Local Control on Abortion
Supreme Court liberals, in dissent: "Withdrawing a woman’s right to choose whether to continue a pregnancy does not mean that no choice is being made. It means that a majority of today’s Court has wrenched this choice from women and given it to the States."
The states? Why stop there?
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| Politico |
County-by-county control on abortion would be a vast improvement in representative government. We are accustomed to neighboring counties having different zoning laws, different health department priorities, different policing protocols, different facilities, and different politics. Local control maximizes representation.
A close look at counties, however, reveals sharp internal divisions, visible at the neighborhood level. In my home country, densely-settled college-town Ashland had precincts giving 82% and 85% of the vote to the Democrat, Kate Brown. Yet in a rural precinct less than five miles outside Ashland she received less than 19% of the vote.
To make the abortion decision "close to the people," we need neighborhoods to govern, not counties or states. This is not uncommon or unworkable. Voters are already divided into voting area precincts. We have local school districts, fire districts, and irrigation districts providing government tailored to that community's needs and wishes. A great many socially conservative anti-abortion advocates favor "neighborhood schools." They argue that parents at the local level should decide if their schools teach sex education or disturbing information about slavery, racism, or gender. Why should people in D.C., or the state capital, or even people in another part of the same county make those decisions for that school? And then, in the local school, if the sex education lessons seem objectionable, individual parents can and do pull their children out of class for that lesson. After all, sex is a personal matter. Each parent decides what is best.
The principle of bringing the decision closer to the people has no clear limiting factor. That principle can be applied thoroughly and all the way down to the individual parent. We call it liberty. Abortion clinics can be sited in neighborhoods that want them. We would see them scattered about--but only where they are accepted. On the personal level, if someone opposes abortion, she shouldn't have one.
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17 comments:
Abortion is a medical procedure that is sometimes necessary for the physical and/or mental health of the mother. Do we really want politicians dictating that ten-year-old rape victims bear their attacker’s spawn, or that women carry a fetus with anencephaly to term?
Please forgive the levity, but the first image that came to mind for me upon seeing the issue framed this way? A voter's pamphlet listing the contenders for, e.g., Sams Valley Abortion District, Position 4.
Seriously, though, what is the nature of the right to abortion access? If it's a fundamental right, it cannot--should not--be subject to regular plebiscite, even if states traditionally rule health and welfare.
There is an axis extending from total federal control down through state and local control to total individual control. Each issue falls somewhere on that axis. Each of us most likely has a different opinion about where each issue should fall.
Abortion? Liberals say individual control, conservatives say states’ rights.
Election policy? Liberals say federal control, conservatives say states’ rights,
School choice? Liberals say federal control, conservatives say individual control.
Gun rights? Liberals say federal control, conservatives say individual control.
Free speech at colleges? Liberals say local institution control, conservatives say individual control.
Free speech on social media? Liberals say corporate control, conservatives say individual control.
There is no principled consistency to be had here, just political preferences in principled drag.
Is this satire?
Isn't the individual, the point of Roe?
Republican pandering, via Trump/McConnell, to the religious zealots has trashed the Supreme Court, and has put the World's best hope for democracy at risk. The Roe decision was a compromise that leaned toward the autonomy of the individual while recognizing that such a compromise jeopardized founding principles, and would be at risk from those who would take advantage of dissent. Conservatism has failed to persuade and now has resorted to violence to impose its will, as evidenced by Dobbs, which is nothing less than violence against women. It's just the beginning.
It's encouraging to see the lines of cars leaving Russia. Let's hope we don't end up in the same place, as we only have Canada for an escape, or a long swim elsewhere.
LD, thanks. Your lighthearted post is exactly what I have in mind. More likely it would be a city district. The isolated college town in a county. It would be a polity large enough that it would have doctors offices and an area zoned for medical facilities.
My suspicion is that some gynocologists in fact do abortions or clean-ups of problem pregnancies quietly under the cover of anodyne other procedures, at least for regular health checkup clients. I don't KNOW that, but it makes sense. There are lots of reasons for a physician to do procedures in a medical gray area.
State legislatures will likely pre-empt local control. People like to make rules for other people. I am attempting to point out the hypocrisy. If local control is the principle, and freedom is the principle, then I extended it to its logical conclusion, using the local school board meetings and the anti-abortion/anti-sex-education mother as the poster child.
I like the analogy of the college dorm for smokers. Let's say 20% of a student population wants to smoke tobacco or whatever and 80% want no smoking. There could be a college-wide rule passed by the majority. That would mean 20% are unhappy and there is an ongoing enforcement problem. The other solution is federalism. Let the college say that 20% of the dorm buildings allow smoking, the others do not. Now nearly everyone is satisfied, and enforcement problems greatly diminish.
Peter Sage
Responding to LD:
If, as you say, abortion is a fundamental right, the constitution has a clear mechanism for delineating and establishing that right: the Bill Of Rights.
We have the First Amendment for free speech, and the Second Amendment for gun rights. A fundamental right to abortion would require its own new constitutional amendment.
I would vote for it.
If the abortion issue had been left to states in the beginning, as per the constitution and as “assisted suicide” is playing out, we would never have gotten to this point. Europe is largely measured and rational.
I’m pro-abortion and I thought that also at the time. So 50 years of wars and we thought it was over … boomerang.
If Mississippi is at one extreme, Oregon is at the other.
Mr Trigoboff, I believe Congress could also enact legislation legalizing.
By the way, If the people are so hell-bent on joining Idaho, why don’t they just move there? Otherwise it looks kind of dumb.
You say that the states "have significant internal divisions"? Is there any reason for us to believe that that is not the case nationally?? That in itself is another reason for the 10th Amendment.
In truth Peter, I couldn't agree more.
For many years I have believed that every County in America should become a State in the Union, Therefore we would have a little over 3,000 states in the United States.
We could certainly take that down further to every City, town, and village, and yes, to our very neighborhoods, ...and, yes, to our very individual home with our full family unit of father, mother, and children. The truest form of government there is.
Just ask Israel, one of the oldest legendary families to truly resist the destructive power of time, to the culmination of one of the grandest family reunions that the Earth will ever come to know. Family endowed with so much abundance that no matter how many armies they faced they persist and persist and persist. In truth, this is mainly due to the temerity and endurance of the house of Judah in order that the entire family come back together. Baruch Hashem!! Happy New Year!!
Now just imagine, Peter, If Abraham had gone through with God's command, and sacrificed his beloved Son as a burnt offering. None of this would be. In fact, America would never come to exist, and even better yet, there would be no Christians in which to spew your invectives.
But God knows you better than you know yourself Peter. Because God intervened on his own behalf sending a "representative" to suggest an alternative to what was so common in that time and place of human sacrifice to the goddess/whore of Babbling on n on n on...
Besides, Rams are so much tastier, definitely a more pleasant fragrance.
God knew Abraham well enough to know that he was his faithful servant and no matter how much of a sacrifice it would be, he would do as his God insisted, but the God of Abraham is no ordinary God who demands blood and human sacrifice.
This is a God who commands you to distinguish yourself apart from all others and yet humble yourself in their sight. This is a God that commands clean living so that you may live a long, healthy life. This is a God that commands you to love your neighbor as you would love yourself(and remember that it was Rabbi Hillel of the Pharisees that said it before Jesus supposedly said it) but if you do not love yourself, or, if you love yourself in strange and unclean ways, there will be disorder, and misery, and death.
This is a God that wants nothing more than for your family to flourish.
But today more and more people are submitting to "strange and unclean ways", because none of us want to take responsibility for our own actions. We want it to be washed away, surgically removed, or for a magic pill to just eliminate the problem.
Again, I say: Nuclear war is My White Pill. ..."we'll meet again, ...don't know where, don't know when, but, I KNOW..."
...it's a JEFFERSON STATE of mind
31 states (including Oregon) and Washington D.C. have laws allowing forced sterilizations, taking away people's right to decide to have a child, so it should come as no surprise that states consider themselves entitled to also take away the right not to have one.
Some say that unless the Constitution specifies something as a right, it isn't one. Point of information: there's no mention in the Constitution about a right to travel, but the Supreme Court has interpreted it as one anyway. Of course, as we've seen, what SCOTUS has given SCOTUS can take away.
To Sally -
Your comment is exactly what RBG said. She agonized over the ruling as it created a legal test that, without clear stipulation within the Bill of Right, was easy for culture and religious warriors to attack the court's ruling. The Supreme Court preempted the process where by, over time, a States Rights issue like abortion would have swelled to the level of a universal mandate that of course a woman is entitled to control her own reproduction. We saw this play out with same-sex marriage. Oh if there could be a do-over.
You’re right, Sally. Congress could do that. It wouldn’t be a fundamental right, though, if it were done that way.
Much of the discussion today is interesting but not realistic. The Supreme Court turned over pro-life versus pro-choice to the states. Does anyone really think a state will delegate decision making to cities or counties over whether to expand or limit abortion rights? What I can't figure out (so please explain) is whether Congress has authority to determine the cutoff for getting an abortion, such as 15 weeks or whatever, given that the states are clearly entitled and clearly supposed to decide such matters. Is federal authority based on the commerce clause? When a state has determined the extent of a woman's right to an abortion, or her lack of such a right, what allows Congress to change that, even if a fetus is a person?
I agree that states are unlikely to let there be local control, but they could if they wanted to. Sometimes there is state pre-emption, sometimes not.
The argument of the anti-abortion advocates is that the issue SHOULD be settled by politics because abortion isn't a right. And they argue for it on the basis of states being the logical and appropriate voice of the people. My effort was to pop that balloon. Tell the people in Harney County that state government represents them. It represents the STATE majority, but not them. Since I think the woman herself is the appropriate decision maker I attempted to use the abortion opponents' argument against themselves. I suspect there are polities. even in Alabama, where a majority supports abortion and would welcome an abortion clinic.
Peter Sage
It's just me, but I think that the Greater Idaho zealots in Oregon aren't aware Idaho has a relatively stiff sales tax, and further are under the impression that even joining Idaho, they would get to keep their sales tax free status. A situation easily rectified by an Oregon agreement with Idaho to collect those taxes for Idaho, and enacting appropriate Legislation.
John F And Michael Trigoboff
Thanks.
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