Commonsense?

Last week buried in the rush of information, regarding what happened at Virginia Tech, was a Supreme Court decision maintaining laws Bush and the Republican Congress had passed earlier blocking partial birth abortions. I had been mulling over what I would write about it. This morning, when I went to Ronni Bennet's blog Time Goes By, she had written most of what I was thinking.

Personally, I am not against blocking very late term abortions. I have a hard time understanding why they are needed. If you cannot make up your mind to have an abortion in the first 4 or 5 months, I think the rights of the baby grow as it does.

Mine is not a purist view, but I am not on many things. I use what I like to refer to as commonsense and can see where one thing might be okay, like a sliver of cheesecake but the whole cheesecake is not. Why this is considered namby-pamby is beyond me, but lately there is a whole cadre of people who feel it's all or nothing. In my opinion, while that might make a good song, it doesn't actually work in love or life.

The same all-or-nothing mantra is arising with gun control. I would be fine to make people apply for a license to buy any gun. I wouldn't object if they make buyers go through the same hoops I had to go through to get a concealed weapon permit. (The most recent killer might have been stopped from buying guns-- if anybody had bothered to record the things he had done-- if there was a good computer system to check all records. It however would not have prevented him from killing.) As a gun owner who intends to stay a gun owner, I also wouldn't mind seeing automatic and assault weapons limited, as to which citizens can purchase them, to those with a need-- like nobody. But it seems that is not okay to see an issue where some of some is okay, too much is not. We have gotten into a period where people want simple answers and yes or no is simpler than perhaps.

Anyway back to the abortion issue, of all the women I know who have had abortions, none chose it lightly, none forgot it, but most still believed that at the time it had been the right choice-- all were early abortions as are most. I see a fetus just beginning to grow as different than a full formed baby. Some see that as a sliding moral scale, but for me it's that commonsense again. It makes sense to me that abortions be legal until the fifth month. After that only when the mother's life is at stake; and even then, trying to save the life of the baby should be a factor when the baby is viable. That doesn't suit either extreme, but it's how I feel. Crushing the skull of a healthy, living baby in the womb makes no more sense to me than if it was done right after delivery.

I suspect late term abortions don't feel right to a lot of people; but they are afraid with a foot in the door, the whole right to choose will be thrown out. There is good reason for that worry. The current so-called Supremes (as many of us feared with Bush's election) now have at least four on the panel who want an eventual decision to block all abortions or send them back to the states to decide. That means in states, that see women as incapable of making this decision legally, women would again be forced into back alley abortions. It won't stop abortion but it could stop clean and safe ones.

That was bad enough but reading Justice Kennedy's tortured justification for his vote added to it. He said the decision was to defend women because they might regret their decision later. So his was not a legal decision but paternal one... Say what!