(written 9/3/12)
Why a woman’s right to choose will NEVER be taken away…
If you’ve been watching TV or reading about the presidential campaign, you may have noticed that there have been talking points about the Republican Party’s “War on Women.” It started early in the year with the nonsense over the ObamaCare mandate that health insurance providers offer free contraception with no co-pays. The religious right of the GOP (including presidential candidate Rick Santorum) decried the mandate as an intrusion on religious freedom, potentially forcing Catholic institutions to violate their religious beliefs.
So the liberal establishment (including the media) has been continuing the “war on women” narrative since the beginning of the year. Mitt Romney’s campaign is obviously aware of this, which is why they made such a big deal about Ann Romney’s speech last week and why they gave high-profile speaking slots to Republican women like former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez.
Obviously, the contraception issue is minor compared to the biggie, a woman’s right to choose, which has been the law of the land since 1973 because of the Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade. For years, one of the chief talking points of the liberal establishment is that the Republicans want to “take away your right to an abortion.” And the truth is that many Republicans, because of their religious belief that abortion is murder, would like to make abortion illegal. The official Republican Party platform calls for a constitutional amendment banning the procedure with no exceptions.
Here is what I believe fundamentally to be true: IT WILL NEVER, EVER, EVER HAPPEN and the whole controversy is a red herring. For years this has been, and will continue to be, an issue that is fought on the margins. Individual congressmen will waste their time proposing bills that will never pass and individual states will enact bans on late-term abortions (this is actually fairly common). Debates over federal funding of organizations such as Planned Parenthood will continue to rage. But NEVER, EVER, will the fundamental right to an abortion go away. Let me explain how my opinion is supported by facts.
I’ll start by mentioning that I personally am a Republican who is strongly pro-choice. There are a lot more of us than many people realize. Most of my Republican friends are also pro-choice, although the fact that I live in California may have something to do with that. So let’s start with my hypothesis: there are LOTS of Republican office-holders who proclaim that they are “pro-life” strictly to cater to the religious right. If push ever were to come to shove, if any one of these Republicans became the deciding vote that would determine the issue, they would blink. By the way, Mitt Romney is one of these “cater to the base” Republicans. As his opponents in the primaries were keen to point out, Romney ran as pro-choice candidate for Governor of Massachusetts just 10 years ago.
OK, the idea that there are many pro-choice Republicans who pretend to be pro-life to win elections is a theory that I can’t prove. Here is some evidence that is factual and highly significant: last November, the state of Mississippi had a referendum on a “personhood amendment” which declared that “life begins at conception.” This was supposed to be a symbolic statement without any legal bearing and yet it was defeated BY THE VOTERS OF MISSISSIPPI by a 58%-to-42% margin. Political analysts credit the defeat of this amendment to a growing fear in the electorate that this symbolic amendment could be a slippery slope leading to an actual ban on abortions. My friends, these are the voters of Mississippi, not Massachusetts or California. The voters of the red state of Mississippi rejected a symbolic pro-life amendment!
By the way, in 2010, a similar “personhood amendment” referendum was rejected by the voters of Colorado 71%-to-29% margin. Those same voters re-elected an incumbent Democratic Senator (Michael Bennett) by a mere 48%-to-46% margin over his Republican challenger Ken Buck.
So the evidence is clear: there are a lot of Republican politicians and voters out there who are pro-life, who believe that abortion is morally wrong, even akin (pun intended) to murder. However, just because a lot of people disapprove of abortions doesn’t mean that all of these folks want to IMPOSE their beliefs on others. Even Rick Santorum, the rightest of the right Republican presidential candidates, issued the following statement way back in 1990, when he was starting his political career:
“While having no abortions would be ideal, it would be very difficult to criminalize any activity once a large portion of society comes to see it as a ‘right.’”
So, let’s say my theory is wrong: under what doomsday scenario could an abortion become a criminal act? There are only two ways this could happen. One would be a Constitutional Amendment making abortions illegal. Yes, this is in the Republican Party platform. It is symbolic only. It will NEVER happen. In order to amend the constitution, a bill requires a 67% majority vote in BOTH Houses of Congress and then the amendment needs to be ratified by three-quarters of the states (which is 38 out of the 50 states). Anybody wondering now why there haven’t been ANY constitutional amendments passed since 1971?
The other way is the one that Dems are more worried about, that a Republican president will pack the Supreme Court with pro-life judges and the Court will overturn its decision of Roe v. Wade. Remember that a woman’s right to choose was established by the Court, not Congress. It is extremely rare for the Court to overturn its own decision but let’s look at what would have to happen.
It is possible that either Mitt Romney or Barack Obama will have the option of selecting up to three (possibly four) Supreme Court justices. Ruth Bader Ginsburg (79 years old), Antonin Scalia (76), Anthony Kennedy (76) and Stephen Breyer (74) are all old enough that they might retire in the next four years. The fear on the left has always been that Republican presidents will tilt the Court so far to the right that Roe V. Wade will be overturned. Ginsburg and Breyer are reliable votes for the left, Scalia is almost always on the right and Kennedy is usually the perennial “swing vote.”
Recent history has shown that Supreme Court justices retire only when a like-minded President is in office. So if Romney wins, you could expect Ginsburg and Breyer to hang around as long as their health permits. If just one of the two can “survive” a Romney presidency, there is zero chance for overturning a woman’s right to choose. Chief Justice John Roberts (a Republican) proved, in upholding the ObamaCare mandate, that he doesn’t want his Court to intervene in major issues that affect all Americans. You can rely on Roberts (and likely Kennedy) to join the left on this issue.
But let’s say doomsday occurs and a future Supreme Court overturns Roe. What would that mean? It wouldn’t mean that abortions would immediately become illegal. It would mean that the individual states would have the legal right to pass laws to MAKE abortions illegal. Most states would never do this. There might be one or two red states with Republican leaders who would commit political suicide and enact laws to criminalize the procedure. But as the results from the personhood amendments in Mississippi and Colorado proved, there’s a big difference between being pro-life and actually VOTING to make abortion a criminal act.
One thing I can guarantee: if the Supreme Court were ever to overturn Roe, it would be the #1 and ONLY issue in politics for years. The Democrats would have landslide victories in the next House and Senate elections, creating super majorities so big that they could probably pass a constitutional amendment that would make it legal. And Romney would be trounced in his re-election bid by anybody the Dems’ would care to nominate.
Let me end by saying this one last time: the elimination of the right to choose will NEVER, EVER, EVER be taken away. Republicans will continue to cater to the religious right and nothing will happen. It is a big issue in theory only, not in practice.