Guest Opinion: My letter to Josh Shapiro on PA abortion law
Dear Mr. Shapiro:
There is a good chance you are going to be the next governor of Pennsylvania. As attorney general, I assume you are familiar with Pennsylvania's abortion law, which you have sworn to uphold, but based on some of your recent pronouncements on the campaign stump, I question whether you have a right understanding of that law. Hence, this letter.
Pennsylvania's abortion law as it stands today does not expressly forbid, nor does it expressly permit, abortion(s). There are no punitive consequences in the law whatsoever for the birth mother; only the conduct of the abortionist is criminalized. The law expressly protects the birth mother's right to an abortion if her health would be endangered by bringing her unborn child to term.
You may have heard our President say on television, soon after what he called the "outrageous" Dobbs decision which held there is no right to an abortion contained in the U.S. Constitution, that we need to "codify Roe v. Wade as soon as possible." And whereas I assume you as attorney general have read the 79-page majority opinion in Dobbs, I seriously doubt that the President read the opinion, and I am reasonably certain he had no clue what he had in mind with his call to "codify Roe v. Wade."
I doubt, in light of the state of ultrasonography today ("the science," if you will), that President Biden would have Pennsylvania's abortion statute go back and define a 24-week fetus as only "potential life" — what the Roe v. Wade Justices were willing to call a 24-week fetus in order to justify their desire to eliminate the abortion laws then in effect in every state in the nation.
Mr. Shapiro, this is the thinking — the only thinking — behind Pennsylvania's abortion law: we are not going to destroy fetal life except in very unusual and exceptional circumstances. The prohibitions on abortion, the prohibitions Roe v. Wade struck down by fabricating — yes, fabricating — a constitutional right to abortion, were always viewed, and continue to be viewed, as the protection of emerging yet real human life. Pennsylvania's fetal homicide law, which criminalizes the killing of an unborn child by someone other than his or her mother, is predicated on exactly the same considerations.
The men and women who legislated our abortion laws, contrary to what our present governor apparently believes, in no way intended to interfere with women's "reproductive rights"; their bodily autonomy; their "fundamental freedoms"; or otherwise interference in any way with a woman's decision when it comes to the unborn child she bears. And you will find none of those sentiments amongst 99% of those persons who advocate for the unborn.
Both before and after Roe v. Wade, the public generally, and Pennsylvania specifically, supports protection for the unborn child. The unborn are not, as Roe v. Wade called them, "potential life." Unborn children are real, human life. Everyone knows this. Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal, when weighing all the arguments for and against abortion restrictions, perhaps said it best when she said, "That's a baby in there."
If you should become our next governor, Mr. Shapiro, I hope you will keep that in mind.
Joseph P. Caracappa is a lawyer and resident of Newtown.
This article originally appeared on Bucks County Courier Times: Guest Opinion: My letter to Josh Shapiro on PA abortion law
