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NRL News
GONZALES v. CARHART
“This decision marks a dramatic departure from four decades of
Supreme Court rulings that upheld a woman’s right to choose and
recognized the importance of women’s health. Today’s decision
blatantly defies the Court’s recent decision in 2000 striking down a
state partial-birth abortion law because of its failure to provide
an exception for the health of the mother. As the Supreme Court
recognized in Roe v. Wade in 1973, this issue is complex and highly
personal; the rights and lives of women must be taken into account.
It is precisely this erosion of our constitutional rights that I
warned against when I opposed the nominations of Chief Justice
Roberts and Justice Alito.”
“I could not disagree more strongly with today’s Supreme Court
decision. The ban upheld by the Court is an ill-considered and
sweeping prohibition that does not even take account for serious
threats to the health of individual women. This hard right turn is a
stark reminder of why Democrats cannot afford to lose the 2008
election. Too much is at stake—starting with, as the Court made all
too clear today, a woman’s right to choose.”
“I strongly disagree with today’s Supreme Court ruling, which
dramatically departs from previous precedents safeguarding the
health of pregnant women. As Justice Ginsburg emphasized in her
dissenting opinion, this ruling signals an alarming willingness on
the part of the conservative majority to disregard its prior rulings
respecting a woman’s medical concerns and the very personal
decisions between a doctor and patient. I am extremely concerned
that this ruling will embolden state legislatures to enact further
measures to restrict a woman’s right to choose, and that the
conservative Supreme Court justices will look for other
opportunities to erode Roe v. Wade, which is established federal law
and a matter of equal rights for women.”
“Today the Supreme Court took a dangerous step backward in regard to
Americans’ rights to personal choice and privacy…. While not
unexpected, I believe this unfortunate decision is a clear signal
that the Supreme Court is opening the door to further challenges to
personal medical decisions between patients and doctors that should
not involve the government. I am concerned, as Justice Ruth Bader
Ginsburg stated so clearly in her dissenting opinion, that this vote
could be the beginning of ‘an effort to chip away a right declared
again and again by this court.’ I sincerely hope that is not the
case.” In a rousing indictment of the Bush administration and the Supreme Court it created, Senator Barack Obama told a Planned Parenthood convention here on Tuesday that the next election would decide a fundamental question: “What kind of America will our daughters grow up in?”… Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton declared that President Bush had consistently “played politics with women’s health.” She added, “He has chipped away at reproductive rights...” She added, to cheers, “I want you to know that when I’m president, I will devote my very first days in office to reversing these ideological, anti-science, anti-prevention policies that this administration has put into place.”…
Mr. Obama’s speech — and the reception it received from the Planned
Parenthood Action Fund — underscored the power of the Supreme Court
as a galvanizing issue for Democratic primary voters [emphasis
added]. In a speech on Tuesday, Barack Obama told his audience that the 2008 presidential election would answer the question: “What kind of America will our daughters grow up in?” What, one might wonder, does he want to protect our daughters from? An oversexualized culture? Predators on the Internet? Alas, no. Mr. Obama was addressing a Planned Parenthood convention and worried that if the wrong person got into the White House, our daughters might grow up in a country without . . . partial-birth abortions…. [A] donkey with a halo over his head graces the cover of Time magazine this week and the story inside chronicles “How the Democrats Got Religion.” From faith working groups to faith breakfasts, Mr. Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards are all participating in what strategist Mike McCurry tells Time is “a Great Awakening in the Democratic Party.”… Ms. Brown, the coordinator of the Faith in Action initiative at the Democratic National Committee, says she is working for a “big tent party,” with plenty of room for people of faith. She tells me, for instance, that “evangelicals often get painted in broad strokes, as a monolith,” but they’re not….
Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women, is
probably less than excited by such initiatives. She recently said in
a speech, “I don’t want a progressive evangelical movement any more
than I want the conservative one we have right now.” To paraphrase NOW’s Kim Gandy: we don’t need pro-partial-birth- abortionists “who got religion” any more than the ones we already have. All that hand waving about “Faith in Action” and “a Great Awakening in the Democratic Party” is the same deceitful baloney as Bill Clinton gave us with his vision of making abortion “safe, legal, and rare.” It’s naïve to assume that these candidates’ defense of the indefensible is “just” catering to the activist left during the Democratic primaries. They won’t become less extremist on abortion after the primaries. Remember the “centrist” Democrat Bill Clinton. On his first day in office as president, he reversed the pro-life policies of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush by executive order. Later, he appointed the extreme, pro-abortion feminist Ruth Bader Ginsburg as the successor to pro-life Justice Byron White. So much for moving to the “center.” CORRECTION: In the July column, the name of Dr. Christopher Blunt was incorrectly stated. The appropriate sentence should have read: ”Experienced poll analysts, such as Gallup’s Lydia Saad and pollsters Christopher Blunt and Fred Steeper, have identified the campaign to ban partial-birth abortions as one of the primary reasons for the shift towards the pro-life side.” |