-By Gary Krasner
Dear Mike,
I was listening to your radio broadcast on February 16, 2016. You devoted the first hour of your show to a discussion of Kentucky Senate Bill 152, which would require women seeking abortions to undergo ultrasound and force them to view the fetus in the womb.
I didn’t hear you mention ultrasound. Instead, you presented the bill as a reasonable measure for women to receive pre-abortion counseling. You correctly mentioned how many women experience depression following their abortions.
The issue of ultrasound vs. counseling is not relevant to the topic I wish to raise, although the public should be aware that prenatal ultrasound is unsafe: see: http://harvoa.org/chs/pr, and http://harvoa.org/chs.
But to my point, I oppose this Kentucky bill that compels women to consult a physician before obtaining an abortion.
Personally, I’m pro life. I’m conservative. I regularly contribute to this website and for 10 years I wrote for AmericanDaily.com. I’m friend and confident to the pro-life activist Debi Vinnedge of COG For Life.
Yet I oppose the bill because when you make something compulsory, YOU are inviting government into the private affairs of OTHER people who are engaging in lawful activities.
In this case, private care physicians are deputized by government, as the legal front-line gatekeepers of this law, to evaluate the woman’s emotional state, as you suggested, or to generate an ultrasonic image for the woman to view, as the bill mandates.
The dichotomy of aims and ends expressed from you alone is emblematic of the wide discretion by which state regulators and front-line gatekeepers (i.e. doctors in this case) often exercise their own agendas, which becomes a highly divergent outcome from the original legislative intent.
But that kind of problem is a derivation from the fact that, in this case, your pretext for the Kentucky law is a concern for the emotional state of the woman after an abortion is performed. Or the more honest aim of shaming the woman, by making her realize, from the ultrasonic image, that that she’s ending a human life. Either way, what you really hope is that the woman may have second thoughts about proceeding with the abortion.
But this is the ends-justify-the-means mindset of liberals. You are sacrificing small government conservative principles for a policy preference — however noble it is. But as you know, liberals have no shortage of noble ends themselves.
Consider their recent noble end in which they propose, as a feature of Obamacare, that private care physicians evaluate the mental state of gun owners. That can easily be presented as a proposal which is just as reasonable as you felt the Kentucky abortion bill is.
Yet we both know that such a regulation, while presented under the guise of gun safety, is intended to limit the Second Amendment rights of Americans. Get it? Liberals seek to enact a “reasonable” measures — by your standards! — to limit the lawful activity of owning a gun.
Here’s a better example. I’m director of the parents rights organization, Coalition For Informed Choice. I’ve assisted thousands of NYS parents obtain legal religious exemptions from the immunization requirements for school. In NYS, public and private schools hold the equivalent of religious tribunals in which school principals interrogate parents to ostensibly ensure that parent’s religious beliefs are sincerely held. (Because God forbid, a parent might secretly believe that 40 vaccines pumped into a toddler before age 2 might be excessive!)
Like the liberal gun example, and your Kentucky abortion bill example, there’s a pretextual element to “justify” the deputizing of school principals — the statutory front-line gatekeepers of this section of the state’s school vaccination law — to invasively intrude in the private religious beliefs of parents. That pretext is to limit the number of exemptions that are granted, out of concern for the public health equities among secular public health authorities.
Perhaps that would be your noble end as well? I can respect that. Personally, I tend to believe that parents should decide which vaccines are pumped into their children’s bodies. Indeed, if “informed consent” doesn’t include the right to WITHHOLD consent, then I would like you to explain to me what it does mean.
But it’s very dangerous — not to mention antithetical to conservatism — to enact laws that can, and inevitably are, enforced disingenuously. The intent of the legislature was to extend to citizens the religious liberties written into the NYS Constitution. It was not intended to be a means to regulate vaccine rates on the basis of public health. Other department of health regulations take care of those concerns anyway.
On you program that day, you juxtaposed the “reasonable” ultrasound mandate bill with another bill which a liberal Kentucky lawmaker had introduced, which would “unreasonably” (your word) require men seeking erectile dysfunction treatments to first obtain the consent of their spouses (plus other outrageous requirements).
But the so-called Viagra Bill wasn’t a serious initiative. Unfortunately, you didn’t appreciate the sponsor’s (Assembly Democrat Mary Lou Marzian) point in introducing that bill. “My point is to illustrate how intrusive and ridiculous it is for elected officials to be inserting themselves into private and personal medical decisions,” she told Reuters.
But I’m afraid neither you nor Marzian understand the damage that’s done to our liberties with more and more government mandates. Liberals, and occasionally conservatives like you, are nourishing state and federal leviathans with laws which you think are “reasonable” — to use the word you repeated so often. But too often, what legislators create in statutes looks nothing like what the regulators of jurisdiction end up implementing!
When the religious exemption provision was included in the NYS school vaccination law, for example, had lawmakers intended the phrase, “parents with genuine and sincere religious beliefs” to be a test performed by third parties (i.e. building principals), or did they deem it to be a self-executing declaration by the parent? We’ll never know. It was counsels for health and education departments (who had joint jurisdiction), behind closed doors, who decided the matter.
Conservatives must be alarmed by the rise of the “administrative state”, in which agencies of government, unaccountable to the public, wield discretionary powers that would have outraged the Framers.
Your opposition to abortion is laudable. Your preferred method (that Kentucky bill) to do something about it, is not. In fact, it is the sort of law that’s destroying our republic.