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| Blumenthal -- Pesci |
Walgreens has aroused U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal’s ire, easily aroused during his 20 year reign as Connecticut’s Attorney General.
“Walgreens has
succumbed,” said Connecticut’s U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal in a recent Hartford
Courant news story, “it has
caved cravenly, cowardly to this bullying and intimidation. Walgreens should
know better. Walgreens has simply thrown up its hands and said ‘women lose, you
win.’ That’s not the law. And that’s
not moral (emphasis mine). It’s not acceptable.’
“On March
2, Walgreens announced that it would not sell mifepristone, an
abortifacient, in 21 red states after threats of legal action from those states
by Republican Attorneys General. Connecticut is not one of those states.
“Mifepristone is
the first part of a two-drug regimen for a medication abortion, the most common
way to end a pregnancy.”
As Attorney General of Connecticut for two decades before he moved on to the U.S. Senate, Blumenthal, with a bracing wind of 200 lawyers at his back, had engaged in a great deal of pushing and shoving, if not outright bullying.
“U.S. Sen. Richard
Blumenthal and health advocates,” the story tells us, “are asking [emphasis
mine] Walgreens to reverse what they say is its decision to ‘put
profits and politics’ over people, by denying millions of people access to
abortion pills in their stores.”
Walgreens’ position
on the selling of mifepristone is legally proper and prudent. The company will
provide the product in states that have not declared the selling of
mifepristone illegal and punishable under state law, but the company, unlike
many lawyer-politicians, does not wish to become embroiled in costly legal
action.
Blumenthal,
according to the story, “also said that 21 Attorneys General have said they’re
going to sue not only Walgreens, but other pharmacies if they make mifepristone
unavailable.”
Now, the use of the
word “asking” in the above graph is hilariously imprecise and, in view of
Blumenthal’s admonition that Walgreens may be brought to court by 21
pro-abortion Attorneys General for having aligned itself with state laws, it is
also equally ironic, a prime example of pots calling kettles black.
To put it in clear
language, if Walgreens persists in accommodating the laws of various states,
the company will be sued by pro-abortion activists Attorneys General in the 21
states whose pro-abortion laws Walgreens has pledged to honor.
Who among all these
pushers and shovers is the bully?
Blumenthal is simply
wrong on both points he raised in the Courant story. The refusal by Walgreens
to distribute mifepristone in states in which the distribution violates state
law cannot be “illegal.”
Indeed, during his
long career as Attorney General in Connecticut, much of Blumenthal’s effort as
“the peoples’ Attorney General” was devoted to the prosecution of both people
and businesses he determined to be non-compliant with state laws.
Neither is Walgreens’
compliance with state laws “immoral.”
For centuries, among
Jews and early Christians in the Roman Empire, abortion was thought to be both
legal and immoral. During the pre-Christian Roman Empire, the paterfamilias,
the male head of household, could legally induce his wife or daughter to get an
abortion, and the paterfamilias also practiced what was called “exposure” on
unwanted born infants. The unwanted born child, often female, was taken by the
father to a hostile environment, a snow covered height, for instance, and there
left to die of exposure. It was the Christian ethical assault on paganism that
eventually brought both practices to an end.
It simply makes no
sense to imply that pro-abortionism is an ethic that must be defended by a
state clothed in pre-Christian morality. Likewise, it is anti-scientific to
claim that a fetus, at any stage of its development, is no more than “a part of
a woman’s body,” as are the usual bodily organs, a diseased liver for instance
or an extracted wisdom tooth.
But common sense, a
rational understanding of history, the claims of an authoritative “science”
worthy of its name, and a humanistic compassion for defenseless human life, are
beyond the ken of politicians who must depend, as Blumenthal does, upon Planned
Parenthood for their monetary support and moral unction.
If it is indeed
immoral to oppose abortion at any stage of fetal development – roughly
Blumenthal’s position on abortion -- why is it not equally immoral for
scientists and historians and theologians and ethicists to oppose, let’s say,
late-stage abortion on what they conceive to be scientific, historical,
theological and ethical grounds? If killing a fetus, without sound medical
reasons, is moral, does it not follow that silencing opposition to such anti-abortionists
is also a high moral undertaking?
Planned Parenthood,
which contributes more than a widow’s mite to Blumenthal’s various campaigns,
may have found at last in Blumenthal a worthy pro-abortion high priest.
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