Interesting intellectual exercise in a federal judge in Alabama’s decision invalidating an Alabama law aimed at shutting abortion clinics.
Alabama and other states are trying to add required hospital admitting privileges as a condition for abortion clinics. They know many local hospitals won’t extend the privileges. The laws are intended as de facto bans on a medical procedure that remains legal and constitutionally inviolate before fetal viability. Judge Myron Thompson wasn’t buying, as Addicting Info recounts:
“The evidence compellingly demonstrates that the requirement would have the striking result of closing three of Alabama’s five abortion clinics, clinics which perform only early abortions, long before viability,” Thompson writes.
Taking it further, Thompson presents a thought experiment which may be my new favorite way of countering anti-abortion rhetoric from this day forward. It goes like this:
What if, instead of abortion, the issue were gun sales. Let’s say in an effort to bypass the Constitution and curb gun ownership, the state or federal government passed a law that effectively shut down every gun store in the state but two.
“The defenders of this law would be called upon to do a heck of a lot of explaining — and rightly so in the face of an effect so severe,” Thompson points out. “Similarly, in this case, so long as the Supreme Court continues to recognize a constitutional right to choose to terminate a pregnancy, any regulation that would, in effect, restrict the exercise of that right to only Huntsville and Tuscaloosa should be subject to the same skepticism.”
Remember, even the discussion about gun control is typically met with grandiose, overblown rhetoric about governmental tyranny and something, something cold, dead, hands. The idea that conservatives would allow their gun shops to be closed down simply because gun control activists don’t agree with their ownership of them is unthinkable.