Greg's Corner

Being Pro-Choice is being Pro-Constitution!

The state of Alabama made national headlines recently for enacting the most restrictive abortion law seen since the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that protected abortions under The Constitution. If and when Alabama’s new law goes into effect, it essentially outlaws abortion under most circumstances including those of rape and incest. If a medical professional were to perform an abortion in Alabama, they could be potentially sentenced to 99 years in prison. That’s a longer sentence than any sentence for rape or sexual abuse in the state. So in effect, a doctor could serve more time in prison for performing an abortion on a rape victim than the actual rapist. Alabama isn’t the only state enacting such legislation as many conservative states are in the process of passing similarly restrictive legislation when it comes to a woman’s right to choose.

Usually, when the topic of abortion is debated, it comes down to two fundamental arguments, a woman’s right to choose and domain over her own body vs. the protection of an unborn child. Now we’re going to take a different approach and discuss the Constitutionality of abortion and why overturning Roe v. Wade could be more harmful to the country than you might think. Conservative state governments love to tout that the Constitution is a sacred document, however, they tend to pick and choose which parts of it they hold sacred. While they’ll continually encourage and advocate the Second Amendment as if it was handed down by God, they’ll try to circumvent others like the Fourteenth Amendment. That’s the Amendment which contains the Equal Protection Clause. Under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution, the Supreme Court ruled in 1973 that women have a fundamental “right to privacy” that protects a pregnant woman’s liberty to choose whether or not to have an abortion. President Trump has stated that if he were to seat enough justices on the Supreme Court, he would have Roe v. Wade overturned. That would mean that a landmark decision that was previously protected by the Fourteenth Amendment would be overturned. This would cause precedent for other landmark decisions under the Fourteenth Amendment to be possibly overturned. One of the most famous landmark decisions that was also protected by the Equal Protection Clause was Brown v. Board of Education, the ruling that led to the ending of segregation in schools in our country. In today’s politically charged climate, to put it politely, is it too far out of the realm of possibility that overturning Brown v. Board of Education would be next after Roe v. Wade?

If conservative states like Alabama really wanted to curtail abortion there are more helpful ways they could do that such as providing better sex education information to their students. They could also provide better and more affordable healthcare access for things like birth control. They could provide better incentives for adoption and foster care, that is after cleaning up bloated and corrupt family service departments. Instead, they enact restrictive policies that endanger women under the guise of “states’ rights”. Why is it that the concept of states’ rights usually only comes up when they’re trying to take the rights of others away?