The Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v Wade is not pro-life.
It is anti-woman, anti-freedom, and anti-American.
The idea that a fertilized egg is already a person with its own rights is questionable. But let’s take it at face value. Does the government have the right, given that assumption, to force another person – with her own rights – to make all or parts of her body available to this other in order to save its life?
Let’s look at some other examples where that potentially could be the case.
Organ transplants.
If a person dies and has not given permission for their organs to be harvested and made available for the transplant list, the organs are not made available. This is life or death for those on the list who run out of time while they wait for a donated organ. But as a society we don’t say it is OK to overrule a person’s decisions about what happens to their organs. Not while they are alive – (people are not required to donate an “extra” kidney or bone marrow or part of their liver, for example.) We don’t even say it’s OK after they are dead and are no longer using the organs themselves.
Blood Donations.
My blood can save a life. And I have the opportunity, but not the mandated responsibility, to donate it voluntarily to save a life. But you can’t just roll up, shove me in a van, and hook up the machine to take my blood.
It is not OK for society to tell a woman what to do with her body – even if you personally interpret it as saving a life.
Are you ready for someone to come to you and demand your kidney? Your blood? Your bone marrow? Your very life?
Not to ask for it.
To demand it.
And to have the government say you don’t have a choice.
After all, it will save a life.
Who Decides?
I have long said that if a government can tell a woman she cannot have an abortion, that same government has now opened the door to telling a woman she must have an abortion. If a government is in the position to make the call, the government is in the position to make the call – and the woman no longer has the right to self-determination of what happens to her own body.
Example: In the early 1980s, China had a policy that families were only allowed to have one child.
Example: In 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court’s Buck v Bell decision upheld a state’s right to forcibly sterilize a person considered unfit to procreate. Estimates are 70,000 or so people were forcibly sterilized in the U.S. in the 20th century. And “unfit to procreate” included persons with disabilities, the poor, and minorities.
The Supreme Court has gone too far. And, according to Justice Thomas – written with smug audacity right there in his opinion – they are not done with their moves to eliminate the established rights of Americans.
If you are celebrating this decision, stay tuned.
They’ll be coming for some right you care about next.
Don’t say you weren’t warned.
Will you sit by and watch it happen?
Your choice.
Until it’s not.
Home Among the Hills 