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Jeff Bell on Abortion |
Bell: Strongly Agree.
Question topic: Should abortion be allowed under extenuating circumstances? If so, what circumstances?
Bell: No.
Question topic: Briefly list political or legislative issues of most concern to you.
Bell: Applying the 14th Amendment's protection of life to the unborn
A: Abortion on demand, imposed by the Supreme Court in all 50 states in 1973 and reaffirmed by the Court on a vote of 5 to 4 in Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992, is a violation of the first human right mentioned among the "self-evident" truths in our Declaration of Independence: the right to life. The need to apply this self-evident truth to the unborn has become much more apparent in the last four decades because of discoveries in the field of DNA and advances in the technology of the sonogram. Even the Supreme Court of 40 years ago in Roe v. Wade acknowledged that if it were factually established that an unborn baby is a "person," anti-abortion legislation would have to be upheld by the courts. I believe this simple fact has been conclusively established by the science of DNA.
A: If elected I will introduce and support legislation recognizing the unborn as persons entitled to the right to life under the terms of the 14th amendment. I will also vote in Congress for legislation that seeks to reduce the number of abortions. Two examples are the House-passed ban on abortions after 20 weeks and the proposed ban on abortions for the purpose of sex selection.
The nation's highest court voted 5-4 that companies with religious objections can dodge the requirement to pay for insurance coverage for contraception under ObamaCare, saying it violates a federal law protecting religious freedom. The ruling favored art-and-crafts chain Hobby Lobby, among about 50 companies to sue over the ObamaCare requirement.
Booker is running for re-election this year against Republican challenger Jeff Bell, who--like other GOP leaders--praised Monday's ruling. "This is a great assurance to the American people and to New Jerseyans that their religious freedoms will not be stripped away by government mandates forcing people to pay for and buy into practices they believe violates their religious conviction," Bell said in a statement.
Abortion is not only tragic on its own terms: it violates the founding principle of a right to life. The need to apply this self-evident truth to the unborn has become much more apparent in the last four decades because of discoveries in the field of DNA and advances in the technology of the sonogram.
Even the Supreme Court of 40 years ago in Roe acknowledged that if it were factually established that an unborn baby is a "person," pro-life legislation would have to be upheld by the courts. If elected I will support legislation recognizing the unborn as persons entitled to the right to life under the terms of the 14th amendment.
I will also vote in the Senate for legislation that seeks to reduce the number of abortions. Two examples are the ban on abortions after 20 weeks and the ban on abortions for the purpose of sex selection.
Legal and social conservatives soon came to refer to these words as the "Mystery Passage." The opinion was particularly galling because it was composed by 3 Republican justices--Sandra Day O'Connor, Anthony Kennedy, and David Souter--who had now provided the decisive swing votes to uphold Roe. These three clearly saw themselves as reasonable centrists, underlining the transformation of the global left after the 1960s from a mainly economic to a mainly social movement. It also makes clear that moral relativism and open-ended human freedom MUST become far and away the highest political good.
The classic example of judicial activism was the US Supreme Court's 1857 "Dred Scott" decision throwing out as unconstitutional federal laws prohibiting slavery in the US territories.
The Dred Scott decision went so far as to say that even free blacks could not be citizens of the US and had no rights that the white majority was bound to respect. Many pro-life critics of Roe v Wade saw it as the recrudescence of Dred Scott, an egregious act of judicial elitism that denied fundamental rights to an entire category of human beings.