Some Rights Are Less Important

(Editorial cartoon by Joel Pett published 1/23/13 by the Lexington Herald Leader and featured at McClatchy DC.  Click on image to enlarge and then kindly return.)

Forty years after Roe v Wade and a woman's right to abortion is still under attack.  The right to privacy, upon which the decision hinged, is simply not as important to many as the right to own and flaunt military type semi-automatic rifles.  We really have not yet come a long way, baby.

From a Los Angeles Times editorial:

Unlike many landmark Supreme Court cases that have become accepted parts of our culture — such as Brown vs. Board of Education, which declared school segregation unconstitutional, or Loving vs. Virginia, which overturned state bans on interracial marriage — Roe did not lead to a clear national consensus on abortion.

A recent Pew Research Center survey found that although most Americans support the court's decision, 29% said they would like to see Roe overturned. Nearly half of Americans say they believe abortion is morally wrong. Those positions have changed little in recent decades.

Sadly, the Roe decision remains under attack in many quarters from politicians, conservative religious groups and others. Fueled by their belief that abortion is murder, they are intent on taking away or substantially curtailing the right to choose, even though the Supreme Court has correctly concluded that abortion is a private matter.

Today, most states have some kind of law that affects access to abortion. ...

In some cases, state restrictions have been declared unconstitutional by courts as violations of Roe vs. Wade. But even where they have not, they often seem to be efforts to drive a wedge into the debate or to make it increasingly onerous to get an abortion, particularly for low-income women.   [Emphasis added]

The editorial details the forms of those attacks on the right to abortion, most coming from state legislatures, which include not just time delays but also invasive procedures including sonograms, a further invasion of a woman's body.  And, even more horrifying, one national party would not allow for any exceptions such as incest, rape, the health of the woman.  Women are just not as important as that cluster of fetal cells and certainly not as important as men's right to have instruments of death.

This makes me crazy.