The following article has been authored by a non-lawyer.
Democracy can be messy. Just look at what happened last month in Augusta, Maine.
Gov. Janet Mills, D-Maine, introduced a bill with House Speaker Rachel Talbot Ross to allow abortion through all nine months of pregnancy.
A public hearing on the bill was then scheduled for May 1.
Hundreds of people showed up, including 675 who wanted to speak in opposition, vastly outnumbering the bill’s supporters.
The hearing began at noon on Monday, and at 7 a.m.
Tuesday there were still a few people awaiting their two minutes at the microphone.
No one really wants to sit through a 19-hour hearing, but that’s democracy in action.
Of the people, by the people, for the people. And sometimes, the people show up.
Democracy, by definition, is something we get involved in, not something that’s imposed on us, and it happens like it did over the course of 19 hours in Augusta, Maine.
We don’t always get our way — as anti-abortion residents in Maine likely will not — but we must always be the ones, as a people, setting the policy, no matter how messy and burdensome the process may be.
That’s the difference between self-governance and tyranny.
With the one-year anniversary of the historic U.S. Supreme Court Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022) decision overturning Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973) just past, it’s important to understand that the Court’s opinion was less about abortion than it was about how we set policy in this constitutional republic.
The court did not rule on whether abortion should be legal, but on whether its legality should be imposed. Instead, the Justices asserted that the people and the lawmakers they elect — not the high court — are the ones who should set abortion policy.
Dobbs found, "Abortion presents a profound moral question. The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion. Roe and Casey arrogated that authority.
"We now overrule those decisions and return that authority to the people and their elected representatives." (Dobbs majority opinion, p. 79)
Dobbs also found, "we must guard against the natural human tendency to confuse what that Amendment protects with our own ardent views about the liberty that Americans should enjoy." (p. 14).
How do we guard against that tendency? We look to history.
Analyzing American laws, constitutional provisions, court decisions and scholarship, the court found that the "right to abortion" does not appear until Roe and that until then the court had not used the concept of "privacy" or "liberty" as a justification for purposely ending another life.
Dobbs took away those justifications.
But now, having lost the U.S. Constitution as cover for their extremism, abortion advocates are trying to force it into state constitutions.
In an increasing number of states, abortion supporters are asking courts or voters (through ballot initiatives) to declare that their states' charters include a "right to abortion."
Ballot initiatives, such as the one passed in Michigan shortly after Dobbs, or the one currently underway in Ohio, are pure examples of "soundbite voting."
They are nothing more than public relations campaigns funded and orchestrated by mostly out-of-state abortion groups that try to reduce the issue to soundbites about endangering women’s health or increasing freedom.
What the initiative would actually do is therefore never faced honestly or debated thoroughly. Many voters don’t realize they’re voting to permit abortion in circumstances that the public has never supported, such as with healthy moms carrying healthy babies in the final months of pregnancy.
The voters haven’t been given an opportunity to process whether, by approving these amendments, they want to exclude parents from a minor’s abortion decision, start paying for abortions with taxpayer dollars, or give children unfettered access to transgender surgery.
Nor do they consider that putting a right to abortion in a state constitution effectively annuls the work that they and their elected representatives may have done in the past to protect the unborn.
A robust legislative process, on the other hand, would examine all these implications through public hearings, witnesses, cross-examination, amendments, lobbying, and voting by legislators who represent every part of the state — legislators whom the citizens can then fire if they don’t agree with their policy votes.
You don’t get to do any of that if the very foundation of law in your state, that is, the Constitution, declares abortion to be a right.
Frank Pavone is one of the most prominent anti-abortion leaders globally. Read Frank Pavone Reports — More Here.