Tim McCarthy was on his knees last Thursday, praying in front of the Suburbia Building in the 5600 block of Baltimore National Pike.
There’s an abortion clinic inside the Suburbia Building. McCarthy and other pro-life Catholics have been praying there since Sept. 4, when the Baltimore archdiocese launched its “40 Days For Life” campaign to protest abortion.
McCarthy, 66, said he’s been involved in the pro-life movement for 30 years. He was praying the night that Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain had their last presidential debate. He passed on watching to pray, so he didn’t get to hear Obama answer the moderator’s question about abortion, Roe v. Wade and whether either candidate would appoint Supreme Court justices based solely on the nominees’ willingness to give a thumbs up or thumbs down vote on abortion rights.
I should have been doing what McCarthy was doing the night of that last debate: Praying. It sure beats trying to talk sense to the “pro-choice” crowd.
It’s like rolling the dice or playing Russian roulette with your sanity trying to reason with these people. Except each die has only one dot on all six sides, and the revolver has bullets in all six chambers.
Had I been praying like McCarthy the night of the last presidential debate, I wouldn’t have been driven completely up the wall by Obama’s answer. There does exist, he insisted, a constitutional right to privacy. After McCain said the issue of abortion should be left to state legislatures, Obama countered that fundamental rights should not be subject to an up-or-down vote in state legislatures or, by logical extension, even Congress.
Never mind that the very “right to privacy” Obama cherishes is based, in part, on that piece of legislation called the 14th Amendment.
Never mind that the “right to privacy” is not an enumerated right, but one that might be included in the unenumerated rights referred to in the Ninth Amendment.
Nowhere in the Constitution is the power to yank unenumerated rights out of the Ninth Amendment or the “penumbra” of other amendments granted to nine justices elected by no one and accountable to no one. But Obama seems to think so, notwithstanding the fact that the 10th Amendment giving rights not specifically granted to the federal government to the states clearly proves McCain was on more solid constitutional ground with his answer.
The issue of “abortion rights” is far more complex than Obama would have it, and he has his fellow “pro-choicers” to thank for that. In Roe v. Wade the high court gave them an inch; since then they’ve tried to snatch an entire continent.
The “pro-choice” crowd based Roe v. Wade on a right to privacy, then demanded as a right PUBLIC funding of abortions for indigent women who want to terminate pregnancies that result from the ultimate private act.
Their passion for “a woman’s right to choose” now extends to teenage girls who irresponsibly have sex, get pregnant and then want to have abortions without the knowledge or consent of their parents.
And finally, there’s the biggest problem with the Roe decision: When justices voted 7-2 in 1973 to overturn every anti-abortion law in the land, they didn’t just make a ruling about a right to privacy or a woman’s right to choose. They tried to define, for a nation of 200 million people at the time, when life does and does not begin.
In Roe, the justices ruled life doesn’t begin at all in the first trimester of a pregnancy, kind of begins in the second semester and definitely begins in the third. And seven people got to decide this for a nation of millions because of — what was the reason again?
A right to privacy? A “woman’s right to choose”? If those were the only matters before the Court in 1973, I’d have fewer problems with the Roe decision. But on matters like when life does and does not begin, I want Congress and 50 state legislatures in on that debate.
Obama, with his answer, showed that he doesn’t trust state legislatures to make sound, rational decisions about our rights. He and the justices he selects will get to do that. The problem is that such an arrangement doesn’t describe a constitutional republic as much as it does a country ruled by a junta.
No wonder Tim McCarthy is praying.
Gregory Kane is a columnist who has been writing about Baltimore and Maryland for more than 15 years. Look for his columns in the editorial section every Thursday and Sunday. Reach him at [email protected].
