Al's Opinions

There’s no use arguing with my friend H about this question. He doesn’t look at it as a matter of balancing the right of the woman to terminate a pregnancy against the right of society to protect the unborn child in her womb. H looks at abortion as a variety of murder. Aborting at any stage after the fertilization of the egg amounts to ending a potential human life. He opposes abortion on spiritual and religious grounds.

I have little patience with the religious belief that life begins at the moment of conception. That is the present teaching of the Catholic Church, but it has not always been the teaching. At one time it was believed that life begins at the moment of quickening, when the woman can feel the fetus moving within her womb. At that moment it is apparent that the fetus is not like one of her permanent organs, such as the liver. The liver has no muscle to move itself; the fetus moves independently of any signal her brain and nervous system might generate. It is definitely on its way to becoming an independent human being. Of course, life doesn’t begin at the moment of quickening, either. In my world, life is a continuous process and began on this planet more than three billion years ago. Human life began when the first member of our species came into existence through a series of mutations. I don’t know how long ago that happened, but it was more than two hundred thousand years ago.

I have never believed that abortion is murder. Whether or not abortion is a proper act, whether or not many abortions are performed for convenience rather than for reasons of saving the life or health of the woman, I do not believe it to be murder. I do not believe that medical doctors who perform safe abortions should be punished in any way. The only laws regarding the practice should pertain to safe, medically approved procedures and should forbid inexperienced or incompetent persons to perform abortions.

I have no patience with legal scholars who assert that the federal constitution does not grant a woman the right to an abortion, that the decision Roe versus Wade was done improperly, yada yada yada. The federal constitution stipulates a number of specific rights that the people have and that government must not tamper with. It also stipulates that there are unspecified rights that are reserved to the States or to the people. Rather than assert that the constitution does not specifically grant a woman the right to an abortion, legal scholars ought instead to argue that the constitution does not give congress or the States the power to forbid abortions.

I am not a member of the Libertarian Party, but many of my beliefs and opinions are libertarian. For example, I have never found any language in the federal constitution that gives congress the power to forbid the growing and the use of marijuana for medical purposes. Yet our wonderful Supreme Court has recently asserted that congress does indeed have that power and that it overrides the power of State governments to permit the use of medical marijuana. Some of our learned Associate Justices have stated that marijuana has no medical use. Since they are specialists in constitutional law and not in medicine, I wonder what basis they have for such a belief. I have little patience with them, either.

However, what do I know? I am not a specialist in either constitutional law or medicine. I am just an opinionated old fogey. Take my opinions with a little salt.