Put bluntly, Democrats widely support the extermination of their unwanted preborn, and Republican support is less likely. Two recent issues have forced a wider gulf on abortion than ever: science has shown a fetal heartbeat at six weeks of pregnancy, and many taxpayers oppose funding extermination clinics. If we followed the Constitution, abortion would not be government-approved in all states, and the practice would not be federally funded.
Republican Iowa governor, Kim Reynolds, just signed a law banning abortions when a heartbeat can be detected, normally about six weeks of pregnancy. The new law, set to begin July 1, will replace a 20-week law passed last year. Exceptions to the law include some cases of rape, incest or to save a mother's life. Otherwise, it is pretty firm. Acknowledging that the law may be litigated, she said: "This is bigger than just a law; this is about life, and I'm not going to back down." Mississippi already has a similar law banning extermination after 15 weeks.
Opposed by Democrats and supported by Republicans, a string of other states are poised to legislate similar bans. When the term to justify extinction was "viability" of the fetus -- even full-term deliveries are not viable without human intervention -- elimination appeared "reasonable" to some until science showed the existence of a heartbeat at 16 weeks; then it seemed more like a human baby -- like killing humankind -- especially when most physicians believe fetus pain is present.
The other issue, funding extermination centers like Planned Parenthood with forced taxpayer dollars through Title X, seemed wrong and unjust to those who view abortion as killing their own. For years, those for abortion have gotten away with terminology suggesting that what existed in the womb was a mere glob of cells or just tissue, the result, conditioned public insensitivity. Forgive my intended bluntness to shock even the most insensitive into understanding the issue.
Many who work in Planned Parenthood centers admit that perhaps 80 percent of what they do is exterminating underdeveloped humans. This is not family planning; it is the destruction of the family. Nor are such centers primarily for women's health, unless one can argue that pregnant women are unhealthy because they are pregnant. Abortion is not healthcare.
If women's health were the real issue, redistributing the annual $260 million in Title X grants now given to Planned Parenthood to hundreds of genuine comprehensive women's health clinics instead would better serve so many more women. But funding extermination centers remains the primary purpose of Planned Parenthood.
Since Roe v. Wade, we have aborted 60,449,039 in the U.S. (www.numberofabortions.com). A review of abortion pictures on the Internet often shows tiny human body parts separated from the whole body when a scalpel was used to cut up the body to make it easier to expel.
Sadly, abortion would not be a federal issue if both political parties followed the listed limits of federal power in the Constitution as written and intended. The word abortion is not found in the Constitution, nor inferred, and no new amendment to the Constitution has been added moving it from a state power (where all powers not specifically identified in the Constitution as federal reside) to a federal prerogative. Instead, from its inception, the Constitution housed the philosophy of federalism (shared government), the federal government to manage foreign policy, and the states domestic.
Without constitutional perversion of the original intent, the Supreme Court could not rule, as it did in Roe v. Wade in 1973, in such a way as to create new law in an area where no federal law first existed or was subsequently added by way of a constitutional amendment. That we have traveled some 45 years from the Constitution in this particular area is not authority to extend that travel.
Article 1, Section 8, lists federal powers. This clause divides all federal power into the four following areas: to tax, pay debt, provide for the general welfare and common defense. So as to restrict the federal government from enlarging its power, which is its natural tendency to do, the last two grants of power of the four each had an additional eight clauses giving clarity to what was meant by general welfare (clauses 2-9) and common defense (clauses 10-17). Outside these qualifiers, the federal government has no power to tax, spend, legislate, administrate or adjudicate.
Even with the clarification of the list, states fearing that the federal government might still like to grow at their expense refused to ratify the Constitution without additional restrictions harnessing it more fully to the enumerated powers, hence the Bill of Rights. These end with the handcuffs of Amendment 10: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
The problem with the federal government going off the list and funding or assuming powers clearly not on it is that, each time it does so, the stronger the inclination is to do so again. One minor departure begets another until one notices that what the federal government does has little or no relationship to the list. The result, in this case, is that mothers, encouraged by their federal government, exterminated more than 60 million of their own -- about 10 times the number of Jews killed in the Nazi Holocaust death camps which are now universally condemned.
Harold W. Pease, Ph.D., is a syndicated columnist and an expert on the United States Constitution. He has dedicated his career to studying the writings of the Founding Fathers and applying that knowledge to current events. He taught history and political science from this perspective for more than 30 years at Taft College. To read more of his weekly articles, please visit www.LibertyUnderFire.org.
Editorial on 06/06/2018