The long knives of the Left are being sharpened in anticipation of the confirmation hearing of Judge Samuel Alito, nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court.
While a number of charges are being leveled against Judge Alito, they are nothing more than stalking horses for the main one. Judge Alito, his critics maintain, will vote to reverse Roe v. Wade. Whether the charge is true remains to be seen.
History has shown that there is a poor correlation between how nominees are expected to vote and how they actually vote on the abortion issue. Republican presidents have been notoriously unsuccessful in nominating judges who actually voted to reverse Roe v. Wade. Nevertheless, there is value to examining the rhetoric that undergirds the charge.
Justice Alito would undermine a woman's right to choose: The right to choose what? Note how the rhetoric of pro-abortion advocates always divorces the "right to choose" from the object of the choice. They prefer that Americans view the right to choose as an abstraction rather than as a concrete reality. But the right to choose is not an abstraction; nor is it exercised in a vacuum. The morality (and legality) of any choice has always been determined on the basis of what is being chosen. And let's get real here -– we're not talking about choosing between chocolate and vanilla. What we are talking about is the "right" of a woman to choose to kill her innocent unborn child. The fact that pro-abortion advocates will not own up to the true nature of the "choice" they advocate is a reflection of the moral poverty of their position.
Judge Alito does not acknowledge that the Constitution protects a right to abortion: We know that that used to be true; whether it is now is undetermined. In a job application submitted 20 years ago to the Reagan Administration, Mr. Alito stated that he believed that the Constitution does not protect the right to an abortion. In the aftermath of his Supreme Court nomination, however, Judge Alito has distanced himself from that application, saying that at the time he was an "advocate" applying for a job. Now, he maintains, his legal views have changed somewhat and, as a judge, he has "great respect for precedent." Judge Alito's views on the legal foundations of abortion, thus, appear equivocal-a posture his handlers, no doubt, felt was required in light of the current climate in the Senate.
The truth is, Alito got it right in his job application. There is not a single reference to the right to abortion in the Constitution. Nor is there anything to be gleaned from the debates by the Constitution's framers that suggests such a right was in view at the time the Constitution was adopted. The "right" to abortion was one that was created ex nihilo (out of nothing) by a majority of the Supreme Court in 1973, when it decided Roe v. Wade. They did it because they could, substituting "power" for "authority". Supporters of Roe predicate the right to abortion on the "right to privacy," but that right is not mentioned in the Constitution either. Assuming that a right to privacy can be fairly implied from the Constitution, it is a huge leap to infer from such a right that a woman has the "right" to kill her innocent child.
Women cannot be truly free unless their right to reproductive freedom is protected by the Court: "Reproductive freedom" is just another euphemism for "abortion on demand." It is outrageous to maintain that a woman is not truly free unless she is free to kill her innocent unborn child. What a perverse view of freedom! People in quest of a just society should reject the view that "freedom" requires a license to kill the helpless and innocent among us.
The legacy of Roe v. Wade is that over 44 million innocent unborn children in America have perished at the hands of abortionists since 1973. The perpetrators are white-coated mercenaries who wage surgical and chemical warfare against defenseless human targets. The license to engage in such ghoulish practices comes not from the Constitution but from judges, masquerading as social engineers, who have perverted and distorted the requirements of the Constitution. Would that some future nominee to the Supreme Court and his appointing authority would have the gumption to say so.
