Anna Quindlen - Bedroom v. Courtroom

[realFedUp]

Bedroom v. Courtroom

Instead of fostering an atmosphere in which government was agnostic on abortion, Roe v. Wade fomented one in which it became activist.

By Anna Quindlen
Newsweek

Nov. 14, 2005 issue - Samuel Alito has heard hundreds of cases during his long tenure on the court of appeals, but the interested members of the American public are now likely familiar with a single one. It is the dissent in which Judge Alito ruled that it was not an undue burden for a married woman to be obliged to notify her husband that she was having an abortion.

snip

Alito argued that spousal notification was no undue burden and noted that under the terms of the Pennsylvania statute it was "difficult to enforce and easy to evade." In other words, it was merely a symbolic roadblock.
To what purpose? To pay lip service to the marital bond? To lump spousal and parental notification together, so that women become children and husbands guardians? To play some cynical game with complex decisions of conscience for the sake of the folks back home?

snip

We're in a real mess here, trying to fit a profound and intimate matter into a system more suited to tax codes and property issues, like trying to solve the mysteries of literature using formulas in math class. That's because abortion is unlike any other matter and pregnancy is different from any other state of being. The situation in which an embryo is permitted to grow over time into an independent human in the body of another is just not comparable to anything else. Yet analogy is the lifeblood of both lawmakers and jurists.

snip

Imagine how it could transform the landscape if somehow abortion were absent from government intervention or interference. Those who believe it is a moral wrong could fight through hearts and minds, not laws that would resurrect the Lysol and the garden hose. Those who believe it is a woman's personal decision could choose either to end a pregnancy or to continue it and have a child. How much money could be raised for safe abortions for poor women and for prenatal care, too, if it didn't need to be poured into the incessant pinball game of partisan politics. And judges could return to those issues that lend themselves to jurisprudence instead of puzzling out the singular fact patterns of the womb.

continued

[madeline_con]

1. My philosophy...

If someone is against abortion, they don't have to have one. End of discussion! ;)

[No Exit]

2. She's come close to expressing what I couldn't express.

"We're in a real mess here, trying to fit a profound and intimate matter into a system more suited to tax codes and property issues, like trying to solve the mysteries of literature using formulas in math class."

I like that quote.

I have what I think are ideas along these lines, but I know I can't express them coherently. That--plus the fact that it never fails, anytime someone mentions the "abortion issue", they are bound to offend someone else.

I'm trying to think of an analogy. Here's a situation completely unrelated to someone having an abortion: say Person A does very grievous physical harm to Person B. We know Person A must compensate Person B... but suppose Person B has to, say, have his/her legs amputated because of what Person A did? How can Person A really do anything to get Person B his/her legs back?

There is really nothing A can do to completely compensate B. So we make A give a great big sum of money to B. But that still never gives B his/her legs back.

IOW, we take a horrible situation and put a legal/monetary framework on it. But the horrible situation was something that the legal/monetary system really is inadequate to address.

And, to return to the issue of abortion, I think it is an issue that politics and legalism are inadequate to address.

Okay, that's all. Now people can get on with being offended with me.