “When I was sworn in as governor, I took an oath to preserve, protect and defend both the Arkansas Constitution and the Constitution of the United States. I take that oath seriously,” the governor said.

He's right about the bill being unconstitutional, but he's very wrong about why. The bill is unconstitutional because it fails the requirement that all persons must be afforded equal protection under the law. Any law that allows the killing of a baby just because he or she has not yet passed the 20 week gestational date clearly affords unequal protection to persons based on age. The Supreme Court has embraced a legal fiction in voicing opinion that children in the womb are not persons.

Read more about the veto, and the prospects for it being overriden, in the top front page story in today's Fort Smith Times Record -- http://swtimes.com/sections/news/politics/beebe-vetoes-abortion-bil...
-----
Steve Schulin
volunteer - Rockville, Maryland
http://www.marylandindependentparty.org
steve@schulin.net SKYPE: steve.schulin

Radio Iowa

By O. Kay Henderson

A group of Republican legislators has introduced legislation that would make all abortions illegal in Iowa and any doctor who performs an abortion in Iowa would face murder charges.

“What the bill does is it defines what a person is,” says Representative Tom Shaw, a Republican from Laurens who is the bill’s lead sponsor.

“We put it right underneath our murder statute. This is in keeping with Roe v Wade where Justice Blackman said that if the state ever defined the fetus to be a person, then, of course, it would have all the protections of the 14th amendment. ...”

*excerpt*

“We just kind of sat down and thought, ‘We’re making this way too hard. We should be following what the Supreme Court said in their opinion,’” Shaw says. “And so the bill just merely defines who a person is and it defines a person from the moment of conception when the zygote is formed until natural death.”

*excerpt*

“...we should not determine whether a person’s life is worth living based on their age or their stage of biological development,” Shaw says.

CNS  

Michael W. Chapman

The Alabama Supreme Court ruled in a case on Friday that “unborn children are persons with rights that should be protected by law.”

The case involved two women who had been charged under a “chemical endangerment” law because they had ingested illegal drugs—one, cocaine, and the second, methamphetamine—while pregnant. …

In its concluding remarks, the Alabama Supreme Court said: “The decision of this Court today is in keeping with the widespread legal recognition that unborn children are persons with rights that should be protected by law. Today, the only major area in which unborn children are denied legal protection is abortion, and that denial is only because of the dictates of Roe.” …
Read this story at cnsnews.com ...