Judie A. Brown Quotes
Abortion is never necessary to save a mother's life.
On this medical statement she was contradicted by the FDA, National Institutes of Health, the CDC, the AMA and every Obstetrical organization and association.
Judie A. Brown, President and Cofounder of American Life League, Quoted in "Right Wing Watch - American Life League", http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/american-life-league#sthash.27MrcQAw.dpuf, , This is another good illustration of ideologues not being swayed or even accepting fact and reality–very common in politics and religion. See {36975} for her own self assessment.]
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
See {583384} for a good example of the political intellectual process of zealots and ideologues.
Portugal, a traditional Roman Catholic nation where the Church has always had great influence, had laws banning abortion. However, in a national referendum the Portuguese people voted overwhelming to allow abortion despite the Church’s stand. The Parliament then overwhelmingly passed a law legalizing abortion on demand up to the 10 the week of pregnancy. The President, though opposed personally to abortion signed the bill. This quotation illustrates a common occurrence in industrial democracies whereby politicians will not impose their personal moral views on the laws of society but may well have contrary personal views.
At the time of the debate, the average pregnant woman’s risk of death was much higher from delivery than for an early abortion.
The speech was given early in his career before he changed is position in 1980 to be Ronald Reagan's running mate. Bush's mother was the head of Planned Parenthood in Connecticut.
Churches are political organizations too and are subject to the forces of their membership. In the case of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1971 they passed resolutions to assure the right of a woman to have an abortion to protect her health. The position on abortion changed steadily thereafter to even pass Constitutional amendments to ban abortions except to save the life of the mother. See {614356},54122, {614358}, {614359}, {614360}, {614361} for the dynamic history of the change.
The argument she made is that a woman should not be required to risk her life if she does not want to. Other than military conscription, there is no other aspect of American law whereby the society forces a citizen to risk their life.
At the time, condoms and other forms of contraceptives were illegal to buy, sell, possess or own. As late as 1963 a Connecticut druggist was sentenced to jail for filling a doctor’s prescription for condoms and selling them to a married couple even thought the woman might die if she again became pregnant. The Supreme Court (Griswald v. Connecticut) established that a woman had a right to control her own reproductive cycle and the government had no business interfering with a privacy right possessed by a couple. Roe v. Wade established the right to an abortion. The same moral compunctions used with abortion were, and still are used by some to oppose any form of artificial birth control. They argued: preventing a life was as serious a moral failure as taking one. Many Catholics, many evangelical and fundamentalist protestants, and some orthodox Muslims are today morally opposed to birth control and believe that the government should ban birth control as it once was in the United States.
