I’m not too optimistic about turning a culture of death into a culture of life. But perhaps we had a glimmer of hope today. The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 to uphold the 2003 partial-birth (what else could it be called?) abortion ban. If nothing else, the re-election of George Bush in 2004 had this consequence, that a previously legal form of infanticide was ruled illegal.
The responses were predictable: this is just the beginning of the “all-out assault” on Roe v. Wade; it chips away at abortion rights; many more restrictions are coming.
Nothing rational gets past the blinders of the pro-death crowd.
It doesn’t matter what the actual procedure is like. It doesn’t matter that revulsion is the appropriate response to a description of the procedure. It doesn’t matter that any sane person’s stomach churns at even MSNBC’s semi-sanitized version:
The procedure at issue involves partially removing the fetus intact from a woman’s uterus, then crushing or cutting its skull to complete the abortion.
It also escapes the notice of these, what shall we call them? fundamentalistic? proponents of a woman’s right to murder her own children that the same moves they argue against now are identical to the moves they used in 1973. Witness the argument of Planned (Obsolescence of) Parenthood’s Eve Gartner:
“This ruling flies in the face of 30 years of Supreme Court precedent and the best interest of women’s health and safety. … This ruling tells women that politicians, not doctors, will make their health care decisions for them.”
And Justice Ginsberg:
“Today’s decision is alarming,” Ginsburg wrote in dissent for the court’s liberal bloc. She said the ruling “refuses to take … seriously” previous Supreme Court decisions on abortion.
Ginsburg said the latest decision “tolerates, indeed applauds, federal intervention to ban nationwide a procedure found necessary and proper in certain cases by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.”
What about the politicians who signed this hideousness into law 34 years ago? What about the federal intervention 34 years ago? Oh that’s right. Logic has nothing to do with it. Reason has long since left the brains of abortion’s apologists. All that’s left is the single-minded conviction that nothing even appear to interfere with a woman’s “right” to “choose.” Fine. Let’s compromise: you can choose to kill your child, and we’ll choose to put you in jail for it. That’s how the free choice to do something wrong usually works. But women are apparently exempt from the law that covers other, lesser humans.
There is no more time for argument. There is only time to do what’s right. Finally some Supreme Court justices (five out of nine ain’t bad) recognized that. Kyrie eleison. Maranatha!
Balaam's Ass 