Partial Birth Abortion
Tom links to an interesting entry on the partial birth abortion ban:
And yet, the Republicans write a ban that does not limit itself to one procedure, and does not contain any health exception. They’ve written a ban, in other words, that’s specifically designed to be rejected by the Supreme Court. What’s up with that?
Follow the links for the reason. This ban reminds me of other pointless legislation, such as the assault weapons ban. Neither really accomplishes anything. The AWB doesn’t ban assault weapons and this ban will not stop partial birth abortion.
Remember, it’s not important that the laws congress passes actually do anything good. It’s important that congress appear to be doing something good.
November 6th, 2003 at 11:01 am
That’s it precisely.
November 6th, 2003 at 12:14 pm
The other parallel you fail to mention is the attachement of made-up incendiary terms like “assualt weapons” and “partial-birth” that don’t really apply. Any weapon is an assault weapon if you use it to assault someone, so the term is meaningless. Any abortion involves the destruction of a fetus, and is as such unpleasant, so the “partial-birth” term is put there for oomph but without any real meaning.
November 6th, 2003 at 12:18 pm
Would you rather i called it the sucking an almost born baby out of the womb, peircing its skull with a sharp stick, and sucking its brains out with a vacuum ban?
November 6th, 2003 at 1:53 pm
Would you rather I called it the weapons that can be used to quickly gun down dozens of coworkers without reloading ban?
November 6th, 2003 at 1:59 pm
Yes, it’s more accurate.
All kidding aside, it bans no such weapons. It bans the features those weapons can have. however, thepartial birth abortion ban doesn’t name a specific procedure.
Both are bad.
November 6th, 2003 at 3:21 pm
Not a bad link on D&X (“partial birth”) abortions. Most notably, it seems that the procedure is “very rarely performed,” and that when it is used, it’s almost always done for legitimate medical reasons.
November 7th, 2003 at 9:49 am
Another thing that I find interesting is that the pro-abortion folks automatically oppose ANY restriction or regulation of abortion, because they view it as the first step in a plan to outlaw abortion completely.
But 2nd Amendment supporters are just wackos when they oppose gun control laws.
November 7th, 2003 at 10:04 am
good point.
November 7th, 2003 at 11:34 am
That editorial has been brewing in my head for a long time, how there are uncomfortable synergies between the pro-choice folks and the pro-second-amendment folks. Both employ similar same slippery-slope arguments, but relatively few people fall into both groups (i.e., the pro-gun crowd, I’d wager, is overwhelmingly pro-life — which could be misconstrued as an anomoly in and of itself).
In both cases, I don’t have a problem with common-sense legislation, so I don’t totally buy the slippery slope stuff. I don’t mind post-viability abortion bans, provided there are adequate protections for the health and safety of the pregnant woman, and provided there are exemptions for badly malformed fetuses unlikely to survive outside the womb anyway.
Similarly, I don’t mind gun licensing and registration requirements, as long as they’re at the state level and not the federal, and as long as there are no prohibitive fees associated with such licensing and registration. That sentiment generally gets me crucified within the NRA crowd, but I still don’t see anything unreasonable about requiring a prospective gun owner to demonstrate that they actually know how to use the thing.
Once you start passing laws designed to discourage or criminalize gun ownership or abortion, rather than simply promoting responsibility and safety, that’s where I start to have a problem.
November 7th, 2003 at 1:38 pm
Considering that we’ve seen the slippery-slope in action w.r.t. gun rights, I’m quite willing to grant the pro-abortion people that point. In fact, considering that a lot of people ARE opposed to abortion, period, the “partial-birth” ban (see, I’ll even grant them the scare quotes) probably IS viewed by a lot of people as a first step.
Believing in the slippery-slope doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a wacko.