Penumbra Obliterated

I’ve got a question for any of our readers that happen to be lawyers.

Free access to abortion services appears to be a shibboleth of the Left that they hold particularly dear. That, at least, is the unmistakable conclusion one must draw when considering the actions of the Democrats.

For example, the abortion question was at the forefront of the news all during the Bush administration. Just about every time the President nominated a jurist to fill a vacancy on a court bench, it seems that the Democrats wanted to spend most of their time during the confirmation hearings endlessly grilling the potential judge on their views concerning abortion. If memory serves, it started with Priscilla Owen, who had to wait through four years of wrangling and filibuster before her nomination ever came to a vote! In fact, she would probably still be stuck in confirmation hearing limbo if it wasn’t for the so-called Gang of 14.

There were other issues that got the Dem’s fur up, but it seemed to me that the abortion issue certainly took center stage more often than any other.

Unless I am mistaken, abortions are considered a right because the only way to outlaw them is to allow the government to violate our right to privacy. The right to an abortion isn’t directly a right as specified under the Constitution, but it is a right protected under the penumbra of the 14th Amendment.

Such vital decisions are between a pregnant woman and her doctor. But wouldn’t increased government meddling in the medical profession destroy the very basis of that right?

Pres. Obama recently gave a speech concerning his health care reform plan. The now infamous “red pill, blue pill” speech. It seems to me that he thinks most doctors are either ill-informed hacks who don’t know what they are doing, or else they are money-besotted greedniks that care more for stuffing their bank accounts than curing the sick. Either way, a panel of experts needs to be appointed to develop “protocols of health care.”

So Obama’s solution to the high costs of health care is to have the government take a direct interest in every aspect, even going so far as dictating which drugs your doctor is allowed to prescribe for you.

Taking this to the next logical step, it seems to me that any questions about a right to privacy go out the window toot sweet. Not only that, but neither you nor your personal physician has any real control over any aspect of your health care. The government knows everything about your medical history, it can override your doctor’s decisions, so why can’t it regulate abortions? Or even do away with them altogether?

If this is the way the dominoes fall, it is rather a delicious irony that both sides of the aisle might see a major unintended consequence if Obamacare is ever implemented.

Conservatives will have to suffer through a deteriorating health care system, with spiraling costs and increasing inefficiency, but at least they could console themselves with the abolishment of abortion.

Democrats, on the other hand, would finally get one step closer to their Socialist utopia, but they’d lose out on a political issue that they have expended so much capital protecting.