13th Amendment, US Constitution:
Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. [My emphasis.]
Section 2. Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
No law is self-enforcing. No one can simply snap his/her fingers and suddenly STOP “abortions” from happening. Such “prohibition” laws MUST be accompanied by a threat of CRIMINAL prosecution, conviction and punishment for those who intend to proceed with an abortion. In other words, any new “laws” must suddenly criminalize otherwise law-abiding persons.
Most states provide very little financial assistance to poor women who must raise their children in poverty. Such benefits are scorned by many well-off people as “welfare.” So, as I understand the coming scenario, the state will prohibit women from having early-term abortions, and those women will thereby be FORCED to carry their fetuses to term, be FORCED to give possibly painful birth, then be FORCED to spend the next 18-25 years raising those government-mandated children with very little financial assistance, including medical assistance and food. I just don't understand how that squares with a notion of LIMITED government.
I know some who are reading this piece are weary of my blatherings about the US Supreme Court’s revocation of ROE v. WADE. I AGREE with those who (like Justice Samuel Alito, the primary author of the recent DOBBS Opinion that seemingly revoked ROE) say that there is no “right” to an abortion openly declared in the US Constitution. My belief has been, though, that neither the states nor the federal government have the POWER to criminalize any thing done with or to a woman’s body by herself UNLESS another “person's" interests are adversely affected thereby, and that is basically what Justice Harry Blackmun was saying in ROE v. WADE with his famous “trimester” analysis. That Opinion left the abortion decision to the pregnant woman and her attending physician(s) without government interference UNTIL the seventh month of pregnancy, whereupon the fetus is likely “viable” and might be able to live outside the mother’s womb. So those fetuses are surely deserving of state protection, just as babies already born are thus protected.
Yet there is nothing seemingly written into the law that gives a pregnant woman a “veto” power over a political majority in a state legislature. I have been struggling to “square that circle” by finding a CONSTITUTIONAL argument that voids the presumed power of a state to step in and “protect” all fetuses, irrespective of development, as some are wont to do. That DOBBS decision is BAD law and should be immediately reversed. I hope I have here succeeded in showing the way.
I have finally realized that there is NO SUCH THING as a “constitutional right”! Constitutions cannot possibly recite all of our rights, and the Framers of the US Constitution did not attempt to do so. That much is made clear by the 9th Amendment, which Justice Blackmun cited in ROE, and which Alito airily dismissed in DOBBS. Constitutions are, instead, recitations about government POWERS only—what is required of government and what is prohibited. POWER flows from the People to government; rights do NOT flow from government to us, the People! We are dependent ONLY on having governments (unlike other countries) that will completely ENFORCE our rights! The DOBBS majority on the US Supreme Court has, sadly, violated their solemn oaths to support the US Constitution and all the manifestations that flow from it. They have dishonestly turned their backs on protecting the People, and they should each be impeached and removed.
All governments inside the US cannot possibly have any power that ignores scientific reality, and the “reality” is that a fetus cannot possibly be a legal “person” who merits his/her own protection, unless/until it reaches a state of “viability,” as discussed above, whereby it then becomes its own “person” able to survive, separate and apart from the mother’s body. The issue of “viability” is a medical issue, NOT a legal issue, so it cannot be autocratically changed by a state legislature mostly full of men. Until such time, the fetus is an integral part of the mother’s body, and its fate is FULLY controllable by her alone.
ANYTHING to the contrary amounts to enforced “servitude” whereby a pregnant woman may be REQUIRED by a state government to carry that fetus to term, give birth, and raise the child at her own expense for many years, all regardless of her own wishes. She may not be in chains nor out in a field picking cotton, but the state is, nevertheless, attempting to regulate and compel the treatment of her own body against her wishes. THAT is, in my opinion, INVOLUNTARY SERVITUDE and a blatant violation of the 13th Amendment. And, contrary to my earlier conclusions, it is specifically addressable by Congress per Section 2!
Article VI of the US Constitution, which EVERY state has ratified, declares that the US Constitution is the “… supreme Law of the Land.” Therefore, EVERY state’s “sovereignty” is subordinate to that ratified declaration. And Article VI also REQUIRES that ALL officials, both federal AND state officials and including legislators and judges, “to support this Constitution, …” and every one of them has sworn an oath to do so.
So it is. Let it be.
