The Indicrat Policy on Abortion

Republicans would win handily almost every election if they were to tell the electorate one simple thing-
"If you want an abortion, that is between you, God, and the soul of the child. And we Republicans will never seek to restrict your right to choose through law. Only the free marketplace of ideas can set the course of abortion in this country."

If Republicans did that, they would save themselves immeasurable angst come election time.
The reason so many Republican governors, senators, and congressmen win in competitive states but the Republican candidate for president loses in those same states is because people want the fiscal conservatism for their state, but they don't want the religious conservatism on a federal level.

We used to have a Jeffersonian Republic and our original republic has been destroyed not only by Progressives and big government Democrats, but by FAKE Republicans that foist their religious ideology on their fellow citizens (as government policy) while knowing full well that Thomas Jefferson wanted individuals to be free from government backed religion. These are not true Republicans.

It is hypocrisy from these "Republicans", claiming to be defenders of the constitution, who say we should follow it (including it's secular tenants) on the one hand, but modify or ignore our originally founded way of governance to suit certain beliefs about abortion on the other.

The longest-serving Supreme Court justice, and Republican, Antonin Scalia said, “My view is that regardless of whether you think prohibiting abortion is good or whether you think prohibiting abortion is bad--regardless of how you come out on that--my only point is the Constitution does not say anything about it. It leaves it up to democratic choice. Some states prohibited it, and some states didn’t. What Roe v. Wade said was that no state can prohibit it.”

Nowhere in the constitution does it say there should be a "separation of church and state", but Jefferson made it quite clear the government cannot back a church's agenda that would force it's policies on the people (and Vice Versa). Symbols of religion in the public square are fine because we have freedom "OF" religion (as well as public expression), but not freedom "FROM" religion. However, freedom "OF" religion does not mean the religious can impose their beliefs on anybody. 

Governor Mike Huckabee argues that most of the founding fathers were clergy and therefore would be against abortion. This clergy "fact" is completely irrelevant. These men specifically sought a government that protected individual rights from religious policy, including their own. These same clergy would protect your right to curse Jesus, even though they personally would be against it.
Granted, the destruction of a fetus is far more vile than merely insulting a religion, but anti abortion sentiment is a religious condition based on morals not ethics. Our founders were shooting for ethics, not religious morals.

Both Jefferson and Franklin had nothing to say about abortion with regards to policy, and Jefferson is known to speak of it only in his Notes on the State of Virginia in Query 6: “Minerals -

"...They [Native Americans] raise fewer children than we do. The causes of this are to be found, not in a difference of nature, but of circumstance. The women very frequently attending the men in their parties of war and of hunting, child-bearing becomes extremely inconvenient to them. It is said, therefore, that they have learnt the practice of procuring abortion by the use of some vegetable; and that it even extends to prevent conception for a considerable time after. During these parties they are exposed to numerous hazards, to excessive exertions, to the greatest extremities of hunger. Even at their homes the nation depends for food, through a certain part of every year, on the gleanings of the forest: that is, they experience a famine once in every year. With all animals, if the female be badly fed, or not fed at all, her young perish: and if both male and female be reduced to like want, generation becomes less active, less productive. To the obstacles then of want and hazard, which nature has opposed to the multiplication of wild animals, for the purpose of restraining their numbers within certain bounds, those of labour and of voluntary abortion are added with the Indian. No wonder then if they multiply less than we do. Where food is regularly supplied, a single farm will shew more of cattle, than a whole country of forests can of buffaloes. The same Indian women, when married to white traders, who feed them and their children plentifully and regularly, who exempt them from excessive drudgery, who keep them stationary and unexposed to accident, produce and raise as many children as the white women."

Pro-lifers like to use another quote by Jefferson to back their argument which is-
"The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government."

However, it does not bode well for the happiness of the woman prohibited to have an abortion who wishes to do so, does it? And there is no evidence that Jefferson was including unconscious fetuses or exclusively dependent fetuses in that quote.

Dr. Benjamin Rush, a prestigious physician who signed the Declaration of Independence once asked the question, “What is an abortion but a haemoptysis (if I may be allowed the expression) from the uterus?” Hemoptysis is clinical terminology for expectoration of blood or bloody sputum from the lungs or throat...Not exactly a glowing defense of the unborn. Abortion was legal at the time of U.S. Independence and laws prohibiting abortion after 4 months started cropping up in the 1820's with almost full banishment by 1900. This, without any mandate from our founders to create such laws.

The bottom line for the Indicrat is that a person once born is an individual and an independent, not exclusively dependent on another. This individual has certain inalienable rights that cannot be trumped by an un-born dependent, a fetus.

An individual is a self aware being with aspirations, two way social connections and independent mobility in the world. Science unequivocally tells us that a fetus under six months of gestation has none of these qualities. Life without consciousness is absolutely meaningless. What makes life worth living is EXPERIENCE. A fetus destroyed without it knowing pain or despair is not cruelty, yet forcing a woman to carry an unwanted burden is.

Infants born earlier than 23 (roughly 6 months) weeks have a much smaller chance of survival than babies born after 23 weeks. About 9 out of 10 babies born at 28 weeks survive.

According to Christof Koch, Professor of Biology and Engineering at the California Institute of Technology and the Chief Scientific Officer of the Allen Institute for Brain Science,

"...Its physical substrate, the thalamo-cortical complex that provides consciousness with its highly elaborate content, begins to be in place between the 24th and 28th week of gestation. Roughly two months later synchrony of the electroencephalographic (EEG) rhythm across both cortical hemispheres signals the onset of global neuronal integration. Thus, many of the circuit elements necessary for consciousness are in place by the third trimester. By this time, preterm infants can survive outside the womb under proper medical care."

So again, consciousness, as well as survivability outside the womb, arrives at around 6 months.

The federal government should not have any say in abortion whatsoever. Yet, the states should be able to decide for themselves in a democratic process whether after 6 months there should be any regulations on abortion. However, Roe v. Wade should absolutely stand to protect the individual rights women during the first 6 months of pregnancy.

If pro-lifers are people of faith, then they should have faith that an abortion is only the concern of the mother, God, and the soul of that child, and that God will take care of it. It's nobody else's business, with the exception of the father who has every right to express, yet not impose, his feelings on the mother.

That is the Indicrat position on Abortion.

~Dhruva Aliman