Beacon Hill Institute Exposed

U.S. Two States Away from Constitutional Convention

The majority of U.S. voters just elected a dedicated leftist as President. Republicans are at their weakest right now! This is a horrible time to try such a crazy scheme. We cannot control the debate right now! Don’t for one second doubt that delegates to a Con Con wouldn’t revise the 1st Amendment into a government-controlled privilege, replace the 2nd Amendment with a “collective” right to self-defense, and abolish the 4th, 5th, and 10th Amendments, and the rest of the Bill of Rights. Additions could include the non-existent Separation of Church and State, the “right” to abortion and euthanasia, and much, much more.

Our uniquely and purely American concept of individual rights, endowed by our Creator, would be quickly set aside as an anachronistic relic of a bygone era; replaced by new “collective” rights, awarded and enforced by government for the “common good”.

The problems our nation faces are not a result of deficiencies in our Constitution; rather, they are the direct result of our disregard for that divinely-inspired document of liberty.

There is no challenge faced by this nation that cannot be solved either by enforcing existing law, or in limited cases, by writing new law. We do not need, AND MUST NOT RISK THE LIBERTY OF THE UNITED STATES with, a Constitutional Convention!

Read full article

Pro-Life Policy: Does It Make a Difference?

EXCERPT

by Andrew Grossman
WebMemo #598

These pro-life laws implemented at the state level accounted for a significant amount of the variation in the states’ abortion rates in the 1990s. For example, state laws restricting the use of Medicaid funds in paying for abortion reduced the abortion ratio by 29.66 abortions per thousand women ages 15-44. Informed consent laws in the states also pushed down abortion rates. State-level policies such as these caused real declines in abortion rates over the 1990s. Stassen’s analysis, however, does not consider the timing of the passage and repeal of such legislation.

And who was responsible for passing these successful state-level policies as legislation? It was not the pro-choice administration of President Clinton, but instead a large crop of pro-life state legislators. From the 1994 elections and on, pro-life candidates enjoyed great political success. And this made it easier to pass pro-life laws that have been effective in driving abortion rates down.

In other words, lowering the incidence of abortion may be more straightforward than Stassen makes it seem. Stassen argues voting for pro-life candidates may not help the pro-life cause. But a wealth of empirical data supports the view that traditional pro-life policies, such as informed-consent laws, Medicaid funding restrictions, and parental-notice or -consent laws, have all been shown to reduce abortion rates. And, crucial in response to Stassen’s contention, these policies were passed following increases in the numbers of state pro-life politicians. This is the real lesson of the Clinton-era decrease in abortion rates.

Read full article

A Report of The Heritage Center for Data Analysis

EXCERPT

USING NATURAL EXPERIMENTS TO ANALYZE THE IMPACT OF STATE LEGISLATION ON THE INCIDENCE OF ABORTION
BY MICHAEL J. NEW, PH.D.

CONCLUSION
The number of abortions that were performed increased throughout the 1970s and the 1980s. However, that trend reversed itself during the 1990s as the number of legal abortions declined by 18.4 percent between 1990 and 1999. There are a number of different reasons for this decline. However, one factor that cannot be overlooked is the impact of state pro-life legislation. By the end of the decade, more states had adopted parental involvement requirements, informed consent requirements, and partial-birth abortion
bans. A number of academic and policy studies find that there is a correlation between the passage of pro-life legislation and a reduction in the incidence of abortion. However, some have argued that
changes in values or mores in states that have passed such legislation may be responsible for these declines. By comparing the impact in states that enacted legislation to the impact in states that nullified legislation, this study is able to resolve some of these endogeneity problems. This study analyzes six states where parental involvement laws were nullified and two states where informed consent laws were nullified. The regression findings indicate that enacted legislation results in statistically significant declines in the incidence of abortion, while value shifts correlated with the passage of legislation have little impact. This shows with greater certainty that pro-life legislation has been effective in reducing the number of abortions that have taken place.

Read full study

Placeholder 1