(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
James J. Kilpatrick, conservative supporter of abortion rights [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags']
Date: 2022-07-02
He argued against integration, but...
Many of us can remember James J Kilpatrick’s weekly face-off with Shana Alexander on 60 Minutes, when he would argue the conservative side of some contemporary topic.
BUT, I still remember his forceful defense of Medicaid abortion funding for poor women, when he said his experience as a cub reporter in Richmond, seeing the gruesome results of illegal abortions, convinced him that abortion must be something any woman could obtain.
In his syndicated column, printed in the Suffolk (Va) News-Herald on June 3, 1977, Kilpatrick denied that there was “a constitutional right to abortion at public expense”, but that the states “should include elective abortions in...Medicaid programs.”
Kilpatrick went on to say, in 1992, that, per Roe v Wade, “[u]p to the point of viability of a fetus, a woman has a right to an abortion. Her freedom in this regard is a part of the fundamental liberty that no state may deny to its citizens.“
All that I remembered. BUT, I hadn’t heard the shocking account from 1989 of his goddaughter’s rape at gunpoint. She could afford to abort the resulting pregnancy, but, as certain Republican senators would have it, a poor woman would just have to live with “[t]he humiliation, the horror, the degradation, the invasion of her most private self”, from which she would “never recover fully.”
His ringing conclusion — “If there is one basic tenet of the conservative philosophy, it is that government must not interfere with the private lives of a free people. I find it unconscionable that conservatives should defend this ultimate denial of a woman's freedom over her own reproductive organs.”
[You should read the whole column in the link from 1989: Kilpatrick ridicules Henry Hyde’s use of the word “inconvenient”, which we’re still hearing today.]
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/7/2/2107940/-James-J-Kilpatrick-conservative-supporter-of-abortion-rights
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
