“First, do no harm” — the timeless admonition to new doctors — gets about as close to the core of conservative philosophy as four words can. A conservative measures twice before cutting, heeds the doctrine of unintended consequences and lives by the motto: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

A healthy republic needs conservatives in its political mix, and the lack of them in power today is a leading cause of America’s civic anomie. Our conservative party has become a radical movement, from the White House to the statehouse.

The latest evidence is found in the radical antiabortion laws passed this month by legislatures in Georgia, Alabama and Missouri, with other states apparently close behind. These laws are intentionally provocative, reckless and, as televangelist and abortion foe Pat Robertson put it, “extreme.”

Though not identical (Georgia’s law will subject patients to criminal penalties, while Alabama targets only the doctors), the new laws are built from the same rigid timber. They hold that a fetus of six or eight weeks’ gestation has all the rights and protections of a born child. No ifs, ands or buts. The end result is tyranny masquerading as love: Even an Alabama child in grade school raped by an abusive father must carry the resulting pregnancy to term.

The radicals behind such laws fall into two camps, neither one conservative. Some are zealots who genuinely believe in their extreme ideas. The rest are cynics who hope that the courts will strike down these laws and thereby drive the abortion wedge into the heart of the 2020 campaign. What unites them is their willingness, even eagerness, to strain the social fabric and discredit our institutions.

One sees this drive to inflame and divide in the way they talk about existing abortion laws. In his State of the Union address, President Trump — solidly in the cynics’ camp — spokeof babies “ripped from the mother’s womb moments before birth” and killed. However, in 2007, the Supreme Court actually upheld a nationwide ban on the procedure he so morbidly referenced. Nor has there ever been an “unlimited right to abortion,” as proponents of the crackdown claim. The high court’s landmark 1992 abortion ruling plainly stated that may choose an abortion before the fetus is viable outside the womb — but the state can regulate abortion after viability, as long as the regulations don’t impose an “undue burden” on women.

Full article below

https://www.google.com/amp/s/beta.washingtonpost.com/opinions/this-months-abortion-laws-are-anything-but-conservative/2019/05/17/959655ec-78ce-11e9-bd25-c989555e7766_story.html%3foutputType=amp

logo-footer