And I’ve noticed that everybody that is for abortion has already been born.
Make no mistake, abortion-on-demand is not a right granted by the Constitution. No serious scholar, including one disposed to agree with the Court’s result, has argued that the framers of the Constitution intended to create such a right.
The decision by the seven-man majority in Roe v. Wade has so far been made to stick. But the Court’s decision has by no means settled the debate. Instead, Roe v. Wade has become a continuing prod to the conscience of the nation.
We cannot diminish the value of one category of human life — the unborn — without diminishing the value of all human life.
If you don’t know whether a body is alive or dead, you would never bury it. I think this consideration itself should be enough for all of us to insist on protecting the unborn.
The real question today is not when human life begins, but, What is the value of human life?
The abortionist who reassembles the arms and legs of a tiny baby to make sure all its parts have been torn from its mother’s body can hardly doubt whether it is a human being.
Regrettably, we live at a time when some persons do not value all human life. They want to pick and choose which individuals have value.
As a nation, we must choose between the sanctity of life ethic and the “quality of life” ethic. I have no trouble identifying the answer our nation has always given to this basic question, and the answer that I hope and pray it will give in the future.
As a nation today, we have not rejected the sanctity of human life. The American people have not had an opportunity to express their view on the sanctity of human life in the unborn. I am convinced that Americans do not want to play God with the value of human life. It is not for us to decide who is worthy to live and who is not. Even the Supreme Court’s opinion in Roe v. Wade did not explicitly reject the traditional American idea of intrinsic worth and value in all human life; it simply dodged this issue.
We must all educate ourselves to the reality of the horrors taking place. Doctors today know that unborn children can feel a touch within the womb and that they respond to pain.
Late-term abortions, especially when the baby survives, but is then killed by starvation, neglect, or suffocation, show once again the link between abortion and infanticide. The time to stop both is now.
It is possible that the Supreme Court itself may overturn its abortion rulings. We need only recall that in Brown v. Board of Education the court reversed its own earlier “separate-but-equal” decision.
As we continue to work to overturn Roe v. Wade, we must also continue to lay the groundwork for a society in which abortion is not the accepted answer to unwanted pregnancy. Pro-life people have already taken heroic steps, often at great personal sacrifice, to provide for unwed mothers.
We will never recognize the true value of our own lives until we affirm the value in the life of others.
We cannot survive as a free nation when some men decide that others are not fit to live and should be abandoned to abortion or infanticide. My Administration is dedicated to the preservation of America as a free land, and there is no cause more important for preserving that freedom than affirming the transcendent right to life of all human beings, the right without which no other rights have any meaning.
If only we could have another president like Ronald Reagan….I was too young to really enjoy him when he was president.
Even assuming he is absolutely right on abortion, he ruined our nation, without, incidentally, accomplishing anything significant for the pro-life agenda. I’m old enough to have lived through the semi-depression his policies inflicted upon millions of working families, who were making about one third the income when he left office that they earned when he came in. With 20/20 hindsight, it is obvious that he already had early Alzheimer’s symptoms… he was always taking jokes about his long naps at the White House, his memory lapses. He lived in a rosy dream world. The rest of us had to live in the real world. I don’t really blame him personally. He was asleep at the wheel, and a cadre of ruthless men who knew exactly what they wanted to impose on America handled all the details for him.
It would be gratuitous to place too much emphasis on the fact that Reagan signed, and openly supported, California’s liberalized abortion law, some years before Roe v. Wade. Everyone has a right to change their mind, and I have no doubt that when he uttered the above words, he sincerely believed it.
He is correct of course that the constitution does not create a right to abortion on demand. It does establish a broad principle that individuals and families have a right to be left alone by the government, and the court applied that, in the best way they could see, to the specific question of regulating or prohibiting abortion by law. The only sound basis to object is that IF it is true that a human life entitled to the full protection of the law exists from the moment a zygote forms, THEN the right to be left alone of course recedes. There is, we can all agree, no constitutional right to commit murder in privacy. That would be sort of like a cult that believed in human sacrifice claiming that their First Amendment rights trumped the homicide laws. Whether first trimester abortion is murder is a matter we are still debating.
Ninety plus percent of those 50 million abortions are first trimester, and nobody is counting arms and legs after any of them. That would be late second and third trimester abortions, which are the most talked about, but the least common.
Ninety plus percent of those 50 million abortions are first trimester, and nobody is counting arms and legs after any of them.
What is that supposed to mean?
Reagan was truly a transformational force in American politics and society…and mostly for the better. I too lived through those years which began in the deepest of economic quandries thanks to the feckless Jimmy Carter. Three economic boom cycles, during which uprecedented creation of wealth occured, are directly the result of Reagan policies. It wasn’t until the disastrous 2006 elections that put Pelosi and Reid in the driver’s seat that the unravelling began.
On abortion, Reagan understood what was really needed was that hearts needed to be changed. He knew a quick political fix was not in the cards. To this end he used the bully pulpit of the presidency in each of his state of the union messages to try to nudge people in the direction of respect for the sanctity of life. When and where he could he issued executive orders limiting the federal government’s support of abortion policies. Largely due to his efforts a political shift occured in the U.S. that eventually resulted in a center right country that now boasts a majority on the Supreme Court. This was no easy task to achieve.
Revisionists, liberals, and agenda driven ideologues will never be able to understand or acknowledge the greatness and complexity of the man. All they can do is sit on the sidelines of history and take their miserable little pot shots at him. One of the most frequent criticisms we hear is that he was not an intellectual equal to the academia elite, that he was beset by the mind robbing disease that would eventually consume him. What I have to say to these is I will happily take a 78 year old Reagan at the end of his second term instead of a Clinton or an Obama in the prime of their lives.
Well, let me put it this way. Thanks to the leadership Ronald Reagan provided to the economy, in the city where I live now, the unemployment rate for African Americans doubled as the good paying industrial jobs they migrated north for disappeared, which has a lot to do with why African American women who are pregnant seek out the nearest Planned Parenthood, and why African American men can be overheard on the bus saying to a friend “Well, if she’s pregnant, that’s on her. I hate to say that, but I can’t deal with it.” Fifty years earlier, he would have had a job fresh out of high school and married the young lady before she became pregnant. Reagan had similar effects on plenty of people who think of themselves as “white” also. I recall a laid-off mother in Illinois in the early 1980s who said “I wouldn’t have had these kids if I knew I wasn’t going to be able to provide for them.” That’s Reagan’s legacy.
Agenda driven ideologues who worship at the shrine of Reagan cheer for tax cuts paid for by selling debt to the Bank of China, thereby giving the Chinese so much leverage over our policies that we hardly dare criticize them — something to consider if you want to praise Ronnie while condemning Chinese population policy. At least Clinton generated a budget surplus and started paying down the national debt. George W. Bush and his brain (Dick Cheney), convinced that “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter” more than doubled our national debt, giving away the store. If I ran my personal budget, or any family ran their budget, in a like manner, we would quite our jobs, take out a second mortgage on the house, take a long vacation to Hawaii, come home, take out a third mortgage on the house… Nobody who calls that great, or even complex, demonstrates any capacity to allow facts to interfere with their rose-tinted worldview.
Viewing the world with blinders on is what liberals do.
Spouting pat little diatribes is unworthy of a conservative. I know, because my mother is a life-long conservative, who is horrified that her beloved Republican party has run up huge deficits and multiplied the national debt, while a Democrat actually balanced the budget, generated a surplus, and began paying the debt down. I don’t know what you are, and I’m not trying to pin a label on you, but you are no conservative.
AMEN!
I miss Ronnie. there will never be another, he was a great man.