710 - Peace & Life: SCOTUS / Debate - July 5, 2024
More SCOTUS Rulings
In United States vs. Rahimi, the court allowed that domestic abusers under restraining orders could be prohibited from having guns. In our blog post Abortion and Violence Against Pregnant Women, we cover how domestic abuse promotes abortion and how availability of abortion promotes domestic abuse.
In Grants Pass v. Johnson, the Court decided it was permissible to criminalize sleeping outside, including for homeless people who have nowhere else to go. This week’s blog post expands on the problems with this.
In Moyle v. United States and Idaho v. United States, the Court decided not to decide. This allows for abortions defined as emergencies to continue in Idaho hospitals.
Confusion comes from differing vocabulary. If abortion is defined as the deliberate killing of a baby, then there’s no medical situation where that’s necessary. See the Dublin Declaration on Maternal Health Care, signed by over 1,000 ob-gyns, and this video with a neonatologist.
There are many situations where it’s necessary to remove the child quickly under circumstances where the child won't survive the removal but won’t survive anyway, or is far along enough to get intensive care rather than simply being killed. Abortion advocates euphemistically refer to “pregnancy termination,” but if you take that term to mean what it really means, all pregnancies terminate eventually. Most of them end with living children. So yes, there are times when for medical reasons to save the life of the mother, the pregnancy must end. But there’s no case where deliberately killing the child is necessary, and often it actually adds more danger to the mother to use techniques that kill the child.
There’s much confusion on this point, and it really is crucial for state legislatures to clarify.
As for the decision on presidential immunity, we’d like to point out that all U.S. presidents – and leaders in general worldwide – have always been given authority to kill large numbers of people in war. Right now, Biden is sending a huge stockpile of weapons to Israel in full knowledge that Israel is using them to kill large numbers of children and other civilians. Any objection is regarded as a mere disagreement on policy. But fueling war should be regarded as a crime.
June 27 Debate
As is customary, the presidential debate never covered the death penalty or euthanasia, had little substantive on stopping poverty and racism, and assumed war to be acceptable.
Our issue that was given a good amount of time was abortion. Trump verified again that he’s not pro-life on abortion, and is sabotaging the pro-life movement . Biden’s incoherence fit with the rest of his problematic performance.
Our Latest Blog Posts
Sarah Terzo tells the life story of Ramiro Gonzales, an abortion survivor who was just executed on June 26.
Sonja Morin details the problems with the Supreme Court’s recent decision on homelessness in Home of the Brave? A CLE Response to City of Grants Pass, Oregon v. Johnson.
Quotation of the Week
Richard Stith, CLN Board of Directors
E-mail, April 7, 2024
I would put it this way: those authorized to choose to die have to decide whether their lives are justified, whether the costs they incur are outweighed by the benefits they produce.
But in the end they and we will find that few of us are really indispensable. People will get along pretty well without us. So none of our lives is really justified.
Thus choice inevitably leads to more and more killing.
The alternative, the traditional approach, is to take every life as having intrinsic value so that it does not need to be justified.
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