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In all their majesty, the House and Senate have drawn their shrinking reputations up to full height, cleared their money-grubbing throats, considered with terror the upcoming fall elections and given us a law that serves no one.

They have made it a federal crime to take a pregnant minor to another state to obtain an abortion without her parents' knowledge. Is there no way to get these nitwits out of our hair, rap their knuckles with a ruler and demand they do useful work?

The Congress of the United States has not seen fit to tell the individual states whom they may kill within their prison systems, or for what crimes or by which means and yet they claim the need to prevent young prospective mothers from choosing abortion.

What a disgrace.

The stately gentlemen in Washington will not suffer the consequence of this outrageous fiddling with privacy. They seldom, if ever, suffer the consequence of their own idiocy--they are too rich for that, too privileged, too irresponsibly out of the line of fire.

Young women who have no viable relationship with either parent will be the victims.

Conceivably (in this matter of conception), a minor female, made pregnant by her abusive father, who's mother remains in denial about that abuse, would need her parents permission to seek abortion. That's pretty draconian. One can readily admit that, while incest may be an unusual circumstance, parental estrangement is overwhelmingly an ingredient.

Just choke it down, those pillars of congressional wisdom proclaim. If your preacher, pastor, priest or rabbi is your spiritual port in family storms, that's tough luck. Likewise a caring grandfather or grandmother. Congress has spelled it out. Go face your raging or insane or drunk or mentally unstable parents.

And, by the way, none of the above applies if a good buddy or terrified boyfriend merely wants to take you to the big city within your state to have your abortion. That's perfectly okay with Representative Blotto or Senator Slink. They have no opinion about your personal terrors in that circumstance.

They care not a legal whit about the state (or future) of your fetus, as long as it's not being carried within your body across a state line.

Nor has the national gallery of chumps known as the Congress ever given a tinker's damn about access to abortion for the poor and the scared and the threatened and those without options, until the politics of the mid-term elections loomed.

At that moment, 65 otherwise disinterested Senators suddenly dropped their fund-raising, got religion and figured if they couldn't stop the scourge of flag-burning and had had no luck with gay-bashing, they'd damned well better further wreck the lives of the already-wrecked by standing them up in front of their parents to take the heat.

And do it now. Not a moment to waste. Children are at risk. So are elections.

It's the miracle of these congressional miscreants that they can be so utterly self-serving and, at the same time, so miserably un-understanding of the plight of the nation's have-nots. Abortion is never an issue of the haves, as they fly off to France for a few weeks vacation, coming back with some great stories of cute little restaurants.

It's never an issue of the religious right either and don't you think for a minute that their children (married or otherwise) are exempt from that topic. Just as the great names in TV evangelism have been carted off for fleecing their flock and caught with their pants down, so do they quietly cover their tracks and those of their families. The bigger they are, the lower they crawl.

Ask Jimmy Swaggart about abstinance.

A White House statement claimed the law would "protect the health and safety of minors, as well as the rights of parents to be involved in the medical decisions of their minor daughters consistent with the widespread belief among authorities in the field that it is the parents of a pregnant minor who are best suited to provide her counsel, guidance and support."

Nearly every Republican Senator voted 'yes' as well as every Democratic Senator from a 'red' state. And thus we have dereliction on the part of all these fine specimens of representative democracy for issues relating to war, budgets, taxes, minority rights and constitutional guarantees.

But you can depend on their ability to understand the NRA and the religious right.

About the Author

As a political commentator, Jim Freeman's op-ed pieces have appeared on the pages of The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, International Herald-Tribune, CNN, The Jon Stewart Daily Show, The New York Review and a number of magazines. His commentary is available at http://www.opinion-columns.com/