Crossing the Line

The Law:  The problem with drawing a line in the sand is that someone is likely to cross it; it's almost a challenge to see if you can find a way to do it.

Ask any business executive or Wall Street player if there aren't trade and finance laws that you can beat just by arranging your books the right way, and you can make a killing.

The authority of law rises from the moral intent to prevent harm, to avoid a pitfall, as in 'don't do that or you'll hurt somebody'. We know it's not perfect; loopholes in the law let you hurt others legally, so for now, the law says that's acceptable.  Some folks are fighting to keep it that way, but to be fair, perhaps they don't understand what they've agreed to.



Norma McCorvey was Roe in Roe v. Wade.  She later testified to Congress:

Her parents named her Amillia - which means
resilient in Latin, a fighter and hardworking
 - to reflect her survival against the odds.
Born at 21 weeks and 6 days ...
Fortunately, Planned Parenthood was
 not involved.

"It was my pseudonym, Jane Roe, which had been used to create the "right" to abortion out of legal thin air. But Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee never told me that what I was signing would allow women to come up to me 15, 20 years later and say, "Thank you for allowing me to have my five or six abortions. Without you, it wouldn't have been possible." Sarah never mentioned women using abortions as a form of birth control. We talked about truly desperate and needy women, not women already wearing maternity clothes."

Instead of a last resort to avoid unendurable troubles, abortion has become a convenience available without restriction.

From the 2012 Democratic Party platform on abortion:

"... unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade  ...  We oppose any and all efforts to weaken or undermine that right. Abortion is an intensely personal decision between a woman, her family, her doctor, and her clergy; there is no place for politicians or government to get in the way. ..."

Although unintended by the court, the ruling has loopholes big enough for an eight-month pregnant minor to walk through for an abortion without "her family, her doctor," or "her clergy" ever being part of the decision.

The party has removed the sentence “Abortion should be safe, legal, and rare” from its platform. 

The question?  After millions of written pages and hundreds of millions of dollars spent on the legal battles in state and federal courts and in government houses, the original question is lost.
Is there harm to anyone?

Abortion -- does it hurt anyone?

It's a moral question, not a legal one. We've come so far from our first intent that we now permit an abortionist to dismember a living, viable baby in the womb (just like these pictured here) and then sell its' heart and brain and other organs.

Where is the transition from embryo to child?  At what point have we crossed that line?