National Affairs Rory Leishman
In a televised debate on October 15th among Democrat candidates for President of the United States in next year’s election, former vice-president Joe Biden maintained: ”Reproductive rights are a constitutional right.” Furthermore, he promised to nominate people for the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) who can be relied upon to “support the right of privacy on which the entire notion of a woman’s right to choose is based.”
As it happens, there is no mention of abortion, reproductive rights or privacy rights in any provision of the United States Constitution. But that matters not to Biden or judicial activists who insist that unelected judges have a right to change the laws and the Constitution through judicial interpretation.
Thus, in Griswold v. Connecticut(1965), the judicial activists on SCOTUS ruled that a hitherto unknown right of privacy is contained in “penumbras, formed by emanations” from the Fourth and Fifth amendments to the Constitution. That finding was, and remains, nonsense. The Fourth and Fifth amendments prohibit only “unreasonable searches and seizures “and the deprivation of “life, liberty or property, without due process of law.”
Nonetheless, eight years later, in Roe v. Wade(1973), the Court cited the nonsensical right of privacy concocted in Griswaldas a pretence for striking down all state restrictions on abortion. In a stinging dissent in Roe, Mr. Justice Byron White wrote: “I find nothing in the language or history of the Constitution to support the Court‘s judgment. As an exercise of raw judicial power, the Court perhaps has authority to do what it does today; but, in my view, this judgment is an improvident and extravagant exercise of the power of judicial review that the Constitution extends to this court.”
Meanwhile, judicial activists on the Supreme Court of Canada have likewise willfully struck down Canada’s abortion law in Morgentaler(1988) and then legalized physician-assisted suicide in Carter(2015). Now, to make matters worse, a judge of the Quebec Superior Court has recently struck down the provision in the 2016 federal euthanasia law that only people whose death is “reasonably foreseeable” can qualify for physician-assisted suicide.
Like the earlier judgments in Morgentalerand Carter,this latest euthanasia ruling has no basis in law or precedent, yet the leaders of every major federal party in Canada promised in a televised election debate on October 10 to respect the judgment of the Court. Only Conservative leader Andrew Scheer suggested that the euthanasia law should ”protect vulnerable people.”
Meanwhile, thanks to two judicial appointments initiated by President Donald Trump, SCOTUS is now so evenly divided between practitioners of judicial activism and judicial restraint that the latter might soon reverse the “improvident and extravagant” ruling of the Court in Roe v. Wade in 1973.
In marked contrast, the Supreme Court of Canada is still stacked with judicial activists who routinely subvert democracy and the rule of law by usurping the exclusive legislative powers of elected representatives of the people in Parliament and the provincial legislatures. Yet unlike the Republicans, none of our parliamentary leaders has promised to curb rogue judges by appointing practitioners of traditional judicial restraint who will uphold the law as originally understood and, in so doing, overturn the lawless judgments of judicial activists in cases like Morgentalerand Carter.
In the United States, the majority of Republicans are pro-life and opponents of Roe, whereas almost all leading Democrats support abortion on demand. One prominent Democrat exception is presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard, a longstanding congresswoman from Hawaii. Although she is not consistently pro-life, Gabbard has at least called for enactment of legislation stipulating that “during the third trimester, abortion is not an option unless the life or severe health consequences of a woman are at risk.”
People’s Party leader Maxime Bernier takes much the same view. Although he, too, is not consistently pro-life, he noted earlier this year that in Quebec, there have been over 20 late-term abortions involving a healthy mother and healthy baby. He observed: “My personal view is that at this stage, when the baby is fully developed and viable, this amounts to infanticide.”
Quite so. Thanks mainly to the Supreme Court of Canada, there is no law prohibiting abortion in this country even up to the last second before birth.
That is scandalous. Yet Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Conservative leader Andrew Scheer (a self-described pro-lifer), New Democrat leader Jagmeet Singh, Green Party leader Elizabeth May and even People’s Party leader Bernier all pledged during the recent election campaign that they would oppose the enactment of any legislative restrictions on abortion.
What a disgrace.
