Posted on 04/22/2007 9:33:49 AM PDT by jazusamo
Sunday, April 22, 2007
Here's what the Supreme Court said Congress could prohibit in last week's Gonzales v. Carhart decision. Here's what the Supreme Court said is not included in a woman's constitutional right to an abortion:
A abortion doctor extracts a baby, feet first, from a mother's womb down through the birth canal until only its head remains inside. The abortion doctor plunges the tips of his surgical scissors into the back of the still-living baby's skull, inserts a suction device into the opening and vacuums out the baby's brains. The abortion doctor then proceeds to completely remove the now-dead baby from the mother's womb.
That's a partial-birth abortion.
It's easy to see why abortion rights advocates never get specific about what they like to call a late-term abortion. It must be a special challenge for anyone who argues that this gruesome "procedure" must be protected under a woman's right to choose. People might conclude you have a pretty radical extreme notion of a woman's right to choose if they learn it includes near-infanticide.
That certainly was Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's problem in her overwrought dissent. (She didn't go into details either.) This limited but important decision somehow managed to alarm Ginsburg. She saw it as a full-scale assault on a woman's right to an abortion. Wrote Ginsburg, "The Court's hostility to the right Roe and Casey secured is not concealed."
Of course, Roe v. Wade established a woman's right to abortion in 1973 and Planned Parenthood v. Casey reaffirmed that right 19 years later. One of the justices in the Casey majority was the author of last week's majority opinion. Justice Anthony Kennedy didn't think he was being hostile to Roe or Casey.
Kennedy was nothing if not attentive to the tests he helped fashion in Casey. He found that Congress wasn't creating a "substantial obstacle" by outlawing partial-birth abortions.
"The Act's stated purposes are protecting innocent human life from a brutal and inhumane procedure and protecting the medical community's ethics and reputation . . . ," wrote Kennedy. "Moreover, Casey reaffirmed that the government may use its voice and its regulatory authority to show its profound respect for the life within the woman."
For better or worse, Kennedy returned again and again in last week's decision to the "balance" the Supreme Court struck in the Roe-reaffirming Casey. "Casey confirms the State's interest in promoting respect for human life at all stages in the pregnancy," he wrote. "Physicians are not entitled to ignore regulations that direct them to use reasonable alternative procedures."
Ginsburg isn't interested in balance. Never mind that she thinks Casey and Roe should be construed to make sacrosanct the ghastly and medically controversial procedure Congress outlawed in the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003. She sees unconcealed "hostility" to both decisions in the oddest places in Kennedy's majority opinion.
She is upset Kennedy uses the term "abortion doctor." (Would fetal health care provider be better?)
She's upset Kennedy repeats the "anti-abortion shibboleth" that "women who have abortions come to regret their choices, and consequently suffer from 'severe depression and loss of esteem.' " (No, women in post-abortion recovery groups are just imagining things.)
She's upset Kennedy says "unborn child" and "baby" instead of "fetus" and "late-term abortion" instead of "second trimester pre-viability abortions." (Congratulations, you're having a fetus if you don't have a second trimester pre-viability abortion.)
Ginsburg's dissent reads more like a rap sheet from the thought police than a Supreme Court opinion.
What kind of constitutional right depends on euphemisms and doublespeak for its survival? Maybe the kind that relied on penumbras and emanations for its creation.
Actually, Ginsburg does strike a blow for linguistic clarity -- and, indeed, legal and moral clarity -- at one spot. She points out that the majority opinion accepted Congress' ban on partial-birth abortions because of their brutal nature. But another kind of abortion procedure that Congress left alone "could equally be characterized as 'brutal.' "
Yes, indeed, it could. But, right now, more people grasp the brutality of partial-birth abortion and recognize the struggling humanity of the unborn child at the heart of this "procedure." One of those was a nurse who once assisted the pioneer of the partial-birth abortions. Here's what she told the Senate:
"Dr. [Martin] Haskell went in with forceps and grabbed the baby's legs and pulled them down into the birth canal. Then he delivered the baby's body and the arms, everything but the head. The doctor kept the head right inside the uterus. . . . The baby's little fingers were clasping and unclasping, and his little feet were kicking. Then the doctor stuck the scissors in the back of his head, and the baby's arms jerked out, like a startle reaction, like a flinch, like a baby does when he thinks he is going to fall. The doctor opened up the scissors, stuck a high-powered suction tube into the opening, and sucked the baby's brains out. Now the baby went completely limp. "
It has always seemed unfair, even unseemly, to use such quotes or to describe a partial-birth abortion. But how else to convey the barbarism that some thought should be legal and even constitutional? No more, after last week's balanced and humane Supreme Court ruling.
David Reinhard, associate editor, can be reached at 503-221-8152 or davidreinhard@news.oregonian.com.
Sickening - How can a nation of selfish and cruel individuals justify this?
In a ‘standard’ abortion the baby is usually taken apart piece by piece by a vacuum or forceps with the head taken out last. This means that it is conscious longer and experiences much more pain.
This is a nightmare worse than Hitler’s gas chambers.
great article
I had a discussion with a High School teacher who was very much for partial birth abortion. When I described to him what happens during the proceedure he accused me of making it all up. The next day he called me, very upset because he had checked to see if the information was correct and he wanted to apologize. (HUGE) Why, he wanted to know was this not more widely known? He was now very much opposed to this very cruel proceedure. He admitted to thinking that an abortion was a very clean neat and painless event. The baby just, poof, disappeared in a little cloud. Thank you Dave.
I applaud him for being honest and having enough of an open mind to follow up on your discussion. I suspect there are many who would change their support of it if they knew the particulars.
"Near"?
bump
I hear you but I believe he was speaking from strictly a legal standpoint, another 3 or 4 inches with the head out would have been infanticide under the previous law. But it was still infanticide in my view.
How could a DOCTOR do such a thing? I can’t even read about it without tears of pain and outrage...how could anyone actually do such a thing...and then almost as bad...defend it? There is a lot of evil in this world.
Even more evil is a country that uses the law to justify this
Supreme Court Rules on Abortion Procedure
April 21, 2007
The U.S. Supreme Court upheld Congress’ ban on a gruesome abortion procedure. The 5-4 ruling said the Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act that Congress passed in 2003 is not prohibited by the Constitution. The opponents of the act “have not demonstrated that the Act would be unconstitutional,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion.
Abortion rights groups claim that the partial birth abortion is sometimes the safest procedure for a woman. Dr. Kenneth Killborn, co-chair of Practicing American Physicians for Abortion (PAPA), defended the procedure. “If we were to do the dilation and extraction and pull the fetus out without crushing its skull there’s a chance it might live,” Killborn said. “Even if the woman were not required to take responsibility for the resulting child, she would still be burdened with the knowledge that she was a mother. This could be traumatic and damaging to her health. That’s why we must have a ‘health of the mother’ exception to any proposed limit to the right to an abortion.”
Eve Gartner of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) complained about the Court’s ruling. “These judges aren’t doctors,” Gartner said. “They aren’t competent to overrule 30 years of Supreme Court precedents validating the medical necessity of this procedure.”
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was one of the four dissenting votes on the Court saying that the ruling “deviated from previous Supreme Court decisions” on abortion and “rides roughshod over ‘states rights’ by tolerating, indeed applauding, federal intervention to ban nationwide a procedure found necessary and proper by the doctors performing it.”
In 2000, prior to the addition of Bush appointees John Roberts and Samuel Alito, the court struck down a state ban on partial-birth abortions. Writing for a 5-4 majority then, Justice Breyer said the law imposed an undue burden on a woman’s right to make an abortion decision. “Some women might prefer to have the fetus partially extracted before having it dismembered,” Breyer wrote. “They should not be forced to have it torn apart while fully inside the womb or have to bear the risk of a live birth. As Justice Blackmun wrote in the original Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, ‘a woman must not be forced to become a mother, she must be free to dispose of the tissues her body has created in any manner that seems most conducive to her well-being or personal preferences.’”
Eager to use the ruling to fuel her bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) pounced on the news. “This decision marks a dramatic departure from four decades of Supreme Court rulings that upheld a woman’s right to terminate an unwanted pregnancy,” Clinton asserted. “As the Supreme Court recognized in Roe v. Wade in 1973, there are penumbras and emanations from the Constitution that explicitly justify this medically essential procedure for ending late term pregnancies. It is precisely this erosion of our constitutional rights that I warned against when I opposed the nominations of Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito. I promise that when I am president steps will be taken to neutralize the influence of these men and their ilk or I will have them replaced on the Court.”
read more...
http://www.azconservative.org/Semmens1.htm
It's a matter of development. Few people shed any tears over the death of an embryo, (most of which never implant in the uterus anyway), but only a few psychos would not be bothered by the death of an infant. Partial birth abortion by it's very nature involves a late term pregnancy and I think the vast majority of people find late term abortions to be morally reprehensible.
The subpreme court recognizes the right of Congress to pass a law banning one of those ghoulish methods and the liberal dead souls on the current court see it as an assault on their power to create laws ... don't buy the crap Ruthie is peddling. Ginsberg cares not a whit for the alive unborn nor the females hiring the killers, she's all about the power of the subpreme court to create the social fabric leftists need to take over the country and set the moldy old Constitution aside. Ruth Ginsberg is a dead-soul leftist worshipped by the liberal elite because she is more than willing to create laws from the bench and maintain even the most heinous ones if it empowers liberalism, in contradiction to the separation of powers.
Hillary Clinton - Pure evil.
Dr "Killborn" ay? Fulfilling his name as his destiny.
aka Vince Foster style?
To mimic PJ O'Rourke, abortion is the Holocaust sold by the drink.
Appropriate and accurate mimicking of PJ O’Rourke, Jacquerie.
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