Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
1/90
ABORTION NEG
Abortion Neg ............................................................................................................................................................................................. 1
Notes on the DA ........................................................................................................................................................................................ 3
*** Topicality *** ..................................................................................................................................................................................... 4
T – Barriers ................................................................................................................................................................................................ 5
T – Subsets ................................................................................................................................................................................................. 6
T – social Services ..................................................................................................................................................................................... 7
G-Spec 1NC ............................................................................................................................................................................................... 8
G-Spec 2NC Overview .............................................................................................................................................................................. 9
G-Spec – AT: Court Has to Spec ............................................................................................................................................................. 10
*** States Counterplan *** ..................................................................................................................................................................... 11
States CP 1NC ......................................................................................................................................................................................... 12
States CP – Solvency ............................................................................................................................................................................... 13
*** Hollow Hope Disad *** .................................................................................................................................................................... 14
Hollow Hope 1NC ................................................................................................................................................................................... 15
Uniqueness – Extension ........................................................................................................................................................................... 16
Ext – No social Change............................................................................................................................................................................ 17
2NC Hollow Hope Impact ....................................................................................................................................................................... 18
Ext – No Social Change ........................................................................................................................................................................... 19
Ext – Turns Case ...................................................................................................................................................................................... 20
*** Conditions Counterplan *** ............................................................................................................................................................. 21
Conditions CP 1NC ................................................................................................................................................................................. 22
AT: Conditioning Ineffective ................................................................................................................................................................... 23
Say Yes .................................................................................................................................................................................................... 24
AT: Rollback............................................................................................................................................................................................ 25
Competition Theory ................................................................................................................................................................................. 26
AT: Perm do the CP ................................................................................................................................................................................. 27
AT: Perm Do Both ................................................................................................................................................................................... 28
AT: Perm do the CP Then Plan ................................................................................................................................................................ 29
AT: Perm do the CP then Plan ................................................................................................................................................................. 30
AT: PErm – Condition But Do Even If They Say No .............................................................................................................................. 31
AT: Perm – Condition Something Else .................................................................................................................................................... 32
AT: Conditions CP Bad ........................................................................................................................................................................... 33
*** Abortion DA *** .............................................................................................................................................................................. 34
Abortion DA 1NC 1/2 .............................................................................................................................................................................. 35
Abortion DA 1NC 2/2 .............................................................................................................................................................................. 36
Abortion Bad – Gender ............................................................................................................................................................................ 37
Abortion Bad – Murder ............................................................................................................................................................................ 38
Abortion Bad – Racism ............................................................................................................................................................................ 39
AT: Rights of the Mother ......................................................................................................................................................................... 40
AT: We Don’t ‘Increase’ Abortions ........................................................................................................................................................ 41
AT: Back Alleys ...................................................................................................................................................................................... 42
*** Advantages *** ................................................................................................................................................................................. 43
Reproductive Rights F/L .......................................................................................................................................................................... 44
Ext #3 – Kills Autonomy ......................................................................................................................................................................... 45
Edleman F/L 1/2 ...................................................................................................................................................................................... 46
Edleman F/L 2/2 ...................................................................................................................................................................................... 47
Ext #1 – No Shift ..................................................................................................................................................................................... 48
Ext #2 – No Political Reform................................................................................................................................................................... 49
Discrimination F/L 1/2 ............................................................................................................................................................................. 50
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Abortion Neg
Gonzo and Lison
2/90
Discrimination F/L 2/2 ............................................................................................................................................................................. 51
Ext #1 – Alt Cause ................................................................................................................................................................................... 52
Ext #3 – Abortion = Black Genocide ....................................................................................................................................................... 53
AT: Courts ............................................................................................................................................................................................... 54
Natives F/L ½ .......................................................................................................................................................................................... 55
Natives F/L 2/2 ........................................................................................................................................................................................ 56
Human Rights F/L ................................................................................................................................................................................... 57
Overpopulation F/L 1/2............................................................................................................................................................................ 58
Overpopulation F/L 2/2............................................................................................................................................................................ 59
Individual Agency F/L ............................................................................................................................................................................. 60
Ext #3 – Util............................................................................................................................................................................................. 61
Ext #4 – Util Key to Rights...................................................................................................................................................................... 62
*** Equal Protection *** ......................................................................................................................................................................... 63
Equal Protection F/L ................................................................................................................................................................................ 64
Ext #1 – Ideologies .................................................................................................................................................................................. 65
Ext #3 – 14th Limited ............................................................................................................................................................................... 66
Ext #4 – Doesn’t Solve Discrimination ................................................................................................................................................... 67
Felon Voting F/L ..................................................................................................................................................................................... 68
Minority Businesses F/L .......................................................................................................................................................................... 69
LGBT F/L ................................................................................................................................................................................................ 70
Women In Combat F/L ½ ........................................................................................................................................................................ 71
Women In Combat F/L 2/2 ...................................................................................................................................................................... 72
Death Penalty F/L 1/2 .............................................................................................................................................................................. 73
Death Penalty F/L 2/2 .............................................................................................................................................................................. 74
Environmental Justice F/L ....................................................................................................................................................................... 75
Equal Protection Turn – Court Legitimacy .............................................................................................................................................. 76
Link – Legitimacy .................................................................................................................................................................................... 77
Equal Protection Turn – Federalism ........................................................................................................................................................ 78
Equal Protection Turn – Liberty .............................................................................................................................................................. 79
*** Solvency ***..................................................................................................................................................................................... 80
Solvency F/L 1/2 ...................................................................................................................................................................................... 81
Solvency F/L 2/2 ...................................................................................................................................................................................... 82
Ext #1 – Funding Irrelevant ..................................................................................................................................................................... 83
Ext #4 – Alt Cause ................................................................................................................................................................................... 84
*** Off Case *** ..................................................................................................................................................................................... 85
Politics – Popular (Public) ....................................................................................................................................................................... 86
Politics – Popular (Congress) ................................................................................................................................................................... 87
Politics – Unpopular ................................................................................................................................................................................ 88
Politics – Unpopular (Public)................................................................................................................................................................... 89
Politics – Unpopular (Congress) .............................................................................................................................................................. 90
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
3/90
NOTES ON THE DA
So the abortion aff seems core of the topic based off of the number of camps that wrote it (all six labs at DDI wrote one!!!). So it does
one of two things – either repeals the Hyde amendment, which bans poor people from getting abortions, or it overturns a court case
(probably Harris v. McRae). Their main advantage will be patriarchy/women’s rights. Other big ones are intersectionality (basically
turning the aff into a massive fem and racism aff), and overpopulation (taking a more policy perspective). As for off case, T shells are
in here (G-Spec is NOT God spec, it is GROUNDS Spec for courts affs – it’s basically OSpec, saying they overspecified how the
court rules). The conditions counterplan is interesting. It does the plan “if and only if” providers only perform 1 st trimester abortions.
Two things – it avoids the politics DA (for Hyde affs) or the legitimacy DA (for Courts affs), and also avoids the abortion bad disad
(Note on that. Evidence is needed that life begins after the first trimester, so there are questions about counterplan solvency of that
DA, but honestly, they can’t take EITHER position without linking themselves harder to the DA because of the counterplan, which is
interesting, because no one writes comparatively about when life begins, they all have their own views but don’t talk about others. For
courts affs: Amendment Counterplan. For Hyde, States Counterplan. The hollow hope DA that’s in here is for courts affs. It’s
interesting and worth reading.
Suggested Strategy (Congress)
T
States
Politics (It’s political suicide!!!)
Conditions CP
Abortion DA
Case
Suggested Strategy (Courts)
T
G-Spec (If they don’t spec they basically lose…, so they have to)
Amendment
Slew of Court DAs
Case
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
4/90
*** TOPICALITY ***
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
5/90
T – BARRIERS
A. Violation – Increase means to make greater – the aff doesn’t create new social service or increase funding for an
existing one – it just removes a barrier to eligibility
Random House Webster’s College Dictionary 96
Increase: 1) to make greater, as in number, size, strength, or quality; augment 2)to become greater, as in number, size,
strength, or quality 3)to multiply by propagation 4)growth or augmentation in size, strength, quality 5)the act or process of
increasing
B. Vote Neg
1. Limits – expansions in eligibility double aff ground by letting them fund or expand any one of the hundreds of
federal social services
2. Ground – justifies plans that extend eligibility symbolically without actually defending an increase in usage –
makes it impossible to get disad links
3. FX T – The eligibility increase is only achieved via the removal of a barrier – this is FX T and it’s bad - unlimits
the topic because anything could uphold the resolution through its effects, making research impossible
3. Potential abuse is a voter because it overstretches our research burden and undermines preparedness for all
debates
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
6/90
T – SUBSETS
A. Interpretation: Persons means human beings – in context of the resolution this means all people living in poverty
Random House Webster’s College Dictionary 96
Persons:1)a human being; a man, woman or child 2)a human being as distinguished from an animal or a thing 3)the actual
self or individual personality of a human being 4)the body of a living human being, sometimes including the clothes being
worn
B. Violation: the aff only increases social services to a subset of people living in poverty – pregnant women
C. Standards:
1. Limits: allowing the aff to specify a certain subgroup with a certain condition allows for affs to run plans that
increase social services only to people living in poverty in a certain state. This creates an unreasonable research
burden.
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
7/90
T – SOCIAL SERVICES
A. Interpretation: Social services, as defined by the federal government, exclude land grants, wage payment, healthcare,
education, child care and welfare
Title
XX
of
the
Social
Security
Act
http://www.ssa.gov/OP_Home/ssact/title20/2000.htm) [Tanay]
35(Section
2005,
1935,
US
law,
accessed
at
SEC. 2005. [42 U.S.C. 1397d] (a) Except as provided in subsection (b), grants made under this title may not be used by the State, or by
any other person with which the State makes arrangements to carry out the purposes of this title—(1) for the purchase or improvement
of land, or the purchase, construction, or permanent improvement (other than minor remodeling) of any building or other facility;
(2) for the provision of cash payments for costs of subsistence or for the provision of room and board (other than costs of subsistence
during rehabilitation, room and board provided for a short term as an integral but subordinate part of a social service, or temporary
emergency shelter provided as a protective service); (3) for payment of the wages of any individual as a social service (other than
payment of the wages of welfare recipients employed in the provision of child day care services); (4) for the provision of medical care
(other than family planning services, rehabilitation services, or initial detoxification of an alcoholic or drug dependent individual)
unless it is an integral but subordinate part of a social service for which grants may be used under this title; (5) for social services
(except services to an alcoholic or drug dependent individual or rehabilitation services) provided in and by employees of any hospital,
skilled nursing facility, intermediate care facility, or prison, to any individual living in such institution; (6) for the provision of any
educational service which the State makes generally available to its residents without cost and without regard to their income; (7) for
any child day care services unless such services meet applicable standards of State and local law; (8) for the provision of cash
payments as a service (except as otherwise provided in this section); (9) for payment for any item or service (other than an emergency
item or service) furnished— (A) by an individual or entity during the period when such individual or entity is excluded under this title
or title V, XVIII, or XIX pursuant to section 1128, 1128A, 1156, or 1842(j)(2), or (B) at the medical direction or on the prescription of
a physician during the period when the physician is excluded under this title or title V, XVIII, or XIX pursuant to
section 1128, 1128A,1156, or 1842(j)(2) and when the person furnishing such item or service knew or had reason to know of the
exclusion (after a reasonable time period after reasonable notice has been furnished to the person); or (10) in a manner inconsistent
with the Assisted Suicide Funding Restriction Act of 1997[6].
B. Violation: the affirmative increases access to abortion which is considered healthcare
C. Standards:
1. Limits: Defining abortion as a social service allows for affs to claim giving those living in poverty doughnuts or a
place to sleep for a night because it would help them out.
D. This is a voting issue for the reasons above
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
8/90
G-SPEC 1NC
A. Interpretation – the affirmative can’t specify the grounds on which the Court rules
B. Vote Neg on Extra-Topicality –the grounds for the decision are not intrinsically related to the topic – grounds
specification justifies abusive affirmative tactics like specifying sources of funding or their bill’s Congressional
sponsor and then reading advantages stemming from these unrelated planks
C. Extra T is a voter – it’s impossible to predict what non-topical planks the aff will tack on to the plan – failure to vote
them down makes it a no-risk venture for the aff
D. Potential abuse is a voter because it overstretches our research burden and undermines preparedness for all debates
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
9/90
G-SPEC 2NC OVERVIEW
The affirmative specifies the grounds for the Court’s ruling – that’s extra-topical because it goes beyond the scope of the
resolution – this kind of specification is infinitely regressive and justifies aff specification of their bill’s Congressional sponsor
with a politics advantage or specifying that a program will be cut ot fund the plan with advantages stemming from cutting the
program – Xtra T is bad because aff planks are totally unpredictable – it’s a voter because failure to vote makes it a no-risk
venture for the aff where we have to win our t violation just to get them to sever out of the extra topical portions of the plan
The impact to this is predictability – absent the ability to predict affirmatives advantage, the negative is always a step behind,
ensuring the loss of education and fairness. Potential abuse is reason enough to vote them down – it sets a precedent for future
debates on the topic
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
10/90
G-SPEC – AT: COURT HAS TO SPEC
Just because the courts have to provide grounds for a ruling doesn’t mean the aff should get to specify it – in order for a bill to
be passed, it has to pass a vote in both houses, but that doesn’t mean that the aff should get to specify the vote count in each
house – this justifies stupid politics advantages based on absurd Republican concessions or consensus building that would
never happen – this kills limits because it literally multiplies the number of topical affs by the number of different ways each
house could vote to make the bill pass
And, having a normal means debate solves their offense – if they want to discuss the grounds for the ruling, they should just
read cards saying that this is the most likely scenario for the courts to repeal the barrier.
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
11/90
*** STATES COUNTERPLAN ***
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
12/90
STATES CP 1NC
Counterplan Text: The 50 States should provide Medicaid funding for abortions regardless of federal restrictions under the
Hyde Amendment.
States can fund repealing the Hyde Amendment
National Abortion Federation 06 [“Public Funding for Abortion: Funding and the Hyde Amendment”
http://www.prochoice.org/pubs_research/publications/downloads/about_abortion/public_funding.pdf]
The Hyde Amendment affects only federal spending. States are free to use their own funds to cover additional abortion services.
For example, Hawaii, New York, and Washington have enacted laws funding abortions for health reasons. Other states, such as
Maryland, cover abortions for women whose pregnancies are affected by fetal abnormalities or present serious health risks.
These expansions are important steps toward ensuring equal access to health care for all women. Prior to the 1993 expansion of
the Hyde Amendment, thirty states chose not to use their own Medicaid funds to cover abortions for pregnancies resulting from
rape or incest.
State legislatures are key to success of any abortion law
Morris, Fordham International Law Journal, 93
(Danielle Morris, Fordham International Law Journal, 1993, “Planned Parenthood v. Casey: From U.S. “Rights Talk” To Western
European “Responsibility Talk”,” Lexis) SS
The Court in Casey allowed society to force its concern for more thoughtful decision-making upon the woman in the first trimester.
n238 Justice O'Connor asserted in Casey that the woman has the right only to make the ultimate decision, but does not have a right to
be insulated from all others in so doing. n239 This assertion signals an acceptance of something like the Western European concept of
wedding community values with the woman's choice. The Court in Casey approved the imposition of a more reflective choice upon
the woman by upholding the twenty-four hour waiting period. n240 Moreover, the Court allowed the presentation of communityoriented arguments to the woman before she makes her decision. n241 Thus, the Court in Casey effectively redirected U.S. abortion
jurisprudence in the Western European direction. n242 Mandating that women be more thoughtful in their decision-making n243 and
take reproductive responsibilities and free [*795] dom seriously, n244 as the Court in Casey demands, also should entail making the
community accountable for such regulations. n245 Redirecting society toward shared responsibilities means that society must also
share in the collective responsibility such as providing meaningful material assistance to aid a woman in her choice to bear to term or
abort the fetus. n246 Faithful adherence to the Western European example would mean accompanying the regulations aimed at
encouraging more thoughtful decisions with funding for the woman's ultimate decision to terminate her pregnancy or to keep the child.
Providing meaningful material assistance to the woman should include paying for the woman's expenses that accompany terminating a
pregnancy or bearing the child. Such assistance should include travel costs and days spent away from her job, counseling regarding
her decision, and helping the woman bear and support a child, should she forgo terminating her pregnancy. n247 Material assistance,
however, should not be limited to the above-mentioned suggestions. Furthermore, state legislatures should implement programs
designed to prevent [*796] unwanted pregnancies such as sex education programs and providing condoms at schools. n248 The
Court in Casey did not explicitly address whether the state regulations carry communal responsibilities to the woman. n249 The
government should support the woman's abortion decision by equally promoting both the woman's and the state's interests. n250
Moreover, state legislatures should ensure that clinics and hospitals provide the safest procedures available, counsel the woman in her
choice, and help her pay for it.
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
13/90
STATES CP – SOLVENCY
States currently assist funding of Medicaid now – no reason for a solvency deficit
Guttmacher Institute (supports social science research, policy analysis and public education concerning sexual and reproductive issues) 7/8/ 09
(“RESTRICTING MEDICAID FUNDING FOR ABORTION FORCES ONE IN FOUR POOR WOMEN TO CARRY UNWANTED PREGNANCIES TO TERM,”
Rebecca Wind [Senior Communications Associate @ Guttmacher], July 8 2009,
http://www.healthnewsdigest.com/news/Women_s_Health_260/Restricting_Funding_for_Abortion_Forces_1_in_4_Poor_Women_to_Carry_Unwanted_Pregnancies_t
o_Term.shtml ]
Approximately one-fourth of women who would obtain a Medicaid-funded abortion if given the option are instead forced to carry their pregnancy to term when
state laws restrict Medicaid funding for abortion, because they lack the money to pay for the procedure themselves. According to a new report, “Restrictions on
Medicaid Funding for Abortions: A Literature Review,” by the Guttmacher Institute and Ibis Reproductive Health, Medicaid funding restrictions also delay some
women’s abortion by 2–3 weeks, primarily because of difficulties women encounter in raising funds to pay for the procedure. Currently, 32 states and the
District of Columbia allow Medicaid funds to be used for an abortion only in cases of rape and incest, or if the woman’s life is
endangered, in accordance with the federal Hyde Amendment; only 17 states have policies to use their own funds to pay for all
or most medically necessary abortions. Lacking insurance coverage, some poor women need a considerable amount of time to come up with the money
to pay for an abortion, and may have to pull resources from other family necessities, like food or rent, if they are able to find the funds at all. As the cost of the
procedure increases with gestation, many poor women become trapped in a vicious cycle of scrambling to raise enough money before the cost—and risk—
increase further, while others are left with no recourse but to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term. “The research literature clearly shows that restricting
Medicaid funding for abortion forces many poor women—already at greatest risk of unintended pregnancy—to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term,” says
Stanley Henshaw, Guttmacher Institute senior fellow and the study’s lead author. “Antiabortion advocates are using these restrictions in a misguided attempt to
reduce the nation’s abortion rate. Instead, we should be focusing on reducing the underlying cause of abortion—unintended pregnancy—by ensuring better
access to and use of contraceptives.”
The states’ constitutions are capable of resolving issues caused by the Hyde Amendment and can therefore provide abortion
services
National Abortion Federation, No Date Given. (“Public Funding for Abortion: Medicaid and the Hyde Amendment”).
http://www.prochoice.org/about_abortion/facts/public_funding.html
The first challenges to the Hyde Amendment came shortly after its implementation. The Supreme Court has held that the Hyde
Amendment restrictions are constitutional8 and that states participating in Medicaid are only required to cover abortion services
for which they receive federal funding rather than all medically necessary abortions.9 Challenges under state constitutions have
been more successful. Several lawsuits have been brought in individual states arguing that state constitutions afford greater
protection for privacy and equal protection than the federal Constitution.10
With adequate funding states can provide abortions – Hawaii, New York, Washington, and Maryland prove
National Abortion Federation, No Date Given. (“Public Funding for Abortion: Medicaid and the Hyde Amendment”).
http://www.prochoice.org/about_abortion/facts/public_funding.html
The Hyde Amendment affects only federal spending. States are free to use their own funds to cover additional abortion services.
For example, Hawaii, New York, and Washington have enacted laws funding abortions for health reasons. Other states, such as
Maryland, cover abortions for women whose pregnancies are affected by fetal abnormalities or present serious health risks.
These expansions are important steps toward ensuring equal access to health care for all women.
States have laws for abortion- they solve due to financial incentives
Gary MacDougal, became Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Mark Controls Corporation in September 1969, 2007,
http://www.amazon.com/Make-Difference-Americas-Poverty-Problem/dp/0312252234
It's illegal for an adult man to seduce an underage girl into a sexual relationship. Every state has statutory rape laws that prohibit
sex between adults and children. But Planned Parenthood, the National Abortion Federation, family planning service providers,
and all other clinics that profit from selling products and services to sexually active underage girls, have a financial incentive to
ignore the laws that were designed to protect children from sexual abuse. And now there’s proof that 91% of these businesses
don’t comply with child abuse reporting laws. On the contrary, they actually help conceal child rape from law enforcement!
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
14/90
*** HOLLOW HOPE DISAD ***
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
15/90
HOLLOW HOPE 1NC
A. Reproductive rights groups focusing on Congress now
Sarah Posner (author of God’s Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters) 7/23/2009: Ryan-DeLauro’s
Common Ground on Abortion is in Religious Territory. http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/sexandgender/1695/ryandelauro%E2%80%99s_common_ground_on_abortion_is_in_religious_territory
There were abundant blessings for this week’s triumphant rollout of the Reducing the Need for Abortion and Supporting Parents Act,
also known as the Ryan-DeLauro bill, after its two chief sponsors in the House, Reps. Tim Ryan (D-OH) and Rosa DeLauro (D-CT).
These two legislators, who disagree on the question of whether abortion should be legal, worked with the centrist think tank Third
Way’s culture program to find common ground among supporters of reproductive rights and opponents of legal abortion. The result,
though, is pretty much what NARAL Pro-Choice America, Planned Parenthood, and other reproductive health advocates have been
arguing for years: prevent unintended pregnancies through comprehensive sex education and birth control, and support economically
struggling women and their families. The Ryan-DeLauro bill now has the support of the major reproductive rights groups, a blessing
the effort had previously lacked. Two years ago, Third Way unveiled “Come Let Us Reason Together,” (CLURT) which argued for
common ground between progressives and evangelicals on contentious issues like abortion and gay rights. It endorsed (at least in
spirit) the then-existing version of the Ryan-DeLauro bill, and touted the blessing of evangelical figures who said they were rejecting
the single-issue, rancorous politics of their religious right brethren. They would, they pledged, abandon the trench warfare of Roe v.
Wade, and instead try to find practical solutions for reducing abortions.
B. Pan uses the courts
C. Empirically, courts cannot produce social change on the abortion issue – courts distract those movements from more
effective legislation, drain movement resources and strengthen pro life groups – all of this turns the case
Gerald N. Rosenberg (assistant professor of political science University of Chicago) 1991: The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring
About Social Change?
If this is the case, then there is another important way in which courts affect social change. It is, to put it simply, that courts act as “flypaper” for social reformers who succumb to the “lure of litigation.” If the constraints of the Constrained Court view are correct, then
courts can seldom produce significant social reform. Yet if groups advocating such reform continue to look to the courts for aid, and
spend precious resources in litigation, then the courts also limit change by deflecting claims from substantive political battles, where
success is possible, to harmless legal ones where it is not. Even when major cases are won, the achievement is often more
symbolic than real. Thus, courts may serve an ideological function of luring movements for social reform to an institution that is
structurally constrained from serving their needs, providing only an illusion of change. While I have found no evidence that court
decisions mobilize supporters of significant social reform, the data suggest that they may mobilize opponents. With civil rights, there
was growth in the membership and activities of pro-segregation groups such as the White Citizens Councils and the Ku Klux Klan in
the years after Brown. With abortion, the Right to Life movement expanded rapidly after 1973. While both types of groups existed
before the Court action, they appeared re-invigorated after it. In addition, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 1989 Webster decision,
seen by many as a threat to continuing access to safe and legal abortion, pro-choice forces seemed to gain renewed vigor. This
interesting and anomalous finding requires further work, but it does suggest that one result of litigation to produce significant social
reform is to strengthen the opponents of such change. And that, of course, is far from the aim of those who litigate.
D. Courts tank the abortion movement – pro-choice activists will simple assume that they won and disband – turns the case
Stephen L. Carter (Professor of Law, Yale University) 1992: 1992 SURVEY OF BOOKS RELATING TO THE LAW; I. THE
COURTS AND THE CONSTITUTION: DO COURTS MATTER? + THE HOLLOW HOPE: CAN COURTS BRING ABOUT
SOCIAL CHANGE? Lexis
Rosenberg goes beyond the assertion that litigation strategies rarely if ever produce significant change. He argues, correctly, that they
are often counterproductive, for they can distort perceptions about where resources are needed (pp. 339-42). In the particular case of
abortion, Rosenberg notes that "reliance on the Court seriously weakened the political efficacy of pro-choice forces. After the 1973
decisions, many pro-choice activists simply assumed they had won and stopped their pro-choice activity. . . . The political
organization and momentum that had changed laws nationwide dissipated in celebration of the Court victory" (p. 339). The result, of
course, was that pro-choice forces abandoned the political arena to pro-life forces -- and then professed surprise when pro-life forces
won important electoral victories. The current broad public support for at least some abortion rights has arisen largely because of the
more recent decision of pro-choice forces to return to the grass roots -- the place, Rosenberg tells us, where real social changes take
place (p. 341).
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
16/90
UNIQUENESS – EXTENSION
Pro-choice groups focusing on Congress – Ryan DeLauro Bill
Ted Miller (Staff writer) 7/23/2009: NARAL Pro-Choice America, NARAL Pro-Choice Ohio Welcome Ryan-DeLauro Bill to
Prevent Unintended Pregnancy
WASHINGTON - July 23 - Today, Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, and Kellie Copeland, executive
director of NARAL Pro-Choice Ohio and resident of the 17th Congressional District, issued the following joint statement regarding
the Preventing Unintended Pregnancies, Reducing the Need for Abortion and Supporting Parents Act, introduced by Reps. Tim Ryan
(D-OH) and Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn).
"Americans want a future with a constructive and thoughtful debate over reproductive rights, where lawmakers on both sides of the
issue can unify behind commonsense measures to improve women's reproductive-health-care options. Reps. Ryan and DeLauro have
demonstrated how reaching across the divide to find common-ground solutions to prevent unintended pregnancy is possible; their bill
includes a number of positive proposals to improve women's access to contraception and to support teen-pregnancy-prevention efforts.
We also support the bill's aim to ensure that women who choose to carry their pregnancies to term are given the options and resources
necessary to guarantee a healthy pregnancy. This approach contrasts greatly with the divisive and inflammatory rhetoric we see from
too many lawmakers and organizations that oppose a woman's right to choose and refuse even to support access to birth control.
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
17/90
EXT – NO SOCIAL CHANGE
Politcal support is key for abortion – if we win that the plan is unpopular, than we win that there is no social change
Gerald N. Rosenberg (assistant professor of political science University of Chicago) 1991: The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring
About Social Change?
Political support, the constraints suggest, is essential for court effectiveness. Without such support, as in Brown, Court victories
provide no reform. How were abortion reformers able to avoid this problem? In order to answer this question, both pre- and post- 1973
actions must be examined. In examining them, I make two important arguments. First by the time the Court reached its decisions in
1973, there was little political opposition to abortion on the federal level, widespread support for it among relevant professional elites
and social activists, large scale use of it, and growing public support. These positions placed abortion reform in the American
mainstream, perhaps suggesting to the Court that giving constitutional protection to abortion was not a radical departure from current
American beliefs, practices, and concerns. Second, in the years after 1973, opposition to abortion strengthened and grew. The
interesting question this poses is how, given the growing opposition detailed below and referred to in the case discussion, abortion
continued to be available. On the federal level, action evolved from more or less benign neglect to an open antipathy to abortion. State
action followed a different course. Legislative efforts in the 1960s and early 1970s to reform and repeal abortion laws gave way to
efforts to limit access to abortions.
Roe v. Wade was inevitable – the court did nothing aside from affirm current political trends
Rachel Brauner (Boston College) 2k: The impact of the court: Evaluating Roe v. Wade.
http://www.helvidius.org/files/1999/1999_Brauner.pdf
One reason that Rosenberg sees Roe as merely an affirmation of a national shift towards legalized abortion is the growing
governmental effort to repeal abortion laws that preceded the decision. He asserts that: by the time the Court reached its decisions in
1973, there was little political opposition to abortion on the federal level, widespread support for it among relevant professional elites
and social activists, large-scale use of it, and growing public support.
From this historical interpretation, Rosenberg concludes that both the federal and state legislatures would have legalized abortion on
their own, without the Court's mandate; rather than a controversial, unorthodox decision, Roe signified nothing more than the Court
catching up with the overwhelming sentiment of the nation.
Courts can’t provide social change – hospital regulations prove
Rachel Brauner (Boston College) 2k: The impact of the court: Evaluating Roe v. Wade.
http://www.helvidius.org/files/1999/1999_Brauner.pdf
Also, Rosenberg points to the Court's inability to implement its decision as further evidence of its impotence in the sphere of social
change. He highlights the resistance of local institutions to the Court's decisions, particularly on the part of hospitals. "Hospitals
administrators," he notes, "both public and private, refused to change their abortion policies in reaction to the Court decisions"27; as a
result, women still find it difficult, or even impossible, to obtain abortion services. In addition, Rosenberg finds that "cost, a lack of
information on where to go, and limitations on the circumstances under which a provider will make abortions available"28 renders the
decision wholly ineffective.
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
18/90
2NC HOLLOW HOPE IMPACT
Disad turns the case
1. Flypaper – courts fail to produce social change, but symbolic victories cause feminist groups to get stuck to the court where
they continue to waste their resources pursuing useless litigation – the result is that no change is achieved and the resources of
feminist groups are drained – that’s Rosenberg
2. Backlash – a victory by pro life movements will drastically increase public opposition to their cause and strengthen the pro
life movement - that’s Rosenberg.
3. Disbandment – after a symbolic victory, pro choice groups will believe that they’ve won and disband – this abandons the
political arena to pro life forces who will fill the void and pass legislation like Hyde – that’s Carter
AND the impact – Feminist groups are key to preventing extinction – without them, “the future evaporates into a fireball or
freezes to double-death in a nuclear winter.
Zoe Sophia PhD, History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz, Adjunct Research Fellow at the University of
Western Sydney, Summer 1984 "Exterminating Fetuses: Abortion, Disarmament, and the Sexo-Semiotics of Extraterrestrialism"
http://www.jstor.org/stable/464758?seq=2
Clearly, we need to reverse the displacements which have turned our world into an extraterrestrial environment, and allowed
mechanical monsters to devour the space into which new life might have been born. The feminist and anti-nuclear movements are
albready at work to reverse these displacements, developing styles of politics which reinsert human bodies into the spaces of power;
consensus-based decision-making structures which allow both groups and individuals to make morally responsible decisions; a postCopernican cosmology recentered around a finite Earth with its elements of fire, air, and water; songs and chants about
interconnectedness and respect for the planetary parent. We might think of other possibilities: the development of a hermeneutics of
technology aimed at unravelling the condensations and displacements behind the apparently unquestionable solidity of the tools which
structure our lives; more radically perhaps, the reinstitution of male fertility rituals which allowed men to play out their ambivalent
relations to life and death, women and children, upon their own bodies and minds, instead of sublimating them ever upward and
outward to consume the world under the cover of a rationalizing instrumentality. The question of displacement might form the basis
for a reproductive ethics which distinguished the relative moral weights of different levels and types of reproductive choice according
to such criteria as the contiguity of the decision makers to the implementers and the effects of their decisions; and the duration, the
scale, and the character of these effects. By such criteria, abortion, though it might be experienced as a personal tragedy, scarcely
seems a crime at all: the woman chooses it for herself and bears the psychological and physical consequences of that decision, which
still preserves her own reproductive poten-tial. By contrast, a nuclear war would be initiated by a handful of men, who would not even
remain alive to bear the consequences of that decision, which are not entirely known or predictable, which are of the greatest possible
scale, and which render the question of dura-tion meaningless. It seemed at first that a contradiction existed between the ruling
conservatives' interest in military escalation and their espoused desire to protect fetal life, but both positions turn out to be articulations
of the collapsed future. The "always already" in the cult of fetal per-sonhood is identical to the "bound to be" in the ideology of
progress; each is part of the ideological apparatus of exterminism, which collapses the future onto the present and prepares for the
ultim4ate science-fiction spectacular, where the future evaporates into a fireball or freezes to double-death in a nuclear winter. The
apparent contradiction of the pro-choice anti-nuclear position similarly disappears when we recognize each as a struggle to pry open
the futureless spaces of futurism and open up the pluripotent space of the future conditional. A nuclear war, like a pregnancy, can be
averted. If we let our actions be guided by the desire to let new life into the world, and bear a parental responsibility for all of our
creations, children might again have the comfort of growing up on stories of a world without end, and the future may well manage to
skirt its way gingerly around the decaying remains of experiments in celestial physics which were fortuitously aborted before going
apocalypti-cally awry.
AND – extend the thesis of the disad to their equal protection arguments – they can’t solve
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
19/90
EXT – NO SOCIAL CHANGE
Courts can’t bring about social change – 3 reasons
Lee Epstein (Henry Wade Rogers Professor at Northwestern University) 1991: THE HOLLOW HOPE: CAN COURTS BRING
ABOUT SOCIAL CHANGE? by Gerald N. Rosenberg. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Reviewed by Lee Epstein.
http://www.bsos.umd.edu/gvpt/lpbr/subpages/reviews/rosenber.htm
In the much-awaited THE HOLLOW HOPE, Gerald Rosenberg questions that basic assumption. He finds that it is largely wanting.
Following his argument to its logical conclusion, it does not matter who sits on the Court because the Court itself does not matter
much. To put it more centrally in terms of this study, the answer to the question raised in the subtitle of his book (Can courts bring
about social change?) is NO. The question we, the scholarly community, need to consider is whether Rosenberg provides sufficient
evidence to support this rather astonishing assertion. Before I provide my assessment, let me give you a better sense of the book's
theoretical under-pinnings and its design. Given its anything-but-conventional conclusion, THE HOLLOW HOPE starts in a rather
conventional way. In the Introduction and first chapter, Rosenberg lays out two distinctly conflicting, and familiar perspectives on the
Court's ability to generate significant social change and the conditions under which it can do so. The first, which he calls the
Constrained Court view, generally maintains that courts will rarely be able to produce social change of any magnitude because of
three important con- straints: Page 139 follows: Constraint I. The bounded nature of constitutional rights prevents courts from hearing
or effectively acting on many significant social reform claims, and lessens the chances of popular mobilization (p.13). Constraint II.
The judiciary lacks the necessary independence from the other branches of government to produce significant social reform (p.15).
Constraint III. Courts lack the tools to readily develop appropriate policies and implement decisions ordering significant social reform
(p.21)
Going through the courts wastes resources of the groups without achieving social change
Ann Southworth (assistant professor of law, Case Western Reserve University) 1999: The Boston Public Interest Law Journal,
Spring, 8 B.U. Pub. Int. L.J. 469. Lexis
Are civil rights and poverty lawyers single-minded and politically naive rights crusaders, as critics from the left sometimes argue? Are
they the radical left brigade of American politics, as critics from the right often charge? These empirical questions lie at the heart of
controversies about the limitations of litigation as a vehicle for social reform and about the future of legal services for the poor.
Drawing upon empirical research on civil rights and poverty lawyers, this article asserts that neither characterization of civil rights and
poverty lawyers is accurate. One might better describe the lawyers in this study as engaged political strategists than as myopic
technicians. However, their work is more full-service lawyering than revolutionary politics. Activist lawyers recently have drawn fire
from all directions. n1 Two persistent criticisms from the left are that lawyers fail to understand, or refuse to acknowledge, the
limitations of litigation and that they divert resources from more promising strategies. One early and comprehensive critique of legal
rights activities, Stuart Scheingold's The Politics of Rights [*470] (1974), argued that activist lawyers embrace a simplistic view of
the interplay between litigation and social movements. n2 He asserted that lawyers generally adopt the "myth of rights," a view that
judicial declarations directly produce change, rather than a more realistic "politics of rights" orientation, according to which judgments
are merely political assets to be used strategically in other arenas. n3 More recently, Gerald Rosenberg has asserted that courts "act as
"flypaper' for social reformers who succumb to the "lure of litigation' " rather than pursuing more effective legislative alternatives. n4
This attraction to litigation is problematic, critics argue, because litigation discourages client initiatives, n5 diverts [*471] resources
away from more effective strategies, n6 and leaves larger social change undone. n7 From the right, critics often assert that civil rights
and poverty [*472] lawyers are all too politically sophisticated and engaged and that they pursue systemic reform at the expense of
providing basic legal services to poor individuals. n8 Some argue that lawyers inappropriately allocate scarce legal resources to further
their own conceptions of the general welfare rather than poor people's self-defined needs. n9
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
20/90
EXT – TURNS CASE
Court rulings on abortion created the pro life movement and caused the enactment of the Hyde Amendment
Gerald N. Rosenberg (assistant professor of political science University of Chicago) 1991: The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring
About Social Change?
Within one week of the Court’s decisions, proposals to curtail abortion were flying. One set involved amending the Constitution.
Amendments prohibiting abortion in all circumstances were introduced by Representative Lawrence Hogan (R., Md.) in the House
and Senator Jesse Helms (R., N.C.) and five co-sponsors in the senate, while a third constitutional amendment, introduced by
Representative Whitehurst (R. Va.), would have allowed states sole discretion in regulating abortion, returning the country to the pre1973 status quo. In toto, sixty-eight constitutional amendments were proposed in Congress by sixty House members and eight
Senators.
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
21/90
*** CONDITIONS COUNTERPLAN ***
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
22/90
CONDITIONS CP 1NC
Counterplan Text: [insert plan] if and only if abortions are performed prior to the second trimester and family planning
centers promote and distribute contraception.
Restrictions on second trimester abortions and funding for contraception solve reproductive rights and equal protection
Laurie Shrage (Ph.D. Director, Women's Studies. Professor, Philosophy) 2003: Electoral Politics and Abortions.
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=463
ANOTHER COMPROMISE the Court and legislators should consider would be to require public and private health insurers to cover
contraception and abortion services in exchange for new restrictions on second-trimester abortions. The Court might argue that if
women had both a greater ability to avoid getting pregnant plus unrestricted access to first-trimester abortions, then restricting secondtrimester nontherapeutic abortions would not too drastically limit their rights to privacy and equal protection. State restrictions on
second-trimester abortion would be constitutional only if states, through the regulation of insurance and drug companies and the
development of social welfare programs, guaranteed that women had access to adequate reproductive health care. Moreover, many
D&X abortions would be avoided if the government would require health insurers to permit women to choose CVS (chorionic villus
sampling) over amniocentesis. CVS can be performed around ten to twelve weeks, while amniocentesis cannot be performed until
fifteen to eighteen weeks, with results available around two weeks later.
Current political polarization of the abortion issue makes solvency impossible – only the counterplan solves because it reaches
a popular compromise by preserving restrictions on abortions past the first trimester
Laurie Shrage (Ph.D. Director, Women's Studies. Professor, Philosophy) 2003: Electoral Politics and Abortions.
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=463
Most progressives would say the abortion debate is intractable because it reflects the huge gap between conservative Christian and secular humanist values. I'd like to
offer another theory, one not incompatible with this one, but a supplement to it. The abortion debate is intractable at this time because the two major
political parties in the United States exploit this issue to pursue electoral majorities. Republicans use the abortion issue to forge
coalitions with right-wing and fundamentalist Christian voters. Democrats use it to attract women voters. Neither party will risk
modifying its rigid position for fear of alienating the constituencies that the abortion issue has helped attract. Opinion surveys over the
past thirty years, however, indicate that the majority of Americans support some abortions as well as some restrictions. Most voters, that is,
fall between the positions represented by those who refuse to recognize any problems with the legal status quo and those who want to
change it radically. According to a national poll in 2000, overall support for the landmark Roe vs. Wade decision seems to be softening as
Americans adopt a more nuanced view of the circumstances under which abortions should be allowed . . . .Despite the increasing level
of discomfort with the high court's ruling-43% of current survey respondents express support for Roe, compared with 56% in 1991-the poll shows continued
opposition to a constitutional ban on abortion . . . Nearly two-thirds of respondents say abortions should be illegal after the first three months of
pregnancy. While 85% support abortion when a woman's physical health is at risk, the level of support drops to 54% when only her emotional health is at stake. And
66% say they support abortion when the fetus is at risk of an abnormality. In short, the large majority of voters support the right to choose in the first
third of pregnancy and, after that, want access restricted to some cases of hardship , though no one would get this impression from the media or
current party politics. Although the heated atmosphere surrounding abortion politics has been good for Republicans and
Democrats, it has not been good for women. Abortion services have become so controversial that women without health insurance,
and even many with it, find abortion services inaccessible because of the increasing number of bureaucratic and funding restrictions
imposed. Women who live far from major cities face a severe shortage of service providers. Political polarization has not only made abortions
inaccessible, it has pushed other important feminist goals to the sidelines: universal child care and preschool, universal health care, paid maternity and
parental leave, and better public services for children and adults with special needs. Keeping the abortion debate heated and polarized doesn't serve
women's interests, but it has probably benefited mainstream feminist organizations that grew up around this issue . Rather than trying to
forge a public consensus, groups such as NARAL-Pro-Choice America (originally "National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws), the Feminist Majority, the
National Organization for Women, and Planned Parenthood have taken a "we won't budge" approach. Any compromise on abortion is represented as a
complete loss and the retraction of a fragile right recently acquired. By equating democratic compromise with defeat, these
organizations sustain the fear that women will lose all access to abortion; and they also attract more members and funds . For example, the
recent ads of the Pro-Choice Public Education Project feature frightening pictures of back-alley abortion rooms, suggesting what could happen if women lose the right
to choose. Other ads argue that if a woman's right to choose can be taken away (it is not even clear what this means in legal terms-for example, overturning Roe and
then having no states permit abortion for any reason, or something less drastic?), then so can her right to work, vote, and receive an equal education. [2] The ads of the
Pro-choice Public Education Project are online at: http://www.protectchoice.org/media.htm Women in the United States, according to this campaign, face the same
level of threat to their civil rights from religious extremists as women in Iraq and Afghanistan. Rather than create an atmosphere for a calm discussion of
the social and legal requirements for "choice," these ads aim to induce panic-a reaction that will shut down debate and make people
unwilling to consider a compromise with their opponents. In this respect, these pro-choice ads are as manipulative as pro-life ads that
display pre- and post-abortion fetuses.
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
23/90
AT: CONDITIONING INEFFECTIVE
Conditional federal spending power is empirically effective with entitlement programs
JENSEN 2K (Laura S; professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts)(Subsidies, strings, and the courts: judicial action and conditional federal
spending) 2000
A significant means of withholding (or threatening to withhold) government benefits lies in the ability of Congress (and the executive
branch, through delegated authority) to hinge their availability upon conditions, such as the requirement that states adopt a uniform
speed limit, or that medical professionals not discuss abortion. Government largesse does take important forms other than cash including tax
expenditures, subsidies, licenses, services, employment, contracts, franchises, and the use of public resources. Yet, especially in the light of the constrained size of U.S.
budgets (and their accompanying deficits), the national spending power must be seen as one of the most critical components in the
contemporary federal system. The now-pervasive use of conditional spending, whether in the context of direct financing of
government operations, grants-in-aid to state and local governments, or entitlement payments to individual citizens, fundamentally
affects policy outcomes and has significant consequences for the rights of both individuals and subnational governments as political
entities.
Conditional spending power is empirically effective
JACKSON ‘2 (Harold L; Disability Rights Section – NYA, Civil Rights Division, U.S. Department of Justice)( IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
NORTHERN DISTRICT OF ALABAMA SOUTHERN DIVISION) 6/21/02
<http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:56WcTX1HkG8J:www.ada.gov/briefs/garretbr.doc+Section+504+of+the+Rehabilitation+Act+%2B+conditional+spending+pow
er&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=safari>
Section 2000d-7 makes unambiguously clear that Congress intended to condition federal funding on States’ waiver of Eleventh
Amendment immunity to suit in federal court under Section 504 (and the other federal non-discrimination statutes tied to federal
financial assistance) if they accepted federal funds.5 Any state agency reading the U.S. Code would have known that after the effective date of Section 2000d-7 it would waive its immunity to suit in federal court for
violations of Section 504 if it accepted federal funds. Section 2000d-7 thus embodies exactly the type of unambiguous condition discussed by the Court in Atascadero, putting States on express notice that part of the
“contract” for receiving federal funds was the requirement that they consent to suit in federal court for alleged violations of Section
504 for those agencies that received any financial assistance.6 Thus, the Supreme Court, in Lane v. Peña, 518 U.S. 187, 200 (1996), acknowledged “the care with which Congress responded to our decision in
Atascadero by crafting an unambiguous waiver of the States’ Eleventh Amendment immunity” in Section 2000d-7. The Court of Appeals for this Circuit also made clear in Sandoval, that the “plain language” of 42 U.S.C. 2000d-7 “manifests an unmistakable intent to
condition federal funds on a state’s waiver of sovereign immunity.” 197 F.3d at 493. Six other courts of appeals agree with Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. See Litman v. George Mason University, 186 F.3d 544, 554 (4th Cir. 1999), cert. denied, 528 U.S.
1181 (2000) ( “Congress succeeded in its effort to codify a clear, unambiguous, and unequivocal condition of waiver of Eleventh Amendment immunity in 42 U.S.C. § 2000d-7(a)(1).”); Douglas v. California Dep’t of Youth Auth., 271 F.3d 812, 820, opinion amended,
271 F.3d 910 (9th Cir. 2001), cert. denied, 70 U.S.L.W. 3669 (June 17, 2002)(U.S. No. 01-1546 )(Section 504); Nihiser v. Ohio E.P.A., 269 F.3d 626, 628 (6th Cir. 2001) (Section 504), cert. denied, 70 U.S.L.W. 3597 (June 17, 2002)(U.S. No. 01-1357); Jim C. v.
Arkansas Dep’t of Educ., 235 F.3d 1079, 1081-1082 (8th Cir. 2000) (en banc) (Section 504), cert. denied, 533 U.S. 949 (2001); Stanley v. Litscher, 213 F.3d 340, 344 (7th Cir. 2000) (Section 504); Pederson v. Louisiana State Univ., 213 F.3d 858, 875-876 (5th Cir.
2000) (Title IX). The text and structure of 42 U.S.C. 2000d-7 makes clear that federal financial assistance is conditioned on both the nondiscrimination obligation under Section 504 and removal of Eleventh Amendment immunity. Defendant suggests its waiver was not
The
Second Circuit in Garcia agreed that Section 2000d-7 “constitutes a clear expression of Congress's intent to condition acceptance of
federal funds on a state’s waiver of its Eleventh Amendment immunity.” 280 F.3d at 113. And it further agreed that, under normal
circumstances, “the acceptance of funds conditioned on the waiver might properly reveal a knowing relinquishment of sovereign
immunity.” Id. at 114, n. 4. However, Garcia also held that Title II of the ADA did not validly abrogate the States’ immunity and that the Section 504 waiver was not knowing because the state agency did not “know” in 1995 (the latest point the alleged
knowing and voluntary, relying on an isolated decision in Garcia v. SUNY Health Sciences Center, 280 F.3d 98, 113 (2d Cir. 2001). Defendant similarly contends there can be no constructive waiver of its sovereign immunity. See Def. Mem at 10-11, 15.
discrimination in Garcia had occurred) that its waiver of immunity under Section 504 would have a substantial fiscal effect, rather than simply result in liability substantially similar to that under Title II. According to the court, since “by all reasonable appearances state
sovereign immunity [to claims of disability discrimination under the ADA] had already been lost” by virtue of the Title II abrogation, the State “could not have understood that in [accepting federal funds] it was actually abandoning its sovereign immunity from private
damages suits” for the same disability discrimination under Section 504. Id. at 114. The Second Circuit’s conclusion about a knowing waiver is, in our view, incorrect. It is wrong because it ignores what every state agency did know from the plain text of Section
2000d-7 since it was enacted in 1986, that acceptance of federal funds constituted a waiver of immunity to suit for violations of Section 504. Section 504 was not amended or altered by the enactment of Title I of the ADA in 1990, and it was clear that plaintiff could sue
under either statute. See 42 U.S.C. 12201(b) of the ADA (preserving existing causes of action). It is thus untenable to suggest that abrogation for suits under one statute is relevant to whether an entity waived its immunity to suits brought to enforce a distinct, albeit
substantively similar, statute. Garcia’s holding – that the waiver for Section 504 claims was effective until Title II went into effect and then lost its effectiveness until some point in the late 1990’s, when a “colorable basis for a State to suspect” that the abrogation was
Thus, the “clear intent to condition participation in
the programs funded” required by Atascadero, 473 U.S. at 247, i.e., a clear statement in the text of the statute about the Eleventh
Amendment and non-discrimination statutes tied to federal financial assistance, assured that defendant knew as a matter of law that it
was waiving its immunity when it applied for and accepted federal financial assistance.7 2. Congress Has Authority To Condition The
Receipt Of Federal Financial Assistance On The State Waiving Its Eleventh Amendment Immunity Congress may condition its
spending on a waiver of Eleventh Amendment immunity. Indeed, in Alden v. Maine, 527 U.S. 706, 755 (1999), the Court cited South
Dakota v. Dole, 483 U.S. 203 (1987), a case involving Congress’s Spending Clause authority, when it noted that “the Federal
Government [does not] lack the authority or means to seek the States’ voluntary consent to private suits.” Similarly, in Florida
Prepaid the Court reaffirmed the holding of Petty v. Tennessee-Missouri Bridge Commission, 359 U.S. 275 (1959), where the Court
held that Congress could condition the exercise of one of its Article I powers (there, the approval of interstate compacts) on the States’
agreement to waive their Eleventh Amendment immunity from suit. Florida Prepaid, 527 U.S. at 686.
unconstitutional developed, see Garcia, 280 F.3d at 114 n. 4, and has now regained its full effectiveness – creates an unprecedented patchwork of effective coverage.
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
24/90
SAY YES
States will force acceptance – Medicaid is partially state funded so they only have one option- say yes to the condition
CORBELLI ‘88- practicing lawyer, Summer 1988 (James 49 U. Pitt. L. Rev. 1097,“TOWER OF POWER: SOUTH DAKOTA V.
DOLE AND THE STRENGTH OF THE SPENDING POWER +,”, LexisNexis)
This dramatic example is a result of the tremendous increase in federal spending. Indeed, the result of increased federal spending
provides Congress with the power to bring states to their knees. By threatening to withhold millions of dollars from states,
Congress is able to dictate to the states its desires. n184 In order to adjust to the recent growth in congressional power which
resulted from large increases in federal spending, a more liberal use of the "coercion" limit would allow the Court to adjust to
changes due to the recently increased possibilities of coercion. Instead of conclusory statements merely stating that the states are
not forced to take the federal money, the Court should view the strings attached to federal money as congressional sanctions and
decide future spending power cases based on the fact that forfeiting millions of dollars is coercive to the states. States have come
to rely on the large amount of federal money they receive. They have budgeted their various programs with that money. When a
substantial amount is withheld from them, their choices are [*1123] actually narrowed to one -- accept the condition. n185
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
25/90
AT: ROLLBACK
Conditional spending is rooted in the constitution and courts perceive it as being contractual
LUKEN ‘2—Associate member of U Cincinnati Law Review (Susan, 70 U. Cin. L. Rev. 693, Winter 2002, COMMENT:
IRRECONCILABLE DIFFERENCES: THE SPENDING CLAUSE AND THE ELEVENTH AMENDMENT: LIMITING
CONGRESS'S USE OF CONDITIONAL SPENDING TO CIRCUMVENT ELEVENTH AMENDMENT IMMUNITY, LexisNexis
Academic)
The power to spend is one of the enumerated powers given to Congress in Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution. n18 It provides
in pertinent part that "[t]he Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, . . . to pay the Debts and provide for the common
Defence and general Welfare of the United States." n19 Incident to this separate and independent power, Congress may attach
conditions to the receipt of federal funds, and perhaps most importantly, the objectives of such conditions are not limited in scope to
the direct grants of legislative power specified elsewhere in the Constitution. n20 Thus, federal statutory and administrative directives
and "objectives not thought to be within Article I's 'enumerated legislative fields,' may nevertheless be attained through the use of the
spending power and the conditional grant of [*696] federal funds." n21 Although courts have generally characterized Spending Clause
legislation as contractual in nature because it theoretically presents states with a choice to either comply with congressional mandates
in exchange for federal funds or decline to comply and forego the funds, n22 many commentators have questioned whether mutuality
and consent are for practical purposes present in the exchange. n23
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
26/90
COMPETITION THEORY
Functional Good
1. Real world- members of congress evaluate the implications of policies in practice far more than whether “texts are compatible.”
2. Only a functional evaluation allows the judge to determine competition based on the actual arguments made in the round.
3. Promotes good judging- text comparison is removed from all substance within the round, which leads to arbitrary decisions and
skews fairness.
Textual Bad
1. Kills policymaking- debating semantics turns the contest into a race to see who can write the best plans, not the best policy options
for the real world.
2. Comparing texts removes all actual substance of the debate, leading to arbitrary decisions and unfair debates
3. Only functional evaluation of how they would interact can prove real competition.
4. Leads to bad advocacies because adding “reject plan” to the bottom of the CP text makes a CP competitive in their interpretation.
5. Justifies aff abuse- any “do both” perm would win because they don’t weigh whether or not the perm is net beneficial, killing neg
CP ground and skewing fairness.
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
27/90
AT: PERM DO THE CP
The 1AC fiat indicates immediate unconditional implementation of the plan. This perm severs out of the immediate and unconditional
passage of the plan. Severence is an independent voting issue.
1. Makes the aff a moving target- the affirmative can change any part of their plan to avoid any negative argument. This skews
fairness in that they could change their plan in the 2AR and we’d never be able to argue with them.
2. Infinitely regressive- allowing the aff to sever out of one part of their plan justifies them severing out of all but one word of their
plan text and claiming solvency from it. The neg would never win in such a world, which kills competitive equity.
3. Strategy Skew- The affirmative speaks first, last, and has infinite prep time, while the negative has mere minutes before the 1NC.
With time already limited, allowing the aff to change their advocacy after the 1AC completely kills neg strategy and makes for a
wholly unfair debate.
4. Education- When the affirmative constantly changes advocacies, it becomes impossible to learn from a debate round because we
debate over running away from arguments.
5. Not real world- legislators and lawyers aren’t allowed to eliminate parts of their cases or bills because someone objects to them.
This lack of real world policymaking kills education.
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
28/90
AT: PERM DO BOTH
This perm is functionally the same as perm do the CP. The 1AC fiat indicates immediate unconditional implementation of the plan.
This perm severs out of the immediate and unconditional passage of the plan. And severance is a reason to reject this perm because:
1. Makes the aff a moving target- the affirmative can change any part of their plan to avoid any negative argument. This skews
fairness in that they could change their plan in the 2AR and we’d never be able to argue with them.
2. Infinitely regressive- allowing the aff to sever out of one part of their plan justifies them severing out of all but one word of their
plan text and claiming solvency from it. The neg would never win in such a world, which kills competitive equity.
3. Strategy Skew- The affirmative speaks first, last, and has infinite prep time, while the negative has mere minutes before the 1NC.
With time already limited, allowing the aff to change their advocacy after the 1AC completely kills neg strategy and makes for a
wholly unfair debate.
4. Education- When the affirmative constantly changes advocacies, it becomes impossible to learn from a debate round because we
debate over running away from arguments.
5. Not real world- legislators and lawyers aren’t allowed to eliminate parts of their cases or bills because someone objects to them.
This lack of real world policymaking kills education.
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
29/90
AT: PERM DO THE CP THEN PLAN
The 1AC fiat indicates immediate unconditional implementation of the plan. This perm severs out of the immediate and unconditional
passage of the plan. And severance is a reason to reject this perm because:
1. Makes the aff a moving target- the affirmative can change any part of their plan to avoid any negative argument. This skews
fairness in that they could change their plan in the 2AR and we’d never be able to argue with them.
2. Infinitely regressive- allowing the aff to sever out of one part of their plan justifies them severing out of all but one word of their
plan text and claiming solvency from it. The neg would never win in such a world, which kills competitive equity.
3. Strategy Skew- The affirmative speaks first, last, and has infinite prep time, while the negative has mere minutes before the 1NC.
With time already limited, allowing the aff to change their advocacy after the 1AC completely kills neg strategy and makes for a
wholly unfair debate.
4. Education- When the affirmative constantly changes advocacies, it becomes impossible to learn from a debate round because we
debate over running away from arguments.
5. Not real world- legislators and lawyers aren’t allowed to eliminate parts of their cases or bills because someone objects to them.
This lack of real world policymaking kills education.
And this is also a timeframe perm because they are doing them at different times. This is a reason to reject the perm because
1. Allowing timeframe perms to slide snowballs into wider justification of more abusive arguments.
2. Timeframe perms are just another way of adding to and taking away from parts of the plan. They are still severance/intrinsic, but
the aff tries to hide the fact by saying “do this now, and that later.”
3. Fairness- the aff could always solve for any DA impact and do any CP in the future. This makes it impossible for the neg to win,
killing fairness.
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
30/90
AT: PERM DO THE CP THEN PLAN
One, this makes no sense because you cant pass the same plan twice.
Second, this is a timeframe perm, which is a reason to reject the team because
1. Allowing timeframe perms to slide snowballs into wider justification of more abusive arguments.
2. Timeframe perms are just another way of adding to and taking away from parts of the plan. They are still severance/intrinsic, but
the aff tries to hide the fact by saying “do this now, and that later.”
3. Fairness- the aff could always solve for any DA impact and do any CP in the future. This makes it impossible for the neg to win,
killing fairness.
4. Explodes aff bias- the aff speaks first, last, and has infinite prep time. They have no need for an illegitimate permutation: they
should be prepared to defend their plan and its merits without gaining extra ground for bad offensive arguments.
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
31/90
AT: PERM – CONDITION BUT DO EVEN IF THEY SAY NO
The 1AC fiat indicates immediate unconditional implementation of the plan. This perm severs out of the immediate and unconditional
passage of the plan. And severance is a reason to reject this perm because:
1. Makes the aff a moving target- the affirmative can change any part of their plan to avoid any negative argument. This skews
fairness in that they could change their plan in the 2AR and we’d never be able to argue with them.
2. Infinitely regressive- allowing the aff to sever out of one part of their plan justifies them severing out of all but one word of their
plan text and claiming solvency from it. The neg would never win in such a world, which kills competitive equity.
3. Strategy Skew- The affirmative speaks first, last, and has infinite prep time, while the negative has mere minutes before the 1NC.
With time already limited, allowing the aff to change their advocacy after the 1AC completely kills neg strategy and makes for a
wholly unfair debate.
4. Education- When the affirmative constantly changes advocacies, it becomes impossible to learn from a debate round because we
debate over running away from arguments.
5. Not real world- legislators and lawyers aren’t allowed to eliminate parts of their cases or bills because someone objects to them.
This lack of real world policymaking kills education.
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
32/90
AT: PERM – CONDITION SOMETHING ELSE
This is intrinsic, our condition was X, not Y. This is a reason to reject the perm because
1. Makes the aff a moving target- the affirmative can change any part of their plan to avoid any negative argument. This skews
fairness in that they could change their plan in the 2AR and we’d never be able to argue with them.
2. Infinitely expansive- allowing the aff to constantly add to their plan effectively moots all negative ground and justifies infinite
additions to the plan. The neg would never win in such a world, which kills competitive equity.
3. Neg Strategy- The affirmative speaks first, last, and has infinite prep time, while the negative has mere minutes before the 1NC.
With time already limited, allowing the aff to change their advocacy after the 1AC completely kills neg strategy and makes for a
wholly unfair debate.
4. Education- When the affirmative constantly changes advocacies, it becomes impossible to learn from a debate round because we
debate over running away from arguments.
5. Justifies neg abuse- the perm would allow for new and multiple CPs to generate offense against the 1AR, and makes any other
claims of abuse moot in order to preserve reciprocity.
6. Doesn’t test competition- 2AC additions prove that there is a 2AC addition, but concedes that the texts are mutually exclusive and
making the perm illegitimate.
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
33/90
AT: CONDITIONS CP BAD
1. Counter-interpretation—negative gets one conditions counterplana) Predictable on the topic—
Conditional federal spending power is one of the most critical components of the federal system- empirically used with
entitlement programs
Jensen 2k (LAURA S; PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENCE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS)(SUBSIDIES,
STRINGS, AND THE COURTS: JUDICIAL ACTION AND CONDITIONAL FEDERAL SPENDING) 2000
A significant means of withholding (or threatening to withhold) government benefits lies in the ability of Congress (and the executive
branch, through delegated authority) to hinge their availability upon conditions, such as the requirement that states adopt a uniform
speed limit, or that medical professionals not discuss abortion. Government largesse does take important forms other than cash
including tax expenditures, subsidies, licenses, services, employment, contracts, franchises, and the use of public resources. Yet,
especially in the light of the constrained size of U.S. budgets (and their accompanying deficits), the national spending power must be
seen as one of the most critical components in the contemporary federal system. The now-pervasive use of conditional spending,
whether in the context of direct financing of government operations, grants-in-aid to state and local governments, or entitlement
payments to individual citizens, fundamentally affects policy outcomes and has significant consequences for the rights of both
individuals and subnational governments as political entities.
b) Action conditioned on state action is key to education- encourages debate on the core of multilaterism and domestic
policies’ effect on international relations, and allows us to evaluate the risk of plan passage
2. Deters 2ac sand-bagging—the aff will save their best advantages to read as add-ons—
a) Sand-bagging results in under-developed arguments—shifting everything one speech backwards kills policy analysis.
b) Kills CP ground—the aff can read 2ac advantages that are artificially immune to counterplans
3. Key to solve unpredictable advantages and squirrelly affs- no conditions CP encourages aff of the week
4. Literature solves infinite regression—finite number of mechanisms for conditional action—specificity of our evidence outweighs
their hypotheticals
5. Tests resolved and the unconditional nature of the plan— conditions counterplans ensure aff upholds every word in the
resolution
Resolved indicates a fixed, unchanging thing
American Heritage Dictionary 2k of the English Language 4th edition, 2000 (“resolve”,
http://www.bartleby.com/61/87/R0178700.html)
A determination or decision; a fixed purpose.
6. They can generate offense against net benefit—they can impact turn the condition
7. Structural aff bias justifies neg flex—the persuasive value of the 2ar outweighs the strategic benefit of the block, they get to pick
the focus of the debate, and vast aff ground from all social service programs and mechanisms—we should be able to use any means to
prove an advocacy is better than the affirmative
8. Best policy option—if we win the counterplan is a preferable advocacy, warrants a negative ballot—best form of cost benefit
analysis and better simulations—if congress saw we should condition action on ____ first, they would do it
9. Not a voting issue—at best reject the CP not the team—can’t prove it prevented them from answering rest of our positions—they
didn’t drop anything
(A2: Justifies theoretical perms)
10. Theoretical permutations aren’t justified—permutation is a test of competition—either they can or can’t prove counterplan is
competitive—illegitimate perms slay rational opportunity cost—offense only applies to them
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
34/90
*** ABORTION DA ***
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
35/90
ABORTION DA 1NC 1/2
1. You have a moral obligation to reject the promotion of abortion – despite the affirmative’s intentions, the offering of
abortion destroys the value to life by justifying human objectification and exploitation. One justified violent act spills over to
other areas of life until no violent act is too heinous to reject.
Charles Lugosi, Visiting Associate Professor of Law, Ave Maria School of Law, 2004, “Respecting Human Life in 21st Century
America: A Moral Perspective to Extend Civil Rights to the Unborn Creation to Natural Death”
The legal distinction between person and human being must be abolished if there is to be true equality among all members of
the human family. Justice requires that there be respect for the life of all human beings, from the very beginning to the very
end of life. The alternative is to classify unborn human beings as non-persons who are mere objects over which to exercise dominion
and control, to treat as a property to be harvested and grown for commercial, humanitarian or scientific purposes, to be disposed of at
will, and as a means to an end. Scientists have an obligation to act morally and adhere to proper ethical standards even if domestic law
and technology permit otherwise. Cozzoli writes: The embryo cannot be reduced to an "object' or "instrument' of experimentation. No
matter how great the utility or how noble the intention of an experiment, it must not reduce a being having the "value of an end
in himself' to a "value of utility.' This is true in every phase of the prenatal life, even in the simplest and most miniscule, as in
the first two weeks, in which period today embryonic experimentation rages, at the price of an enormous [*462] spending of
human lives. This is an exploitation and a crime which the active and passive complicity of positive law cannot dissimulate. n190
Thomas Jefferson, author of the American Declaration of Independence, used the moral authority of natural law to assert for all time
that all members of the human family are created equal and possess the fundamental right to life. He stated: When in the Course of
human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to
assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a
decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold
these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,
that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men,
deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these
ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and
organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. n191 If all men are
created equal, then it must follow that the living human organism, at the time of conception, is politically and legally endowed
with the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. n192 On this basis, the right of the unborn to life (no
abortion, no harvesting of embryonic stem cells, no cloning), liberty (the right to be left alone, freedom from harm) and the pursuit of
happiness (the right to autonomy, self-determination, development of full potential) is assured. Human beings are endowed at
creation with an inalienable right to life. This natural right cannot be conferred, as it is the common heritage of human beings
that all are created equal. It can be expressed as a matter of constitutional law. n193 The emergence of a new class of
Depersonalized Humans is evidence that there is diminishing respect for the sanctity of human life. Civil libertarians who believe in
equality are morally compelled to speak for those who cannot speak for themselves to ensure all human beings are treated as ends and
never [*463] as a means to an end. Once the human family is divided into persons and non-persons, every human being is at
risk to become a member of the class of Depersonalized Humans. n194 The power to destroy other human beings leads to greater
abuses as people become desensitized to immoral conduct. The killing and exploitation of the unborn are at the most basic level, acts
of violence. Everyone, including scientists, businessmen, politicians, judges, clergy, voters, doctors or patients, who benefits from, or
does any harm to Depersonalized Humans, is morally culpable. "Anyone who commands, directs, advises, encourages, prescribes,
approves, or actively defends doing something immoral is a cooperator in it if it is done and, even if it is not in the event done,
has already willed it to be done and thus already participates in its immorality."
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
36/90
ABORTION DA 1NC 2/2
2. The right to abortion justifies all atrocities with the prioritization of economic status over the recognition of love of one
another.
Dr. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Professor of the Humanities at Emory University, 2007, Orthodoxy Today Magazine, “How Abortion
Has Failed Women,” http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles/FoxGenAbortFailed.php
Abortion begets and anchors the culture of death that threatens us all, but especially women, whose essence includes the
ability to bear new life. Contrary to apocalyptic visions, the culture of death has less to do with the threat of nuclear cataclysm
than with the market's invasion of our lives and relations with others. By substituting economic calculus for love, we jeopardize
our personhood, the essence of which lies in our recognition of others as persons made, like us, in God's image. Abortion
makes a mockery of personhood by licensing one person to dispose of another. For in denying the personhood of the baby a
woman is carrying, we deny our own. In this respect, Jesus' command to love your neighbor as yourself, echoed in His frequent
injunctions to honor, protect, and emulate children if we are to have any hope of salvation, above all instructs us that we cannot
wantonly kill another without simultaneously killing ourselves. From the days of the Old Testament to our own, the world has
consistently defied God's commandments and provoked His wrath, but few societies have done so as blatantly as our own.
Engulfed in an unprecedented material prosperity, we have fallen prey to the illusion that material goods offer the appropriate
standard of our worth. Driven by this conviction, we increasingly measure others by that standard and, when they appear to
fall short, mark them for sacrifice. In licensing the slaughter of babies, abortion legitimates the slaughter of all the others
who are a drain on our wealth: the elderly, the terminally ill, and, sooner or later, the poor. A more complete repudiation of
the Gospel would be hard to imagine.
3. Each abortion must be rejected-failure to compromise a human life justifies all killings.
J. Budziszewski, Associate Professor of Government and Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, 1999, “The Future of the
End of Democracy,” http://www.leaderu.com/ftissues/ft9903/articles/budziszewski.html
The charge of absolutism involves a different kind of disagreement. Both the symposiasts and their critics think abortion and
euthanasia are wrong; both are willing to oppose them; and both support halfway measures like prohibiting partial-birth or thirdtrimester abortions. So what’s the problem? The problem is that how wrong it is to take innocent human life is not just an
academic question; it determines strategy. If abortion and euthanasia are bad only in the way that budget deficits are bad, then we
should strike a “win some, lose some” pose and be willing to make lots of tradeoffs between saving human lives and our many other
goals. But if they are bad in the way that stuffing Jews into gas chambers was bad, then it is morally unthinkable to make our
peace with them; human lives cannot be traded off. Halfway measures may be the only available pathway to complete prohibition,
but even so we should be willing to sacrifice almost anything to achieve them. As to those offensive analogies, it all comes down to
whether we take our premises seriously: if an abortion is really a murder then thirty-seven million abortions are really a
Holocaust. They aren’t something that could happen here; they are happening here. Who has the better argument? In one point
the symposiasts are right: The fact that our local oligarchy privatizes the program does not make it any less a program, and the burden
is on their critics to show why ending it is no more important than Social Security reform. But in another point their critics are right.
The privatization of the program does make a vague talk about “resistance” a little glib, and the burden is on the symposiasts to
explain more clearly what they have in mind in there here and now.
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
37/90
ABORTION BAD – GENDER
Any government intervention in abortion reentrenches patriarchal principles.
Beti Poposka, Women in Welfare Education, November 2006, Women and abortion: liberal citizenship or patriarchal regulation?
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_6959/is_8/ai_n28438641/?tag=content;col1
Some of the opposing views of the anti-abortion stance come from liberal feminists (Bacchi 1999). Liberal feminists argue that
women's reproductive and body rights belong to women and that they do not need to be regulated by a 'patriarchal system'
(Summers 1994). Liberal feminists go further to assert that a woman's right to abortion is a private issue and does not need to be
regulated by laws. Liberal feminists consider sexual relations between men and women as a matter for the parties concerned and not
for policy or Government intervention (Bacchi 1999). The public / private divide is a key issue regarding the regulation of
Government provisions to resources for abortion. This is because Governments can argue that if abortion is a private issue then public
revenue does not need to be provided for private provisions (Bacchi 1999).
Abortion reinforces gender barriers.
Mary Catherine Wilcox, Ave Maria Law Review, Fall 2008, “WHY THE EQUAL PROTECTION CLAUSE CANNOT "FIX"
ABORTION LAW,” LEXIS
Without constitutional or precedential support for using the Equal Protection Clause as a safe haven for the right to abortion, the
argument to analyze abortion restrictions under heightened scrutiny of the Equal Protection Clause is essentially an unreasonable
policy [*328] argument. n158 The main thrust of the "equality" argument for abortion is that abortion is necessary for women to
"enjoy equal citizenship stature." n159 Yet in the thirty-five years since Roe legalized abortion, it has become abundantly clear that
legal abortion denigrates - not elevates - women's status in society by physically and psychologically harming women who have
abortions and by providing an excuse for society not to deal with the real reasons women feel they cannot keep their child. n160
The abortion advocates' focus on pregnancy as a burden only women bear - rather than a miracle only women can experience perverts the spirit of feminism and denies the reality of unborn life in the womb. It also excludes males from the equation, who
must be held accountable for the child they helped to create. Furthermore, their argument is impossible to justify for the simple
reason that many women do not consider abortion their right, and in fact, believe it is degrading to women. n161 More and more
women who have had abortions are speaking out about the physical, emotional, and psychological trauma they have experienced
as a result of their abortion procedures. n162
Abortion hurts the feminist cause.
Mary Catherine Wilcox, Ave Maria Law Review, Fall 2008, “WHY THE EQUAL PROTECTION CLAUSE CANNOT "FIX"
ABORTION LAW,” LEXIS
As these women recognized, abortion is inherently anti-feminist because it violates the central tenets of feminism: nonviolence,
nondiscrimination, and justice for all. n170 Early feminists fought against male oppression, yet pro-abortion feminists today are
oppressing the unborn in the worst way. Abortion advocates' justifications for a woman's decision to place her interests above the life
of her unborn child, such as her own superiority of size, intellect, need, or value as a person, are the same justifications men gave for
denying women equal rights. n171 There was a time when women were treated as men's property, and their value was determined by
whether men wanted them. n172 Thus, it is repulsive to feminist ideals to say that an unborn child is the property of his or her mother
and to allow a child's life to depend on whether or not the mother wants her child. n173 Abortion advocates fail to take into account
that abortion denies unborn females the equal protection of the law. n174 In an increasing trend of sex-selective abortion, female
unborn children are aborted [*331] purely on the basis of their gender. n175 This reveals the inconsistency of pro-abortion feminism:
condemning sex-selective abortion as an acknowledgement that there is a living female baby inside the mother's womb, while
accepting that sex-selective abortion tolerates a preference for male children over female children. n176 Abortion is also a threat to
women's equality because it facilitates pregnancy discrimination. n177 Pro-life feminist Daphne Clair de Jong equated abortion with
the continued subjugation of women when she wrote, "To say that in order to be equal with men it must be possible for a pregnant
woman to become un-pregnant at will is to say that being a woman precludes her from being a fully functioning person." n178 No
other oppressed group has ever needed surgery to become un-oppressed. n179 The very idea suggests that women's bodies are inferior
to men's, and must be fixed in order to enjoy the equal protection of the law. This is not a feminist argument. A truly feminist position
recognizes the natural, physical differences between men and women, and seeks equality for women based on these differences, rather
than by pretending they do not exist.
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
38/90
ABORTION BAD – MURDER
Abortion is murder.
Mary Catherine Wilcox, Ave Maria Law Review, Fall 2008, “WHY THE EQUAL PROTECTION CLAUSE CANNOT "FIX"
ABORTION LAW,” LEXIS
Elizabeth Cady Stanton considered abortion a form of "infanticide." n164 She adamantly opposed abortion, writing, "When we
consider that women are treated as property, it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed
of as we see fit." n165 Most significantly, an editorial from the newspaper that she edited identified women's equality as a means
of ending abortion: "There must be a remedy even for such a crying evil as [abortion]. But where shall it be found, at least where
[shall it] begin, if not in the complete enfranchisement and elevation of women?" n166 Victoria Woodhull, the first female
presidential candidate, was a strong advocate for the right to life of the unborn. n167 She, too, believed abortion hurt women's
equality: "Every woman knows that if she were free she would never bear an unwished-for child, nor think of murdering one
before its birth." n168 Finally, Alice Paul, the author of the original Equal Rights Amendment ("ERA"), opposed the later
development linking the ERA and abortion. n169
Among its crimes, abortion is murder.
Paul Bassen, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1982, Vol. 11, No. 4, p314-337, “Present Sakes and Future Prospects: The Status of Early
Abortion”
Many different charges have been brought against abortion: that it erodes respect for human life, diminishes the standard of
parental responsibility, abets sexual promiscuity. But the main and most famil¬ iar charge against it, the one which chiely animates
debate about this topic, is that of murder. It is disconcerting that the primary antiabortion claim is framed so crudely, for
murder is not a translucent or a simple concept. There are degrees or varieties of it, and near relatives to it; moral facts which
are relected and defined in the law. People who participate in abortion are liable not to see the act as prolifers do, which is
morally enough to vitiate the murder charge. But despite all this something important is expressed by calling abortion
murder, something to which prochoice thinking often seems unresponsive: the idea that abortion has a victim, and that the
fundamental injury done to this victim is the same as is done to the victim of a very early mur¬ der. And it is true: if the fetus is
a victim, the injury is catastrophic, for it consists in total deprivation of the span of human time through which it would have
lived had it not been aborted.
Prochoice views don’t resolve the problem.
Paul Bassen, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1982, Vol. 11, No. 4, p314-337, “Present Sakes and Future Prospects: The Status of Early
Abortion”
The murder charge also has a legal aspect. It implies that, in jus¬ tice, the law should protect the fetus from abortion. Fixing on
this aspect, prochoice advocates reply that such a law would do an in¬ justice to the pregnant woman. But there is more to the
problem of abortion than enters into the dispute about law. Whatever the law should require, no conscientious person who
sees the aborted fetus as the subject, or even possibly the subject, of such a severe misfortune can undertake abortion without
serious conlict of mind. This re¬ mains true whether or not abortion wrongs the victim, or violates its rights. However cogent
the prochoice position may be on the level of law, it leaves unresolved a very nasty problem on the level of personal choice.
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
39/90
ABORTION BAD – RACISM
Abortion advocates are advocating the genocide of the black population
Jesse Lee Peterson (president and founder of The Brotherhood Organization of A New Destiny) 2008: Abortion: Black Genocide.
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=56202
I realized that this problem was not being dealt with by the black clergy or black politicians. In fact, to my surprise, abortion was often
actually encouraged by these "leaders." Abortion was first popularized by Margaret Sanger, a white woman who was the founder of
the National Birth Control League (now Planned Parenthood). Sanger was a lifelong champion of birth control and eugenics (the
movement devoted to "improving" the human species by control of hereditary factors in reproduction). Margaret Sanger called for the
sterilization of "genetically inferior races." In 1939, she organized her "Negro Project" and wrote: "The poorer areas, particularly in
the South ... are producing alarmingly more than their share of future generations." Sanger's plan has worked extraordinarily well over
time – today numerous black religious leaders defend the "right" of women to kill their unborn children. It's ironic to me that black
leaders complain about racism, yet they promote one of the most racist practices in this country – abortion. Abortion propagandists
have dehumanized the unborn baby just as was done with the Jews in the Holocaust. In his book "Abortion Practice," Warren Hern,
M.D. compares the unborn child to a "parasite," which was the exact word Hitler used to dehumanize Jewish people in his infamous
"Mein Kampf." The alarming numbers on abortion: Since 1973, when abortion became legal there have been more than 14 million
black babies killed in the black woman's womb; Since 1973, more than twice as many blacks have died from abortion than from heart
disease, cancer, accidents, violent crimes and AIDS combined; More than 1, 450 black children are aborted each day in the United
States. (Source: U.S. Center for Disease Control)
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
40/90
AT: RIGHTS OF THE MOTHER
The invocation of rights is nonsensical—fetuses also have the right to live. The affirmative’s rejection of the child’s rights
denies ethics and turns their rights claims
Sharvy NO DATE( Ben Sharvy, Green-libertarian activist and freelance writer, “The Morality of Abortion: A Critique”,
http://www.efn.org/~bsharvy/abortion.html)
Implicit in the claim that it is unethical to kill a human being deliberately is the idea that we have rights because we are human
beings. Therefore, the reasoning goes, a fetus has rights, since a fetus is a human being. This idea has been rejected by some
philosophers (especially Michael Tooley, in Abortion and Infanticide). The alternative view is that membership in a biological
species is not morally significant in itself; that is, if most human beings have rights, it isn't because they belong to a biological
species that is innately morally privileged, but because of some other feature or features that human beings typically possess.
Such features are usually held to be mental: self-awareness, self-determination, etc. Exactly which features, and to what degree, a
being needs in order to have rights seems very complex, but it is reasonable to attach them to a capacity for self-determination,
on the grounds that self-determination is the individual right from which others (such as the right not to be murdered) derive.
Such features would be mental then, e.g., a capacity for acting by choice (as opposed to reflex), for sustained interests and
thought, for having goals, and so on. In any case, the collective of mental capacities needed to endow a being with rights is
typically called "personhood"; the position that mental capacities rather than biological specieshood determine an entity's rights
is sometimes called the "personhood" argument. We are thought to have rights not because of our biological species, but because
we are persons. The personhood argument has some results that are intuitively appealing to many:
It justifies letting a human being in a persistent vegetative state die, which is difficult when the relevant moral criteria derive
from being a homo sapiens rather than being a person.
It would explain the feeling that an animal's moral status varies according to its typical ontological status: that it is more wrong to
kill a dog for no reason than a fly, that whales and other primates (but not shrimps and ants) deserve humane treatment because
they are "intelligent," and so on.
It would explain rights in a way that avoids "speciesism." It seems true intuitively that a non-human species that could talk,
laugh, cry and aspire with us would have the same rights that we have--a result not produced by the theory that being a human is
what causes these rights.
It explains why spontaneously aborted zygotes (usually never even detected) are not a great loss.
So according to the personhood view, the morality of abortion depends on the mental capacities of the fetus. In normal human
beings, none of the mental capacities generally referred to as "higher" capacities, e.g., thought, are detectable until after birth. So
it is unlikely that a fetus or a neonate is a person, even granting considerable uncertainty over which capacities, exactly,
personhood requires. Pro-life advocates make the point that brain activity occurs in fetuses, but their point has problems. The
conventional pro-life view needs to account for the zygote, not the fetus, and there is no brain activity in zygotes; in fact, there is
no brain in zygotes. So the conventional pro-life view can't incorporate personhood criteria at all. More importantly, brain
activity is not in itself relevant. Brain activity--EEGs, REM, reflexive functioning, etc.--occurs in many animals that aren't
persons. The "higher" capacities in humans have been located in the upper layers of the cerebral cortex, which is physically
incapable of significant functioning until after birth. So, it appears that fetuses are not persons, and if the personhood view is
correct, that they have no rights and that abortion is moral in any term. However, if the personhood view is correct, neonates
have the same moral status as fetuses, and infanticide is equally moral, since the event of birth doesn't correspond to the event of
attaining personhood (significant psychological plateaus seem to occur at two to three months and one year). Birth determines
where the human is, not what he or she is. In summary, the personhood view has much intuitive support, and results in a
justification of abortion, but by the same token it justifies infanticide of neonates. Yet infanticide is a practice which most people
are intuitively and emotionally unwilling to accept.
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
41/90
AT: WE DON’T ‘INCREASE’ ABORTIONS
Repeal of the Hyde Amendment will result in more abortions
Clapper 08(Benjamin Clapper, the Executive Director of Louisiana Right to Life, a statewide pro-life organization, Save Our
Hydes:
Losing
Pro-Life
Amendment
Could
Drastically
Increase
Abortions,
December
30,
2008,
http://www.lifenews.com/nat4684.html)
The Termination of the Hyde Amendment
The Hyde Amendment, originally enacted in 1976, is a pro-life limitation
amendment in the annual appropriations bill that restricts the direct federal funding of abortion through Medicaid. Without the
Hyde Amendment, women eligible for Medicaid would have their abortions paid for by the Federal Government – in other
words, OUR tax dollars. If abortions are free to the individual, you can bet on abortion rates increasing. A Pertinent
Threat: The Termination of the Hyde Amendment Because Hyde is an “amendment in the annual appropriations bill”, the Hyde
Amendment must be passed every year to protect our tax dollars. FOCA may or may not come to the surface in 2009; however,
the Hyde Amendment will have to be dealt with in 2009, making it a serious and pertinent threat to unborn human life.
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
42/90
AT: BACK ALLEYS
Empirical studies prove that Hyde doesn’t facilitate back alley abortions—the number of abortions is less than it would be
NCHL, 08(National Committee for a Human Life Amendment, “The Hyde Amendment”, April 2008,
http://www.nchla.org/datasource/ifactsheets/4FSHydeAm22a.08.pdf)
Several studies, conducted in states where both state and federal Medicaid abortion funding has been cut off, have indicated that
there is no increase in the numbers of illegal abortions. One of these studies was conducted by the Texas Department of Health in
cooperation with the Centers for Disease Control. The results were published in the CDC’s June 8, 1980 Morbidity and Mortality
Weekly Report. The study concluded: The present study in Texas found more than one-third of the legal abortions expected
among Medicaid-eligible women were not obtained in the post funding restriction period. The data cited from the present study
are consistent with those from a previous investigation in Texas, which found approximately 40% of the expected number of
subsidized abortions were not being obtained in the interval after the funding restriction . . . In Texas, pregnant, low-income
women who do not have federal or state funds for abortions do not appear to be resorting to illegal abortions to terminate
unwanted pregnancies . . . These findings are consistent with those from a national monitoring system, which also could not
document that the restriction of public funds for abortion caused a large percentage of Medicaid-eligible women to choose self
induced or non-physician-induced abortions.
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
43/90
*** ADVANTAGES ***
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
44/90
REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS F/L
1. Doesn’t change mindsets – abortion will still be unpopular and there will be backlash – means they can’t solve patriarchy
2. Obama repeal of the Gag Rule accesses your internal links
Laser, 6-16-09. Rachel, BA Harvard, Graduated UChicago Law and was on the Review Board for their Law Journal. “Common
Ground Rules,” http://rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2009/06/16/common-ground-rules.
Don't go beyond the agreement you've got. Shortly after the Come Let Us Reason Together group debuted its common ground
governing agenda, which included an abortion policy, President Obama repealed the controversial Mexico City policy or "global
gag rule." This repeal, which freed up funds for birth control to go to poor women in developing countries, arguably fit into our
agreement, which already embraced increasing access to birth control for low-income American women. Except it didn't. We
had never discussed the Mexico City policy repeal as a group, and this policy had always been highly politically charged and
embroiled in the abortion debates. Before we had time to raise it, reporters called Third Way to inquire whether the groups'
common ground abortion approach included the repeal. Though it was totally in our right to try to persuade the group to support
the repeal, we absolutely could not presume to speak for the group about so loaded an issue.
3. Turn: Access to abortion hurts autonomy
Denbow, J.D., U.C. Berkeley, B.S. (Philosophy, minors in Mathematics & Physics), University of Michigan, 05
(Jennifer Denbow, 2005, Abortion: When Choice and Autonomy Conflict, 2005, Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law, and Justice)
The theoretical framework of choice described by Velleman has implications for the abortion debate, particularly for the pro-choice
argument that a woman’s autonomy is enhanced by affording her the right to choose whether or not to have an abortion. It is
undeniable that the opportunity to have an abortion will enhance the autonomy of those women with unplanned pregnancies who are
open to the idea of abortion and face no pressure to abort. However, for women who would have preferred the previous status quo of
birth and who face pressure to abort, the availability of a choice will decrease and afford less respect to their effective autonomies. An
extreme example that demonstrates this point is the case of a pregnant indigent woman who is in an abusive relationship with a man
on whom she is financially dependent. Her partner does not want a child, but she wants to bring the pregnancy to term and raise the
child. This case can be analyzed in the context of the theoretical framework of choice outlined by Velleman to show precisely how a
choice can be harmful. This particular woman’s option to end her pregnancy exposes her to pressure from both her partner and
society, which can consequently serve to undermine her autonomy.
4. Patriarchy cannot be explained by a single causality
Steven Goldberg (Chairman of the Department of Sociology, City College, City University of New York), “The Logic of Patriarchy,”
Gender Issues. Summer 1999.
“Patriarchy is a result of the requirement of a hunting culture, or Christianity, or capitalism, etc.” If it is to be at all persuasive,
an explanation of universality must be parsimonious; the explanation must invoke a causal factor common to the varying
societies that exhibit the universal institution. Just as the explanation in terms of capitalism fails to explain patriarchy in
the many non-capitalist societies, so do explanations in terms of any single factor other than the physiological fail to explain
the host of societies for which that factor does not apply. Non-hunting, non-Christian, non-capitalist, etc. societies are all
patriarchal. A single-cause theory of the limits constraining every society need not, of course, be the neuroendocrinological one I
suggest. But the few alternative parsimonious explanations fail on empirical grounds.
5. Patriarchy is not the root cause of all impacts
Cat Maguire of EVE Online, an online feminist news source June 9 2005 http://eve.enviroweb.org/what_is/main.html
It assumes patriarchy is the root cause of all our problems. While the patriarchal mindset is certainly accountable for
much of humankind's dysfunctionality, patriarchy is only 5,000 years old.
Emerging theories from thinkers like Chellis Glendinning contend that our dislocation from nature (and hence from ourselves)
goes back at least 20,000 years ago when humans moved from the gatherer/hunter stage to that of domesticating plants and
animals. As such, we have come to believe that anthropocentrism and speciesism—the impulse to conquer and control
nature—are conceivably a more accurate source of today’s problems than is patriarchy per se.
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
45/90
EXT #3 – KILLS AUTONOMY
The plan undermine a women’s self-determination
Denbow, J.D., U.C. Berkeley, B.S. (Philosophy, minors in Mathematics & Physics), University of Michigan, 05
(Jennifer Denbow, 2005, Abortion: When Choice and Autonomy Conflict, 2005, Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law, and Justice)
The abused, impoverished, and pregnant woman faces a multitude of troubles when she wants to bring her pregnancy to term. She
bargains from a weak tactical position against her partner; she faces heightened responsibility in giving birth while her partner’s sense
of responsibility is diminished; she is subject to societal and governmental scorn if she gives birth; her prospects for financial support
from society in the form of welfare benefits are minimal; and she and the fetus confront a myriad of health risks. Any of these factors
alone would exert pressure on a woman to abort. Taken together, these factors exert tremendous pressure and can certainly overwhelm
a woman’s own wishes to give birth. The aforementioned factors and consequent pressure combine with the option to terminate a
pregnancy to, ironically, undermine the autonomy of the poor, abused, pregnant woman. Instead of the availability of the abortion
choice working, in Velleman’s terms, to respect a woman’s capacity for selfdetermination,^^ the reality of the situation may serve to
undermine this capacity for some women. Giving a woman options may sometimes make it more difficult for her to take the one she
would otherwise rationally choose according to her desires and values. Preventing someone who wishes to give birth from having a
child is an offense to her fundamental capacity for self-determination. By valuing her options as goods in themselves, we fail to value
and respect her capacity for autonomous decision-making.^^ The choice to abort is sometimes antithetical to the very autonomy that it
is meant to promote.
The plan would make society pressure women into having abortions promoting inequality
Denbow, J.D., U.C. Berkeley, B.S. (Philosophy, minors in Mathematics & Physics), University of Michigan, 05
(Jennifer Denbow, 2005, Abortion: When Choice and Autonomy Conflict, 2005, Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law, and Justice)
The indigent woman may not only face pressure from her partner: society can also act as an instrument of coercion. Society tends to
hold women who neglect their children to a higher level of contempt than neglectful fathers."*" The stigma associated with bearing a
child that one cannot financially support will likely encourage a poor, abused, pregnant woman to exercise the abortion option,
particularly when this option is both legally sanctioned and endorsed by a significant portion of society. Societal pressure is even more
acute when an indigent woman has little recourse to seek help from the government in the form of financial or other assistance.
Furthermore, by providing only minimal assistance that may not even keep a mother and child at subsistence level, the government
communicates to the woman that she and her child are a burden on society."*' Ineffective public assistance programs and child support
laws, combined with the availability of the option to abort, may communicate something even more troubling—that a child born to a
poor woman is not to be valued in the same way as a child born to a woman of higher social standing who is not subjected to the
foregoing pressures. These negative messages serve as an additional source of pressure on the indigent pregnant woman to terminate
her pregnancy. As in Dworkin's analysis, the existence of a choice in this example is deleterious because of the pressure it 42 exerts.
The availability of the choice to end a pregnancy can also be problematic due to what the choice may signify, as in Velleman's
analysis."*^ The lack of societal support given to a poor woman when she chooses to bring her pregnancy to term sends a strong
message that her decision to bear a child should not be trusted or respected. This message may not only offend poor women but also
may erode their confidence in their rational capabilities to assess their situation and thereby choose according to their own desires and
values. Additionally, the message may indeed make them believe that they are not worthy mothers and should exercise the abortion
option.
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
46/90
EDLEMAN F/L 1/2
1. Edelman’s failure to distinguish between different queer cultures prevents a constructive shift away from reproductive
futurism.
Andrea Fontenot, Professor, English Department, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2006, “No Future: Queer Theory and the
Death Drive (review),” Project MUSE, MFS Modern Fiction Studies 52.1, p252-256
Edelman's acceptance of the cultural logics linking death and homosexuality may seem hard to swallow: not only does he ask us to
commit political suicide, he systematically refuses the fantasy of an afterlife, of an alternative future. However bleak this may
seem, Edelman's work envisions for queer theory something much more powerful than politics. In identifying the broad nexus of
forces that participate in reproductive futurism, Edelman enables queer theory to be a voice of resistance to the dominant political
order in a more comprehensive way than any issue or identity based politics could contain. Indeed, the challenge he puts forth is
for queer theory to more effectively channel the dissonant and disruptive effect of sexuality rather than distance ourselves from it.
From my perspective it is not the negativity of his theory that constitutes its weakness. Rather, it is his failure to imagine the
sinthomosexual in more diverse terms and his unwillingness to recognize possibilities for allegiance with [End Page 255]others
who suffer under reproductive futurism's grip on our political culture. It is not just that his examples happen to all be white middleclass childless men—something we may excuse as product of the cultural register he chooses to investigate—but that his entire
imagining of the scope of the sinthomosexual is limited; his exclusive use of "he" to denote queers and sinthomosexuals alike is
only one manifestation. Though he illuminates the intricate displacements and disavowals required to figure the homosexual's
difference in terms of their narcissistic love of sameness (see 56–60), he nonetheless ignores the differences that exist among those
positioned under the sign "homosexual." This becomes a weakness for his analysis in the section where he deconstructs Jean
Baudrillard's nauseating jeremiad, "The Final Solution," a treatise against "artificial insemination" and the "global extermination"
of meaning it portends (64–65). Edelman dedicates six wonderfully reasoned pages to exposing Baudrillard's outrage at the
imminent vanishing of sexual difference (and thus, for Baudrillard, difference at all) as a homophobic response to the way that the
possibilities of sex without reproduction and reproduction without sex reveal the always already meaninglessness of sex, even in
the heterosexual pairing (60–66). What Edelman misses here, though, is an opportunity to show another face of the figure of the
sinthomosexual. In Baudrillard's paranoid reaction to new technologies of reproduction, it is not the gay male who is evoked but
rather the lesbian mother, that most notorious beneficiary of this desexualized reproduction. Were Edelman to entertain this
difference, he would find that she is figured in much the same terms as her male counterpart: imperiling both the child she would
bear and the future that the Child is meant to guarantee, despite the efforts of some lesbian mothers to trade on the capital of
reproductive futurism to purchase civil rights. By simply dismissing queer parents as "comrades in reproductive futurism" (19),
capable only of contributing to the homophobic scapegoating of the sinthomosexual, he ignores their possibility as allies on the
frontier between the Child and children, between the future and tomorrow. Regardless of these omissions, however, Edelman has
certainly articulated a new direction for queer theory, making No Future required reading both within the field and beyond.
2. Edelman’s rejection of the present ignores advances in “queer” rights and eliminates the potential for political reform.
John Brenkman, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center and Baruch College,
2002, “Queer Post-Politics,” Project MUSE, Narrative 10.2, p174-180
Edelman compounds his reductive concept of the political realm by in turn postulating an ironclad intermeshing of social
reproduction and sexual reproduction. Here too he takes a fundamental feature of modern society, or any society, and absolutizes
it. Sexual reproduction is a necessary dimension of social reproduction, almost by definition, in the sense that a society's survival
depends upon, among many other things, the fact that its members reproduce. Kinship practices, customs, religious authorities, and
civil and criminal law variously regulate sexual reproduction. However, that is not to say that the imperatives of social
reproduction dictate or determine or fully functionalize the institutions and practices of sexual reproduction. The failure to
recognize the relative autonomy of those institutions and practices underestimates how seriously feminism and the gay and
lesbian movement have already challenged the norms and institutions of compulsory heterosexuality in our society. They have
done so through creative transformations in civil society and everyday life and through cultural initiatives and political and legal
reforms. The anti-abortion and anti-gay activism of the Christian Right arose, in response, to alter and reverse the fundamental
achievements of these movements.
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
47/90
EDLEMAN F/L 2/2
3. Queer theory is self-serving and self-reinforcing, creating the problems they try to eliminate.
James Penney, Assistant Professor in the Cultural Studies Program at Trent University, 2002, “(Queer) Theory and the Universal
Alternative,” Project MUSE, Diacritics 32.2 p3-19
It is precisely with respect to these last notions that Žižek's polemic against Laclau and his radical democratic followers is
absolutely correct: the "radical" in "radical democracy" refers only to the disturbing decisiveness and passivity with which the
classical Marxist denunciation of the cultural and material devastation performed by unlimited capital is rather cynically
abandoned in that discourse. Indeed, a bitter historical irony attaches itself to this observation when one recalls that, for early
Marxism, the concept of "radical democracy" referred not to the maximization of the progressive potentialities of liberal
democracy, but rather to the "dictatorship of the proletariat," in other words to the admittedly paradoxical notion that "true"
democracy is possible only by means of the suspension of "democracy" as it has been construed by the constitutional apparatus of
parliamentary liberalism. While the dictatorship of the proletariat, for historical reasons, is undoubtedly no longer desirable nor
possible in the mode Marx himself imagined, one fundamental point remains: it is necessary to leave open the "utopian" possibility
of a political act in the present that would, in general terms, transform in toto the conditions of intelligibility of the notion of
"democracy" itself and, more specifically, inaugurate a new political symbolic in which the problematic of "sexuality" would find
itself essentially and decisively tied to the basic economic conditions of the subject's position within the social world's means of
material production and resource distribution. Queer theory must proceed to its "self-destructive" auto-critique, to the traversal
of its most intimate liberal fantasies (that of so-called "sexual freedom" undoubtedly being the most fundamental) because it fully
participates in the cultural and socioeconomic logics that impede the emancipation of the great majority of the world's citizen and
noncitizen subjects, queer and not-so-queer alike. Žižek is certainly worth quoting here:
. . . The much-praised postmodern
"proliferation of new political subjectivities" [of which "queer theory" has of course been an integral part], the demise of every
"essentialist" fixation, the assertion of full contingency, occur against the background of a certain silent renunciation and
acceptance: the renunciation of the idea of a global change in the fundamental relations in our society . . . and, consequently, the
acceptance of the liberal democratic capitalist framework which remains the same, the unquestioned background, in all the
dynamic proliferation of the multitude of new subjectivities. [Contingency 321]
4. Accepting Edelman’s queer pessimism justifies coercive practices.
Michael Snediker, English Department, Mount Holyoke College, 2006, “Queer Optimism,” Project MUSE, Postmodern Culture 16.3
My line of inquiry might seem petty, but my question, in fact, illuminates how little Edelman's argument can hold onto the
particularity on which it is partly premised. "The queer," Edelman insists, "insists that politics is always a politics of the signifier"
(6). Edelman likewise insists that "queer theory must always insist on its connection to the vicissitudes of the sign" (7). The
ubiquity of "always" and "every" in Edelman's argument is nearly stunning, and it seems to me indicative of No Future's
coerciveness, as a different passage from No Future's introduction quite handily demonstrates:
Rather than rejecting, with
liberal discourse, this ascription of negativity to the queer, we might, as I argue, do better to consider accepting and even
embracing it. Not in the hope of forging thereby some more perfect social order--such a hope, after all, would only reproduce the
constraining mandate of futurism, just as any such order would equally occasion the negativity of the queer--but rather to refuse
the insistence of hope itself as affirmation, which is always affirmation of an order whose refusal will register as unthinkable,
irresponsible, inhumane. And the trump card of affirmation? Always the question: If not this, what? Always the demand to
translate the insistence, the pulsive force, of negativity into some determinate stance or "position" whose determination would
negate it: always the imperative to immure it in some stable and positive form. (4) Always this, always this, always that. This
absoluteness in Edelman's characterization of affirmation, meant to rally and provoke, recalls Sedgwick's incredulous reading of
Fredric Jameson's ukase, "Always historicize." "What could have less to do," Sedgwick rightly asks, "with historicizing than the
commanding, atemporal adverb 'always'" ("Paranoid Reading" 125)? What, for that matter, could have less to do with
particularizations? The axiomatic thrust of Edelman's "always" would seem to make the world so irrevocably one thing that
response to the world would amount to one thing. But still: why would rejecting a primary attachment to futurity (regardless of
what this futurity always does or doesn't do) necessarily require embodying negativity?20 #
Edelman's queer pessimism
positions itself as "our" only option without having exhausted what other options might glimmeringly look like. This glimmer
doesn't conjure the sort of horizon Edelman would be so quick to dismantle. Rather, it suggests that not all optimisms are a priori
equivalent to each other. And as importantly, that not all queer theories need look like Edelman's. "As a particular story . . . of why
storytelling fails," Edelman writes, "queer theory, as I construe it, marks the 'other' side of politics . . . the 'side' outside all political
sides, committed as they are, on every side, to futurism's unquestioned good" (7). This account of queer theory, even as construed
by one theorist, hardly seems like a "particular" story, not at least particular enough. Queer theory, on this account, doesn't seem
like an escape from the political's claustrophobically refracted unavailing sides, but a claustrophobia unto itself.21
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
48/90
EXT #1 – NO SHIFT
Edelman’s ignorance of reform makes a shift away from “queer” politics impossible.
John Brenkman, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center and Baruch College,
2002, “Queer Post-Politics,” Project MUSE, Narrative 10.2, p174-180
It is the next moves in Edelman's argument that concern me. Having postulated in his political theory argument the intermeshed
unity of social reproduction, sexual reproduction, and politics, he is led to suggest that the phobic position of queers is the
quintessential requirement of the social-symbolic order as such. Having postulated that the very projection of a narrative of social
change from the present toward a future is inescapably complicit in this whole mechanism of social-sexual-political reproduction,
he is led to cast all social and political reforms as in essence perpetuations of the anti-queer imperatives of the socialsymbolic order. The true queer politics is therefore beyond politics. Edelman formulates this post-politics in the following
passage (at the same time equivocating by affirming the importance of the actual extension of tolerance, rights, and interests
achieved by the gay and lesbian movement—an equivocation I will not dwell on, since politically it is a welcome ambiguity,
though it highlights the faultlines of his theoretical position): "[T]he true oppositional politics implicit in the practice of queer
sexualities lies not in the liberal discourse, the patient negotiation, of tolerances and rights, important as these undoubtedly are to
all of us still denied them, but rather in the capacity of queer sexualities to figure the radical dissolution of the contract, in every
sense social and symbolic, on which the future as guarantee against the real, and so against the insistence of the death drive,
depends" (23).
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
49/90
EXT #2 – NO POLITICAL REFORM
Edelman’s focus on the future prevents true political engagement.
John Brenkman, Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center and Baruch College,
2002, “Queer Post-Politics,” Project MUSE, Narrative 10.2, p174-180
For Edelman the image of the child-as-future is more than a powerful trope in the political discourse of the moment. It in effect
defines the political realm: "For politics, however radical the means by which some of its practitioners seek to effect a more
desirable social order, is conservative insofar as it necessarily works to affirm a social order, defining various strategies aimed at
actualizing social reality and transmitting it into the future it aims to bequeath to its inner child" (19). The burden of this argument
is that a genuinely critical discourse cannot arise via the marking or symbolizing of the gap between the present and the future.
Such symbolizing has indeed been the defining feature of modern critical social discourse, whether among the Enlightenment's
philosophes, French revolutionaries, Marxists, social democrats, or contemporary socialists and democrats. Jürgen Habermas, in
The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, defines modern time-consciousness itself as a taking of responsibility for the future.
Edelman sees in such a time-consciousness an inescapable trap. For him any such political discourse or activity steps into "the
logic by which political engagement serves always as the medium for reproducing our social reality" (26). Certainly the political
realm—whether viewed from the perspective of the state, the political community and citizenship, or political movements—is a
medium of social reproduction, in the sense that it serves the relative continuity of innumerable economic and non-economic
institutions. But it is not simply a mechanism of social reproduction; it is also the site and instrument of social change. Nor is it
simply the field of existing power relations; it is also the terrain of contestation and compromise.
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
50/90
DISCRIMINATION F/L 1/2
1. Alt causes to gender discrimination:
A. Marriage incentives.
Deborah A. Harris and Domenico “Mimmo” Parisi, Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work within the Social
Science Research Center at Mississippi State University, November 29, 2005, “Gender Role Ideologies and Marriage Promotion: State
Policy Choices and Suggestions for Improvement, Review of Policy Research,” Volume 22 Issue 6, Pages 841 – 858
Several reasons have been proposed for the lack of attention given to family formation goals and marriage promotion, in particular.
First, there was the controversial nature of the topic. Several critics spoke out against marriage promotion saying that such policies
were biased toward the traditional breadwinner- homemaker household, a family arrangement that represents only 10% of United
States families today (Gring-Pemble, 2003). They argue that such arrangements often leave women with less power in
relationships as the caregiver role is devalued relative to the wage-earner role. Martha F. Davis (2002) suggests that, Welfare is a
women’s issue because women are made poor by a society that assumes that women’s work—both in the marketplace and in the
home—is less valuable than men’s work. Because marriage [as a social policy] does not address this fundamental cause of
women’s poverty, one can only assume that the marriage movement is primarily motivated by another agenda: legislating
patriarchy. (p. 153) This “legislating patriarchy” is cited by critics who are concerned that the federal and state governments are
advocating one family form over another and may be placing women and children in jeopardy by encouraging welfare clients to
become even more dependent on a husband than they had ever been on welfare.
B. Government, business, religion, and cultural practices.
Essortment, Online Health, Science, Education Database 2002, “What is patriarchy?”
http://www.essortment.com/all/whatispatriarc_rhsf.htm
Look to most world leaders to see how powerful patriarchy is. Women are certainly as capable as men to be President of the United
States, yet they are not and probably won't be any time soon. Men have been in that role for so long that our country probably does not believe it is
possible. Consider who is typically at the head of a company or leaders in local governments. While certainly more women are
fulfilling these roles, it is a constant struggle for the ones who are able to achieve that success with men having much more power just by their
biological nature. Men have not had to fight for their place in society like women have. It has been an expectation that they will become leaders
because that is what patriarchy is about. Much of patriarchy also has its roots in Christianity. Religions which believe the Bible or other
religious text often follow it faithfully by its every word which puts the men in charge. The Bible which most Christians live by states boldly
that women should be submissive to men. With that in mind and those beliefs instilled in cultures, women don't stand a chance at
gaining strength in their gender and its potential in our world. Patriarchy is also found in family traditions like women taking the
name of their husbands and children always carrying the father's last name . More women are choosing to keep their maiden names or hyphenate
with their married name so they can retain their own identity. With reference of Mr. and Mrs. so-and-so, the man assumes the dominant role again and women lose.
2. No discrimination – statistics prove.
Mark Graber, Professor of Law and Government at the University of Maryland, 1996, “Rethinking Abortion: Equal Choice, the
Constitution, and Reproductive Politics”
Newly instituted pro-choice policies helped many poor women finance their abortions. By removing the criminal tariff and
permitting the procedure to be done on an outpatient basis, legalization significantly reduced the cost of a simple abortion. Willard
Gates of the CDC estimates that Roe lowered the price of an abortion from $500 to $150. Prices dropped by 90 percent in some region of the country
when obtaining an abortion in a specialized clinic became a legal option. Legalization permitted philanthropic organizations to subsidize abortion
fees for those who could not otherwise afford to terminate a pregnancy. Many abortion clinics offer discounts and some waive payment entirely for indigent
patients. These price reductions instantly increased legal abortion rates. In states and localities where only affluent families had enjoyed access to safe abortions,
poor women and women of color immediately began procuring legal abortions as frequently is did more privileged women. Before New' York repealed its
restrictions on abortion, 94 percent of all legal abortions! in that state were granted to white women. The year New York abandoned its pro-life measures, women
of color obtained 56 percent of all legal abortions.3* Less fortunate women at present have much higher legal abortion rates than their more
affluent counterparts. Rosalind Petechesky of Hunter College estimates that "Medicaid eligible women, a disproportionate number of whom arc
women of color, have an abortion rate that is three times higher than that of the white, married, middle- or working-class majority.”
The national abortion rate for women of color is significantly greater than the abortion rate for white women. Doctors at the CDC
note that black women "use legal abortion at approximately twice the rate of their white counterparts " Black and white women in 1981
had 549 and 329 abortions, respectively, for every thousand births.'"1 Legalization has not completely eliminated economic and racial disparities in maternal
mortality and morbidity rates.” Nevertheless, far fewer women of all races and classes presently suffer botched abortions . Dr. Tietze estimates
that as of 1984, legalized abortion had saved 1,500 maternal lives and prevented "several tens of thousands... of life threatening but not final complications.” In
California, legislation that permitted abortion on demand increased the abortion rate twenty-five-fold while decreasing hospital admissions for septic abortion to a
seventh of pre-legalization rates. Septic abortion after Roe went the way of malaria in the United States. "The experienced gynecologist,” several practicing
physicians recognize, "need only make rounds on tin- gynecology ward of any municipal hospital ti> recognize the difference that legal abortion has made.”
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
51/90
DISCRIMINATION F/L 2/2
3. Turn – not only are black abortions occurring in the status quo, but abortion advocates are advocating the genocide of the
black population
Jesse Lee Peterson (president and founder of The Brotherhood Organization of A New Destiny) 2008: Abortion: Black Genocide.
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=56202
I realized that this problem was not being dealt with by the black clergy or black politicians. In fact, to my surprise, abortion was often
actually encouraged by these "leaders." Abortion was first popularized by Margaret Sanger, a white woman who was the founder of
the National Birth Control League (now Planned Parenthood). Sanger was a lifelong champion of birth control and eugenics (the
movement devoted to "improving" the human species by control of hereditary factors in reproduction). Margaret Sanger called for the
sterilization of "genetically inferior races." In 1939, she organized her "Negro Project" and wrote: "The poorer areas, particularly in
the South ... are producing alarmingly more than their share of future generations." Sanger's plan has worked extraordinarily well over
time – today numerous black religious leaders defend the "right" of women to kill their unborn children. It's ironic to me that black
leaders complain about racism, yet they promote one of the most racist practices in this country – abortion. Abortion propagandists
have dehumanized the unborn baby just as was done with the Jews in the Holocaust. In his book "Abortion Practice," Warren Hern,
M.D. compares the unborn child to a "parasite," which was the exact word Hitler used to dehumanize Jewish people in his infamous
"Mein Kampf." The alarming numbers on abortion: Since 1973, when abortion became legal there have been more than 14 million
black babies killed in the black woman's womb; Since 1973, more than twice as many blacks have died from abortion than from heart
disease, cancer, accidents, violent crimes and AIDS combined; More than 1, 450 black children are aborted each day in the United
States. (Source: U.S. Center for Disease Control)
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
52/90
EXT #1 – ALT CAUSE
The USFG markets marriage incentives, reinforcing patriarchal standards.
Deborah A. Harris and Domenico “Mimmo” Parisi, Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work within the Social
Science Research Center at Mississippi State University, November 29, 2005, “Gender Role Ideologies and Marriage Promotion: State
Policy Choices and Suggestions for Improvement, Review of Policy Research,” Volume 22 Issue 6, Pages 841 – 858
Advocating One Family Form over Another—Marriage promotion as it has been “marketed” by the federal government extols the
virtues of two-parent families while presenting the dangers faced by children growing up in single-parent families. As Davis
(2002) and her fellow critics argue, by legislating patriarchy the government is advocating one family form at the expense of
others. In fact, there was so much uproar by women’s rights organizations and similar groups over marriage promotion policies
that appeared to disregard the high rates of domestic violence among low-income women that in recent reauthorization of the
family formation provisions in PRWORA the need for “safe and healthy families” has replaced earlier language (Ooms, Bouchet,
& Parke, 2004; Healthy Marriage Initiative; Seefeldt & Smock, 2004).
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
53/90
EXT #3 – ABORTION = BLACK GENOCIDE
Abortions are only a way through which elites can exploit blacks for power and wealth
Jesse Lee Peterson (president and founder of The Brotherhood Organization of A New Destiny) 2008: Abortion: Black Genocide.
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=56202
Abortion has also given black men one more way to be irresponsible. Because of the weakness of the father and the lack of morality in
the black community, many black women feel they have no other choice but abortion. It is nearly impossible to get black churches and
black politicians to get involved with us to picket abortion clinics, to counsel mothers who are getting abortions, or to speak out
against abortion. I believe there is a reason for the silence of black churches and black politicians regarding abortion. They actually
have much in common with the abortionists: Abortionists are simply using blacks for power and wealth, the same way much of the
black clergy, black politicians and liberal elite whites have used blacks for years. I notice that when I am in front of the clinics or talk
about abortion on my radio show, most of the anger, hostility and attacks come from young white and black educated women. These
women typically hate their fathers, and men who have used them in the wrong way. Our universities have taken this hatred and
"educated" these young women with "facts" that reinforce their existing inner rage and prejudices. It is time for America, but
especially the black community, to come out of its state of denial and realize that true racism is the attack on the black unborn baby,
started by Margaret Sanger and carried out by the liberal elite in this country. The solution to this problem is a strong belief in the
Creator, strong families and self-respect. Most importantly, men must step to the forefront of this issue. They must return back to their
proper state as men of character and as the head of their families, or the horrors we've already seen in this "one nation under God" will
be dwarfed by the horrors to come.
Abortion and racism are evil twins – abortion is used as a tool to perpetuate the destruction of the black community and
humanity
Dr. Alveda C. King (niece of MLK) 7/20/2009: The abortionist’s eye is on us.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jul/20/the-abortionists-eye-is-on-us/
Like many black women, I once believed the doctor who told me my babies were no more than "a blob of tissue." I wanted to believe
it. Eventually, I realized I was wrong, that I was a secondary victim of abortion. I repented and found healing through God. Today, I
work in the civil rights movement of the our century -- the right of every one of every race to live. I am asking you to join me. Let me
tell you why. Abortion and racism are evil twins, born of the same lie. Where racism now hides its face in public, abortion is
accomplishing the goals of which racism only once dreamed. Together, abortionists are destroying humanity at large and the black
community in particular. Abortion has taken a gruesome toll on the black community, killing more than AIDS and crime combined.
Some 14 million black babies have been aborted since the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion in
all stages in all 50 states. That's equal to one-third of the number of blacks living today. By the abortion industry's own statistics, black
women are 4.8 times more likely to abort than are non-Hispanic white women. Blacks comprise about 13 percent of the population,
yet have 37 percent of all abortions. When dramatic racial disparities like these appeared in employment and education, it was enough
to conclude that institutionalized racism and discrimination were present in our corporations and colleges. Why should we apply a
different standard to the abortion industry? Racism and abortion are twins in many other ways. Racism springs from the lie that certain
human beings are less than fully human. It's a self-centered falsehood that corrupts our minds into believing we are right to treat others
as we would not want to be treated. So it is with abortion. Racism oppresses its victims, but also binds the oppressors, who sear their
consciences with more and more lies until they become prisoners of those lies. They cannot face the truth of human equality because it
reveals the horror of the injustices they commit. While victims die physically, practitioners die spiritually. So it is with abortion.
Racism is a way to gain economic advantage at the expense of others. Slavery and plantations may be gone, but racism still allows us
to regard those who may keep us from financial gain as less than equals. So it is with abortion. A majority, perhaps as many as 75
percent, of abortion clinics are in areas with high minority populations. Abortion apologists will say this is because they want to serve
the poor. You don't serve the poor, however, by taking their money to terminate their children. The abortion movement in this country
was started by Margaret Sanger, the founder of an organization known today as Planned Parenthood. Ms. Sanger was quite open that
she wanted "more children from the fit, less from the unfit." The unfit, she made clear, were blacks and poor whites. She had no
qualms about speaking to as many as 12 Ku Klux Klan meetings. As I discuss in the new film, "Maafa 21" (produced by Life
Dynamics Inc.), she targeted blacks in her eugenics-based campaigns. Does an overtly racist past mean that the abortion industry is
racist today? Consider last year's widely reported account of seven Planned Parenthood offices that agreed to accept a donation on the
sole condition that the money only be used to abort black babies. The recordings of the phone calls to Planned Parenthood are chilling.
Why were some offices of the organization willing to take money based on race? Abortion targets blacks disproportionately, but it
affects everyone. And as my uncle, Martin Luther King, wrote from the Birmingham jail, "[i]njustice anywhere is a threat to justice
everywhere." Abortion is an attack on the family and the humanity that unites us all. My Uncle Martin also wrote: "The Negro cannot
win if he is willing to sell the future of his children for his personal and immediate comfort and safety." Those words are still true
today. After all, how can the dream survive if we let them take our children?
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
54/90
AT: COURTS
The Courts can’t resolve issues of gender discrimination and sexuality.
Robin West, Frederick J. Haas Professor of Law and Philosophy and Associate Dean at Georgetown Law, 1998, “A Moral
Responsibility,” http://bostonreview.net/BR23.5/West.html
The same is true, I believe, of the Chief Justice’s argument that the criminalization of abortion puts women (and presumably men,
as well) to an unconstitutional choice between celibacy and heterosexual intercourse coupled with a fear of pregnancy. A
constitutional right to sexual privacy, or sexual autonomy, if it exists, would upend social understandings of the relationship
among family, sexuality, and reproduction. Our current legal regimes reflect a belief, perhaps now held by only a numerical
minority, that sexual activity is proper and moral only within traditional marriage, and even then only when both parties are open
to the possibility of conception being the result. This legal regime could obviously be displaced through legislative processes, and
perhaps that displacement might eventually be reflected in our national, evolving Constitution: it may be, for example, that we
have a constitutional right to a wide array of family structures, sexual choices, and marital arrangements and
nonarrangedments. It may be, as a constitutional matter, that "family" should be reconceived so as to focus on mutual care,
intimacy, and the nurturance of children, rather than being defined by a hierarchic relation between man and wife and an
authoritative and authoritarian relation between parents and their genetically connected children- But, if so, as is true of motherhood, this reconception of sexuality and its relation to the Constitution cannot happen by fiat from courts, and it certainly cannot
happen solely because we declare it to be necessary en route to the discovery of a right to an abortion. To truly establish a right to
sexual intimacy, entire bodies of law, again ranging through family law, employment law, and criminal law, will have to be
rethought. By declaring a right to an abortion as a shortcut toward providing, in effect, a right to sexual pleasure unfettered by
reproductive consequences, again we perversely validate, by constitutionalizing, our current sexual, marital, and familial
regimes so long as those regimes include the choice to have an abortion. This would do little but unduly truncate the development
of constitutional thought as it might more positively affirm a desirable and generous understanding of the diversity and range of
our intimate sexual and familial lives.
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
55/90
NATIVES F/L ½
1. Equal protection and liberal equality shouldn’t be extended to Native Americans – they are a sovereign nation and
independent of the US government’s authority.
Tweedy 2000 (Ann Tweedy, The Buffalo Public Interest Law Journal, 2000, 18 Buff. Pub. Interest L.J. 147. The Liberal Forces
Driving the Supreme Court's Divestment and Debasement of Tribal Sovereignty)
In addition to the reasons mentioned above, there are compelling reasons for not applying the doctrine to Indian tribes at all-irrespective of whether it continues to be applied to other groups. First, as mentioned earlier in this paper, Supreme Court
precedent itself maintains that tribes are not racial groups. Additionally, it has been argued that Indian tribes should be
understood as peoples under international law and therefore should [*215] be accorded the right to self-determination as a
matter of international law. This approach would render the Equal Protection Clause inapplicable to Indian tribes altogether,
making tribes both eligible to receive special rights from the United States government based on their status as peoples and free
from the constraints of liberal equality doctrine within their own borders. Similarly, Patrick Macklem has argued that "because
tribal governments do not derive their authority from federal or state sources, their actions need not conform to constitutional
constraints on federal and state authority." In other words, the facts that tribes were present on the North American continent
before the establishment of the United States and that they retain some of their preexisting sovereign powers make them exempt
from the Equal Protection Clause and other limitations emanating from United States' governmental power.
2. Forcing assimilation into US laws by enveloping Native Americans into the Equal Protection Clause destroys their
sovereignty and repeats the history of cultural genocide.
Tweedy 2000 (Ann Tweedy, The Buffalo Public Interest Law Journal, 2000, 18 Buff. Pub. Interest L.J. 147. The Liberal Forces
Driving the Supreme Court's Divestment and Debasement of Tribal Sovereignty)
Lastly, others have argued that Indian tribes' prior occupancy, standing alone, justifies their continued exercise of sovereign
power and their exemption from federal constitutional requirements. Whether one focuses on the illegitimacy of liberal equality
doctrine or on its inapplicability to Indian tribes, it is clear that the Supreme Court's increasing reliance on liberal equality
doctrine in abrogating tribal sovereignty is dangerous to tribal sovereignty and integrity. The continued application of this
doctrine to tribal sovereignty issues will lead to the complete abrogation of tribal sovereignty by the Court, in contravention of
Congress' announced self-determination goals for tribal governments. Involuntary assimilation into white culture will inevitably
follow such a wholesale abrogation of tribal sovereignty. Forced assimilation has been implemented before with disastrous
results. As Gotanda points out, it is another form of [*216] cultural genocide. As such, members of a democracy should be
vehemently opposed to it. Furthermore, the U.S. has an obligation to treat Indian tribes--and its peoples--with respect and to stop
repeating its previous misguided policies with Indian tribes. After all, if one closely examines United States history, she will find
that the federal government--with the help of many of its citizen's--invaded Indian Country, only to ruthlessly massacre Indians,
steal their land, and then try to assimilate them into a radically foreign culture. While Congress has taken steps towards
reconciling past wrongs and charting a new course, the activist Court seems determined to eradicate the progress made in this
area. In sum, the Court has begun a behind-the-scenes debasement of tribal sovereignty. Its debasement is based on a highly
questionably conflation of Indian racial status with that of other minority groups. Moreover, liberal equality theory has merely
become a tool for prolonging the oppression of subordinated groups, and therefore, should be abandoned or significantly
modified.
3. Native Americans are left vulnerable to sterilization under the IHS
Lawrence, a Ph.D. student at Arizona State University, 00
(Jane Lawrence, is a Ph.D. student at Arizona State University where she is studying under Dr. Peter Iverson, The Indian Health
Service and the Sterilization of Native American Women, The American Indian Quarterly 24.3 (2000) 400-419 )
The experiences of these four women, along with other evidence provided earlier in the paper, reveal that the IHS sterilization
procedures drastically affected all aspects of Native American life. IHS practices harmed the relationships between Native Americans
and the government and between tribal communities, husbands and wives, and mothers and their children. The operations also caused
an inordinate amount of harm to the individual Native American women whom the Indian Health Service physicians sterilized.
Sterilization abuse has not been reported recently on the scale that occurred during the 1970s, but the possibility still exists for it to
occur. The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare does not audit Indian Health Service programs; it only audits the computer
records on reported sterilizations that do not meet the guideline's requirements. Until the department conducts full audits on all
sterilizations that the federal government funds, sterilization abuse will continue to concern Native Americans.
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
56/90
NATIVES F/L 2/2
4. The government can’t give the right of abortions to natives, to presume they need government approval ignores the natives
choice
Hazlehurst is Senior Lecturer in Cross-Cultural Studies in the Faculty of Arts at Queensland University of Technology, 95
(Kayleen M. Hazlehurst, Popular Justice and Community Regeneration Pathways of Indigenous Reform, 6/30/95)
I do not enter the debate over abortion. Whether or not it is sanctioned by state law, it exists. Native women make their own decisions
about themselves, their children and their families. Native women have the right to determine whether abortion should be legal, and if
the women in a given society practiced it traditionally, they will continue to do so. If they did not, they won’t.
5. Coercive contraceptives destroy reproductive rights
Ralstin-Lewis, University of Oregon Graduate Teaching Fellow, 05
(D. Marie Ralstin-Lewis, Department of Sociology Native American Event Coordinator, Office of Admissions, The Continuing
Struggle against Genocide: Indigenous Women's Reproductive Rights, Wicazo Sa Review, Vol. 20, No. 1,
Colonization/Decolonization, II (Spring, 2005), pp. 71-95, Spring 2005)
While Norplant can be seen as an empowering advance in reproductive technology, it is also highly susceptible to governmental
abuse. Compared to other contraceptive devices, it is easily monitored by government or population-control officials. The rods can be
located readily in the upper arms, and removal by a patient would be obvious to a medical worker. Since the decision to utilize
Norplant is a onetime affair (the devices are inserted only once every five years) the doctor-patient relationship is critically important.
Also, both insertion and removal must be done by a trained medical professional, so some personal control is relinquished in using this
method of contraception. 54 The challenge comes in balancing access to Norplant for those who authentically choose it while not
coercing others, by intimidation or incentives, to use the device. A woman cannot start and stop using Norplant whenever she chooses;
she must depend on her doctor to abide by her reproductive decisions. If her doctor refuses to remove the Norplant inserts, a scenario
that occurs with alarming frequency on many reservations today, a woman effectively has no control over her fertility.
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
57/90
HUMAN RIGHTS F/L
1. They can’t solve human rights leadership – US hypocrisy on human rights abuses world wide
Roth 09 - executive director of Human Rights Watch [Kenneth, "Taking Back the Initiative from the Human Rights Spoilers"
http://www.hrw.org/en/node/79269]
In some cases of bilateral ineffectiveness, the United States bore principal responsibility. For example: * Washington provided
massive assistance to the Pakistani military while doing little to rein in its Inter-Services Intelligence's use of torture and the
"disappearance" of suspects. Indeed, the CIA worked closely with Pakistani intelligence forces, taking custody of suspected
terrorists and interrogating them in secret prisons. The Pakistani judiciary's principled insistence on probing into these enforced
disappearances, as well as its apparent unwillingness to bless General Musharraf's election as president while still a member of the
army, is what led Musharraf to depose the chief justice, Iftikhar Chaudhry, and other high court judges. Washington did little to
press for their restoration or to call on Musharraf to subject himself to the rule of law. Musharraf ultimately resigned under
domestic pressure, but efforts to hold him accountable for his lawlessness were stymied by Washington's paramount concern that
its close ally not be humiliated. * Ethiopia has among the worst human rights records in Africa. Its troops have used scorchedearth counterinsurgency policies, including strangling people and burning villages, to displace rural villagers in the ethnic Somali
Ogaden region. In Somalia, Ethiopian forces have indiscriminately shelled densely populated urban areas and tortured and
executed alleged supporters of insurgent groups. Meanwhile, the Ethiopian government has used violence and arbitrary detention
to suppress peaceful dissent at home. Yet as an important regional ally in the fight against terrorism, Ethiopia is the beneficiary of
some US$700 million annually from the US government-and of a notable public silence from Washington about these atrocities.
* Washington in 2005 briefly demonstrated its ability to gain human rights concessions from the Egyptian government, but it
backed off its push for reform when parliamentary elections gave the Muslim Brotherhood big wins. With the restoration of
unconditional support-Egypt remains the world's second largest recipient of US aid-the government has reverted to arresting and
beating democracy activists, including thousands of members of the Muslim Brotherhood; prosecuting journalists, publishers, and
writers who have called for free elections or even commented on President Hosni Mubarak's health; committing widespread
torture; mistreating refugees by forcibly returning many to Eritrea and Sudan; and murdering since 2007 at least 32 migrants trying
to cross into Israel.
2. Abortion is not a gender equality issue – it only affects a specific group of women
Wilcox 8 (Mary Catherine, @ Ave Maria School of Law, "NOTE: WHY THE EQUAL PROTECTION CLAUSE CANNOT "FIX"
ABORTION LAW", 7 Ave Maria L. Rev. 307, @Lexis)//northwestern-ak
[*325] In these cases, the Court reasoned that even though only women may become pregnant or undergo an abortion, real
reproductive differences between the sexes may justify laws and regulations that directly impact pregnant women. 139 Abortion
restrictions are not gender-based classifications because they do not regulate women as a class, but only women who are pregnant.
140 Women who are not pregnant are not affected by abortion restrictions. It is true that only women can become pregnant, but the
target of abortion restrictions is pregnancy, "an objectively identifiable physical condition with unique characteristics." 141 Thus,
legislative classifications based on pregnancy are analyzed under rational basis review. 142
3. Abortion kills equality of women – it de-pregnates them
Wilcox 8 (Mary Catherine, @ Ave Maria School of Law, "NOTE: WHY THE EQUAL PROTECTION CLAUSE CANNOT "FIX"
ABORTION LAW", 7 Ave Maria L. Rev. 307, @Lexis)//northwestern-ak
162 Without a constitutional or precedential basis for their arguments, the abortion advocates' only option is to make a policy
argument for a departure from precedent. But as this Note proves, legal abortion has actually lowered the status of women in
society, rather than elevating it as the abortion advocates claim. Legal abortion harms women and forces them to deny what is
uniquely female: the ability to bring a new life into the world. Instead of focusing on turning women into men, that is, making
women "un-pregnant" through an abortion procedure, the abortion movement should seek to make women truly equal by finding
ways to elevate the status of pregnant women in society.
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
58/90
OVERPOPULATION F/L 1/2
1. Developed countries’ populations are declining
ELC 08 - Environmental Literacy Council ["Population" http://www.enviroliteracy.org/article.php/1368.html]
However, while the overall population today continues to grow, developed countries are experiencing a lower rate of growth—
even negative growth—compared to developing countries. In fact, growth rates are expected to decline into mid-century, with
projections beyond 2050 indicating that the global population could stabilize or even decline. In its 2004 World Population
Prospects report, the United Nations projected that fertility—the number of children per mother—will decline substantially from
2.6 children per woman to just slightly over two children per woman by 2050. Many developed countries, including Germany,
Italy, and Japan, are already experiencing a decline as their population ages and fertility rates fall below replacement level. While
fertility rates are declining as women have fewer children, the inverse is true for life expectancy. Global life expectancy at birth is
projected to increase to 75 years by 2050, compared to 65 years at the present time; in developed countries and regions, life
expectancy will reach 82 years by mid-century. As a country develops economically, the expected transition from a country with
high birth and death rates to one with low birth and death rates can be illustrated by the four stages of the demographic transition
model (DTM). Stage one occurs in a pre-industrial society where death and birth rates are high and relatively in balance, resulting
in a slow and steady population growth. In stage two, death rates begin to decline with improved food supplies and sanitation,
which results in a decrease in disease and an overall increase in life span. Stage three sees a decline in birth rates due to a reduction
in subsistence agriculture, an increase in women's education and access to contraception, and other social factors. This is also the
stage where population growth begins to level off. Stage four shows stabilization in population growth, with both low birth and
death rates. However, as the population ages, total population can decline (negative growth) as there are less births than deaths.
2. Turn—Overpopulation doesn’t cause environmental damage—it solves it
PADP 06 - Population and Development Program at Hampshire College ["10 Reasons to Rethink ‘Overpopulation’"
http://popdev.hampshire.edu/projects/dt/40]
4. Population growth is not the driving force behind environmental degradation. Blaming environmental degradation on
overpopulation lets the real culprits off the hook. In terms of resource consumption alone, the richest fifth of the world’s people
consume 66 times as much as the poorest fifth. The U.S. is the largest emitter of greenhouse gases responsible for global
warming—and the least willing to do anything about it. And just who is destroying the rain forest? While poor peasants sometimes
play a role, corporate ranching, mining and logging operations are chiefly responsible for tropical deforestation. Worldwide
militaries are major agents of environmental destruction. War ravages natural landscapes and military toxics pollute land, air and
water. Nuclear weapons, reactors and waste pose the most deadly environmental threat to the planet. Imagine what a different
world it would be if all the resources invested in producing deadly armaments went instead to environmental restoration and the
development of cleaner, greener energy sources and technologies. Focusing on population also blinds us to the positive role many
poor people play in protecting the environment. In many parts of the world, small farmers, especially women, are the main
preservers of plant biodiversity through cultivating local crop varieties, preserving seeds, and forest stewardship. Recent research
in Africa reveals that increasing population densities, if combined with sound agricultural practices, can actually stimulate
environmental improvements.
3. Turn—Trying to control populations legitimizes human rights abuses
PADP 06 - Population and Development Program at Hampshire College ["10 Reasons to Rethink ‘Overpopulation’"
http://popdev.hampshire.edu/projects/dt/40]
8. Population alarmism encourages apocalyptic thinking that legitimizes human rights abuses. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich’s famous book
The Population Bomb warned that the world was on the brink of massive famine and that in the 1970s “hundreds of millions” of
people would starve to death. Though not borne out in reality, such dire predictions have long been popular in the population field.
Today, population funding appeals still play on fears of future apocalypse. Fear does more than sell, however. It convinces many
otherwise well-meaning people that it is morally justified to curtail the basic human and reproductive rights of poor people in order
to save ourselves and the planet from doom. This sense of emergency leads to an elitist moral relativism, in which ‘we’ know best
and ‘our’ rights are more worthy than ‘theirs.’ Politically, it legitimizes authoritarianism. Nowhere is the negative effect of
apocalyptic thinking more dramatic than in the case of China. The decision to implement the draconian one-child policy was
greatly influenced by the 1972 Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth, a deeply flawed computer simulation that incorrectly predicted
impending economic and environmental collapse due to population growth.
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
59/90
OVERPOPULATION F/L 2/2
4. Education about fertility is the only way to solve overpopulation
Mieszkowski 08 – Senior Writer for Salon.com (Katharine, Paul Ehrlich is the Bing Professor of Population Studies in the department
of Biological Sciences at Stanford University, Matthew Connelly is a professor of history at Columbia University, and Robert
Engelman is the vice president for programs at the Worldwatch institute, “Do we need population control?,” Salon,
http://www.salon.com/env/feature/2008/09/17/population_control/index.html)//northwestern-ak
Engelman: Can I just suggest that what Paul is getting at is unnecessary? When you look at countries that have widespread access
to contraceptive services, family planning and access to safe abortion, women make it very clear that they don't want to have more
than two children. And often fewer. There is no question that the international family-planning program brought incredible
benefits to women, children, families and the world. We have a much smaller world population than we would have had absent the
international family-planning movement, which, I might say, Paul's book made a great contribution in spurring. I've met many
people in the family-planning field who got into it after reading "The Population Bomb." So what's the result? Today, most
women the world over are using contraception and family size has shrunk from five children to a little more than two and a half.
That has been an incredible success story for the world. We'd have a much larger population, be much further along in global
warming, lack of water supplies, the loss of nature and biodiversity, if this movement had not gotten going when it did. But should
the family-planning movement really get credit for that, or is it the increasing education of women, and improvement of their
status, that leads to the drop in the average number of children? Connelly: The education of women is far and away the most
important factor in explaining how it is that fertility rates have fallen worldwide, even in countries where there were no
organized family-planning services. The reason is simply that women, when they become educated, when they realize that they
have choices in life, when there are other ways to gain status, to improve their welfare, they typically choose to have fewer
children, and they avail themselves of whatever means available.
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
60/90
INDIVIDUAL AGENCY F/L
1. Violations of individual agency are inevitable.
Hurst Hannum, Professor of International Law, The Fletcher School, Tufts University, 1996, “Autonomy, sovereignty, and selfdetermination,” p117-118
Demands for increased political power, autonomy, or self-determination are the primary concern of the present work, but most
groups are threatened primarily by gross violations of rights to personal security rather than more subtle violations of rights to
political or economic representation. Mass and individual killings; torture; arbitrary and indefinite arrests; induced starvation;
illegal expropriation of land; and discrimination in employment, housing, and public services are the most common causes of the
assertion of group rights by the powerless.426 In addition, they constitute the most common responses by central governments to
perceived threats to national unity and territorial integrity. Such violations are often linked to imposition of states of siege or
emergency,427 and the violation of human rights by members of the security forces almost universally renders the resolution of
conflicting assertions of rights impossible through normal legal or political processes.
2. No impact – their agency impact is in the context of political restriction, not social restriction.
3. Prefer util. Decisions should always be made with consideration to the greatest numbers.
Leonard Ratner, emeritus professor of constitutional law at the University of Southern California, Hofstra Law Review, 1984, “The
Utilitarian Imperative: Autonomy, Reciprocity, and Evolution,” Lexis
As long as humans have lived together, they have been groping for the source and ultimate goal of behavior standards, i.e., of moral
[*725] values. Early derivation of those standards from transcendental, supernatural, or mystical (i.e., nonexperiential) sources and
goals generally accompanied early reliance on such sources and goals for explanations of natural phenomena. n1 The usefulness of
transcendental explanations and guidelines has diminished with expanded information about the physical and social environment. n2
The utilitarian perception of "the greatest happiness of the greatest number" n3 as the goal of moral conduct was engendered by the
empiricist identification of experience as the source of knowledge n4 and reinforced by the pragmatist-consequentialist preference for
empirically ascertained effects on human welfare as the measure of ethical behavior. n5 The utilitarian perception has been
implemented by the majoritarian institutions n6 that have emerged from antecedent forms of social organization. The Social Compact
conceptualizes government as the agent of the governed, with the function of restraining individuals and allocating resources for the
general welfare n7 -- a concept reflected in the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States.
4. We control morals – utilitarian decision-making is critical to ethics.
Dale Jamieson, Director of Environmental Studies at New York University, May 2007. Cambridge Journals, “When Utilitarians
Should Be Virtue Theorists”
For present purposes I assume that our problem is a moral problem. I investigate utilitarian approaches to our problem because
utilitarianism, with its unapologetic focus on what we bring about, is relatively well positioned to have something interesting to
say about our problem. Moreover, since utilitarianism is committed to the idea that morality requires us to bring about the best
possible world, and global environmental change confronts us with extreme, deleterious consequences, there is no escaping the
fact that, for utilitarians, global environmental change presents us with a moral problem of great scope, urgency and complexity.
However, I would hope that some of those who are not card-carrying utilitarians would also have interest in this project.
Consequences matter, according to any plausible moral theory. Utilitarianism takes the concern for consequences to the limit,
and it is generally of interest to see where pure versions of various doctrines wind up leading us. Moreover, I believe that the
great traditions in moral philosophy should be viewed as more like research programs than as finished theories that underwrite or
imply particular catechisms. For this reason it is interesting to see how successfully a moral tradition can cope with problems that
were not envisioned by its progenitors.
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
61/90
EXT #3 – UTIL
Maximized individual based survival is critical to enhanced fulfillment.
Leonard Ratner, emeritus professor of constitutional law at the University of Southern California, Hofstra Law Review, 1984, “The
Utilitarian Imperative: Autonomy, Reciprocity, and Evolution,” Lexis
But the inexorable process of earthly survival through natural selection continues to winnow the allocations and constraints of each
group. n40 And communities that discern the significance of that process can more effectively accommodate or "prioritize," and
thereby enhance, fulfillment of individual needs and wants. n41 Although belief in an afterlife may aid survival by reducing anxiety
and augmenting confidence, n42 present-life survival is more likely to be achieved by those who do not subordinate it to a later
existence. Consequently, most surviving individuals perceive and assiduously pursue earthly-survival goals. The collective goal of
long-run community survival is an volutionary corollary of the drive for individual survival. n43 Evolutionary progression toward
majoritarian decisionmaking follows from the utilitarian function of social organization to enhance human need/want fulfillment. n44
Because the need/want preferences of community members are best known to them, resource allocations and behavior constraints that
significantly reflect their input best implement those preference. The need/want fulfillment of such members expands with their
approval of community decisionmaking institutions. Such approval lowers the costs of dissenter disruption while increasing
psychological security and productive efficiency. The utilitarian enhanced-fulfillment goal is most effectively implemented by
communities that optimize (not maximize) individual [*732] participation in policy formulation. Optimal participation involves the
selection of capable officials who make independent community fulfillment decisions but remain subject to effective community
supervision. Self-constrained majoritarianism thus appears to be the evolving political counterpart of utilitarianism, a continuity
suggested by the progression of western nations from autocracy toward representative democracy, the enhanced need/want fulfillment
that has accompanied the progression, and the inability of totalitarian governments to match that fulfillment.
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
62/90
EXT #4 – UTIL KEY TO RIGHTS
Consequentialism allows for the best moral decisions.
Dale Jamieson, Director of Environmental Studies at New York University, May 2007. Cambridge Journals, “When Utilitarians
Should Be Virtue Theorists”
But utilitarianism has an important strength that is often ignored by its critics: it requires us to do what is best. This is why any
objection that reduces to the claim that utilitarianism requires us to do what is not best, or even good, cannot be successful. Any act
or policy that produces less than optimal consequences fails to satisfy the principle of utility. Any theory that commands us to
perform such acts cannot be utilitarian.16 As I understand utilitarianism, it is the theory that we are morally required to act in such
a way as to produce the best outcomes. It is not wedded to any particular account of what makes outcomes good, of what makes
something an outcome, or even what makes something an action.17 Moreover, having good theoretical answers to these questions
does not mean that we will always know what is right when it comes to practical decision-making. And even when we think we
know what is right we may change our minds in the light of reflection, analysis or experience. If utilitarianism is true, embracing
the theory may be the first step towards doing what is right, but it is certainly not the last.18 9. Utilitarianism is a highly contextsensitive moral theory. Since my concern here is with how a utilitarian should respond to an actual moral problem, I need to make
some simplifying assumptions in order to produce responses that are more definitive than ‘it depends’. So in what follows, I will
assume that the utilitarian in question holds fairly generic and reasonably traditional views about the matters mentioned in the
previous paragraph (e.g. that well-being is at least one of the things that are good, that my causing something to occur or obtain is
part of what makes something an outcome of my action, etc.). I will also assume that taken together these views imply that, all
things considered, global environmental change is bad (or at least not best). Furthermore, I will assume that the utilitarian in
question is a person whose psychology is more or less like mine, and that we have roughly the same beliefs about how the world is
put together. I do not mean anything fancy by this – only that, for example, our decision-making is not decisively affected by our
belief that this world is just a training ground for the next, that most of the world's leaders are agents of an alien conspiracy, or that
I am as likely to be a brain in a vat as a guy with a job. Given this background, in the face of global environmental change, a
utilitarian agent faces the following question: how should I live so as to produce the best outcomes?
Util values life and maximizes happiness.
Harlan M. Smith, University of Minnesota, 1997, “Book Review: Jonathan Schell’s Fate of the Earth and The Abolition,”
www.tc.umn.edu/~smith097/articles/L%2011.The%20Fate%20of%20the%20Earth%20.pdf
Utilitarianism begins by generalizing the hedonistic pleasure principle in terms of happiness. Then what is moral or good is that
which brings an agent happiness. This thesis is further generalized to say that happiness should be secured for as many agents in
the community as possible. Every action, therefore, should be motivated in terms of trying to maximize as much happiness for as
many agents as possible within the given community. The use of happiness in this thesis is in relation to the overall consequences
of all the agents in the given community. The basic argument is that individual good is maximizing individual happiness. Morality
though, involves the common good of all the agents in the community. The common good, therefore, is maximizing every ones
happiness. I think the most promising variation of utilitarianism is rule utilitarianism where emphasis is placed on the
consequences of every agent in the community adopting a particular action as a rule. Implicit within rule utilitarianism is a strong
consistency thesis which places necessary constraints on the basic utilitarian argument.
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
63/90
*** EQUAL PROTECTION ***
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
64/90
EQUAL PROTECTION F/L
1. No precedent spillover – judges will remain true to their political ideology.
Donald R. Songer, University of South Carolina, December 1999, The American Political Science Review, Vol. 93, No. 4, p983-984
The primary focus of Majority Rule is an empirical test of whether the votes of Supreme Court justices are determined by the Court's own precedent or reflect their
ideological preferences. "Does precedent actually cause justices to reach decisions that they otherwise would not have made" (p. 7)? The authors conceptualize this
question as involving a dichotomous choice. They assume that a vote is determined solely by either precedent or judicial ideology. They do not attempt to test whether,
and do not even allow the possibility that, the votes and policies adopted by the justices can be jointly influenced by both . Analysis centers on the behavior of
justices in cases labelled the "progeny" of earlier cases that set precedent. The assumption is that, if the Legal Model is accurate, votes
in these progeny cases should be controlled by the parent case. Only the progeny votes of justices who dissented in the precedent case are examined, as
one can make no firm conclusions about the motivations of the justices who were part of the majority in the precedent. In the case of those who dissented in the
precedent, it may objectively be determined that the precedent was contrary to their ideological prefer- ences. Thus, their votes in the progeny can be classified
"objectively" as supporting either precedent or their prefer- ences. Spaeth and Segal examine all the votes of the dissenters in all the orally argued progeny of the
universe of a list of the "landmark" decisions of the Court and a sample of the nonunanimous "ordinary" decisions of the Court. In all, 2,425 votes cast by 77
justices in the 1,206 progeny of 341 precedential cases are examined. The conclusions of the authors are unambiguous and can be
easily summarized: "The justices are rarely influenced by stare decisis" (p. 288). In only 11.9% of the votes did Spaeth and Segal find
any evidence that the justices were influenced by precedent. Moreover, the domination of precedent by the ideological preferences of
the justices was found in every era of the Court's history and characterized voting in the progeny of both the landmark and the
ordinary cases.
2. Judges have empirically not been bound to follow precedents on equal rights – Plessy v Ferguson and Brown v Board of
Education prove
3. The 14th amendment isn’t all powerful, it has limits
Thomas H. Burrell, M.B.A., Illinois State University; J.D., American University Washington College
of Law,12/12/2007 “Justice Stephen Field’s Expansion of the Fourteenth Amendment: From the Safeguards of Federalism to a
State of Judicial Hegemony”
For too long, individuals and the courts have treated the Fourteenth Amendment2 as the panacea for unfavorable legislation.3 The
Reconstruction Congress debated extensively on areas of civil rights, political rights, and social rights: voices were heard,
opinions were raised, and compromises were reached.4 While many argued for broader coverage, the Fourteenth Amendment
was limited in its scope of federal protection. Subsequent judicial use of the amendment has been unfaithful to these limitations.5
The central proposition of this article is a critique of substantive equal protection6 and substantive due process7 jurisprudence
following the passage of the Fourteenth The central proposition of this article is a critique of substantive equal protection and
substantive due process7 jurisprudence following the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment.8 The article argues two positions.
First, the amendment was not an open-ended grant for the judiciary. Second, the Supreme Court, particularly the “judicial
trusteeship” of Justice Field,9 expanded the breadth of Reconstruction legislation, substituting buoyant, natural law10 principles
reflecting latitudinarian ideals which, when operationalized, distort the intended limitations of the amendment.11 The evolution
of Justice Field’s open-ended interpretations has resulted in a drastic change in federalism and loss of state sovereignty.12
4. Equal protection doesn’t adequately address gender discrimination.
Elizabeth M. Schneider, Rose L. Hoffer Professor of Law, Brooklyn Law School, The University of Chicago Legal Forum, 2002,
“The Synergy of Equality and Privacy in Women's Rights,” LEXIS
Constitutional frameworks of equality have been inadequate to grapple with many core issues of gender discrimination. n20 The
Supreme Court has perceived how the application of traditional stereotypes can harm untraditional women, such as recognizing
that Virginia's all-women alternative was "distinctly inferior" to its state-run elite military institute for men, n21 but the application
of an intermediate standard of scrutiny has often reinforced gender stereotypes. n22 Equal protection has failed to include
pregnancy, n23 and the requirement of discriminatory purpose from Personnel Administrator of Massachusetts v Feeney has
immunized and perpetuated gender discrimination. n24 As a constitutional matter, equal protection has not reached many of the
areas that are most central to women's lives: pregnancy, reproductive rights, [*144] and violence. n25 While the notion of
replacing privacy and its limitations with a broader framework of equality might not be problematic under an ideal vision of
equality, it is far more problematic under the Rehnquist Court's actual interpretations of equality. n26 Similarly, conventional
notions of privacy, as reflected in Roe, have been weak, and focused more on doctors' privacy than women's. In domestic violence,
privacy rationales have supported violence. n27 Thus, in application, judicial interpretations of both equality and privacy have
been flawed.
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
65/90
EXT #1 – IDEOLOGIES
Their studies on precedent are distorted – their authors are often unable to determine which rulings are based on precedent
and which aren’t
Kevin McGuire, associate professor of Political Science at UNC, and Michael MacKuen, professor of Political Science at UNC,
2005, “Precedent and Preferences on the U.S. Supreme Court,” http://www.unc.edu/~kmcguire/papers/precedent.pdf
As an explanatory variable, the law has not fared well in studies of decision making on the U.S. Supreme Court. Testing the legal
model in various ways, scholars have found that such considerations as literalism and original intent do little to distinguish the
behavior of the justices (see, e.g., Gates and Phelps 1996; Phelps and Gates, 1991). Among these legal factors, the one that has
received the closest attention has been precedent. Indeed, in recent years, adherence to the norm of stare decisis has been the subject of
a good deal of empirical scrutiny. For the most part, this work has concluded that prior decisions do not have a substantial influence
on the justices (Brenner and Spaeth 1995; Spaeth and Segal 1999; Segal and Howard 2000). To be sure, there are those who find
evidence that the members of the Court are attentive to the dictates of stare decisis (Brenner and Stier 1996; Songer and Lindquist
1996), but these analyses have been open to serious criticism (Spaeth and Segal 1999, 26). Such disparate findings arise, at least in
part, from disagreement over how best to operationalize adherence to precedent. What constitutes support for doctrine and which
decisions to include in analyses are not immediately obvious. A further frustration stems from the sheer volume of prior cases. With a
wealth of precedent from which to draw, the justices can routinely couch virtually any decision in the language of stare decisis (Spaeth
and Segal 1999). In fact, doctrine dominates most opinions written by members of the Court (Gate and Phelps 1996).
Precedents are vulnerable – empirically, justices follow their preferences rather than stare decisis
Kevin McGuire, associate professor of Political Science at UNC, and Michael MacKuen, professor of Political Science at UNC,
2005, “Precedent and Preferences on the U.S. Supreme Court,” http://www.unc.edu/~kmcguire/papers/precedent.pdf
An alternative approach examines the alteration of precedent, analyzing when and why the Supreme Court overturns its past policies.
If stare decisis genuinely constrained the members of the Court, then they should be unwilling to reconsider precedents, even those
with which they may personally disagree. It turns out, however, that precedents are quite vulnerable, especially those that conflict with
the policy dispositions of the justices (see, e.g., Brenner and Spaeth 1995; Segal and Howard 2000). Again, the evidence supports the
attitudinal, rather than the legal model. No doubt the best evidence on the importance of stare decisis measures the degree to which
justices who oppose a newly established precedent modify their behavior by accepting the authority of that precedent in subsequent
cases (Spaeth and Segal 1999). In landmark decisions (i.e., cases for which there are no genuine precedents), the members of the Court
are not bound by the dictates of stare decisis and are free to follow their preferences. If the justices were truly affected by precedent,
then they would adjust accordingly, supporting the application of that new precedent in later litigation. By this standard, precedent
does not exert much influence; it turns out that, across the Court’s entire history, the justices have rarely modified their behavior after
the Court adopts new policies with which they disagree. This is quite powerful; it convincingly demonstrates that individual justices
see little need to support the decisions of their brethren, even when there are strong legal reasons for doing so. Given the choice
between a disagreeable principle and their own attitudinal inclinations, most members of the Court simply stand by their preferences.
In sum, the weight of the scholarly evidences suggests that, on the U.S. Supreme Court, the legal doctrine of stare decisis is influenced
heavily by the attitudes of its members: fact-patterns can be readily construed as ideological stimuli; votes to overturn precedents are
easily explained by personal policy preferences; justices rarely support existing precedents with which they originally disagreed.
We’ll concede that the court sometimes follows precedent – but justices only cite precedents that support their ideologies
Kevin McGuire, associate professor of Political Science at UNC, and Michael MacKuen, professor of Political Science at UNC,
2005, “Precedent and Preferences on the U.S. Supreme Court,” http://www.unc.edu/~kmcguire/papers/precedent.pdf
Yet, when it comes to choosing which precedents to follow, the Court leaves a trail that suggests that it is both constrained by legal
norms and that it pursues its own policy preferences. Importantly, these two factors, issue relevance and ideological distance, operate
independently of one another. We understand that the importance of preferences does not depend on the relevance of the precedent
(save its passing the citation filter). That is to say, the Court can find useful precedent to follow no matter what the broad features of
the legal structure—it can find governing precedent to justify going its own way. Likewise, we understand that the importance of legal
principle does not depend on ideological compatibility. The Court’s reliance on precedent represents much more than mere
justification for following its own preferences. For many, this storyline should be familiar. Indeed, these results paint a picture of a
Supreme Court that follows its policy preferences while remaining sensitive to legal constraints. Not at all surprisingly, we find
evidence that the justices are strategic actors, deploying precedent to justify and advance their policy goals. At the same time, though,
these same justices seem acutely aware of the principles established in their prior cases, systematically following them irrespective of
their ideological orientations.
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
66/90
EXT #3 – 14TH LIMITED
The 14th amendment is limited – its framers ensured it wouldn’t be self executing
Thomas H. Burrell, M.B.A., Illinois State University; J.D., American University Washington College of Law,12/12/2007 “Justice
Stephen Field’s Expansion of the Fourteenth Amendment: From the Safeguards of Federalism to a State of Judicial Hegemony”
A global criticism of modern constitutional law is that the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment did not intend for the amendment to
be self-executing to the extent modern jurisprudence allows.127 In describing the amendment prior to its adoption, and noting that
the amendment supplied a main shortcoming of the Constitution, Representative Bingham maintained: [Now it is within] the power
[of] the people, the whole people of the United States, by express authority of the Constitution to do that by congressional enactment
which hitherto they have not had the power to do . . . to protect by ational law the privileges and immunities of all the citizens of the
Republic and the inborn rights of every person within its jurisdiction whenever the same shall be abridged or denied by the
unconstitutional acts of any State.128 When Bingham initially introduced the first draft to Congress, he emphasized that the
amendment would protect the spirit of Bill of Rights and the enforcement of the “injunctions and prohibitions” which by oath, the
states owed to the people.129 The draft of the amendment, stated Bingham, would give the “people of the United States the power,
by legislative enactment, to punish officials of States for violations of the oaths enjoined upon them by their Constitution.”130
Bingham held firm on his position that it is the power of Congress which is enlarged under the Fourteenth Amendment: The
Constitution is not self-executing, therefore laws must be enacted by Congress for the due execution of all the powers vested by the
Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any department or any officer thereof.131 Bingham, pushing for
congressional legislation protecting rights, did not believe the Fourteenth Amendment enlarged the judicial sphere, but was merely a
procedural door for Congress to legislate to protect rights:
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
67/90
EXT #4 – DOESN’T SOLVE DISCRIMINATION
Equal protection is an excuse to legitimate gender-based discrimination.
Catherine Grevers Schmidt, partner at Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler, New York University Law Review, June 1993, “WHERE
PRIVACY FAILS: EQUAL PROTECTION AND THE ABORTION RIGHTS OF MINORS,” LEXIS
Feminist legal scholars have criticized traditional equal protection doctrine for its failure to subject gender-based laws to the same
level of scrutiny applied to laws that discriminate against racial or ethnic minorities. n94 More specifically, some critics have said
that the similarly situated [*611] requirement incapacitates the equal protection clause for purposes of advancing women's
equality. n95 They argue that the legal and social discrimination suffered by women itself has left them dissimilarly situated from
men with regard to any number of traits typically addressed by discriminatory laws. n96 Rather than excusing the differential
treatment, as traditional equal protection doctrine would suggest, this disparity is simply another symptom of the discrimination
that women face. Under the traditional model, socially constructed differences cloak discriminatory laws with the appearance
of legitimacy. n97 Thus, traditional equal [*612] protection doctrine contains the perverse requirement that women achieve
equality socially before the courts will guarantee it to them legally, n98 when the law should instead be a vehicle to achieve social
equality. n99 [*613] In addition, feminist scholars criticize traditional equal protection doctrine because it automatically exempts
from heightened scrutiny classifications based on biological differences. n100 Biology is one trait that unambiguously
distinguishes the sexes, and, under the traditional model, laws that merely take account of "real" differences are not considered
discriminatory. n101 However, history demonstrates that biological difference - in particular, women's capacity to reproduce - has
long been used to justify laws that oppressed women while preserving male monopolies. A little over a century ago, the Supreme
Court upheld state laws denying bar admission to women lawyers because "the paramount destiny and mission of woman are to
fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother." n102 Today, denying equal job opportunities to women simply because
their reproductive capacity differs from that of men seems an indefensible injustice. n103 Yet under the traditional model,
biological difference continues to deny women equal treatment in a variety of contexts. n104 Requiring that men and women be
similarly situated before courts can apply equal protection scrutiny to discriminatory laws thus guarantees that biological
differences will continue to retard women's equality.
Equal protection bad – results in gender-based discrimination.
Susan E. Looper-Friedman, Professor at Capital University Law School, New England Law Review, Winter 1995, “"Keep your laws
off my body": Abortion Regulation and the Takings Clause,” LEXIS
Beyond this passing reference to equality in Justice Stevens's concurrence, the Court has not considered the Equal Protection
Clause in the context of abortion rights. Generally, the problem with the equal protection argument is revealed by the Court's
current view of the meaning of equal protection. The Court tends to believe that equal protection requires that like be treated alike
but allows unalikes to be treated unalike. n60 Under this view, as long as women are seen as unlike men, they do not have to be
treated the same as men. The ability to have children is seen as a way that women are unlike men, so the Court has thus far seen
this as a legitimate way to discriminate against women. n61 The Court, in its equal protection jurisprudence, seems to be using
male biology as the standard. Thus, as far as women actually are like men, they are entitled to be treated equally. For example, the
Court in Reed v. Reed n62 struck down a statute that allowed only men to administer decedents' estates. In that case, women were
sufficiently similar to men in their ability to administer estates, so that the statute was seen to [*266] violate equal protection. To
put it another way, as long as gender acts like race, discriminatory regulations will be struck down. But when statutes rely on
physiological differences, such as the ability to be pregnant, the race analogy breaks down. n63 At that point, the Court no longer
sees women as being enough like men to justify invoking the Equal Protection Clause.
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
68/90
FELON VOTING F/L
(__) States expanding felon voting rights now
Erik Eckholm (Staff writer New York Times) 2006: States are Growing More Lenient in Allowing Felons to Vote.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/12/us/12felons.html?_r=1
Legislatures in 16 states have loosened voting restrictions on felons over the last decade, according to a new report, a trend hailed by
some rights advocates as a step toward democratic principles and fairness, especially for black Americans. Because of their high
incarceration rate, blacks are most affected by the voting bans that vary widely among the states, with many barring current inmates
and parolees from voting until they have fulfilled their sentences, and some barring felons for life. In recent years, Iowa, Nebraska and
New Mexico have repealed their lifetime bans on voting by people who have been convicted of felonies, and several other states made
it easier for freed prisoners or those on probation to vote, according to the report, issued yesterday by the Sentencing Project, a liberal
advocacy group in Washington. The recent changes have restored voting rights to more than 600,000 individuals, the report said. But
because the country’s prison population has continued to rise, a record number of Americans, 5.3 million, are still denied the vote
because of criminal records, it concluded. “It’s good news that many people who’d been disqualified from voting are being re-engaged
as citizens,” said Jeremy Travis, president of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York and a leader of the movement to
smooth the re-entry of prisoners to society. “I think people are realizing that the country had gone too far in marginalizing a large
group of people who have been convicted of felonies,” Mr. Travis said. “This has had profound consequences for our democracy and
the participation of minorities.” But some conservatives remain philosophically opposed to any wholesale loosening of voting
restrictions. “If you’re not willing to follow the law, then you shouldn’t claim the right to make the law for someone else,” said Roger
Clegg, president of the Center for Equal Opportunity, a conservative advocacy group in Washington. Mr. Clegg, who was a senior
Justice Department official in the Reagan and first Bush administrations, said that those convicted of felonies should be given the vote
only case by case, when they have proved to be constructive members of society. Some restrictions on voting date to the early years of
the country or to the post-Civil-War period, while others were tightened during the “get tough on crime” era of the 1980’s. By federal
law, voter rules are mainly set by the states. As a result, even in presidential elections, former prisoners can vote in some states but not
others.
(__) No brink – felons have not been able to vote since before the civil war
(__) Felons can still vote – they just do it illegally
Miami Herald Staff Writers February 15, 1998 http://www.pulitzer.org/archives/6263
More than 100 convicted felons -- muggers and con artists, drug traffickers and a few killers -- voted in the Miami election last
November even though they had lost their right to vote. A flasher voted. He fatally beat his cellmate. A pot-smoking jailer voted.
He helped two inmates escape. A convicted ex-Miami detective voted. He covered up the murder of a drug dealer. And a
homeless, crack-addicted thief voted. His voting address: the apartment next to the place he burglarized. The Herald counted 105
ineligible felon ballots in last November's mayoral election. But a three-week Herald study reveals no evidence that any candidate
recruited the ex-convict vote. The only thing that keeps felons from voting in any election is an honor system. And when it comes
to weeding felons from the registration books, the system simply doesn't work. Records show about 2,800 ineligible felons
registered to vote in Miami-Dade alone. Continues… Felons have been voting illegally for years, but the practice didn't get much
attention until recent allegations of organized absentee-voter fraud.
(__) No guarantee of solvency – for the court to rule, a case has to be brought, which could take years
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
69/90
MINORITY BUSINESSES F/L
(__) No brink – lack of equal protection rulings have been hurting minority small businesses for decades
(__) Funding and support for minority businesses high now: stimulus.
Donna Gambrell, Director, U.S. Department of the Treasury's Community Development Financial Institutions Fund, National Capital
Access Forum, 5-12-09, Financing Minority Businesses in Challenging Economic Times,
http://www.cdfifund.gov/speeches/Gambrell-2009-03-Financing-Minority-Businesses.asp
With the change in Administration, the CDFI Fund has experienced significant growth through the funding made available in the
Recovery Act, and the President's fiscal year (FY) 2010 budget that is requesting more than double our annual FY 2009
appropriations. Today, the CDFI Fund is more committed than ever, and has more resources than ever, to expand our efforts
to all small business lenders, especially those among minority populations. For example, the state of North Carolina has seen a
dramatic rise in its Hispanic population. According to U.S. Census Bureau figures for 2000, North Carolina has a Hispanic
population of 378,963, a nearly 400 percent increase from 1990. Hispanics currently account for 7 percent of that state's
population.
(__) No guarantee of solvency – a case would have to be brought for the court to rule – it could take years
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
70/90
LGBT F/L
(__) No brink to the impact – LGBT communities haven’t had rights for decades, there’s no reason that now is uniquely key
(__) Squo Solves
Nico Sifra Quintana policy analyst for the American Progress Institute July 1 2009
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2009/07/lgbt_rights.html
Every day the LGBT community seems to be experiencing a new expansion of civil rights. President Barack Obama signed on
June 17 a Presidential Memorandum on Federal Benefits and Non-Discrimination that grants non-discrimination protections and
some same-sex partner benefits for LGBT federal employees. On May 6, Maine Governor John Baldacci (D-ME) signed into law a
bill legalizing same-sex marriage, making Maine the fifth state—along with Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, and Iowa—to
allow same-sex marriage. And the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act,
which, if passed by the Senate and signed by the president, would expand protections under the federal hate crimes law to LGBT
people.
(__) No impact – heteronormitivity is not the root cause of all other violence, every conflict that they can cite has had other
more important motivations.
(__) Marriage incentives are a more important alt. cause – no court spillover to this area because someone would have to bring
a court case
Michele Hirsch, Dorian Solot, and Marshall Miller, The Alternatives to Marriage Project, June 2007, “Let Them Eat Wedding Rings:
The Role of Marriage Promotion in Welfare Reform,” Second Edition, http://www.unmarried.org/rings2.pdf
The population of unmarried adults is growing steadily. According to the 2005 American Community Survey conducted by the
U.S. Census Bureau, 50.3% of households are headed by unmarried people, 46.9% of people over age 15 are unmarried, and
31.7% of children live in unmarried households.[46] Discrimination against unmarried people and their families is common.
Marital status discrimination, like other forms of discrimination, is often based on stereotypes and assumptions. Those who favor
welfare policies promoting marriage often presume that the main reason unmarried people are not married is that they don’t fully
appreciate the value of marriage. The widespread acceptance of these kinds of simplistic generalizations calls for a more complex
understanding of unmarried lives. In fact, there are a wide variety of reasons why some people are not married. Here are some of the
extraordinarily diverse factors that underlie the decisions of unmarried people.[47] • They have been unable to find a marriage partner. • They have been widowed
or abandoned by their spouse or partner. • They are in relationships that are abusive or dysfunctional, or feel that their partner would make a poor choice for a
lifetime commitment. Some may be waiting to see if a partner can “clean himself or herself up” from drug or alcohol addiction, criminal involvement, or other
negative activities. (Evidence shows that among couples who start relationships around the same time, those where one partner is violent or has a substance abuse
problem are less likely to marry.[48]) Some new parents or parents-tobe may realize that an acceptable boyfriend or girlfriend is not necessarily a dependable
partner for life.[49] • They are unwilling to marry a partner with few financial assets if they are poor themselves, since the partner’s income or potential future
income is unlikely to improve their own economic situation.[50] • They are in a “trial period” to decide if this person would make a good spouse. • They feel they
cannot afford their vision of a wedding or married life (which may include a big party, fancy dress, house, car, steady job, and children.). They prefer to wait and
save money in order to have the wedding or marriage of their dreams.[51] As people’s income increases, so does the likelihood that they will get married.[52] •
They aren’t legally allowed to marry because they are in a same-sex relationship and live in a state that doesn’t recognize same-sex marriage.[53] • They would
lose significant financial benefits (perhaps a pension from a previous spouse) if they were to marry. This predicament is especially common among senior citizens
and disabled people. • They do not want the government to “regulate” their relationship. • They feel marriage is too strongly based in religion for their comfort. •
They have chosen a religious life path that involves a vow of celibacy. • They are disturbed by the divorce rate, or have experienced a divorce themselves, and wish
to avoid such a risk. • In solidarity with those who are not legally allowed to marry, they refuse to take advantage of a privilege available only to some. • They are
happy in a long-term, unmarried relationship and say, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” • They are uncomfortable with the oppression of women associated with the
institution of marriage. • They simply feel no desire to marry and feel deeply satisfied living alone, with family members or close friends, or with an unmarried
partner. It is likely that readers will find some of the reasons on this list more acceptable to them than others. Regardless of personal feelings about these reasons,
each represents the lives of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Americans. People in every one of these categories are
affected when benefits are linked to marital status. Attempts to create policies that target or exempt certain “types” of unmarried
people and families would only result in further discrimination.
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
71/90
WOMEN IN COMBAT F/L ½
(__) No internal link between women in combat and military patriarchy – their impact evidence talks about how wars are
waged – no reason why putting women in combat would make the Pentagon rethink how it executes war
(__) Turn – women in combat kills readiness
James W. Revels (retired U.S. army colonel) March 10, 2004: Opinion: It’s Time to Rethink Women in Combat.
http://www.military.com/NewContent/0,13190,Defensewatch_031004_Women,00.html
After reading David DeBatto's article ("The Young and Restless") I believe the points he raised should make all concerned people
reconsider their support of flawed decisions that allow women to be placed in combat situations.
As you probably know, women constitute about 15 percent of the active force today. Some Reserve and National Guard units have a
higher concentration of females, who did not enlist for combat duty. At last count, seven females have been killed in Iraq, and no one
seems to care, but let one sexual assault complaint see the light of day, and a congressional hearing is launched. We would not be
flooded with sexual assault investigations today if the senior leadership displayed the courage needed years ago to prevent the
expanding employment of women in the military. This being an election year, you can bet the farm no politician will take on the
feminist movement that is pushing for greater opportunities for women in the military. Dressing women in battle dress uniforms does
not make them soldiers. Calling them soldiers does not mean they possess the requisite skills required of warriors. No nation, in
modern history, has advanced the cause of equality and women rights by sending women into combat. Until the American people
demand reconsideration of existing deployment policies, women will continue to die needlessly in Iraq and Congress will continue to
waste time and resources reviewing sexual assault complaints. For years, the senior leadership ignored declining physical standards
caused by increasing reliance on female recruits to fill manpower quotas. Mention pregnancy rates and no comment follows. Now,
because some women, who are as culpable as some men at initiating sexual contact, are complaining, the brass are forced to take
another look at predictable problems created by sex integration. Old soldiers, like me, remember Tailhook and its impact. Years ago,
Tailhook allowed the media to blackmail the senior leadership into over-reacting to claims of sexual harassment. Because this nation
is so obsessed with anything involving sex, excessive media coverage, as witnessed today, is the natural result. However, national
security concerns warrant more than congressional hearings that fail to address the negative impact of consensual sexual activities, as
well as the corrosive impact of women in combat. Asking young men and women to ignore sexual attractions, resulting from living
and working conditions found today in our armed forces, is unnatural and dangerous. Our national security will be impacted if
common sense does not prevail. Away from the media spotlight, I believe education and discipline will correct most problems
drawing media attention today. No one seems to understand that it is not the primary purpose of our armed forces to provide
employment opportunities for women and young men. Our armed forces exist for the single purpose of defending the nation by
destroying any enemy that threatens our national security. Clearly, women can contribute to the nation's defense, but not as warriors.
Readiness is key to U.S. hegemony.
Donnelly, 2003---Resident Scholar at AEI (Thomas, Resident Scholar at AEI, 2/1. ttp://www.aei.org/publications
/pubID.15845/pub_detail.asp)
The preservation of today's Pax Americana rests upon both actual military strength and the perception of strength. The variety of
victories scored by U.S. forces since the end of the cold war is testament to both the futility of directly challenging the United States
and the desire of its enemies to keep poking and prodding to find a weakness in the American global order. Convincing would-be
great powers, rogue states, and terrorists to accept the liberal democratic order--and the challenge to autocratic forms of rule that come
with it--requires not only an overwhelming response when the peace is broken, but a willingness to step in when the danger is
imminent. The message of the Bush Doctrine--"Don't even think about it!"--rests in part on a logic of preemption that underlies the
logic of primacy.
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
72/90
WOMEN IN COMBAT F/L 2/2
Heg solves multiple scenarios for nuclear war and economic downturn.
Khalilzad Poli Sci @ Columbia‘95
Realistically and over the longer term, however, a neo-isolationist approach might well increase the danger of major conflict, require a greater U.S. defense effort,
threaten world peace, and eventually undermine U.S. prosperity. By withdrawing from Europe and Asia, the United States would deliberately risk weakening the
institutions and solidarity of the world's community of democratic powers and so establishing favorable conditions for the spread of disorder and a possible return to
conditions similar to those of the first half of the twentieth century. In the 1920s and 1930s, U.S. isolationism had disastrous consequences for world peace. At that
time, the United States was but one of several major powers. Now that the United States is the world's preponderant power, the shock of a U.S. withdrawal could be
even greater. What might happen to the world if the United States turned inward? Without the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO), rather than cooperating with each other, the West European nations might compete with each other for domination of East-Central Europe and
the Middle East. In Western and Central Europe, Germany -- especially since unification -- would be the natural leading power. Either in cooperation or
competition with Russia, Germany might seek influence over the territories located between them. German efforts are likely to be aimed at filling the vacuum,
stabilizing the region, and precluding its domination by rival powers. Britain and France fear such a development. Given the strength of democracy in Germany
and its preoccupation with absorbing the former East Germany, European concerns about Germany appear exaggerated. But it would be a mistake to assume that U.S.
withdrawal could not, in the long run, result in the renationalization of Germany's security policy. The same is also true of Japan. Given a U.S. withdrawal from the
world, Japan would have to look after its own security and build up its military capabilities. China, Korea, and the nations of Southeast Asia already
fear Japanese hegemony. Without U.S. protection, Japan is likely to increase its military capability dramatically -- to balance the growing
Chinese forces and still-significant Russian forces. This could result in arms races, including the possible acquisition by Japan of nuclear weapons.
Given Japanese technological prowess, to say nothing of the plutonium stockpile Japan has acquired in the development of its nuclear power industry, it could
obviously become a nuclear weapon state relatively quickly, if it should so decide. It could also build long-range missiles and carrier task forces. With the
shifting balance of power among Japan, China, Russia, and potential new regional powers such as India, Indonesia, and a united Korea could
come significant risks of preventive or proeruptive war. Similarly, European competition for regional dominance could lead to major wars in
Europe or East Asia. If the United States stayed out of such a war -- an unlikely prospect -- Europe or East Asia could become dominated by a hostile
power. Such a development would threaten U.S. interests. A power that achieved such dominance would seek to exclude the United States from the area and threaten
its interests-economic and political -- in the region. Besides, with the domination of Europe or East Asia, such a power might seek global hegemony and the
United States would face another global Cold War and the risk of a world war even more catastrophic than the last. In the Persian Gulf, U.S.
withdrawal is likely to lead to an intensified struggle for regional domination. Iran and Iraq have, in the past, both sought regional hegemony. Without U.S.
protection, the weak oil-rich states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) would be unlikely to retain their independence. To preclude this
development, the Saudis might seek to acquire, perhaps by purchase, their own nuclear weapons. If either Iraq or Iran controlled the region that dominates
the world supply of oil, it could gain a significant capability to damage the U.S. and world economies. Any country that gained hegemony would have vast
economic resources at its disposal that could be used to build military capability as well as gain leverage over the United States and other oilimporting nations.
Hegemony over the Persian Gulf by either Iran or Iraq would bring the rest of the Arab Middle East under its influence and domination because of the shift in the
balance of power. Israeli security problems would multiply and the peace process would be fundamentally undermined, increasing the risk of war
between the Arabs and the Israelis. The extension of instability, conflict, and hostile hegemony in East Asia, Europe, and the Persian Gulf
would harm the economy of the United States even in the unlikely event that it was able to avoid involvement in major wars and conflicts.
Higher oil prices would reduce the U.S. standard of living. Turmoil in Asia and Europe would force major economic readjustment in the United States, perhaps
reducing U.S. exports and imports and jeopardizing U.S. investments in these regions. Given that total imports and exports are equal to a quarter of U.S. gross domestic
product, the cost of necessary adjustments might be high. The higher level of turmoil in the world would also increase the likelihood of the proliferation of
weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and means for their delivery. Already several rogue states such as North Korea and Iran are seeking nuclear weapons and longrange missiles. That danger would only increase if the United States withdrew from the world. The result would be a much more dangerous world in which many states
possessed WMD capabilities; the likelihood of their actual use would increase accordingly. If this happened, the security of every nation in the world,
including the United States, would be harmed.
(__) No brink to their impact – the military has always been male dominated yet we haven’t yet seen the end of humanity –
prefer our faster impacts
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
73/90
DEATH PENALTY F/L 1/2
(__) No brink to the impact – the death penalty has existed for a long time – no reason that now is key to solve the impacts
(__) Alt cause: Burma and Sudan erode human rights credibility
Joshua Muravchik June 29, 2009 “The Abandonment of Democracy” http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124631424805570521.html
Many human rights activists have been shocked at the administration's apparent willingness to consider easing sanctions on Burma
and Sudan. The Obama presidential campaign was scornful of Bush's handling of the killings in Sudan's Darfur region, which
Bush labeled as genocide, but since taking office, the administration has been caught flat-footed by Sudan's recent ousting of
international humanitarian organizations. While it is hard to see any diplomatic benefit in soft-pedaling human rights in Burma and
Sudan, neither has Obama anything to gain politically by easing up on regimes that are reviled by Americans from Left to Right.
Even so ardent an admirer of the President as columnist E. J. Dionne, the first to discern an "Obama Doctrine" in foreign policy,
confesses to "qualms" about "the relatively short shrift" this doctrine "has so far given to concerns over human rights and
democracy."
(__) Don’t weigh human rights as an impact – their authors don’t evaluate the costs, which means that you can only prefer our
disads
David Kennedy (Professor of Law, Harvard) 2002: The International Human Rights Movement: Part of the Problem?
http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/hrj/iss15/kennedy.shtml#fn2
But what about the costs. People who have made the criticisms I have listed here differ about the sorts of costs they feel should be toted up. Some criticisms
are ethical, some are political, some are philosophical. For some the problem is aesthetics—the ensemble of characters, identities, vocabularies necessary
to achieve what has been achieved by the human rights movement is also an aesthetic blight. Of course , the human rights movement might create bad
effects not so much by what it does, as by what it does not do. Costs might include things that happen on the ground to potential
victims and violators of human rights, or to other people (innocent bystanders). They might include things that happen to other elites—
people doing good things weakened, doing bad things strengthened—or things that happen to participants in the human rights
movement itself—professional deformations of various kinds that might be subject to ethical, political or philosophical criticism and
then count as a cost of the endeavor. For some people, it matters (ethically, politically, philosophically, aesthetically) what the human rights movement
expresses. If the human rights movement increases the incidence of descriptions of women as mothers-on-pedestals or victimized care givers, in legal decisions or
institutional documents, that, for some people, is already a cost—ethically, aesthetically, politically. It is bad if women have been represented in too narrow or
stereotypical a fashion, even if the only consequence is to pry loose some resources for redistribution to women. A number of the criticisms I have included here are of
this type. For other people, and I must admit, for me, nothing goes in the “costs” column until the human rights movement has a bad effect. A bad effect means
influencing someone to act (or fail to act) or to think in a way that counts as a cost (again, ethically, politically, philosophically,
aesthetically) for the person making the argument. Intensifying stereotypical representations of women might be thought to have an effect on at least some
women (perhaps only plaintiffs and women using the human rights movement as a vehicle of self-expression and freedom, and others who learn who they are from
what the human rights movement says women are), encouraging them to become narrower and more stereotypical or to think of themselves more narrowly than they
otherwise might. And, of course, such representations would have an effect if they encouraged people in some positions of authority—judges, men, legislators, other
women—to exclude women not meeting this stereotypical profile from benefits they would otherwise receive. In weighing initiatives pragmatically, it is
often more useful to focus on “distributional consequences among individuals or groups” than “costs and benefits.” The costs/benefits
vocabulary suggests (incorrectly) that one could know at an abstract and general level what to count as a cost or a benefit of the
initiative. In fact, of course, the “costs” and the “benefits” will look different and be evaluated differently by different people. For
those who feel the death penalty deters, its abolition is a cost, which effects a distribution from victims to criminals. Although I speak
here of costs and benefits (or the “problem” and the “solution”) as if we shared very vague and general aspirations for a more
humanitarian, progressive and egalitarian global society, it would probably be more accurate to think of these “benefits” as
distributions of power, status and means toward those who share these objectives and away from those who don’t. But let us take this
general articulation as a first step. Thereafter we would need to assess, from a more particular point of view, who would win and who would lose from
a human rights initiative. In that effort, we would need to recast the criticisms I list here as distributions of power that one might oppose.
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
74/90
DEATH PENALTY F/L 2/2
(__) Shouldn’t overturn the death penalty – it acts as a deterrent to crime
Washington Post 2007: Studies Say Death Penalty Deters Crime. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2007/06/11/AR2007061100406.html
The steady drumbeat of DNA exonerations _ pointing out flaws in the justice system _ has weighed against capital punishment. The
moral opposition is loud, too, echoed in Europe and the rest of the industrialized world, where all but a few countries banned
executions years ago. What gets little notice, however, is a series of academic studies over the last half-dozen years that claim to settle
a once hotly debated argument _ whether the death penalty acts as a deterrent to murder. The analyses say yes. They count between
three and 18 lives that would be saved by the execution of each convicted killer.
The reports have horrified death penalty opponents and several scientists, who vigorously question the data and its implications.
So far, the studies have had little impact on public policy. New Jersey's commission on the death penalty this year dismissed the body
of knowledge on deterrence as "inconclusive."
But the ferocious argument in academic circles could eventually spread to a wider audience, as it has in the past.
"Science does really draw a conclusion. It did. There is no question about it," said Naci Mocan, an economics professor at the
University of Colorado at Denver. "The conclusion is there is a deterrent effect."
A 2003 study he co-authored, and a 2006 study that re-examined the data, found that each execution results in five fewer homicides,
and commuting a death sentence means five more homicides. "The results are robust, they don't really go away," he said. "I oppose the
death penalty. But my results show that the death penalty (deters) _ what am I going to do, hide them?"
Statistical studies like his are among a dozen papers since 2001 that capital punishment has deterrent effects. They all explore the
same basic theory _ if the cost of something (be it the purchase of an apple or the act of killing someone) becomes too high, people
will change their behavior (forego apples or shy from murder).
Violent crime kills the economy
John Lovik 2008: U.S. Crime Affects Economy. http://crime.suite101.com/article.cfm/costs_of_crime_threaten_us_law_enforcement
According to a United Nations report posted by MSNBC, the United States is the leading country in financial loss due to violent
crimes; the cost estimated around 45 billion dollars. During a time of recession, this information sheds more light on the impact
crime has on our society. Combined with the very real struggle law enforcement agencies face to retain employees and maintain
budgets, the report signals a very serious factor degrading our communities.
Global nuclear war
Mead, 2009 (Walter Russell, the Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow in U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, “Only
Makes You Stronger”, The New Republic, February 4, 2009)
History may suggest that financial crises actually help capitalist great powers maintain their leads--but it has other, less reassuring
messages as well. If financial crises have been a normal part of life during the 300-year rise of the liberal capitalist system under the
Anglophone powers, so has war. The wars of the League of Augsburg and the Spanish Succession; the Seven Years War; the
American Revolution; the Napoleonic Wars; the two World Wars; the cold war: The list of wars is almost as long as the list of
financial crises. Bad economic times can breed wars. Europe was a pretty peaceful place in 1928, but the Depression poisoned
German public opinion and helped bring Adolf Hitler to power. If the current crisis turns into a depression, what rough beasts
might start slouching toward Moscow, Karachi, Beijing, or New Delhi to be born? The United States may not, yet, decline, but, if
we can't get the world economy back on track, we may still have to fight.
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
75/90
ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE F/L
(__) No brink – lack of environmental justice hasn’t killed all of us yet – no reason why it will happen at all
(__) Claims of environmental racism are flawed – studies show there is no discriminatory siting.
Joshua Glasgow (Yale Law School JD candidate) 2005: Buffalo Environmental Law Journal, 13 Buff. Envt’l L.J. 69, Fall. Lexis
In addition to courtroom difficulties, the environmental justice movement was challenged by a number of studies in the mid-1990s
challenging the evidence of discriminatory siting and exposure. [*76] An influential University of Massachusetts study conducted
in 1994 examined over five hundred hazardous waste facilities and found no evidence of discriminatory siting. 27 Additionally,
scholars challenged the earlier studies' methodologies, including the sample selection, the definition of minority, the geographic
scope examined, and the failure to control for other variables. 28 In a series of articles, Vicki Been set forth a particularly powerful
critique of environmental justice studies. 29 Been notes that most studies examined the contemporary makeup of a neighborhood
impacted by a LULU, not its makeup at the time of siting. 30 This method ignores the possibility that a LULU would lower nearby
housing prices, causing affluent residents to move away. These residents would be replaced by lower-income individuals, attracted
by the lower housing prices. As a result of these market dynamics, even LULUs located in a wealthy neighborhood could later
become surrounded by the poor. 31 This "chicken-or-the-egg" dilemma has plagued the environmental justice literature. 32
(__) No guarantee of solvency – to solve the advantage, someone would have to bring a court case – there’s no guarantee of this
occurring, which means that you err neg on the solvency debate
(__) Environmental justice movements can’t solve environmental racism.
Eric K Yamamoto (Hawaii Law School law professor), and Jen-L W Lyman (UC Berkeley visiting law professor) 2001: University
of Colorado Law Review, 72 U. Colo. L. Rev. 311, Spring, p. 320-322. Lexis
The established framework also assumes that fair distribution of physical burdens is the primary, if not sole, means of achieving
environmental justice. Sheila Foster rejects this assumption as "monolithic" 53 and "one-dimensional," 54 focusing "too much on
outcomes and not enough on the processes that produce those outcomes." 55 According to Foster, by not addressing why racial
communities are overexposed to pollution, hazardous waste sites, and poisoned fish stocks, agencies like the EPA fail to confront:
"discriminatory housing and real estate policies and practices, residential segregation and limited residential choices influenced by
such discrimination, discriminatory zoning regulations and ineffective land use policies, racial disparities in the availability of jobs
and municipal services, imbalances in political access and power, and "white flight.'" 56 The established framework's prescription
of the public's role is also limited. Under the pluralist model, since "preferences are defined by the relative power of self-interested
subjects[,] they may be distorted by existing inequalities, poorly construed as a result of exclusion and unequal political clout or
prove simply unethical." 57 Since "environmental justice challenges reside in an ethical dimension beyond" 58 utilitarian choices,
the pluralism model cannot resolve all problems associated with environmental racism.
(__) In fact, the race-based politics of the environmental justice movement reconstitutes racism and precludes unity.
Michael Shellenberger (environmental strategist) March/April 2008: Utne Reader, “Complete Interview: The Temperature
Transcends Race”, p. 6, http://www.utne.com/2008-03-01/Environment/Complete-Interview-The-Temperature-Transcends-Race.aspx
Ever since we wrote “Death of Environmentalism” we’ve been in various debates about environmental justice. We decided to do the
chapter in part because so many people said, Well, environmental justice is the expansive environmentalism. And we went and looked
at it and read a huge amount and interviewed many dozens of people, and what you find is a movement that looks at the intersection of
race, class, and pollution, which actually makes that movement smaller not larger. And frankly, you didn’t ask it, but I’ll say it
anyway: We think that a race-based politics is toxic, and completely outmoded, and that we should not be organizing as different
races. Race is itself a very dubious concept and construct. We’re a single human race and we’ll do far better organizing across race
lines than within them. If you look at where the environmental justice movement has gotten into trouble, it’s where you find a lot of
infighting often between different “races,” different ethnic groups. It hasn’t actually served to be a unifying movement. To say race is
itself a very dubious concept and construct is one thing, but to say that it doesn’t play a role in how communities suffer is another.
Well of course. Of course there’s racism. And of course there are racial disparities, but that’s different from organizing as Latinos or
as African Americans or as whites. I just don’t believe that that’s a positive expansive politics. It’s important to organize outside of
racial and environmental categories. The fact that pollution is a problem does not necessarily lead you to creating a pollution-based
politics. And the fact that racism is a problem does not mean that you should have a race-based politics. The goal of the original civil
rights movement was to put an end to race-based politics not to reconstitute it.
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
76/90
EQUAL PROTECTION TURN – COURT LEGITIMACY
(__) Wide interpretations of the 14th amendment cause the court to lose legitimacy
Thomas H. Burrell, M.B.A., Illinois State University; J.D., American University Washington College of Law,12/12/2007 “Justice
Stephen Field’s Expansion of the Fourteenth Amendment: From the Safeguards of Federalism to a State of Judicial Hegemony”
With this view of “liberty” and the Due Process Clause, the Fourteenth Amendment’s reach—construed and operationalized
solely by the Court—is as wide as the horizon. Any state regulation is subject to reasonableness review by the Court.264
Through these unfaithful interpretations, Justice Field, along with other justices, belied the limited Fourteenth Amendment and
expanded the understanding of the amendment.265 After reaching a majority, these expansive interpretations resulted in the
wholesale loss of the limited Fourteenth Amendment.266
Legitimacy key to rule of law, rights, and democracy.
Peretti 1999
(Terri J., In Defense of a Political Court, Princeton University Press)
Should the Court lose its legitimacy and, consequently, its power, we in turn lose the benefits that only the Court can provide.
Vitally important constitutional rights and liberties, as well as minority groups, would be unprotected and would likely suffer at
the hands of an indifferent or hostile majority. An additional loss of paramount importance is the ideal and the reality of the rule
of law. All government action would be reduced to arbitrary will and force, rather than being justified according to reason and,
thus, rendered legitimate. The consequences of the Court losing its legitimacy and the ability to play its specialized role, if we
are to believe Philip Kurland, are horrible indeed.
The impact is extinction.
Diamond 95
(Larry Diamond, Hoover Institution senior fellow, co-editor of the Journal of Democracy, December 1995, A Report to the Carnegie
Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, “Promoting Democracy in the 1990s: Actors and Instruments, Issues and Imperatives,”
http://wwics.si.edu/subsites/ccpdc/pubs/di/1.htm)
OTHER THREATS This hardly exhausts the lists of threats to our security and well-being in the coming years and decades. In the
former Yugoslavia nationalist aggression tears at the stability of Europe and could easily spread. The flow of illegal drugs intensifies
through increasingly powerful international crime syndicates that have made common cause with authoritarian regimes and have
utterly corrupted the institutions of tenuous, democratic ones. Nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons continue to proliferate. The
very source of life on Earth, the global ecosystem, appears increasingly endangered. Most of these new and unconventional threats to
security are associated with or aggravated by the weakness or absence of democracy, with its provisions for legality, accountability,
popular sovereignty, and openness. LESSONS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY The experience of this century offers important
lessons. Countries that govern themselves in a truly democratic fashion do not go to war with one another. They do not aggress against
their neighbors to aggrandize themselves or glorify their leaders. Democratic governments do not ethnically “cleanse” their own
populations, and they are much less likely to face ethnic insurgency. Democracies do not sponsor terrorism against one another. They
do not build weapons of mass destruction to use on or to threaten one another. Democratic countries form more reliable, open, and
enduring trading partnerships. In the long run they offer better and more stable climates for investment. They are more
environmentally responsible because they must answer to their own citizens, who organize to protest the destruction of their
environments. They are better bets to honor international treaties since they value legal obligations and because their openness makes
it much more difficult to breach agreements in secret. Precisely because, within their own borders, they respect competition, civil
liberties, property rights, and the rule of law, democracies are the only reliable foundation on which a new world order of international
security and prosperity can be built.
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
77/90
LINK – LEGITIMACY
Vast expansions cause the court to lose legitimacy
Thomas H. Burrell, M.B.A., Illinois State University; J.D., American University Washington College of Law,12/12/2007 “Justice
Stephen Field’s Expansion of the Fourteenth Amendment: From the Safeguards of Federalism to a State of Judicial Hegemony”
Regarding expansive interpretations of Section One, the judiciary’s use of a colorful phrase of “absolute equality,” “class legislation,”
or “liberty” quickly loses its legitimacy when carried beyond congressional enactment or existing national privileges and immunities
and into political or social rights not covered by the amendment.309
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
78/90
EQUAL PROTECTION TURN – FEDERALISM
(__) A broad 14th amendment destroys state rights
Thomas H. Burrell, M.B.A., Illinois State University; J.D., American University Washington College of Law,12/12/2007 “Justice
Stephen Field’s Expansion of the Fourteenth Amendment: From the Safeguards of Federalism to a State of Judicial Hegemony”
Bingham, described by some as the most liberal Republican, is generally considered the author of the Fourteenth Amendment.73
Bingham articulated that the amendment was designed for the protection of Americans of African descent and loyal white
citizens.74 Bingham also quipped that a broader construction of the amendment should apply to states that have laws “that are in
direct violation of every principle of our Constitution.”75 Representative Hale, a Republican lawyer from New York, took issue
with Bingham over the extension of the amendment to give Congress the power to “legislate upon all the matters pertaining to the
life, liberty, and property” in the several states, posing the question where would federal power end.76 Joining Bingham and
Hale, other members of the 39th Congress were also worried about encroaching upon states’ rights and disrupting the existing
balance of federalism.77 Some were worried that a broad sweep in post-war congressional action would eradicate the concinnity
between sovereign state government and limited national government.78 Framers of the amendment changed the language in the
initial draft to reflect this concern.79 The evolution of the amendment illustrates the moderation of the more radical
proponents.80 While a few of the original framers of the Fourteenth Amendment hoped to secure school desegregation and
universal suffrage with the amendment, those intentions were not shared by all and were not promulgated into the amendment.81
Federalism preserves peace, preventing ethnic conflicts.
Stephen Calebresi, Associate Professor, Northwestern University School of Law. B.A. 1980, J.D. 1983, Yale, “Reflections on United
States v. Lopez” 94 Mich. L. Rev. 752, Michigan Law Review, December, 1995 lexis
Small state federalism is a big part of what keeps the peace in countries like the United States and Switzerland. It is a big part of the
reason why we do not have a Bosnia or a Northern Ireland or a Basque country or a Chechnya or a Corsica or a Quebec problem.
American federalism in the end is not a trivial matter or a quaint historical anachronism. American-style federalism is a thriving and
vital institutional arrangement - partly planned by the Framers, partly the accident of history - and it prevents violence and war. It
prevents religious warfare, it prevents secessionist warfare, and it prevents racial warfare. It is part of the reason why democratic
majoritarianism in the United States has not produced violence or secession for 130 years, unlike the situation for example, in
England, France, Germany, Russia, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Cyprus, or Spain. There is nothing in the U.S. Constitution that is
more important or that has done more to promote peace, prosperity, and freedom than the federal structure of that great document.
There is nothing in the U.S. Constitution that should absorb more completely the attention of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Ethnic conflicts lead to global wars
David Lake and Donald Rothchild, USC Political Science Profs, “The International Spread of Ethnic Conflict” 1999
Even before fears of nuclear Armageddon could fully fade, new fears of state meltdown and ethnic cleansing have rippled across the
international community. In this “new world disorder,” many worry that ethnic conflict is contagious, that conflict in one local can
stimulate conflict elsewhere, and that initial outbreaks in the Balkans, the former Soviet Union and Africa, if not quarantined could set
off an epidemic of catastrophic proportions.
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
79/90
EQUAL PROTECTION TURN – LIBERTY
(__) Focusing on equality results in the death of liberty.
Tibor R. Machan, Professor Emeritus Department of Philosophy @ Auburn University, Research Fellow at Hoover Institution
Stanford University, 1995, “Private Rights, Public Illusions”
If the proper political goal is the equal progress of all individuals, then obviously the proper function of laws is to achieve this
goal. Clearly, bringing about full equality among citizens will require the widespread enforcement of economic and related
changes required to eradicate the natural and inevitable difference among individuals. The totalitarian and dictatorial
consequences are easy to infer. Voluntary cooperation and generosity are certainly encouraged by those who oppose
governmental welfarism. Within the welfarist system, however, these benevolent qualities are not regarded as enough.
Individuals are not trusted to live peacefully and to be responsible for reaching their full potential. The entire concern with
equality of welfare, even in the framework of “upgrading the poor” and “upholding society’s moral fiber,” is inconsistent with the
ideal that each person must make his or her own way in life. This trend towards economic and spiritual equalization is so strong
that when institutions do not meet the established norm, the government forces progress by utilizing its retaliatory powers for
redistributive and paternalistic purposes. This can be seen in the use of, for example, forced busing to meet integration
standards. The government can also indirectly force institutions to meet various standards by making financial assistance
conditional on certain requirements. Such requirements treat members of society as tools for other people’s programs. This
personal responsibility for others’ goals and well-being, which underlies political support for many desirable programs, also fuelsby making them conceptually and legally acceptable in the sphere of social engineering-the techniques of behavior modification
and, at the extreme end, involuntary psychosurgery. All governmental action that does not serve to repel or retaliate against
coercion is antithetical to any respect for human dignity. While it is true that some people should give to others to assist them
in reaching their goals, forcing individuals to do so plainly robs them of their dignity. There is nothing morally worthwhile in
forced giving. Generally, for a society to respect human dignity, the special moral relations between people should be left
undisturbed. Government should confine itself to making sure that this voluntarism is not abridged, no matter how tempting it
might be to use its coercive powers to attain some worthy goal.
Violations of liberty must be prioritized.
Sylvester Petro, professor of law at Wake Forest, Spring 1974, Toledo Law Review, p480
However, one may still insist on echoing Ernest Hemingway – “I believe in only one thing: liberty.” And it is always well to bear
in mind David Hume’s observation: “It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.” Thus, it is unacceptable to say
that the invasion of one aspect of freedom is of no import because there have been invasions of so many other aspects. That
road leads to chaos, tyranny, despotism, and the end of all human aspiration. Ask Solzhenstyn, Ask Milovan Djilas. In sum, if
one believes in freedom as a supreme value and proper ordering principle for any society aiming to maximize spiritual and
material welfare, then every invasion of freedom must be emphatically identified and resisted with undying spirit.
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
80/90
*** SOLVENCY ***
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
81/90
SOLVENCY F/L 1/2
1. Lack of access to abortion funding is irrelavent – people will find other ways to get abortions.
Mark Graber, Professor of Law and Government at the University of Maryland, 1996, “Rethinking Abortion: Equal Choice, the
Constitution, and Reproductive Politics”
As compared to the impact of simple legalization, the impact of federal and state laws restricting welfare payments for abortions has
been relatively insignificant. Despite much legal and public hand-wringing,il7 the government funding cutoffs Sustained in Maker v.
Roe*16 and Harris v. McRae have had very little effect on abortion rates. Federally financed abortions fell from 300,0011 to fewer
than 3,0110 per year following passage of the Hyde Amendment. Nevertheless, researchers at both the CDC and the Alan Guttmachcr
Institute (AG!) believe that 94 percent of the women financially eligible for Medicaid still obtain abortions. Approximately 200,000 of
these women live in states that fund all abortions; the rest rely on various private sources for financing. Public health specialists
estimate that only 15,000 women annually bear unwanted children as a result of the Hyde Amendment and only 3,000 turn to illegal
abortions. Local funding restrictions have had similarly insignificant effects on abortion rates. One study estimates that states that do
not pay for the abortions of indigent patients only reduce abortion rates by one per thousand women.221 "Women who do not desire to
bear a child," surveys find, "will terminate the pregnancy, regardless of how small the amount of public funds available."222 Official
bans on abortion funding do impose severe burdens on poor women, many of whom, when faced with unwanted pregnancies, must
sacrifice necessities to finance their abortions.2" Still, approximately sixteen times as many poor women have had legal abortions as a
consequence of legalization (282,000) than have done without that procedure as a consequence of decisions denying federal Medicaid
funds (18.000)."4 The CDC estimates that even if a "total funding cutoff" occurs throughout the United States, “only one in every five
women” on Medicaid would “carry a pregnancy to delivery which might otherwise have been aborted.” Hence, claims that the Hyde
Amendment and similar measures make abortions available only to the affluent are wild exaggerations, not responsible arguments. As
one commentary correctly notes, although “funding an abortion can involve a considerable amount of hardship for poor families, it
still is a far cry from the ‘back alley’ days when the cost in dollars and often in personal risk in exploitation were much higher.
2. Turn – keeping abortion out of politics is the only way to ensure that it remains legal.
Mark Graber, Professor of Law and Government at the University of Maryland, 1996, “Rethinking Abortion: Equal Choice, the
Constitution, and Reproductive Politics”
Persons committed to equal choice will best use the support of fickle elites by striving to keep abortion off the political agenda.
This strategy requires that pro-choice advocates eschew efforts to achieve overwhelming political triumphs and concentrate on a
more modest goal: not losing legislative and electoral struggles. Proponents of legal abortion should fight to make the two major
parties indistinguishable on abortion and place a higher priority on defeating pro-life candidates than on supporting pro-choice
candidates. Affluent pro-choice citizens should support political efforts to depoliticize abortion/8 because neither progressive nor
fiscally conservative elites want reproductive issues to supplant economic distribution as the main battleground of American
politics-Defensive maneuvers aimed at not losing to pro-life forces will maintain a favorable political climate for legal abortion.
As long as abortion is legal—and legal abortion will still be the status quo in every state should Roe be overruled—a strategy that
prevents legislatures from making any reproductive policy ensures that abortion remains legal. Moreover, when elected officials
refuse to make abortion policy and do not consider abortion when selecting federal justices, courts are staffed by elite lawyers,
most of whom believe that women should be allowed to terminate unwanted pregnancies. Such jurists are unlikely to overrule Roe
even if they might not have supported abortion rights when the issue first came before the Supreme Court. These strategies—
"defeat pro-life" and "depoliticize abortion"—will not make abortion equally accessible iu practice to all women. Equal choice's
emphasis on keeping abortion legal, however, promises to improve access to safe abortion services almost as much as would the
more difficult and riskier alternative of forging a pro-choice majority.
3. Doesn’t change individual mindsets – means abortion will always be stigmatized.
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
82/90
SOLVENCY F/L 2/2
4. Alt causes to lack of abortion access.
Mark Graber, Professor of Law and Government at the University of Maryland, 1996, “Rethinking Abortion: Equal Choice, the
Constitution, and Reproductive Politics”
The present system of abortion regulation may be more egalitarian than its predecessor, but the hopes many reformers had that all
Americans would enjoy equal access to abortion on demand have not been realized. Abortion laws on the books that offer women
the right to terminate their pregnancies do not guarantee that women who want abortions will find a competent and willing
provider. "Access to abortion," commentators recognize, "depends not only on a women's decision to terminate her pregnancy, but
on her ability to locate a cooperative practitioner.” Everyone familiar with current abortion law in action admits that "as with
access to medical services generally, those who are young, poor, and members of minority groups do not have equal access to
legally induced abortions.” Researchers at the AGI estimate that more than 100,000 women a year forgo legal abortions because
they cannot travel to the nearest sanctioned abortionist. Abortions remain scarce because, although hospital* are free to provide
abortion services, many continue their restrictive pre-Roe practices. Gerald Rosenberg of the University of Chicago points out that
"in response to the Court, hospitals did not change their policies to permit abortions”. Abortion rates in different hospitals vary as
significantly today as they did before Roe. A recent survey found that less than one-fifth of all short-term hospitals and less than
one-quarter of all private hospitals in the United States provide patients with abortions. A majority of American hospitals in 1986
had not yet performed their first abortion. Many hospitals that do offer abortion services terminate very pregnancies and will not
perform that procedure in the second trimester. Only eighty-three hospitals in the United States performed more than four hundred
abortions in 1988.” Legalization barely influenced the abortion practices of most obstetricians. Laws may permit doctors to
terminate pregnancies, but most do not offer that service to the general public. Abortions in traditional medical settings are still
frequently distributed on the basis of economic class. Many practitioners provide abortions only to their private patients, unless a
stranger's pregnancy is life threatening. "Private practice,” the leading study of communal medical services reports, "continues to
serve as the major barrier to a more equitable provision of abortion service.""' The proliferation of freestanding abortion clinics has
partially compensated for the refusal of doctors in private practice to provide equal abortion services. As of 1992, abortion and
other specialized clinics performed approximately 89 percent of all first trimester abortions in the United States. Many women,
however, cannot easily visit an abortion clinic. Clinics require economics of scale to pay for costs (and make a profit). For that
reason, clinics ,a typically located only in metropolitan areas where (hey can perform the number of abortions necessary to stay
open. "Abortion providers," commentators point out, are "limited for the most part to (hose counties where the need for abortion is
large enough to support a specialized clinic.” Few clinics or abortion services of any kind exist in less heavily populated regions of
this country. In 1992, 84 percent of all counties in the United States lacked a single abortion provider. Rural counties arc particularly in need of this service. Only 7 percent of all rural counties have an abortion provider and only 1 percent have a provider that
performs more than four hundred abortions annually.'" Women who live in jurisdictions without abortion providers must go on
expensive journeys in order to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. One study found that "a decade after Roe, more than 10 percent
of the women seeking abortions in twenty two states still had to travel out of state.” Access problems are worsening. Surveys
reveal a steady decrease in the number of abortion providers and major abortion providers in the United States."' The siege
conditions under which many clinics operate apparently deter all but the most committed pro-choice physicians from per forming
many abortions. Active abortion clinics routinely experience vandalism and threats of physical violence. Several doctors have been
murdered.'" Abortion clinics race other, less dramatic difficulties when hiring doctors. The work is not prestigious, the procedure
is tedious, and the wages relatively low" Planned Parenthood of New York City has trouble finding physicians willing to perform
abortions four days a week fin SI 50.000 a year because gynecologists in private practice make twice that figure.” This shortage of
abortion providers significantly influences the distribution of legal abortions. "The local availability of abortion services."
numerous contemporary studies conclude, "is the single most powerful determinant of variations in abortion rates in the United
States.” For this reason, women who cannot afford to travel long distances are often unable to exercise their constitutional right to
abortion on demand. Researchers in Georgia found that for every one hundred miles of distance from an abortion provider, white
abortion rates were reduced by 62 per 1,000 women and black abortion rates were reduced by 78 per 1,000 women. Nationally,
women are twice as likely to have a legal abortion if they live in a country that has a major abortion provider.
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
83/90
EXT #1 – FUNDING IRRELEVANT
Women can get abortion funding from charities and states.
Mark Graber, Professor of Law and Government at the University of Maryland, 1996, “Rethinking Abortion: Equal Choice, the
Constitution, and Reproductive Politics”
The academic tendency to deduce facts about legal and social practices from legal texts has particularly serious consequences
when pro-choice commentators criticize how wealth influences access to safe abortion services. Proponents of legal abortion insist
that as long as the Supreme Court sustains legislation banning government funds for abortion.21 only "pregnant adult women with
the means to pay for it retain their freedom." "The abortion right has already been lost" for "poor women," Catharine MacKinnon
asserts, "by deprivation of governmental funding for abortion."24 Current restrictions on government funding, however, have in
fact had relatively little impact on access to safe abortions. Contrary to Justice Marshall's dissent in Harm, "denial of Medicaidfunding abortion is [not] equivalent to denial of legal abortion altogether" for approximately 94 percent of all women eligible for
Medicaid.15 Sympathetic abortionists and private charities frequently assist those women who cannot otherwise afford to
terminate an unwanted pregnancy. Legalization drastically reduced the cost of safe abortions, making that reproductive choice
affordable for most women. For these reasons and others, poor women and women of color have been the primary beneficiaries of
state policies and judicial decisions that decriminalized but did not fund abortion.
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
84/90
EXT #4 – ALT CAUSE
Lack of funding is irrelavent – not enough abortionists.
Mark Graber, Professor of Law and Government at the University of Maryland, 1996, “Rethinking Abortion: Equal Choice, the
Constitution, and Reproductive Politics”
Legalization destroyed the gray market and, in doing so, sharply decreased race and class disparities in access lo safe abortions.
Nevertheless, many women remain unable to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. Abortion is not equally available to all women,
because abortion providers remain scarce; economic considerations and pro-life mayhem deter physicians from offering abortions
in most American communities. Contemporary access problems, however, cannot be Named on anti-abortion state laws or on
judicial decisions sustaining those laws. When abortion is legal, hostile state regulations that fall short of legal bans have little
impact on access to abortion services. Laws imposing funding bans, waiting periods, informed consent, parental notification, and
other barriers, to reproductive services are not yet preventing women from obtaining abortions. Pro-choice advocates may
proclaim that "Roe v Wade is dead," but the Supreme Court's decisions in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services and Planned
Parenthood v Casey have not affected the reproductive choices presently open to most poor women and women of color.
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
85/90
*** OFF CASE ***
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
86/90
POLITICS – POPULAR (PUBLIC)
Voting results indicate that Americans are largely pro-choice, despite spending
Arons Director of Women’s Health, 08 (Jessica, Director of the Women's Health and Rights Program at American Progress, Center for American Progress,
“Voters Reject Divisive Politics by Defeating Abortion Ballot Measures”, November 6, http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2008/11/abortion_measures.html)
Voters sent a clear message this Election Day that they are tired of divisive politics over abortion. They do not want to
criminalize abortion or make it harder to get one; they simply want pragmatic approaches that recognize the real-life
circumstances women and men face and that respect their right to make their own decisions. Bans and restrictions in South
Dakota, Colorado, and California were squarely defeated, despite millions of dollars spent to garner support for the efforts. In
addition to voting down those measures, Americans elected a president who genuinely supports all of a woman's pregnancy
options—the real meaning of pro-choice—as well as at least an additional 15 representatives and 5 senators who do too.
Voters empirically vote against pro-life, despite their personal beliefs
Arons, Director of Women’s Health and Rights Program, 06 Jessica, Director of the Women's Health and Rights Program at American Progress,
Center for American Progress, “Extreme Abortion Positions Rejected”, November 8, http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2006/11/abortion_in_election.html)
Voters around the country yesterday demonstrated their aversion to extreme abortion positions. In South Dakota, they resoundly
rejected the most radical abortion ban proposed in the states since the landmark Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. Introduced as a direct
challenge to Roe, the law would have banned abortion in all circumstances unless it was necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman. South Dakotans
voted against the ban by a margin of 56 to 44 percent. Voters also rejected harmful parental notification laws in California and Oregon.
They recognized that the laws regulating minors' access to abortion would interfere with teens receiving timely medical care and
put the most vulnerable youth in harm's way. The law proposed in California was virtually identical to one that voters rejected last year as well.
Kansans elected a new Attorney General, Paul Morrison, and sent the incumbent Phill Kline packing. Kline routinely abused the authority of his office to pursue
a personal, extreme anti-abortion agenda, including a long-fought battle to obtain the private medical records of abortion patients. Once those records were in his
possession, sensitive information from them was leaked to Fox News's Bill O'Reilly. Voters have sent a clear message that enough is enough. Although many
Americans have mixed feelings about abortion, they understand that criminalizing it, making it more difficult or riskier to obtain,
and subjecting doctors and patients to witch hunts, are not effective solutions. What is needed is better access to contraception,
comprehensive and medically accurate sexuality education, a reduction in sexual violence, and practical supports for women who want to continue unintended
pregnancies but lack the resources to do so.
10 years of voting proves voters choose pro-choice
Belden, Partner based on polling, 08 [“On solid ground: over 35 years, abortion polls show remarkable consistency” Nancy Belden is a partner in the
Washington, DC-based polling firm Belden Russonello & Stewart.
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/On+solid+ground:+over+35+years,+abortion+polls+show+remarkable...-a0181462997]
Through the last 35 years, however, the support for legal abortion among the American public has not deteriorated. In 1973 after the
Roe v. Wade decision, Louis Harris & Associates found 52 percent favored "the US Supreme Court decision making abortion up to three months of pregnancy
legal" and 41 percent opposed it. Support and opposition has moved up and down marginally in Harris polling, dipping to 47 percent in
favor and 44 percent opposed in 1974 and rising to 60 percent in favor and 37 percent opposed in 1979, before settling back down to 56
percent in favor/40 percent opposed in 2007--virtually the same as in 1973. Other surveys lead to the same conclusion. Our firm has asked whether
Americans agreed or disagreed that "it should be legal for a woman to have an abortion" four times since 1998--always finding
six in ten agreeing (four in ten strongly) and a third disagreeing (a quarter strongly). See Table Two. In another example, polling for ABC News and
the Washington Post has shown virtually no change in the aggregate levels of support and opposition to abortion in the last 10
years among registered voters. In 1996, 24 percent of voters said they thought abortion should be legal in all cases and 34 percent
legal in most cases, 25 percent illegal in most, and 14 percent illegal in all. In 2008, the ABC/Washington Post poll obtained
virtually the same result: 21 percent legal in all cases, 36 percent legal in most, 25 percent illegal in most, and 15 percent illegal in all. Interestingly, as
Table Three shows, the numbers move around if one looks at polls from month to month within a given year--and this often excites advocates and opponents.
However, on average, the numbers reflect a remarkably consistent outcome: about two in ten voters in the most liberal position,
more than a third in the "legal in most" category, a quarter in "illegal in most," and only 15 percent or so rejecting abortion
altogether. There are several ways to look at these figures that have long been part of the discussions about how Americans view abortion rights. One is that
fewer Americans, or voters in the case of ABC/Washington Post poll in Table Three, place themselves in the extreme positions (all cases legal or illegal) than in
the middle "legal in most cases" position. Another way to look at the results is that more than half support a fairly liberal position (legal in all or most cases).
Further evidence of the static state of attitudes on abortion comes from the fact that when survey questions asking about different aspects of the issue are included
in polls repeatedly, they too obtain similar results year to year. The CBS News/New York Times poll has asked the general public: "Which comes closest to your
view? Abortion should be generally available to those who want it, or abortion should be available, but under stricter limits than it is now, or abortion should not
be permitted," 13 times since 2003. The results as shown on Table Four always show similar levels of adherence to the three choices. Another example comes
from the Newsweek poll, which asks adults nationwide: "Which side of the political debate on the abortion issue do you sympathize with more: the right-to-life
movement that believes abortion is the taking of human life and should be outlawed; or the pro-choice movement that believes a woman has the right to choose
what happens to her body, including deciding to have an abortion." (The options are rotated, alternately starting with the prochoice and right-to-life positions.) In
1998 and in 2006, 39 percent of adults took the right-to-life option. The prochoice position was taken by 51 percent in 1998 and 55 percent in 2006. See Table
Five. Bottom line, the American public has not changed its tune on abortion--and there is little reason to think it will.
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
87/90
POLITICS – POPULAR (CONGRESS)
Congress supports abortion rights
NRL News 09
[National Right to Life News, January 2, 2009, “Obama Administration, New Congress Poised to Push Broad Pro-Abortion Agenda,”
http://www.nrlc.org/news/2009/NRL01/ProAbortionAgenda.html]
The pro-life movement is bracing for battle as a new Congress convenes with pro-abortion Democrats in majority control in both
houses, poised to work with incoming President Barack Obama to push an expansive pro-abortion agenda. 2009 will be the first
time since 1994 that both houses of Congress are under pro-abortion majority control at the same time as a pro-abortion president
is in office. "The alignment of a hard-core pro-abortion president with pro-abortion Democratic majorities in Congress means
that many existing pro-life policies are now in great jeopardy," said NRLC Legislative Director Douglas Johnson. "Some damage
is inevitable, but the extent to which the Obama abortion agenda will be achieved will depend on the perception of elected
policymakers as to how the public is responding to the proposed changes."
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
88/90
POLITICS – UNPOPULAR
Overturning the Hyde Amendment costs pol cap
Douglas, Assistant Editor and Harvard grad, 8
[Emily, Assistant Editor and graduate from Harvard University, Hyde Amendment Robs Women of Reproductive Choice, RH Reality
Check: Information and Analysis for Reproductive Health, http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2008/10/17/hyde-amendment-robswomen-reproductive-choice]
Overturning Hyde will be an uphill battle whether Obama becomes president or not. Pro-choice advocates have long struggled to put
progressive legislation that would expand abortion access on the national stage; it's unlikely that poor women's reproductive health
care will find congressional sponsors ready to take on the fight. The National Network of Abortion Funds and a diverse group of
supporters working on the "Hyde - 30 Years Is Enough!" campaign attempted to introduce a resolution in opposition to Hyde in the
last Congress and will try again next year.
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
89/90
POLITICS – UNPOPULAR (PUBLIC)
More Americans are pro-life than pro-choice
Stoddard, journalist, 09
(Ed, journalist, Reuters, “Gallup first: more Americans now "pro-life" than ‘pro-choice’”, May 15,
http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/2009/05/15/gallup-first-more-americans-now-pro-life-than-pro-choice/)
Gallup said on Friday that a new poll, conducted May 7 to 10, found "51 percent of Americans calling themselves 'pro-life' on the
issue of abortion and 42 percent 'pro-choice.' This is the first time a majority of U.S. adults have identified themselves as pro-life since
Gallup began asking this question in 1995." "The new results, obtained from Gallup's annual Values and Beliefs survey, represent a
significant shift from a year ago, when 50 percent were pro-choice and 44 percent pro-life. Prior to now, the highest percentage
identifying as pro-life was 46 percent, in both August 2001 and May 2002." Underscoring how divisive the issue remains, the poll
further found that 23 percent of Americans felt abortion should be illegal in all circumstances and 22 percent said it should be legal in
all circumstances.
Opponents of abortion are in the majority and gaining momentum
McKissick, public relations specialist, 09
(Drew, specialist in public relations and communications with over twenty years of experience, Christian Coalition of America, “Yet
another poll shows majority of Americans pro-life”, May 22,
http://www.cc.org/blog/yet_another_poll_shows_majority_americans_prolife)
The Rasmussen survey, released on May 5, asked a different question than the others and found that 58 percent of Americans say
abortion is morally wrong most of the time. Just twenty-five percent disagree and the rest had no opinion. The survey found
women are more strongly pro-life than men as 64 percent of women believe most abortions are morally wrong, a view shared by
just 51% of men. Of those who identified themselves as pro-life, 88 percent say most abortions are morally wrong as do 29
percent of those who call themselves pro-choice. Meanwhile, another Rasmussen survey question found a majority of
Americans, 52 percent, think it is too easy to get an abortion in America. That's up seven percent from two years ago when 45
percent thought it was too easy. The two important points to take away from this are 1) that the pro-life position is indeed a
majority position in this country, and 2) that the pro-life position has been gaining momentum.
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells
Tampa Prep 2009-2010
Gonzo and Lison
Abortion Neg
90/90
POLITICS – UNPOPULAR (CONGRESS)
Federal funded abortion is a unpopular issue even in the democratic party- health care proves
Yoest, staff writer, 7-17 (Patrick, Wall Street Journal, 7-17-09, http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20090717-713581.html)
-A group of anti-abortion Democrats opposed to U.S. House health-care legislation in its current form have emerged as a major
obstacle to Democratic leaders' goal of passing the measure by August. A group of 20 House Democrats signed a letter sent
Friday to House Democratic leaders stating they "cannot support any health care reform proposal unless it explicitly excludes
abortion from the scope of any government-defined or subsidized health insurance plan." The letter comes at a time when other
blocs of House Democrats, such as the fiscally conservative Blue Dog Coalition, have threatened to withhold their support for
the bill. Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., warned that Democratic leaders should heed the group's letter, saying the bill is endangered
by the defection of anti-abortion Democrats. "I told leadership repeatedly, but they just sort of ignored us," said Stupak, who
signed the letter. "They ignore at their own peril." President Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress have avoided painful
debates on abortion thus far. Obama has largely stayed above the fray on culture-war issues, and the Senate confirmation
hearings of Supreme Court justice nominee Sonia Sotomayor have done little to ignite passions on the issue. But abortion
debates have creeped up in recent days in Congress. The House voted Thursday on a rule to limit amendments on a financialservices spending bill, with 39 anti-abortion Democrats voting against the rule because it bars a vote on an abortion-related
amendment.
Abortion funding faces opposition from both democrats and republicans
CNN, 7-22 (7-22-09, http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/07/22/health.care.abortion/)
The contentious health care reform debate intensified Wednesday as a bipartisan group of congressmen opposed to abortion pledged to
fight any bill that fails to exclude the procedure from the scope of government-defined benefits. "This issue is not about party
politics. It's not about obstructionism. It is about saving lives and protecting pro-life Americans across the country," Rep. Joe Pitts, RPennsylvania, said. "American taxpayers should not be forced to pay for abortion. Nor should they be forced to be unwitting
participants as the abortion industry uses [the health care debate] to mainstream the destruction of human life into America's health
care industry." The group argued that, under the current version of the House Democratic leadership's bill, most Americans ultimately
would be forced to participate in a plan that covers abortion services. They complained that amendments specifying the exclusion of
abortion mandates and subsidies had already been rejected by two of the three House committees handling health care legislation.
Republicans support current abortion policy preventing federal funding.
Goldstein, reporter, 09
(Dana Goldstein, reporter, 7-14-09,“WHAT IS THE GOP'S GOAL ON ABORTION AND HEALTH REFORM?,” Lexis) SS
Chuck Grassley speaks at an Iowa McCain-Palin rally, 2008. Just now on MSNBC, Sen. Chuck Grassley Chuck Grassley, the
ranking Republican on the Finance Committee, claimed that when it comes to abortion and health reform, "What we're trying to
do is maintain current policy." As I report today in a full-length piece, current policy -- which prevents federal funds from paying
for abortions for poor women on Medicaid, military women, federal employees, Peace Corps volunteers, and prisoners -- is not
under threat from any of the proposed House or Senate health reform bills. In fact, reproductive rights advocates have been
telling me all week that as much as they'd like to overturn the Medicaid abortion ban -- known as the Hyde Amendment -- it's
just not a possibility right now. They don't have the votes. So when opponents of abortion rights say they'd like to "maintain
current policy," what they likely mean is that Hyde should also apply to any potential public health insurance plan, thus
maintaining the federal government's ban on abortion funding.
For every action there is an equal and opposite government program – Bob Wells