Abortion – phase two

The Roe v. Wade leak still captures the nation’s attention. We can be ninety-nine-percent confident that the draft opinion will form the foundation of the final opinion. Now pro-life activists need to start now with the next phase of activism in a post-Roe world. This phase includes activism at State, county (or parish), municipal – and house-of-worship, school, and family levels.

Current state of the Roe v. Wade leak

Regular readers can use this link for all Roe v. Wade leak articles, which CNAV has tagged. Briefly:

Justice Samuel A. Alito drew the assignment to write a majority opinion in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The Court was going to find for the petitioner, the State of Mississippi, and reverse the Fifth Circuit. In so reversing, at least five Justices voted to overrule Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

Justice Alito wrote his opinion and circulated it on February 10, 2022. We must assume that this opinion has already gone through at least one revision. Dissenting Justices have written their dissents, and maybe someone has written an opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part. That’s all we know or can reasonably suspect.

Then on Monday evening, someone – maybe a clerk for Justice Sotomayor – leaked the first draft of that opinion to Politico.com.

Shortly before that story broke, barriers went up around the Supreme Courthouse, and the Court website announced that the Court would close the Courthouse to the public until further notice. Those barriers went up just in time, because an angry mob gathered on First Avenue Northeast to protest.

Chief Justice Roberts has tasked the Marshal of the Supreme Court with investigating who leaked the draft. Rumors have him also asking the FBI to help.

About the leftist reaction

Finally: activists and prominent politicians have staged scenes of outrage that would win them Academy Awards.

Just possibly, all their caterwauling is a sham. CNAV accepts Wayne Dupree’s theory that whoever leaked the draft, did so to influence the Midterm elections. Dave Hodges says it best: at last the Democrats have a talking point going into Midterms. They literally cannot talk about anything else.

Once you understand that, everything makes sense. So don’t let Senator Warren or Senator Schumer or Speaker Pelosi or even President Biden fool you. They are displaying fake outrage. They want Roe v. Wade to go down – so they can breathlessly say that it’s coat-hanger time once again, and millions of innocent women are going to die in childbirth. (Incidentally, many wags already have said the Supreme Court managed to unite the country on defining the concept woman. One hopes they’ll brief Ketanji Brown Jackson when she arrives on the First Monday in October.)

Whoopi Goldberg is displaying so much fake outrage that she let slip that the unborn child is a person!

My doctor and my self and my child, that’s who makes the decision.

Excuse me? The child makes the decision? How can that be unless the child is a sentient person? Which has been our precise point for forty-nine years. Not that they can decide, but that they are alive and have rights.

What happens to abortion immediately

Which brings us to what happens to abortion immediately. The Supreme Court will, barring incredible accident, admit and erase its error of forty-nine years ago. When that happens, expect the abortion rate to decline by ten percent. That represents the very few abortions anyone is still performing in red States. Several states have only one abortion clinic left. When Roe goes, so go those clinics.

Twenty-six States have or will have laws that will curtail or eliminate abortion when Roe goes. They include eighteen States with explicit “trigger laws,” and other States that will pass anti-abortion laws swiftly. Medical News Today confirms what everyone knows or should know. Twenty-six States will curtail or eliminate abortion, and their neighbors will prepare to accept new patients or “abortion tourists.”

CNAV does not expect any further Midterms effect, except to harden Democratic attitudes and cause the nomination of fanatics who have even less chance of winning at general election, if one can imagine that.

The medical establishment makes much of a study actually named the Turnaway Study. Scientific American describes it. According to it, women who “have to” carry their children to term when they didn’t want to, often suffer mental and financial stress. Yes, Scientific American talks about financial stress.

Doctors don’t know their job

Here we have the salient problem with the medical profession. They should be devoting every thought to caring for mothers-to-be facing any stress from pregnancies they didn’t plan. Instead they want to kill the children involved. This flatly violates the original Oath of Hippocrates, which reads in relevant part:

I will not give to any woman a pessary to cause abortion.

Though many medical schools reproduce that part of the Oath on inside or outside walls, medical schools have, for nearly fifty years, had their graduates swear a watered-down Oath that does not include the abortion prohibition. We have, simply put, created a cadre of cold-hearted practitioners who concern themselves with their patients’ immediate convenience. And, of course, with their own fat fees.

And when good-hearted people do set up clinics to help a girl come to terms with a “problem pregnancy,” the conventional establishment turns their backs on them. Worse than that, they impose professional and economic sanctions on them and lobby legislatures to do the same. So pro-life activists face more than protecting their legislative gains from politicians with warped minds. They face a medical profession that has made the cold-blooded calculation to support abortion on demand and without apology. That is the most tragic legacy of Roe v. Wade. And for that the medical profession can blame themselves. But our clergy should also blame themselves. They should have offered support and spiritual counseling to physicians in training. But they never did.

How our republic can defeat abortion

So it’s time they started. Clergy should start now to reach out to medical students in their areas of operation. Let that be your next mission field, Pastor! Let’s have baccalaureate services for graduating medical students, where they swear a real Physician’s Oath. Call it the Oath of Saint Luke. Throw out the Greek mythological trappings – and put back in what the medical schools took out. That means we ask doctors to swear not to perform an abortion.

More than that, we must reclaim authority over our children’s education. When Presidents make such ridiculous statements to teachers that our children belong to them, we must never accept that. More to the point, we must recognize God-based moral education as just as important as are reading, writing, and arithmetic. That might require another fifty-year campaign to reverse the Supreme Court’s ruling in Lemon v. Kurtzman. Or it might mean decamping from the government schools altogether, and repealing State Constitutional directives to provide free public schooling.

However we do it, we must teach our children moral lessons on the proper and improper uses of sexuality. The time to decide “what to do with one’s body” is before two people jump into bed, not after. And boys, you’re in this, too. The siring of a child carries with it as much responsibility as the bearing of one. The sooner we recognize that, the sooner we can eliminate a lot of heartache.

Toward the end of abortion

The end of abortion will not come easily. Justice Alito said in his draft opinion that the Supreme Court can never settle the abortion debate and shouldn’t try. He’s right – that’s the job of clergy and family, and of adults who act like adults, and get right with God.

As CNAV mentioned, perhaps ten percent of abortions that now happen in this country will stop. Women who still think they can “take care of the problem” by killing, will move out-of-State or travel out-of-State or even out of the country. Incidentally, the medical profession is not the only relevant mission field. The airline industry is another.

The only way to stop the ninety percent will be by hard work. Beyond the medical profession and the airline industry, the body politic is the new mission field. What if Planned Parenthood opened up another abortion mill and nobody darkened its doors? That is the future toward which we must work.