Phillies: On Maintaining Personal Privacy

Today is the 35th Anniversary of the Supreme Court’s finding in Roe v Wade. By a seven-to-two majority, the Supreme Court found that Texas laws regarding abortion were unconstitutional. The Court noted avariety of valid grounds for their decision: «This right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment’s concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or, as the District Court determined, in the Ninth Amendment’s reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.»

Americans properly celebrate this removal of government intervention from their private lives. «While the decision is actually weaker than many hope or fear,» Phillies wrote, «it protects the consciences of all Americans. A government that claims the right to control abortions has claimed the right to mandate abortions, for example in cases where an infant would be profoundly malformed and end up as a ward of the state. Only the Libertarian position *government should have no role in this matter* guarantees that every American can act as their conscience dictates.»

Phillies condemned reactionary Republican proposals that the abortion question was or should be made a matter of so-called ‘states’ rights’. «As the law now stands, the abortion question is a right reserved to the people. ‘The people’ is of course the people as individuals, the same people whose freedoms to assemble peaceably and to own firearms are protected by the First and Second Amendments. When you hear a Republican calling for making abortion a state issue, you are hearing a Republican call to expand government, because at this time states are forbidden to ban abortions.»

Phillies castigated allegedly ‘libertarian’ Republicans who voted that servicewomen overseas may not have abortions in military hospitals, even if they pay with their own money. «The ‘exception’ in the law protects a woman’s life, but not her health. A servicewoman who would end up crippled or sterile without an abortion is told by Congress that this should be her fate. Usually ‘no medical care except from government’ is the position of socialist extremists who want to destroy private medical care. Here is the socialist extremist position, advocated by the Republicans.»

«Once again, Government intervention in your private life can make things worse for you. Possibly much worse.» Phillies concluded.

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