13 Year Old Florida Girl UPDATE
"Legally speaking, it's not a difficult decision to make. Morally speaking, it's very difficult," [Judge Ronald Alvarez] said. "But I'm not here to make the moral decision. I'm here to make the legal decisions."
Florida Governor Jeb Bush said the state would not fight the judge's decision, but expressed sadness about the situation.
"It's a tragedy that a 13-year-old child would be in a vulnerable position where she could be made pregnant and it's a tragedy that her baby will be lost.
"There's no good news in this at all," he said on Tuesday.
And truthfully, he is right. It is tragic and disappointing that this choice had to be made. But I think anybody will recognize that a 13 year old girl, homeless and in a State controlled foster home, who her whole life has had everything stacked against her, could do little good for a child; and that child would be as bad off as she.
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Update to this post.
posted by General Stan at 1:39 PM
3 Comments:
Added update from NATE from previous post:
"Which reads as though he's saying we should sterilize children, but that's just me."
It amazes me that they were supposedly concerned about her mental health post abortion (everyone knows that terminating an unwanted pregnancy sends your into such a spiral of-deserved-guilt and shame that you end up crazy) but NOT about the strain to her body and mind resulting from being forced to carry a child to term and then either a)give it away or b) try to raise it. And this one's going away pretty quietly, did you notice? An outspoken, determined, disadvantaged, failed-by-the-president's-brother's-state 13-year old is not exactly the Terry Schiavo Redux the talking heads were hoping for. The religious right is not ready, yet, to engage the abortion debate head on. They're going about it in much more subversive ways, eroding women's reproductive health rights (and not just abortion) slowly until they have weakened the ground for a legal right to abortion enough to repeal it. This is why you won't see any more than insincere expressions of regret for poor L.G. from the right...for now.
Yeah, I can't agree with you more. It's a forgotten realm. But you speak to a truth here: at the point the trodden actually raise their voices is when we drop the issue. It's a kind of fascinating way to handle these problems.
And I have to say, Kudos to Judge Alvarez, who, in a rare moment of "Liberal Judicial ideologic activism" actually spoke his mind. I'm not talking about the moment where he declared the decision simple to determine legally, but difficult morally.
I'm talking instead about the moment where LG directly questioned his authority as a representative of the state: "Why can't I make this choice?" and he responded with clarity and honesty: "I don't know."
It speaks to the truly murky world of Moral dilemnas (yes, that's an "n" in there. Viva la revolucion!) in these issues, and how we have so reduced these problems to these moral poles but haven't even taken the time to define them, to really discuss them, and to make meaning from them. Again, kudos, Judge Alvarez, for being willing to work within the realm of ambiguity while in the great fire of moral declaritude (more made up words!).
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