Visitors and Victory

Within a day or so, this site will go over 11,000 visitors since Campaign2008VictoryA began last April. It started on Townhall.com, which I ultimately decided was not somewhere I really wanted to be, and I moved to blogspot.com, where I am now. Earlier in this week, I began writing about the abortion issue and proposed a Human Life Amendment that actually would have a chance of passing. The main purpose of this column has become to advance the political career of a remarkable leader, Sarah Heath Palin, the Governor of Alaska. I've never met Sarah face-to-face, but I feel now that I know her as if she'd been living in the guest room. The future of our wonderful country rests on the ascendance of people like Sarah and my other political heroine, Diana Lynn Irey of Washington County, PA (http://irey.com). I always appreciate your paying this site a visit, and I hope you'll leave comments whenever you wish. God bless. I've have a few short pieces up before noon on Friday.

Stephen R. Maloney

A Human Life Amendment That Will Work

Tomorrow (Thursday) I'll write a realtively brief conclusion to my series on a viable human life amendment. On Friday and Saturday I'll write briefs follow-ups to the series. I'll respond to all comments. If you haven't read Dr. Laurence White's "letter to Mike Huckabee," please do so. The more I read by and about White, the more disturbing I find his "message," basically one of extreme hatred toward American society. So far as I can determine, Dr. White has never lifted a finger to prevent one abortion. He has, however, launched an unending stream of vitriol. Increasingly, he strikes me as Lutheran version of Osama bin Laden.

When I was about 12 or so and living in Rochester, New York, I used to deliver the Democrat & Chronicle morning paper -- and generally read it cover to cover. There was always a personal classified ad that went this way: "Any girl in trouble and in need of a friend, please call Mrs. Brigadier Giles Brunner at [phone number]." Somehow I knew the ad was directed to girls who were pregnant, scared to death, and with nowhere to turn. Mrs. Brunner was the wife of the head of the local Salvation Army. I found myself wondering if Pastor White of the big Lutheran Church in Houston ever had his wife run such an ad, given the fact he professes such a concern for the unborn. Your move, Pastor White. Christianity has everything to do with action and nothing at all to do with self-righteousness or sanctimony.

The following is the third in my series on a workable Human Life Amendment.

As I pointed out in the first piece, the amendment reads this way: "All abortions after 10 weeks of gestation shall be illegal in these United States except in proven cases of rape, incest, or threat to the life of the mother."

I have said that the problem with other proposed amendments (from Huckabee, Brownback, Thompson, and a few others) have no chance of passing. The number of Americans opposed to abortion in all circumstances is 5%. The number of Americans favoring abortions only when the life of the mother is at serious risk are about 10%.

In contrast, the number of Americans favoring abortions in all instances or most instances is 50%- plus. Members of Congress may not always know how to behave in restrooms on in the sending of instant messages, but they do know how to count. They won't vote for measures that lack popular support, because that would endanger their job security. What President John Adams said of the early bureaucracy holds for Congress: "Few die, none retire (unless their names are Chuck Hagel and John Warner).

So, why would my amendment pass? Because two-thirds of the American people approve of abortions in the first trimester. (I know, 10 weeks is not an entire trimester, but it's close enough.) However, the number of Americans who approve of abortions in the SECOND trimester is 25%. The number who approve of them in the THIRD trimester is a mere 14%.

If the Americans polled are speaking truthfully -- and why doubt that? -- the vast majority of our fellow citizens are either uncomfortable with, or downright hostile to, second-and-third-trimester abortions. They may never have heard of the word "quickening," but their attitudes reflect that ancient (and modern) concept.

Trust me, elected officials don't like to cast votes against measures -- like mine -- that have strong popular support.

My proposed amendment would give us a law something like the one in France. There's, it's fairly easy to get an abortion in the first trimester -- and very hard to get one later.

Here's the bad news for pro-lifers, who might ask: "What percentage of abortions take place in the first 10 weeks?" The answer is approximately 75%. As I've said, my proposal would not stop all abortions. The truly good news is that it would stop nearly 200,000 -- and that is a major step forward.

Right now, moral suasion and political action ARE preventing some abortions -- but not nearly enough.

I get back to the fundamental question: what about the other 600,000 abortions? The key question here is: what can we do to sharply reduce those numbers? The answer is we find out who is having abortions -- and why. In other words, exactly what life problems do these women have that cause abortions -- and how do we help solve them?

In Washington, DC problems DON'T get handled -- Iraq, immigration, Social Security Reform, etc. -- because legislators refuse to segment them into manageable sizes. Mega-problems don't get taken care of. Mini-problems often do.

I pointed out earlier than 21%-plus of the women (170,000 annually) having abortions say they do so because they're poor. The answer? We give them money NOT to have an abortion (and to care for the child), and they are no longer "poor."

This is a political variation on the scientific philosophy of Dr. Roy Vagelos, who led Merck Pharmaceuticals during its heyday. The medicines developed under his leadership were meant to attack unwanted things growing in our bodies. Rather than attack the growth directly, Vagelos aimed at the enzymes necessary for the nasty cells to grow. In the case of abortion, we would be aiming at its indirect causes.

Very few people -- outside the extreme fringes of NARAL and Planned Parenthood -- actually want abortions to occur at anything like current levels. It's just that they don't see an alternative. I have one: pay people off.

Here are the reasons women give for having abortions, and some of them are perhaps surprising:

25.5% Want to Postpone Childbearing;
21.3% cannot afford to have a baby -- this is the group I've discussed;
14.1% have marriage or relationship problems in which the partner doesn't want a child;
12.2% believe they're too young or that parents (and others) object to pregnancy;
10.8% believe that having a child will disrupt their education or job;
07.9% don't want anymore children;
06.1%see a risk to fetal or maternal health; and
02.1% have "other" concerns.

In all my years connected with the pro-life movement, I'd never seen these reasons laid out so clearly.

There's a famous old story (so good that it's sad that it's probably apocyphal) about F. Scott Fitzgerald saying to Ernest Hemingway: "The rich are different from you and me." Papa Hemingway replied, "Yes, they have more money."

A majority of abortions in America take place because of money issues or security issues -- and "security" is another name for "money." If people are provided with money, many of them will have children rather than abort them. In other cases, health care -- yet another name for money -- is the primary problem.

Remember what i said in a previous column: But should we actually give people money to have children? In fact, we already do it on a massive scale with the dependent-deductions on federal income taxes.

Let me be very candid: Dr. Laurence White's approach -- accusing America of being terminally immoral -- is not going to prevent even one abortion. I don't believe most Americans ARE immoral, at least no more so than Dr. White.

I'm offering proposals that could sharply limit the number of abortions in America. It would bring them down -- hopefully -- to pre-Roe v. Wade numbers. It would do so without trampling on people's rights to conduct their own lives.

What I'm proposing -- and I believe it can work -- will be expensive. But the monies allocated for something like Hurricane Katrina (about $150 billion) are far, far greater than the costs of my "war on abortion" idea. As I've said before, there's no value in being pro-life for the sake of being pro-life.

What do we do -- what political and social actions -- do we take to limit the number of abortions? Politics is highly contentious, but there are some positive steps that we can take.

It's time to go beyond finger-pointing and get in the real business of life-saving.

Stephen R. Maloney


Note: Thursday or Friday I'll have the last column on this subject.

Abortion: A Modest Proposal to Do Away with It

Question: Who's the visitor from Austin, Texas? I love the city of Austin, including the world's one remaining hippie coffee house and Sixth St., my musical version of dying and going to Heaven. Hook 'em horns! I also love all visitors from Alaska, including one from the North Pole! Santa? I have a regular visitor from a Native Alaskan village. I promise to be in Anchorage one day in the not-too-distant future. If you have read the following piece previously, note that there have been changes, indicated by the paragraphs in italics.

Note: Unlike Jonathan Swift's "Modest Proposal," mine has nothing to do with eating children.

On Wednesday, I'm hoping to do "God's work," to continue coming up with a Human Life Amendment that might actually have a chance of passing. The "abortion issue" is solvable, although perhaps in a way that will make both sides more than a trifle unhappy. I won't finish this until Wednesday, perhaps as late as noon EDT, but I truly do want to solicit your comments as it unfolds.

It will help if you go to http://wikipedia.org/ and look up 'Human Life Amendment." The piece is accurate, and it will tell you that the last serious effort to pass a "pro-life" constitutional amendment took place in 1983, with proposed legislation by Sen Hatch (R, UT) and Sen. Eagleton (D, MO). It failed rather miserably, 49 votes for, 50 against.

As a constitutional amendment, it required for passage 67 votes in the Senate and 291 in the House. If it had gotten through those bodies, it would then have required ratification by three-fourths of the states. I doubt -- everybody doubts -- such an amendment would now get anything like 49 positive votes.

Various candidates, including Mike Huckabee and Fred Thompson (although he's rather vague on the subject) have proposed constitutional amendments overturning Roe v. Wade. Unfortunately, those amendments have zero chance of passing. That will change to minus-zero if Hillary Clinton is elected President and brings with her, as expected, a big majority of liberal Democrats in Congress.

If you want to know what I'm struggling to deal with, I invite you to read a letter to Mike Huckabee by Dr. Laurence White, a big-time Lutheran pastor in Houston. His approach is to utter, "A curse on both your houses." He says it doesn't matter if Hillary Clinton wins the election, because he's fed up with Republicans who promise progress on the sancity of life and deliver zilch.

I have some problems with Dr. White. He strikes me as more of a nihilist than a theist. He also has a disturbing habit in his writings of comparing the moral climate in the U.S. with that in Nazi Germany, which is preposterous -- and utterly renders him an apostle not for a representative democracy but for a theocracy. His chances of getting his theocracy are about the same as Osama bin Laden's getting us to convert to Islam.

Dr. White's letter is followed by a more sensible e-mail from Larry Perrault, who is basically a wonderful guy who tends to look on politics (always a thoroughly mundane business) in theistic terms. Dr. White quotes the line that "politics is the art of the possible," and then he goes on to demand nothing less than the impossible: the total eradication of abortion.

You can find Dr. White and Larry by clicking on the following: http://www.mikehuckabee.com/index.cfm?FuseAction=Blogs.View&Blog_id=350

In my case, I love the possible. I believe that through politics you can accomplish SOME good. You can't accomplish ultimate good, because that is reserved for Heaven and the presence of God.

Quick question: how many abortions are there annually in the U.S.? The CDC (and these numbers are always a couple of years behind) says 850,000. That number has been declining for years, and let us hope it's still doing so.

What is my Human Life Amendment that I believe will move swiftly (or, more probably slowly) through the Congress?

It states, "All abortions after the 10 weeks of gestation shall be illegal in these United States except in proven cases of rape, incest, or threat to the life of the mother."

I'm hoping President Sarah Palin, after her surprise upset defeat of incumbent Hillary Clinton in 2012, will propose words very much like mine. With the bright-eyed Republicans Palin brings in with her, she will have a decent chance of getting it through the Congress -- with significant Democratic support.

But what about Roe v. Wade? The Palin Amendment would supersede it. Roe v. Wade would go into what Karl Marx called "the dustbin of history."

Unlike the proposal by Mike Huckabee, whom I love and may end up endorsing -- the Maloneys having a big thing for lost causes -- my amendment will pass. If Hillary, whom Sarah will beat like a rented mule, were still in the Senate, she'd probably vote for it. After all, it was Mrs. Clinton who called "every abortion . . . a tragedy." We may give her a chance to put her money where her mouth is.

Will Dr. White like my amendment? I fear he would put the Lutheran equivalent of a contract out on me. He may ask, after he gets through sputtering, "How many abortions would your so-called amendment prevent?"

My answer would be: approximately 200,000 per year. That is approximately 200,000 more than Dr. White's "hold-your-breath-until-you-turn-blue" approach to life issues.

About this point, my militantly Lutheran (!!!) daughter with the five children would back Dr. White and ask pointedly: "What about the other 650,000?!!?" And I, with my own five children, would say: "Wait until tomorrow to find out. "

We will never reduce abortions in this country to zero. Pre Roe v. Wade as many as 300,000 abortions per year took place, most of them quite illegal. (Nobody knows the precise figures from yesteryear because people weren't talking much about their abortions in those days, but there were a lot of them.)

(I like to fight with Dr. White, because he's nearly as cantankerous as I am. But he and I are in agreement on many more things than either of us would like to admit. We both have a tendency toward apocalyptic language that probably frightens small children and elderly people.)

Let me chip away at the 650,000 while I still have the energy. How many women say they have abortions because they're too poor to have a baby? It's more than 21%, or roughly 175,000 women, many of whom apparently are Black or Hispanic, although a good number of them are Caucasians. [Note: I understated these numbers in a previous draft of this piece.

In my Solomonic way, I ask: what do you do to encourage these women to have their children? Let's see, when people say that they don't have enough money, you follow the lead of the football player in "Jerry Maguire," and YOU SHOW THEM THE MONEY.

Since only a teeny fraction of it would be coming out of my pocket, let's give them $7,000 a year for two years -- and perhaps a smaller sum after that. Every year, you would hand out $1.2 billion, plus whatever it cost (too much) to administer the program and provide appropriate counselling.

Yes, some of these women would still continue to have abortions, but it seems likely that most of them would take the money and then go to term and deliver their children.

But should we actually give people money to have children? In fact, we already do it on a massive scale with the dependent-deductions on federal income taxes.

With my amendment's prohibition on abortion AFTER 10 weeks of gestation, as well as the monetary payments to poor women, the "total" of abortions THEORETICALLY prevented would be in excess of 370,000. As I explained, some of the women involved -- probably tens of thousands -- would fall through the cracks and have pregnancy terminations.

Also, I admit there's some double counting in my numbers, which is impossible to avoid right now. That is, some of the women who'd have abortions in the first 10 weeks would also be poor. But the offer of monetary assistance would be during the first 10 weeks -- and hopefully after. The reason for continuing the payments beyond 10 weeks would be to prevent illegal abortions.

Granted, my recommendations may sound cynical to some people. I don't care how it sounds. I am interested in actually preventing abortions -- as opposed to chanting pro-life slogans for the rest of my days.

The big question is why I think this approach would get through Congress when nothing else has. I will explain but not tonight . . .

Stephen R. Maloney
Ambridge, PA