It's panic time for the Left. Tonight, President Trump is expected to announce his Supreme Court nominee to replace retiring justice Anthony Kennedy. But the Left doesn't care what any potential nominee thinks about the Constitution. They're only obsessed with one thing – whether one of these potential justices will be the deciding vote in overturning Roe v. Wade, the holy grail of landmark Supreme Court cases for the Left.
In the always-entertaining Washington Post Opinion section yesterday, Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, wrote a piece titled: "Roe isn't just about women's rights. It's about everyone's personal liberty."
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Northup's first lie is front and center in her title – "it's about everyone's personal liberty" – well, everyone's except the unborn baby's.
She writes:
"Given the president's promise to appoint justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade, it's widely understood that his nominee will pose a clear danger to women's reproductive rights. What most don't realize is that everyone's personal-liberty rights are on the line."
Oh, okay. So, now the Left is worried about "personal-liberty rights," but they weren't worried about that in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case, and not when it comes to the Second Amendment right to bear arms, and not even with something like the Obamacare individual mandate. They simply don't see personal-liberty rights at stake in those instances.
Northup continues:
"That line [that the Supreme Court drew to previous landmark decisions] led to the conclusion, enshrined in Roe and elaborated on in Casey, that liberty cannot exist if we are not free to make decisions about our lives, bodies and health free from government interference."
The thing is, if the Left was actually as concerned as Nancy Northup seems to be about personal-liberty rights, conservatives could more often be in lock-step with the Left. But her argument about Roe v. Wade being the linchpin of our personal-liberty rights misses something that is glaringly obvious. The pro-life position says, yes, absolutely, bring on the personal-liberty rights, but if we believe to our core in those rights, then they must be extended to that person growing in the womb. It's completely hypocritical to demand those rights for yourself and in the same breath deny them to a person in the womb that is just months from joining the world.
Progressives like Northup think they own the patent on empathy. Yet, they are apparently incapable of placing themselves in the shoes of the unborn.
Progressives like Northup think they own the patent on empathy. Yet, they are apparently incapable of placing themselves in the shoes of the unborn. If Nancy Northup was in the womb right now, just 32 weeks from birth, would she not want the personal-liberty rights she's talking about to be preserved for her? All men [and women] are created equal… endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights… If you honestly believe that, and you can extrapolate that concept to slavery and see it as evil, or to the Holocaust and see that as evil, how can you not see that it is wrong to deny those rights to the unborn, and even worse, to deny those rights by killing that person in the womb?
Northup says:
"You can have either the president's promise about overturning Roe or the Constitution's promise of a realm of personal liberty. You can't have both."
Actually, you can. The Left makes it sound so easy to overturn Roe v. Wade, but it wouldn't be, and there's no guarantee that it will happen even with a supposed conservative majority. Even if it was overturned, states would still decide on their own abortion law – some might ban it, many would still allow it. Overturning Roe v. Wade would be an anti-murder decision, not the restriction on personal liberty that terrifies the Left.
You can have both overturning Roe and the Constitution's promise of a realm of personal liberty. First, because abortion would still be available in many parts of the country, it's just that killing your child might be a little more inconvenient. Second, overturning Roe would actually extend that realm of personal-liberty rights to more Americans as hundreds of thousands of babies every year would now get to live.
Overturning Roe would not be the restrictive, Handmaid's Tale scenario that the Left is in a panic over. It would actually break the padlocks on some of the cattle cars of the endless Holocaust trains that we call abortion.