Alabama state lawmakers pass an abortion ban in hopes of a Supreme Court challenge that overturns Roe v. Wade.. Critics says the pro-life law could spur Hollywood to stop the flow of cash to the state’s growing film business, and cost millions in legal bills. Is this bad timing for Republicans running in 2020, or should President Trump wave this banner all the way to a second term?
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Alabama Abortion Ban Tests Roe v. Wade, Jeopardizes Hollywood Business
Alabama state lawmakers pass an abortion ban in hopes of a Supreme Court challenge that overturns Roe v. Wade.. Critics says the pro-life law could spur Hollywood to stop the flow of cash to the state’s growing film business, and cost millions in legal bills. Is this bad timing for Republicans running in 2020, or should President Trump wave this banner all the way to a second term?
23 replies on “Alabama Abortion Ban Tests Roe v. Wade, Jeopardizes Hollywood Business”
DW has a headline and article today that Alabama broke a record last year in number of foster children adopted permanently into families.
More women in Alabama than men.
And since they are not prevented from voting for their state representatives, they were clearly represented.
And the governor is a woman.
So my daughter just recently finished her first year of college. We had an interesting conversation on the way home after packing her dorm room. Apparently her group is a bit nonplussed by both Al and GA bills.
I went the personal responsibility route with her. There are now 15 methods of preventing full term pregnancy ( I include abstinence as a method) 14 of which are mandated to be covered by ACA, which was itself mandated. So, with 14 methods including plans B and C, shouldn’t a woman be responsible enough that an abortion should be extremely rare? She brought up rape, to which I pointed out that a simple trip to an urgent care center would result in a plan B even without a police report.
We also got into the discussion as to why birth control still needs a Rx and why PP doesn’t offer the implants, which last 5 years, for free.
She was silent for quite a while as she pondered.
Personal responsibility is pretty big in our family.
I’ve given away many copies of “Victims and Victors.” a study with anecdotes of pregnancies as a result of rape and incest. Long term, the women who gave birth, whether they kept the baby or set up an adoption plan, were happier and healthier. They saw themselves as victorious over the awful man who raped them. One man who was pro-choice, after reading the book, told his wife who told me, “This kind of thing could convince me if anything could.”
It says a lot that she would have this conversation with you. Good for you, Dad.
I am not Christian, and this is not about Christian beliefs. We are not bearing enough children to replace our current generations. It is not because there are not enough pregnancies, because there are; there just aren’t enough live births.
I do not want to hurt anyone’s feelings here, and I have already said this in a comment on a blog post, here, but it bears repeating…
Let’s be clear. This is not about women having control over their “reproductive choices”.
[*] According to The Women’s Centers (https://thewomenscenters.com/birth-control-options/), women have eight choices for preventative birth control (only one of which, can be used by men). Each is effective between 87% to 99% of the time. That means that, however low, there is a failure rate associated with each option. If you choose any of these methods, then choose to have sex, and get pregnant anyway, this is a risk you chose to accept. That makes it your responsibility.
Except in rape, which every civilized person agrees is heinous, women have the ultimate control of their reproductive choices. They can choose not to have sex in the first place (BTW, this goes for men, too). What women and men who encourage abortion really want, is to be able to absolve themselves of responsibility for their bad choices at the expense of an innocent, human life.
If abortion is “moral”, why not infanticide? Indeed, why not retroactive abortion till age 18? You have to draw the line somewhere. If you are dead when the heart stops beating, why are you not alive when the heart starts beating?
[*] EDIT – I fleshed out this comment out to answer a Quora question. This paragraph is the text I added to it.
Excellent points, and well stated.
Guys, you do realize that Bill’s comment about San Fran, followed immediately by the word Sodomites is going to be JUMPED ON by the legions of Whittle research staffers at Media Matters, as yet another glaring example of the ram-pit Homophobia of the commentators at BWDOTC. Context, they don’t care about any stinking context.
Having a case go to the Supreme Court is always kind of a cliff-hanger experience. Roe v. Wade was based on a concept of privacy, and unleashed a wave of bloodshed. The next case, whether Alabama’s or some other one, could result in the abortion issue’s being redefined as a state issue, certainly a favorable outcome in the mind of this pro-lifer. However, a negative outcome could result, just like Roe v. Wade, in the invalidation of the protective state laws that have been passed since Roe v. Wade. In other words, a bad decision could invalidate all the state laws on waiting periods, parental notification in the case of minors, true informed consent, etc. So, although I want to see Roe v. Wade wiped out, I’ll be chewing my fingernails if a challenge comes up, to see whether the result helps the unborn and their mothers or whether it wipes out the hard-fought gains that currently protect both child and mother.
I live in Mobile, Alabama, and have for most of my life. I have also lived in Florida, Texas, Maine and California, so I do have experience out of the Deep South. In my lifetime I have witnessed the growth of racial tolerance and many more good things in the South. Alabama is the heart of the Deep South and is the bastion of people who treasure life, patriotism, God, family and friends, and freedom. I am exceedingly proud of my state and applaud the efforts we are making to preserve innocent lives from the atrocities of Leftists and their support of infanticide. When discussing this issue with a pro-abortion woman (or man for that matter), my question is “What if YOUR mother had felt as you do?” That question takes them aback and leaves them sputtering. I also point out that one of the babies being destroyed by THEIR favorite procedure might have grown up to be the researcher who finds the cures for the diseases we most fear or the person who invents the perfect method of energy to replace fossil fuels. That thought also stops the spouting of nonsense by Leftists. This one subject is what I am most passionate about. I abhor the attitude of Leftists that those innocent lives mean nothing. That has got to be the most evil attitude in mankind’s crazy history. My apologies for running on about this, but it means a lot to me.
RBG herself admits that Roe v. Wade was based on poor reasoning and bad timing. She says that it, and the gay “marriage” case, were decided at a time when states were already tending towards the permissive view in their laws, and didn’t require the heavy-handed interference of the Court. In fact, she goes so far as to acknowledge that it was the Roe case that got the pro-life movement going, whereas if the Court had held back for a few more years, the change would have been much less disruptive to society and people wouldn’t have been so dead-set against it.
(Of course, you can make this same argument about both Dred Scott and the Civil Rights Act. And also of course, just because RBG thinks it’s a bad decision doesn’t mean she’d vote to overturn it because she still believes in and practices outcome-based decision-making.)
Any honest leftist lawyer will admit that Roe v. Wade is bad law (though they think it’s bad for different reasons than we do). It’s actually a conventional view in legal academia. The academics point out that the way Roe v. Wade is framed, states can (and do) chip away at abortion “rights” without contravening Roe. That’s because Roe actually says that the state has an interest in protecting the lives of unborn children, but that it has to be balanced against the woman’s “right to privacy,” and the Court balanced these competing interests on the fulcrum of fetal viability. This is precisely why viability has been a focus these last few decades.
As a thought experiment, under Roe, if functional external uterine devices were invented, such that an unborn baby could be transferred to a canister of some sort and gestated there (a fairly ho-hum sci-fi trope these days), then the state would have the right to tell mothers they can no longer abort their children: they can either carry them to term, or relinquish them to the state (or its appointed charitable agent). That’s under Roe as it stands right now.
The current round of heartbeat bills are pushing the limits of Roe’s viability framework, but because Roe leaves open the door for scientific progress in our understanding of fetal development, it allows states to push back and still stay within Roe’s framework. The pro-abortion argument that “it’s not a baby” actually contravenes Roe.
The pro-life cause does seem to be reaching a tipping point, or perhaps to have just tipped. The “fourth trimester abortion” laws in NY and elsewhere are forcing people who used to take “safe, legal, and rare” at face value to check their assumptions about what their party is actually promoting. And when they look into it even cursorily and discover some of the horrifying statistics, such as more black babies being killed than born in places like NYC, and Democrat state lawmakers saying things like, “you can kill them now or kill them later” out loud, maybe they’ll start to think carefully about it.
I am still skeptical that today’s Court would fully overturn Roe. But I think it might be significantly scaled back.
(I can’t go back and reread this now, so please forgive any typos or worse.)
Thank you for this, Laura.
Glad somebody read it. 🙂 More seriously, I’m thinking it might be time to reread the text of the case myself to see if I’m even remembering it correctly. As I recall, it was written in comparatively plain language in order to be intelligible to non-lawyers. I would recommend anyone interested in the issue to read it.
Again. Video restricted. Viva Big Brother.
I’m at work, where they block BW videos on a regular basis. Meh. I’m used to it by now.
Friday, I can no longer get to this site at work. I have “fixed” this by changing my cell service to unlimited and now stream at work on my cell.
Ralph, I can get the site at work, but certain videos are blocked, even on YouTube. I’m used to it and view them when I get home. Doesn’t even surprise me anymore.
Were you able to access the site at work, in the beginning?
i was good all through the testing, then when it migrated back to the usual domain, no more joy.
Thank you for discussing such a hot button issue because many of your videos have become mundane. But, why did you frame abortion as a moral issue? The discussion was settled at Roe v. Wade. Abortion was framed as an amoral issue and America bought it. It’s now as deep a personal decision as choosing what color to paint your walls. Amoralism was the straw that broke the camel’s back and opened the flood gates of abortion!
Bill said, “The Republican Party tends to be anti-abortion and the Democratic Party tends to be pro-abortion.” Bill, there is no “tending” when your own platform contains the plank to make abortion “safe, legal and rare.” Rare is a ruse. Safe and legal obliterates rare. Abortion is THE bellwether of any nation’s moral character. God will never heal America until the people reject the evil of abortion.
If you think abortion should be made a moral issue again, you’ll have to start Civil War II. Amoralism is the strong delusion that God sent to Americans that they should believe a lie. Anyone with a (D) by their name is cursed by this delusion because they have enabled this evil hiding in plain sight since “safe, legal and rare” became a major plank in their platform. Pro-life Democrat is an oxymoron, so aborting a postpartum antiabortionist is as amoral as aborting a fetus.
It’s not even safe, though. Just legal.
If abortion is about women’s health as the left seems to claim, then pregnancy must be a disease.
Colored only water fountains AL? It’s UCLA that wants to implement colored only graduation ceremonies and housing.