{"id":32666,"date":"2024-11-04T17:27:00","date_gmt":"2024-11-04T17:27:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cincinnatirighttolife.org\/?p=32666"},"modified":"2024-11-05T16:35:46","modified_gmt":"2024-11-05T16:35:46","slug":"abortion-roe-and-the-warping-of-american-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cincinnatirighttolife.org\/abortion-roe-and-the-warping-of-american-politics\/","title":{"rendered":"Abortion, Roe, and the Warping of American Politics"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By: Stephen Soukup, originally published November 4, 2024, The Washington Stand<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In last week\u2019s edition of\u00a0The Weekly Dish<\/a>, Andrew Sullivan, the anomalous, sometimes conservativish writer, discussed abortion, among other things. He wrote:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

\u201cFederalism and the First Amendment are also the safety valves bequeathed us by our Founders. Some questions \u2014 like abortion \u2014 really are hard to compromise on, but forcing one side\u2019s settlement on everyone (Roe) is the illiberal move. So in some ways, Dobbs has actually made liberalism easier, not harder. It allows for different legal regimes \u2014 and experience of them.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Rod Dreher, a far more reliable conservative, seconded Sullivan\u2019s thoughts and added that \u201cTrump ought to have been making [this \u2018great point\u2019] in his own defense on the stump this fall.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I genuinely like Dreher, and I sometimes like Sullivan, and I understand the points each is trying to make. Nevertheless, I can hardly imagine an issue on which two establishment (or establishment-ish, in Sullivan\u2019s case) conservative voices could have missed the point so radically. When it comes to abortion, the Left (in general) doesn\u2019t care one whit about such niceties as federalism, the First Amendment, or even liberalism. Indeed, it believes that abortion \u2014 and a woman\u2019s right to it \u2014 supersedes all of those things. And I am not being hyperbolic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ll try to be brief here, but the present clash between the Left and the Right over abortion mostly boils down to the interpretation of the word \u201crights.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In general, rights are understood as being either negative or positive. Negative rights are those presumed to be \u201cendowed\u201d by man\u2019s \u201cCreator\u201d and which government cannot violate. Man has the right to life, liberty, property, the pursuit of happiness, free speech, freedom of religion, a free press, to bear arms, and so on. All the rights enshrined in the Bill of Rights and derived from classical liberalism are \u201cnegative\u201d rights. The government\u2019s job regarding negative rights is simply to protect them, to keep others from violating them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Positive rights, by contrast, are those that the government endows upon its people. These are the \u201crights\u201d granted to a people by a just sovereign. They are functions not of man\u2019s unchangeable nature but of the law. The right to a job, to food, to housing, to medical care, to personal safety, to equity (as opposed to equality), to education, etc. are all examples of positive rights.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At last count, there are 193 countries in the world. In 191 of these countries, abortion is understood to be a positive right, that is, a \u201cright\u201d granted by the government that can also be changed, modified, expanded, or eliminated by the same government at any time. Throughout much of Europe, abortion is illegal after 12 weeks. In some European states it\u2019s illegal after 20 weeks. In Great Britain, abortion is legal up to 24 weeks but requires the approval of two doctors, both of whom must agree that having the baby would pose a significant physical or mental health risk to the mother. In short, the government decides what \u201crights\u201d women have and can change those rights if and when it chooses. The only two countries in the world that treat abortion differently, that treat it as a negative right, endowed by one\u2019s Creator and as sacrosanct as the rights to life (eh?), liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, are the United States and France (which amended its constitution to guarantee the right to abortion this past March).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is an old saying \u2014 attributed originally to Canadian Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent \u2014 that \u201csocialists are liberals in a hurry.\u201d In many ways, the Warren and Burger courts (1954-1969 and 1969-1986) were American progressives in a hurry. They knew what progressives wanted. They knew what progressivism demanded of the state. And they knew that they could, in line with the progressive spirit, drag the nation along by its nose into controversial policy realms \u2014 for its own good<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The catch with this approach to legislation by judicial fiat is that it created two enormous issues. First, it preempted the formation of a national cultural consensus on abortion, thereby kicking off 50 years of squabbling. The court claimed that it was \u201csettling\u201d the issue, when, in reality, it made it more un<\/em>settled than ever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Second, by tying abortion to the Constitution and, thereby, making the \u201cright\u201d to abortion a negative right, the court created the conditions under which abortion would become THE essential natural right for many on the Left. I put it this way, almost a decade ago in\u00a0a piece<\/a>\u00a0for my former favorite home-away-from-home, The Culture of Life Foundation:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

\u201cPro-[l]ifers and other conservatives tend to see the Supreme Court\u2019s decision in Roe v. Wade as an unnecessary and unconscionable usurpation of the people\u2019s rights in a democratic republic. Pro-[c]hoicers, by contrast, see the decision very differently. When the Court rewrote the abortion laws of the states by virtue of its conclusion that abortion was protected under the 9th and the 14th [A]mendments, it created a constitutional right to abortion. The fundamental human rights traditionally associated with the Bill of Rights \u2014 speech, religion, bear arms, speedy trial, etc. \u2014 suddenly had a new and fully-equal companion right, the right to an abortion. Indeed, some scholars, most notably Russell Hittinger, have argued that between Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Supreme Court established a regime in which abortion is the preeminent and defining right in the constitutional order.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHittinger, who is the William K. Warren Chair of Catholic Studies and a Research Professor of Law at the University of Tulsa, put it this way, nearly 20 years ago:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018In Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), the Supreme Court made abortion the benchmark of its own legitimacy, and indeed the token of the American political covenant. To those who cannot agree with the proposition that individuals have a moral or constitutional right to kill the unborn, or that such a right defines the trans-generational covenant of the American political order, the Court urged acceptance out of respect for the rule of law. \u201cIf the Court\u2019s legitimacy should be undermined,\u201d the Court declared, \u201cthen so would the country be in its very ability to see itself through its constitutional ideals.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

What this means in the real world, then, is that those who define their politics in terms of \u201cwomen\u2019s issues\u201d and the rights of women, see abortion not as a<\/em> fundamental right, but as THE<\/em> fundamental right, the one to which all other rights are subordinate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In other words, the denizens of the Left are obsessed with the \u201cright\u201d to abortion specifically because the Supreme Court convinced them they should be <\/em>obsessed about the \u201cfundamental\u201d nature of that right. They\u2019re obsessed because the court purposefully<\/em> used Roe v. Wade to convince them that abortion is a powerful and unalienable<\/em> negative right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Consequently, the pro-abortion crowd hates Dobbs because they believe that it deprived<\/em> them of that fundamental right. No appeals to \u201cliberalism\u201d or federalism or the First Amendment will change that. Not only was Roe wrongly decided, but it fundamentally altered the nation\u2019s politics in ways that we can barely even fathom, much less hope to resolve so soon after Dobbs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We have our work cut out for us undoing the damage done by the Progressive Court. The only way out is through, and the only way through is to build cultural consensus on the value of every human life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stephen Soukup is the author of \u201cThe Dictatorship of Woke Capital\u201d\u00a0and the vice president and publisher of The Political Forum, where\u00a0this article<\/a>\u00a0originally appeared.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By: Stephen Soukup, originally published November 4, 2024, The Washington Stand In last week\u2019s edition of\u00a0The Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan, the anomalous, sometimes conservativish writer, discussed abortion, among other things. He wrote: \u201cFederalism and the First Amendment are also the safety valves bequeathed us by our Founders. Some questions \u2014 like abortion \u2014 really are…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":32667,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32666","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nAbortion, Roe, and the Warping of American Politics - Cincinnati Right to Life<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cincinnatirighttolife.org\/abortion-roe-and-the-warping-of-american-politics\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Abortion, Roe, and the Warping of American Politics - Cincinnati Right to Life\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"By: Stephen Soukup, originally published November 4, 2024, The Washington Stand In last week\u2019s edition of\u00a0The Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan, the anomalous, sometimes conservativish writer, discussed abortion, among other things. 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