I’m posting this now in advance of the vote in Austin which will almost certainly impose new and repressive restrictions on women seeking abortions and upon men and women alike seeking medical services relating to reproductive health, constituting a massive and probably unconstitutional violation of the relationship between patients and doctors. Later, I’ll have a good deal more to say, especially about so called conservative states’ denial of basic medical services to children. But today I’d just like to say unequivocally that I stand with my friends in Austin and Raleigh and Madison and Indianapolis and Columbus and in all the surrounding locales in this country where reactionary legislatures are attempting to strip citizens of long established rights.
RedStates’ policies’ll get us back to the ugly pre-Roe-v-Wade practices, but now even More furtive will be the unsafe butchery of those days. … Among the things I applauded in Bill Clinton was the abortion-policy he advocated: “Legal, Safe, and Rare”. “Legal” facilitates its being “Safe”; the “Rare” is a matter of policies which educate, facilitate contraception, enhance adoption processes, etc.
Right, Clinton’s policy seems enlightened. I’d modify the last term, since “rare” seems to me to undercut choice. I think I’d say “appropriate” instead.
{As I understand it,} Bill Clinton’s policy-statement Deliberately Skirted the issues involving “Choice”, – so’s to make his position less unpalatable to the Rightists. … His policy {as I understand it} was a matter of Minimizing the Consequences of people’s behaviors in this regard {another of Clinton’s sensible policy-analyses, methinks}. [Clear-to-me is that Rightists’ policy-ideas Enlarge several elements of the problem which they wish to reduce.] … [I’m not an FOB {not a Friend-of-Bill} on a great many matters, – but on This he makes sense to me.]
I agree that Clinton’s statement was astute politically. I’ve been trying to decide whether to write an essay about the history of abortion policy but haven’t yet decided to do so. For instance, I think the Hyde amendment was a product of the same mean spiritedness that drove so-called welfare reform. Both are grounded in the racist assumptions that undergird the Moynihan Report. Today, almost no one questions either of the policy complexes that have grown up in the wake of these (I think) bad laws. The Hyde amendment was treated as sacrosanct in the legislative process that led to the creation of Obamacare, for instance. About choice: for me that is the rock bottom issue, whether the decision to abort or not remains in the realm of moral choice, where I believe it belongs. About the Right: I fear we are trashing federalism almost beyond repair and may find ourselves living in the Confederate States of America before long.
About the “federal system”:
My-generation poli-sci-tists figured that “States’ Rights” clamorings often protected interests which might not prevail at the National level, – but which could work many State-Local governments’ defective systems to get theirs there. Such interests tended to be “minority” at Both levels, but could manipulate state-local levels to their advantage. {I was especially irritated that so many business-interests got theirs in this “States’ Rights” way, – and that many conservative social interests could in this way retard progress toward liberal values.} There was lots of highfalutin scholarship about it, – getting into complex stuff such as Bill Riker’s mathematical model’s proving that in the USofA setting “Confederation” could not possibly produce “democratic” policies.{Doggies, I could bore with a mile-long treatise on the matter.}
You-n-I undergradded with our “sophomore government” general-education courses’ using the single textbook which dominated nation-wide ’til ca early-’70s {Burns, “Government by the People”}, -which textbook emphasized that {I’ve got the quotation pretty-much exact here}: “The government level which addresses a problem should be contiguous in territory with the problem”. [If it’s a nation-wide problem, the nation-wide government’s to be the level where it’s solved. Our nation was such that Most big issues were indeed nation-wide, – and it’s Still this-a-way.]
Yes, it’s still this-a-way, but the Supremes seem determined to refer many issues of national scope to the states. The examples are numerous, but take just the decision allowing states to opt out of the Medicaid expansion required by Obamacare..