I know! I haven't written for 9 days today. This is the life of a homeschool mum of 2 fast-growing always-hungry teenagers (Ethan is 14 and Elliot is 12) living in a 2500 sq ft apartment. So, as I've mentioned, I read in the toilet, and I take days and weeks to finish a book.
I finished Richard North Patterson's Protect and Defend a few days back. It's a thriller dealing with the divisive issue of abortion in the context of the politics of a new president of the US nominating a new chief justice to the Supreme Court.
The author is biased towards the pro-choice and paints a sympathetic picture of the lady lawyer who helps a teenage pregnant girl go to court to declare a state law mandating parental consent for a late term abortion unconstitutional and void. The parents of the girl appear in the court case in support of the law. The conversations, testimonies and cross-examinations are painful to read. The girl and her lawyer insist on an abortion because the foetus has been found to have hydrocephalus or water on the brain and may not survive long after birth. But the reason put forward for abortion is that the girl's mental health and reproductive rights may be infringed, i.e., there is a 5% chance of her becoming infertile if she were to have a classical C-section which is the only way of delivering such a foetus.
The parents argued that a life is a life and they were prepared to take care of the girl and the baby. Loss of the ability to have more babies is not to be compared with the loss of a life. One can always adopt.
The story was probably inspired by the 1973 Supreme Court case of Roe v Wade which involved two feminist lady lawyers (one of them named Sarah as in the book) helping or, you could say, using a pregnant young girl to challenge "the constitutionality of the Texas criminal abortion laws, which proscribe procuring or attempting an abortion except on medical advice for the purpose of saving the mother's life"
The decision of the Court effectually opened the gates to abortion on demand in the US. The majority judgment, written by Justice Harry A. Blackmun, is the most convoluted argument I've read recently, basing the right of a woman to abort on her right of privacy.
"The Constitution does not explicitly mention any right of privacy. In a line of decisions, however, going back perhaps as far as Union Pacific R. Co. v. Botsford, 141 U. S. 250, 251 (1891), the Court has recognized that a right of personal privacy, or a guarantee of certain areas or zones of privacy, does exist under the Constitution.
"This right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment's concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or, as the District Court determined, in the Ninth Amendment's reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.
"We, therefore, conclude that the right of personal privacy includes the abortion decision, but that this right is not unqualified and must be considered against important state interests in regulation."
Then he went on to find that a foetus is not legally a "person" and to divide the gestation period into three trimesters with differing rules as to how the State may regulate the right to abort.
I felt a little sick after reading all that as well as a few other websites on the subject. In Malaysia, abortion is generally illegal unless the doctors certify that continuation of pregnancy or delivery of the baby will threaten the life or physical or mental health of the woman. But the fact is, abortions take place every day here as in the US or Canada or elsewhere in the world.
To me, abortion is murder, or more precisely, infanticide: child-murder, the killing of an infant before or after birth. The pro-choicers will say, what about those who were raped, what about when it affects the physical or mental health of the pregnant, especially the very young females? It is not easy at all to answer these. I found a website www.standupgirl.com which was set up by a young girl to let "young women who've had or wanted an abortion tell their stories." "So you're pregnant, scared and alone?" Becky says "I know. I was there too, and I'd like to help." Now there's something pro-active and pro-life!
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