The Supreme Court determined, over 40 years ago, that the Constitution protected a woman's right to decide whether to reproduce, at least during the first trimester, and gave the states leeway to protect the fetus after that, especially in the third trimester.
You may not like that decision, but it's the law and the choice right is as much a part of the Constitution as the right to keep and bear arms. Subject to regulation, but NOT subject to being denied.
First off, No. The right to keep and bear arms is spelled out.
Now, maybe I missed something in one of the many times I have read the Constitution, so please point to the part that gives anyone the right to deprive a baby of life with neither charge, nor trial, nor conviction by a jury of their peers. I missed it, and I thought I was passably familiar with the Document and Amendments.
The right to reproduce or not is most simply exercised prior to coitus. In fact people decide to not reproduce daily, tens to thousands of times, whether any decision to at least go through the motions is followed up on and completed or not. Somehow, I envision you as one who has seen that look, that "Not if you were the last man on earth" expression of rejected prospective reproductive activity, but if you're hanging with liberal chicks, you're probably only getting that from the pear-shaped ones with flattop haircuts and dunlop's syndrome.
Most often, that decision is made prior (as in long prior) to any hint of physical activity, while communication is still in digital form (one sole digit, middle, extended, back of hand displayed with digit pointing upward) or its verbal equivalent, or perhaps a more courteous rejection.
No one acting within out laws has ever denied a woman her right to choose not to reproduce. Up to and even after the moment of penetration, the woman is (and remains) free to call a halt to such proceedings and send the fellow forth nursing his painfully azure appendages and wounded pride. It has ever been thus, and laws exist in our terribly sexist society to punish the wretch who fails to fully honor her demand that any further activity immediately cease, with prosecution and prison, or in some cases where a fellow becomes too tumescent to apply reason and restraint and desist on demand, even the death penalty, although that usually applies for those who impose themselves throughout the process.
So women have ever had the right to determine whether or not they reproduce, and in the fashion of Western Chivalry (as horribly decried as it may be by the vagina-hat wearing and vocal contingent who claim it "sexist"--which admittedly, it is), predicated on the protection of and esteem for those precious and wonderful human vessels who bring forth our sons and daughters and who make our lives heaven or hell or sometimes both, our culture has wholly acknowledged the right of a woman to choose within some social constrictions whether or not she wishes to, colloquially, make a baby, and with whom. Severe punishment awaits the man who refuses to abide by that choice.
So choice is not the issue, the question becomes one of timing.
The accepted time frame for making that choice has been until the moment of conception. The very last acceptable opt-out (AKA: "pull and pray") has been practiced, with limited success, since people figured out that storks and cabbages were only coincidentally involved and not essential to reproduction.
Many methods of achieving those ends have been invented, from the most basic to biochemical and mechanical means of preventing conception.
However, like all things, that option has a use-by date, a point where the second hand sweeps past the deadline, the DNA combine, the embryo implants, and reproduction is a
fait acompli.
As Gene Wilder, in one of his best cinematic moments might have said, "Life! I have created life!", and indeed you have.
Now the question has changed. It is not one of whether to reproduce, but one of what to do about it.
Whether that result of all the hormone and pheronome-charged activity is a lovingly welcomed addition to an established family, an approaching awkward moment with her parents on the way to the altar, or will it end in a death so horrible we would decry the practice from those who are masters of public and horrible executions, but they won't even do to their enemies what that growing innocent has in store in its brief future.
Consider that. For the accused criminal, we appoint an attorney, we quail at depriving one of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, we provide for years of appeals to avoid the death penalty, and if all fails to produce a verdict of "not guilty" of one of those most heinous and evil crimes (including, in some instances the imposition of reproductive activity), only then do we, as humanely as possible, terminate the life of that person we have deemed by virtue of their horrible acts to be someone we don't even want loose in a prison population.
We still regard protections against the cruel or unusual termination of that convicted criminal's life.
We even make allowances for those not capable of or of expressing rational thought and refuse to convict them in such a way that they suffer the ultimate penalty for their ill deeds.
We would not consider mechanically shredding them.
We would not inject them with or subject them to chemicals which effectively burn them to death.
We would not pull them feet first through an orifice, millimeters from freedom and cut the base of their skulls open and suck out their brains.
Such acts would be considered by any civilized society far too cruel and unusual to be practiced as a mode of execution for people convicted of even the most horrible crimes, in fact would be considered among them and by any standard, inhuman.
By now, you may well see exactly where I am going with this.
That is the punishment reserved for those who have never had a chance to commit any crime, whose only 'evil' is their inconvenient presence.
The intentional destruction of those humans, (statistically speaking, half or whom are female) is demanded as a "right" by those whose very decision to reproduce brought them into existence. It is no longer a decision of whether or not to reproduce, that decision has been made, it is now a decision regarding the future of an existing life, one which has not had any opportunity to lie or steal or cause harm to any other person other than be the inconvenient by-product of their choice to reproduce.
For decades of the development of modern medicine, we grappled with the moral quandary of whether to save the mother at the expense of the child in medical situations where the mother's life was endangered by the position of that developing child (ectopic and Fallopian pregnancies).
In some cases, acknowledging the demise of both if nothing was done, we grudgingly permitted the taking of that small life in order to save that of the mother. In other instances, the mother, herself, has opted to not take medical treatments which would have saved her life but cost the life of her baby, that her child might live even if she would not. Such is the measure of the love a mother can have for her child, sacrificing her very life for her progeny.
On the other hand, there are those who would go to any lengths to recant that decision to reproduce, by taking the life that grows within them.
Traditionally, we had legally forbidden such, we had even gone to great lengths to provide for the means to permit the inconvenient results of the illicit couplings of adults who had decided against social convention to reproduce to be born and be raised, and albeit bastardy was not granted the full keys to the castle in most cases, even royal bloodlines have their unsanctioned branches. There is even an heraldic device for such on coats of arms. Even for the more ordinary folks, the means to discreetly deliver and raise those children existed, often the result of churches putting their money where their mouths were and providing for them or the adoption services to ensure those children would lead lives where they were loved, or at least wanted.
It is only since five people in black robes decided that the "right to choose" whether to reproduce could be invoked after the fact, retroactively, opened the door to the question of where the cut-off date is for committing the murder of those who are inarguably innocent--a decision which opens other doors to darker places which are beyond the scope of this writing.
Oddly enough, despite all Western precedent, despite that such actions undertaken against prisoners of war or heinous admitted and convicted criminals, would be seen as war crimes or unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment, respectively, those justices decided in one of the worst decisions in the context of western jurisprudence that performing those acts on babies was just hunky-dory, and decreed that women had a
right to slaughter their offspring.
It wasn't that such wasn't ever done in the past, under the threat of being found out and prosecuted or reviled by their peers, with that decision it became official policy.
How can a nation which decried the eugenics programs of totalitarian governments, reviled the evils of concentration camps and gulags for the punishment and extermination of everyone inconvenient in their society from political dissidents to actual criminals to children guilty only of being born to parents of whom the State did not approve, which pointed its moral finger at apartheid and intertribal genocide in Africa, consider itself a bastion of freedom and the moral light of a free world and yet sanction the practice of infanticide which has murdered more than any single political ideology or -ism in the past century, a century which fairly swam in human blood?
The
Roe decision heralded the modern era of cognitive dissonance in this Republic, when those who are charged with the protection of the very Rights with which Our Creator endowed us, and which Rights we attempted to protect from just such Governmental edicts via the Constitution and Bill of Rights, hand down a decision so juxtaposed to the entire cultural fabric and moral fiber from which this Republic was made to sanction limitless murder of the most innocent among us, especially in a time when there are so many ways for a woman to decide not to reproduce
before the fact.
One thing is certain, while a woman may invoke this retroactive 'right' to avoid the results of her decision to reproduce, there remains the fact that once that action is taken, that decision to end that life can't be reconsidered nor reversed. Some things just can't be undone.
Many, convinced by the charlatans who have decried that life as a 'lump of tissue', will bear the scars of their decision for the rest of their life. Some will find consolation in repentance of that decision and the love of a forgiving God, but all, misled by those who tout a 'right' crafted by five people in black robes, will suffer from their decision.
How anyone who claims to stand for the 'rights of women' can countenance such an abortion of jurisprudence is beyond me, but such is life (and death) in the era of cognitive dissonance.
