Well, initially even I was speechless, but I've cogitated and I've finally decided my take on the whole Harriet Miers nomination...
...more Bushco crony-baloney. As a judicial nominee, she's a phony. Stick a feather in her cap and call her macaroni.
You can analyse and criticize, but she's just not qualified. It's a question of sheer luck whether she'll be a disaster or not. My guess would be yes. Look for opinions in favor of corporatist, big money government - and quite possibly against reproductive freedoms.
Check out Tennessee Guerilla Women for feminist focused commentary on the Supreme Court Nominations, for example here, here and especially here.
Tags: Politics, Supreme Court, Reproductive Rights, Harriet Miers, Politics, SCOTUS, Law
cronyism Miers
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8 comments:
Hope at Appalachia Alumni poses the question that if Miers supports a constitutional amendment against abortion, does that mean she recognizes a constitutional right for abortion less an amendment? It's a good question. Any thoughts?
I think there are several different issues here:
1. A Constitutional nation-wide ban on abortion, a la the proposed nation-wide ban on gay marriage. I think (hope) this Handmaid's Tale scenario is unlikely. I think most of the Supreme Court (maybe even Thomas!) might find this unconstitutional, as Congress exceeding its powers.
2. Roe vs Wade, which was the opposite of 1. - a nationwide right to abortion, based on a federal privacy right. From what I can see Roe vs Wade's reasoning was rather weak - abortion rights seems to me like the kind of thing the Constitution intended should be left to the States, plus the 'privacy right' is arguably an invention of those 'activist judges'. So I can see Roe vs Wade overturned & abortion rights being left to individual states, likely meaning bans or severe restrictions in some 'red' states.
3. So, currently following Roe there _is_ a Constitutional right to abortion. You don't have to have a Constitutional ban on abortion to overturn Roe - hopefully that "everything not permitted is forbidden" reasoning would only appeal to a few judges like Scalia. But Roe can be attacked on states'-rights grounds. IMO this is a valid legal challenge, Roe's reasoning seems bad to me.
I personally think abortion ought to be legal, probably up to about 15 weeks and in exceptional cases thereafter, but I see it as a balance of interests between the mother and the emergent potential humanity of the fetus. A 10-day-old fetus is just a clump of cells; a 23 week old fetus is basically a baby, and some 23 week 'births' survive these days (though usually severely disabled). BTW apparently the Catholic church used to take a similarly nuanced view, that abortion was ok until Quickening, when the soul entered the child - basically when it became human; which in development terms looks to me to be at about 15 weeks.
I'm no lawyer so have only my common sense to rely on (beware). My common-sense tells me that R v. W was probably improperly decided. That said, common sense leads me to believe that any interpretation of a right to privacy under the 1st, 3rd, and 4th amendments allows a woman dominion over her own body. The only thing left is to determine at which point a fetus becomes a person. V-i-L says 15 weeks. Why? What are the criteria for determining the humanity of an unborn humanoid? I'm not being argumenative, I've just never been able to internalize what constitutes humanity or personhood.
15 weeks - apparently it's around this time that the final nerve tracts are laid down and the fetus starts to look like a baby. It's also around this time that various congenital disabilities become apparent - and if you want to be able to abort for disability this is an argument against a ban at 15 weeks. As a fetus is developing it passses through various stages resembling prior evolutionary states, at different times resembling an undifferentiated cell clump, a fish, an amphibian and so on. Many fetuses are aborted naturally - miscarry - especially in the first trimester; btw in the UK we don't talk about baby names etc until after or just before birth, we find it strange Americans do when it's too early to say if a pregnancy is likely to come to term.
>>What are the criteria for determining the humanity of an unborn humanoid?<<
I'd say roughly the same as for a born humanoid; capacity for thought & feeling, both actual and potential. According to the neuroscientist Susan Greenfield, consciousness is very much an emergent property - indeed arguably we're not fully conscious, fully human, until about 2 years old; chimps are about at the level of an 18-month-old human. I think drawing a line anywhere is arbitrary, but basing the line on development stage rather than at eg conception or birth seems less arbitrary to me.
We could talk about this one all day long but down that path lies madness. As they say, never talk politics or religion at the dinner table, 'cause someone is likely to end up wearing the mashed potatoes. The question of abortion is the bastard child of both religion and politics, which makes it almost impervious to the enlightening power of dialectic. It's really too bad, because there is probably no single issue that defines the ethical path of a society, or expresses its fundamental bedrock principles than how it deals with abortion. I'm obviously a progressive about this stuff and believe the government should have ZERO involvement in the whole abortion issue. A woman and her doctor...that's it.
However, I do find it interesting that lifers and choicers approach the matter from essentially the same direction. The lifers seem to be mostly concerned with when a proto-person gets their soul, the choicers with when they acquire self-awareness. To me they're talking about pretty much the same thing. For my part, I'd buy the old Halacha law that says a fetus doesn't acquire personhood until her head is peeking out the exit.
I guess that's why I'm pro-choice. There's a difference between what I personally would do and what I think should be the law. The former is probably more restrictive than I think the latter should be.
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