Amy Coney Barrett is right about safe haven laws
The Washington Examiner discusses how Amy Coney Barrett has it right regarding the effect of safe haven laws on abortion.
Regardless of what the pro-choice side says, Amy Coney Barrett is correct: No one is forcing a woman to raise a child once he or she is born.
Last week, the Supreme Court justice inquired about safe haven laws during oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The case involves a 2018 Mississippi law that bans abortion after 15 weeks, except to protect the life of the mother.
During oral arguments on Wednesday, Barrett mentioned safe haven laws when talking about Roe v. Wade. She said, “Insofar as you and many of your amici focus on the ways in which forced parenting, forced motherhood, would hinder women’s access to the workplace and to equal opportunities, it’s also focused on the consequences of parenting and the obligations of motherhood that flow from pregnancy. Why don’t the safe haven laws take care of that problem? It seems to me that it focuses the burden much more narrowly.”
Safe haven laws offer an easy way for a mother to drop off an unharmed, unwanted newborn baby with no questions asked and without any legal obligation to the child. Depending on the state , a mother may have 72 hours after giving birth or up to 90 days to do so.
States, municipalities, and safe haven locations, including police stations and fire departments, need to do a better job of promoting where safe haven sites are in their respective communities with additional signage. However, Barrett is correct that this is a serious alternative to abortion — and one that doesn’t kill a child.
Safe haven laws exist to prevent unwanted children from being killed. They were implemented in all 50 states as a direct response to infanticide. In Massachusetts, for example, someone gave birth at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and the baby was found dead in a trash can. So the Democratic-dominated Legislature worked with then-Gov. Mitt Romney to enact a safe haven law.
Safe haven laws weren’t in place at the time of the Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey rulings. This vital alternative to abortion came about in the late 1990s and early 2000s. As Texas governor, George W. Bush signed the first one into law in 1999. Therefore, it is something for Supreme Court justices to keep in mind when ruling on this case. It’s something that they didn’t have to consider when deciding those older cases.
(Read where the science takes us regarding the start of life at the Washington Examiner)
The “Baby Moses Law” (signed by then-Governor G. W. Bush) has a story behind it
Oddly, many people do not associate the story of Moses with the “Baby Moses Law.” Although the story of Moses’ beginning (where a baby that would have died is saved when his mother courageously puts the child in a place to be adopted anonymously) fits the situation presented by this law, our society has drifted from its Biblical moorings so much that it no longer recognizes the core stories.
Possibly, this might be part of the reason for the need for the law.
Nonetheless, we need to pray that this law continue to protect children and that the current trend in adoption (especially in Christian families) either continue or accelerate.
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The Supreme Court isn’t a medical board or legislature — it shouldn’t make abortion law
The New York Post allows Rich Lowry to observe that the Supreme Court was not created as a legislature (therefore, it should not create any law from whole cloth). Likewise, it is not a medical board (therefore, it has no place in sanctioning medical procedures).
At times, you might have been forgiven for thinking that oral arguments over the Dobbs case were being held before the Health and Human Services Committee of the Pennsylvania state Senate or some other legislative body.
Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, involving Mississippi’s ban on abortion after 15 weeks, is, of course, the most consequential abortion case to reach the Supreme Court in decades. The arguments, as you would expect, featured plenty of intricate legal discussion.
They also delved at length into questions of policymaking that aren’t rightly in the ambit of the Supreme Court — and that the court never should have taken on in Roe and Casey, the abortion cases that are on the verge of collapse owing to their manifest constitutional shabbiness.
Indeed, the discussion was relatively light on what is the supposed source of a constitutional right to abortion. The advocates opposed to the Mississippi law located it somewhere in the 14th Amendment, even though, as Justice Samuel Alito pointed out, no one at the time of the amendment’s passage believed it guaranteed a sweeping right to abortion.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor even said at one point that the Supreme Court comes up with decisions all the time that aren’t directly grounded in the Constitution.
In Roe and Casey, the court made the mistake of thinking that it should be the arbiter of a fraught social and moral issue and essentially crafted an abortion policy for the entire nation without any democratic input. Because pro-choicers like the outcome, they have become invested in the notion that Supreme Court precedent, even bad precedent, should stay on the books forevermore.
One of the more jaw-dropping moments of the arguments was when Alito nearly cornered Biden administration Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar into maintaining that it would have been a mistake for the Supreme Court to overturn its hideous pro-segregation decision in Plessy v. Ferguson too soon.
The conservative justices and the abortion-rights advocates went back and forth on where the court should draw the line on allowing restrictions on abortion. Prelogar and Julie Rickelman, a lawyer representing the Mississippi abortion clinic in the case, insisted that it should be at fetal viability, around 23 or 24 weeks of pregnancy.
According to Rickelman, the line of viability is “objectively verifiable and doesn’t delve into philosophical questions about when life begins.” This is in doubt, though. Some premature babies have survived after being born at 21 weeks, and many abortion-rights advocates deny that unborn babies have any moral standing at any point in a pregnancy.
Sotomayor said that believing an unborn baby has a right to be protected under law is a religious view. If so, why does the Supreme Court get to impose its “religious view” that the state can protect a fetus after 24 weeks but not before? She and her colleagues sit on the highest court in the land, not the Sanhedrin.
(Read more at the New York Post)
Maybe this COVID pandemic is a God-send, since it may get people to think about getting the court out of enforcing health
Maybe people will see the hypocrisy of shouting “my body, my choice” when it comes to killing a baby, but ignoring another person’s shout of “my body, my choice” when it comes to a jab to their own body.
Maybe people will see how the court has manufactured Roe from whole cloth now that both unelected and not-soon-to-face-election Democrats (and some RINOs, like Cheney) run roughshod over liberties in the name of a largely-manufactured crisis of COVID.
So, we need to pray for the opening of our own eyes to the predicament within our nation, our ability to communicate in a convincing and winsome way (but not childish), and the direction of our nation from here.
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Mark 1:1 