2019.01.22 NY Reproductive Health Act
I'm pro-choice (read Abortion for more background), but whether you're pro-choice or pro-life, you should be offended by the dishonestly named NY "Reproductive Health Act" that the Democrats and Cuomo just passed, and all of its provision. They claim this is about protecting Roe v Wade -- they are liars: it has virtually nothing to do with that.
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Abortion is already legal and protected in NY at beyond the Roe level, so anyone that claims this is about Roe (like Cuomo or USAToday, etc) is fundamentally dishonest and spreading FakeNews.
The facts are:
- Roe v Wade said that abortion should be illegal in the 3rd trimester (at viability), legal in the 1st Trimester, and left up to the states in-between. (Later rulings extended that more -- but that wasn't Roe).
This law says that:
- (a) infanticide is legal up to birth. That means if your baby is past due (beyond 3rd trimester), you can birth their head and crush it, as long as you keep the little toe in the birth canal. This is Gosnell's law, and a complete violation of Roe. The Blackmun court would throw up and never have passed Roe if they thought these conditions would apply.
- (b) there were laws on the books (in NY/elsewhere) that says if a baby is accidentally born alive during a botched abortion, that it then has rights as a human. This appears to eliminate or dilute those protections. That's not about Roe.
- (c) it removes abortion from the criminal code entirely (you can't call it abortion, just for forcibly or accidentally ending a viable baby's life). Which means if you assault a woman while in her last trimester (domestic abuse, or just stranger assault) -- and force her to miscarry, there was no crime beyond simple assault. That human life that was lost has no value to her, society, or recognition under NY law. That's something new, as society always considered potential life to have SOME value: until now.
- (d) anyone the state wants (not just doctors) can perform abortions. Just take the weekend Hoover-clinic training, and murdering children should be no harder than getting a dermabrasion or a little botox.
- (e) by flipping the wording from fundamental right to life to you have a fundamental right to abort -- it opens the door (if not outright kicks it down), that being pro-life is a crime. Any advocacy for the baby rights is hate speech. Think about it. Protecting the child would be advocating for trying to remove a fundamental right of others to abort. That's not Roe.
- (f) they simultaneously passed the Comprehensive Contraception Coverage Act -- which says that regardless of your religious or philosophical values, you must pay for other people contraception and abortions. (You have to have insurance, and that insurance must pay for these things). It's a natural right to commit infanticide. This crushes religious freedom and opposing views like a baby's skull in Gosnell's forceps.
- (g) there's threat of a "Boss Bill" which will criminalize anyone who has values that disagrees with the first two (e.g. if you check for, discriminate against, or don't want to pay for anyone else's abortions, then you will be fined and thrown into re-education prison).
The proponents point out that only 2% of the ≈90K annual abortions are late term, or about 1,800 infanticides a year. But everyone expects those numbers to rise. Compare that to ≈1-2 deaths per state in accidental gun deaths or mass shootings per year (on average), and it gives you an idea of scale/priorities. (They care dearly about 1-2 gun deaths, which is why they violate the 2nd Amendment, but don't give a fuck about either 2,000+ late term murders of fully viable children). That's exactly what moral hypocrisy looks like.
Conclusion
I'm generally for State's rights... but I'm also for human rights. And protecting the civil liberties of the innocent is a federal jurisdiction. So while Roe never belonged to the fed (Blackmun overreached, even though I generally agreed with what the ruling) -- protecting infants from this kind of thing, is in the federal purview. So like most things the radical Democrats do, I expect this one will backfire -- it will go to the Supreme's, eventually, after thousands of innocents are murdered under the law, and it'll be the catalyst that causes the entire repeal of Roe AND this law. Because protecting against infanticide should be one the most important things on the Supreme's docket. When that happens, remember it was NY's "Protect against loss of Roe" law, that caused the loss of Roe: fucking idiots.
It's also so shockingly bad, that even many sane pro-choicer's will realize how duped they've been by the dishonest left. (One hopes). So like most stupid overreaches, this will probably do more harm and backlash than good. But if Democrats could learn, then the murderous Andrew Jackson would have been the last Democrat President, instead of the first.
The good news is that the NY Democrats just let the world know what the Democrats actually stand for: a radical/extreme world view, where words don't mean what they actually mean, and murdering 42 week innocents is fine by anyone sanctioned by the state. This fight was never about the reasonable right to abort as 12-20 weeks. This was about the extreme view that you should be able to murder humans at will, and force others to pay for it. There's nothing "liberal" or "tolerant" about oppressing religious freedoms, or forcing people to subsidize such behavior against their will. And they are dishonest as this has nothing to do with Roe, and goes well, well beyond anything that Blackmun court would have allowed.
The only bright side is that it's mostly democrats that will get these abortions (and most of those kids would have grown up to be Democrats), so they'll be making the world a better place, one snip at a time.
Vermont
Because infanticide is such an attractive cause to Democrats, Vermont introduced a bill to try to follow in NY's footsteps. [1]