Local Control on Abortion
Supreme Court liberals, in dissent:
"Withdrawing a woman’s right to choose whether to continue a pregnancy does not mean that no choice is being made. It means that a majority of today’s Court has wrenched this choice from women and given it to the States."
The states? Why stop there?
Anti-abortion politicians argued the abortion issue should be a political issue decided by the states. They said the Roe v. Wade decision short-circuited the political process, with its push and pull of persuasion and popular choice. Let the people decide, they said. They say it's a matter of "states rights."
There is a problem with that. I know first-hand that states have significant internal divisions. Rural counties in Oregon say they want to secede from Oregon to become part of Greater Idaho. They say rural counties are steamrolled by the mass of liberal voters in the Portland metropolitan area. The division shows up in election results. The winner in the 2018 election for governor was Democrat Kate Brown. She got 74% of the vote in Portland's Multnomah County. She received 17% of the vote in rural Harney County. States mash opposites together. The divide is greater within states than between them. Trump won Wyoming with 70% of the vote and lost Vermont with only 31% of the vote. That is a huge difference, but nothing like the differences between the counties in the same state.
County-by-county control on abortion would be a vast improvement in representative government. We are accustomed to neighboring counties having different zoning laws, different health department priorities, different policing protocols, different facilities, and different politics. Local control maximizes representation.
A close look at counties, however, reveals sharp internal divisions, visible at the neighborhood level. In my home country, densely-settled college-town Ashland had precincts giving 82% and 85% of the vote to the Democrat, Kate Brown. Yet in a rural precinct less than five miles outside Ashland she received less than 19% of the vote.
To make the abortion decision "close to the people," we need neighborhoods to govern, not counties or states. This is not uncommon or unworkable. Voters are already divided into voting area precincts. We have local school districts, fire districts, and irrigation districts providing government tailored to that community's needs and wishes. A great many socially conservative anti-abortion advocates favor "neighborhood schools." They argue that parents at the local level should decide if their schools teach sex education or disturbing information about slavery, racism, or gender. Why should people in D.C., or the state capital, or even people in another part of the same county make those decisions for that school? And then, in the local school, if the sex education lessons seem objectionable, individual parents can and do pull their children out of class for that lesson. After all, sex is a personal matter. Each parent decides what is best.
The principle of bringing the decision closer to the people has no clear limiting factor. That principle can be applied thoroughly and all the way down to the individual parent. We call it liberty. Abortion clinics can be sited in neighborhoods that want them. We would see them scattered about--but only where they are accepted. On the personal level, if someone opposes abortion, she shouldn't have one.
I am hoping to expose a bit of hypocrisy and unclear thinking among those who argue that abortion should be a political issue and that it should be left up to the states because they are "closer to the people" than is the Supreme Court or the Congress. Yes, states are. But if that is the measure of good government and ethical lawmaking, why stop at states? Go to counties. Or cities within counties. Or the neighborhood school example. That brings it down to what I think should be the unit with power, the same one as the parent I posited who said that sex education was a parent's right to control, not some government. That smallest unit is the individual, i.e. the woman herself.
If abortion is a political decision, then taken to its extreme, that politiy unit that exercises that discretion should be the woman.
I'm confused. Who gave the politicians and the supreme court judges a medical degree so that they can make laws about medical decisions? Isn't it up to the medical profession? And this decision about when life begins being a religious issue, why do we honor one religion over another? And having 'dry' or 'wet' counties (with respect to liquor sales) isn't the same as a chopped up version of who can or cannot have an abortion.