Toomey: I think that Roe v Wade was wrongly defined, wrongly decided and I think states should be free to restrict abortion and I would support legislation in Pennsylvania that would ban abortion and I would suggest that we have penalties for doctors who perform them if we were able to pass that law.Toomey, in the same interview a few seconds earlier, says he's on the "center right." I wonder who he thinks is on the "far" right.Matthews: Would you put people in jail for performing abortions?
Toomey: At some point doctors performing abortions, I think would be subject to that sort of penalty.
August 7, 2009
Pat Toomey on Abortion
Don't know if you caught this one. Here's Pat Toomey, GOP candidate against Senator Arlen Specter, on Hardball (via Crooksandliars):
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5 comments:
i saw that interview. i wondered the same thing.
Well, I'm just plain center, with a bent to the right on some issues and a bent to the left on other. And I certain thing that Roe v Wade was wrongly defined, wrongly decided and I think states should be free to restrict abortion.
The only difference between me and Mr. Toomey on this one, then is that I personally would not support legislation in Pennsylvania that would ban abortion. But then again, since he's running for the United States Senate, his support for legislation that would have to be passed and signed in Harrisburg is more or less irrelevant.
Sooner or later, all of us are going to have to finally understand that abortion is one of those rare, unique issues that simply transcends political ideology. At their core, our views on abortion are defined almost exclusively on the age-old, and probably impossible-to-resolve question of when we think that we (ourselves) became human beings.
You don't have to be a hard right "wingnut" to believe that your life began at (or shortly after) conception. Nor does it invalidate all of your other left-leaning beliefs is you simply aren't sure when life begins, but you are pretty sure that it begins at some time before birth.
Similarly, you can be a hard right wingnut (like some of my relatives) and think abortion is a damn good thing, and should perhaps even be mandatory, at least for poor (often defined, explitily or implicity, by skin color) people. If abortion can reduce the taxpayer burden needed to support social welfare programs, then they are all for it. Under this frame of reference, even if one's own life began at some point early in pregnancy, other people's lives did not.
The media and the pundit classes love to tilt at abortion, simply because it *does* transcend political ideology, and involves fundamental beliefs about human life which are (and, frankly, must be) typically inflexible. It's one issue that hits at the core of who we think we are, can therefore be argued passionately by most of us, and that can actually get people on the same side of the aisle fired up at each other.
But a more grown-up perspective on this demands that we acknowledge that nobody can or ever will be able to really answer such a fundamental philosphical question as to when our lives truly begin. Based on a lifetime of thinking and reading and faith and friendships and everything else that is me, I've decided that life begins early enough that abortion is something that should be avoided at (nearly) all costs. But I also know that other people have put in an equal amount of time and effort into sorting through their own thoughts on this matter, and have come down somewhere else than I have.
And, quite frankly, none of us really *knows* the right answer. And so I'm comfortable with the fact that we all have different views and perspectives on this one. I don't see Mr. Toomey as being excessively right because of his view on abortion, even I do see him as rather far to the right because of his various "Club for Growth" economic ideas. Similarly, I don't see Senator Casey (or his late father) as being any less to the left because they had views on abortion that put them at odds with (some members in) their party.
There's one thing that can be said no matter at what time you believe that life begins:
If you believe that ALL abortions should be banned -- as the GOP platform and Toomey states -- than you do believe that the life of the woman is secondary to the life/potential life of the baby/fetus.
So there's one thing that we do *know*.
Come to think of it, here's a couple of other things that we *know*:
- If you ban all abortions, you could legally punish a doctor for saving a life (the woman's).
- There is no other law in the land that compels a person to give up their own life for another.
The Republican Party platform this year will reassert the party’s opposition to abortion. And again it will not allow for exceptions in the cases of rape, incest or to save the life of the mother, even though Senator John McCain, the presumptive presidential nominee, has long called for such exceptions.
1) Kudos to Richmond for his well-thought and well-expressed comment. I'm sure it'll be forgotten as soon as a certain troll arrives on the scene.
Abortion isn't a strictly right-left issue, and I know a number of liberals who consider protecting fetal rights as important as any other underdog fight they support.
2) An apparent majority of pro-choicers continue forget (or deliberately choose not) to remember that to someone who believes life begins at or near conception, abortion is infanticide - murder. Reread what Toomey said, replacing "abortion" with "murder", and think again about how "far right" his statements are.
I think states should be free to restrict murder and I would support legislation in Pennsylvania that would ban murder...
3) Would you tolerate a ban on abortion that had an exception for physicians' prudence and judgment regarding the life and health of mothers? Allowing abortion for rape and incest ends an innocent as the result of a horrific crime committed by someone else.
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