Sunday, March 20, 2011

Baby dies 15 minutes after she's born due to Nebraska's anti-abortion law.

"[A] mom whose fetus was being slowly crushed by her uterus was denied an abortion in Nebraska. The reason? Nebraska law says no abortions after 20 weeks" (except under the most extreme exceptions such as to save the life of the mother, which didn't apply here).

In a cruel irony, the law was "supposed to protect the fetus from pain." Do you think the pro-life movement is going to be disturbed by the perverse consequences of its laws and use this experience to more intelligently tailor its legislation in the future? Somehow, I doubt it.

The mother says:

"The outcome of my pregnancy, that choice was made by God. I feel like how to handle the end of my pregnancy, that choice should have been mine, and it wasn't because of a law."
Conservatives make powerful arguments about how the government should avoid over-regulating people's behavior. Thomas Sowell, for instance, has often argued that individuals, who are intimately familiar with the mundane details of their situations, are more capable of figuring out the best course of action than remote lawmakers or intellectuals, who know little about the pros and cons that these decisions will actually entail but who want to move the pieces of society around like a puzzle to form a vision they find pleasant. I wish more conservatives would think more clearly about how their own argument applies to abortion.

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