Your Lords and Masters, The Supreme Court: Babies Must Die So The Court Can Reign. Who Is Next?

It is a consolation much needed as Roe v. Wade nears its thirtieth anniversary. If you do not consider abortion a grave injustice, consider what the world looks like to those of us who do. More than 40 million unborn lives have been snuffed out — which implies that something like a third of American women have had their sons or daughters killed. A quarter of unborn children die this way.

The most respected political institution in the land, the Supreme Court, says that all this killing is protected by the Constitution. So in the event you persuaded your fellow citizens and elected representatives to do something about the death toll, it wouldn't matter. The courts would just unleash the abortionists again, and lecture you to accept the judicial resolution of the issue. Even peaceful protest outside the places these killings occur is uniquely circumscribed.

Many people agree with you that abortion is wrong. But most people, whatever their view of abortion, do not want to hear a word about the subject. Most people, whatever their view of abortion, regard people like you as fanatics.

UPS AND DOWNS
Ten years ago was the nadir of the movement. The abortion rate had kept climbing: In 1990, 1.6 million abortions were committed. Public opinion kept moving left. By June 1992, Gallup estimated that 34 percent of the public believed that abortion should be legal in all cases. That same month, the Supreme Court reaffirmed Roe, albeit with qualifications, in Casey v. Planned Parenthood. It did so, moreover, at the direction of three Republican appointees whom many pro-lifers had supported in the hope they would overturn Roe.

Later that year, the most pro-abortion president since Roe was elected. On his first day in office — the same weekend as the twentieth anniversary of Roe — he issued a series of executive orders liberalizing abortion law. It was widely suggested that he had been elected in part because the public supported legal abortion, and that Republicans would have to come around if they were ever to win the White House again.

But the early 1990s turn out to have been high tide for "abortion rights." The annual number of abortions peaked in 1990. Fewer doctors are performing abortions, and fewer medical students want to learn how to perform them. Surveys attribute this reluctance more to moral qualms than to fear of anti-abortion violence or protest.

Even at the peak, most Americans disappointed pro-abortion ideologues by persisting in seeing abortion as a tragedy rather than a routine medical procedure. Parents do not dream of one day telling people about "my son the abortionist." Few men brag about pressuring their girlfriends or wives into having abortions. Unease about abortion is so widespread that the politicians most committed to keeping it legal rarely use the word, preferring to talk about "choice." Abortion is the right that dare not speak its name.

The unease has only grown. Since 1995, the polls have been moving in the pro-life direction. Almost as many Americans now call themselves "pro-life" as "pro-choice." The numbers appear to have been driven by the debate over partial-birth abortion — a debate in which, for the first time, it was the pro-choicers who looked like extremists to middle-ground Americans. Most Americans still think that abortion should be legal when a pregnancy results from rape or incest, or threatens the life or physical health of the mother. But a majority would ban most abortions. Only a quarter of the population now believes abortion should be legal in all cases.

Even at the high tide of pro-choice sentiment, there was never much evidence that opposition to abortion was politically dangerous. Exit polls have always shown that pro-lifers are more willing to vote on abortion than pro-choicers are, and that pro-life candidates therefore have a substantial advantage. That Republicans can win while opposing abortion is now even clearer. For the first time since Roe was decided, the president, the Senate leadership, and the House leadership are all pro-life. Two months ago, pro-life Republicans won four hotly contested Senate seats — in Georgia, Minnesota, Missouri, and North Carolina — partly on the abortion issue. On this thirtieth anniversary of Roe, morale among pro-lifers is high.

The pro-choice side continues to hold the political high ground in one very important sense: It's the party of the status quo. That makes it easy to portray the pro-lifers as the aggressors, when what the public most wants on abortion is peace and quiet. This perhaps explains why Democratic senators are happy to grill Republican judicial nominees on whether they support Roe, while Republicans hardly uttered a peep about the Clinton administration's explicit pro-Roe litmus test for its nominees. In his confirmation hearings, attorney general John Ashcroft, following White House instructions, said that he "accept[s] Roe and Casey as the settled law of the land": "The Supreme Court's decisions on this have been multiple, they have been recent, and they have been emphatic."

That was a substantial concession. But it was also an exception for Bush, who has surprised and gratified pro-lifers with his constancy. Many congressional Republicans were ready to abandon pro-lifers by supporting federal funding for research on "surplus" embryos from fertility clinics. Bush came out against such funding. He also called for an outright ban on the cloning of human embryos, even though many scientists want to be able to do research using (and in the process destroying) these embryos.

President Bush cut off government funding for international organizations that commit abortion or advocate it. He signed a bill clarifying that the child who somehow survives an abortion is entitled to legal protection. This year, Bush is expected to seek a bill to ban partial-birth abortions. Should there be a vacancy on the Supreme Court, no doubt he will nominate someone whose judicial philosophy could be expected to please pro-lifers. (The alternative would be to throw away his hard-won credibility in an instant.)

Pro-lifers should push for more. The law on survivors of abortion ought to be toughened. Breaking it should entail penalties, including the withdrawal of federal funds from hospitals. Pro-lifers should move, as well, to ban all elective abortions past, say, the twentieth week of pregnancy. They need to do political work outside Washington, too, especially seeking new recruits among blacks and Hispanics who oppose abortion.

ASPECTS OF A DEBATE
Busy as the pro-life movement is with its traditional work of combating abortion, it is also having to fight new battles. In the last two years, the issue of research on human embryos has suddenly moved to the forefront of pro-life concerns. The public's initial reaction to cloning embryos, as measured in polls, has been opposition. But that opposition has to be mobilized now if it is not to dissipate as cloning comes to be seen as normal.

The embryo-research debate simultaneously is, and isn't, the same as the abortion debate. In both cases, pro-lifers are acting to vindicate the same principle: that human beings, from the moment they come into being as distinct organisms, have a right not to be killed. Supporters of the research, meanwhile, have sometimes suggested that a society that allows abortion has no principled basis for forbidding it. Both sides in the embryo-research debate, however, have taken pains to separate it from abortion.

A woman's rights over "her own body" cannot be asserted here, and people who want the research to be legal do not claim to be "personally opposed" to it. As such, the debate has turned, more than the abortion debate, on the moral claims of the embryo. Many research supporters say that human embryos deserve "respect," but that this respect cannot be made so absolute as to preclude their intentional destruction for good ends. One gathers that respect for human embryos would instead be manifested in discussions of the importance of having respect for them.

Whatever the rhetoric employed to advance it, the argument for going ahead with the research rests on the premise that merely belonging to the human species does not confer a right not to be killed. This also, ultimately, has to be the argument for a "right" to abortion (although other, prudential arguments could be made against legal prohibitions). On this view, human beings are not intrinsically worthy of protection. If particular human beings may be worth protecting, it is on the basis of accidental qualities they may have: sentience, independence, rootedness in a community, size, or what have you.

The trouble for people wishing to defend these propositions is that these qualities come in degrees. That means, first, that there is no non-arbitrary point at which to start granting protection: How old must a person be, how well must his mind function, for him to enjoy a right to life? Second, on this account there is no basis for asserting an equality of rights among people with different levels of the particular quality held to be crucial — as Lincoln observed in another context. Roe is undemocratic not merely in a procedural sense.

Some contemporary philosophers, most notoriously Peter Singer, have grasped the difficulty of containing the principle behind abortion and embryo research. They concede that the argument for abortion is also the argument for outright infanticide. This is not a reason to prohibit abortion, they say, but rather to reconsider infanticide. American law has not yet achieved this dreadful consistency. But it is moving closer.
The true radicalism of Roe is still not sufficiently appreciated. Many educated people believe that Roe legalized abortion only in the first trimester, allowing it to be restricted in the second and banned in the third. In fact, Doe v. Bolton, handed down the same day as Roe, took back those apparent concessions. Abortions had to be allowed at all stages of pregnancy whenever continued pregnancy was said to jeopardize a woman's "physical, emotional, psychological, [or] familial" health.

It has often been said that the Court's error was to fast-forward a process of liberalization that was already taking place democratically. That's not true either. Before Roe, a few states had substantially weakened protections for the unborn. But the movement for liberalization then stalled, with many more states voting it down in legislatures and in referenda. Justice Blackmun, the author of Roe, tried to downplay its radicalism by depicting it as consistent with American history. Much of the opinion is dedicated to demonstrating that American law never sought to protect the unborn. The shoddy historical work on which he relied has since been thoroughly discredited.

The truth is that Roe was a breathtaking power grab by the Supreme Court, allowing abortion at any stage of pregnancy, nullifying laws in all fifty states, and going far beyond anything contemplated by public opinion before or since. Not even law professors who favor constitutional protection for abortion believe that Roe was well reasoned. Indeed, an academic cottage industry has spent thirty years trying to devise better constitutional foundations for Roe's result. (What this effort has lacked in plausibility, it has made up for in determination.)

RELENTLESS LOGIC
Contrary to John Ashcroft, the Court's abortion jurisprudence is not settled law, either. The latest abortion decision, issued the year before Ashcroft spoke, kept partial-birth abortion free from state bans. It was a 5-4 split in which the principal authors of Casey disagreed with some bitterness about Casey's meaning. Casey itself reworked Roe in significant ways, and hinted that a majority of the Court thought that Roe was a mistake.

But it is a mistake from which the Court is unwilling to retreat. The lack of a settlement in abortion law — the fact that Roe has exposed the Court to decades of intellectual ridicule and political resistance — seems to be experienced by the Court as a scandal. When the Court reaffirmed "abortion rights" in Casey, it cited the need for stability in law, which is a real virtue. But it also said that to admit error and reverse itself on Roe would be to undermine its own power unacceptably.

When they struck down state bans on partial-birth abortion, the federal courts showed just how far they were willing to go to protect their abortion jurisprudence. One federal judge noted that such bans were enacted in order to set a firm barrier against infanticide — and that, he implied, was not possible legally. Another disputed the characterization of a baby partly out of the birth canal as partly born: "A woman seeking an abortion is plainly not seeking to give birth." The baby, whatever the stage of pregnancy, counts for nothing independent of the mother's desires.

When the Supreme Court followed these judges' example, it put a lot of weight on the mother's health. But the Court wasn't saying merely that a woman has a right to a partial-birth abortion when it is the safest way of dealing with a threat to her health: It said that a woman in the eighth month of pregnancy who wants her baby dead, whatever her reason, has a right to have that baby killed in whatever way is safest to her. What if the safest way is to deliver the baby, fully, and then kill it? Yet another federal judge had asked what difference it made, from the perspective of the fetus, whether part of its body were outside the birth canal when his skull was punctured and his brain sucked out. What difference would it make if his whole body had been delivered? The Born-Alive Act signed into law last year was written to prevent this next logical step from being taken. But it is not yet clear what effect that act will have.

When pro-lifers began their campaign against partial-birth abortion, they knew that they ran the risk of legitimizing infanticide rather than delegitimizing abortion. In the courts and in the academy, that danger may be coming to pass. This is thus as important a moment for pro-lifers as any in the last thirty years. They have new opportunities in Washington. If they succeed in banning cloning, they can establish the principle that human beings have a right to life regardless of their age, size, wantedness, location, stage of development, or condition of dependency. They can save some unborn children, as even fairly modest state laws appear to have done.

What happens if they lose? The idea that widespread infanticide could ever come to America is, of course, crazy. Babies are cute, they cannot be mistaken for globs of cells, and there is a natural human instinct to protect them. Other cultures may not have treated them so tenderly, to be sure. But that could never happen here. We're nice people.

So....get a constitutional amendment banning abortion through Congress (fat chance) and through the requisite number of state legislatures (fat chance) and --- no more Consititutional issues. Is this realistic? No.

Okay, plan B.
(1) Get all abortions defunded of federal money - including Planned Parenthood.
(2) Get a partial birth abortion ban pushed through Congress.
(3) Then fund an adoption program for mothers who bring their children to term and put them up for adoption. Use some of those "faith-based" initiatives to organize adoptive parents and hook up those babies with adoptive parents.

Are these feasible now with a Republican President, a Republican House and Senate? Yes.

I agree 100%. The clue here is to *cut off the oxygen* of any taxpayer funding whatever for abortion, on any level.

We really need to support pre-marital abstinence programs, and NOT just for high school students. Birth control by itself isn't enough, because the fertility rates of women age 18-25 is phenomenally high. Even with use of birth control, pregnancies in that age group still routinely occur. Girls need the *facts* about premarital sex when they're young, and need to understand that the statistics bandied about by the birth control clinics are NOT accurate for them, and that they have higher risks of pregnancy. The safest course is to abstain until marriage. That will go a long way to cutting down abortion rates.

The less girls who have abortions, the more possible it will be to bring about the political changes needed for a Human Life Amendment - the only sure-fire way to not only overturn Roe, but forbid any state laws allowing abortion on demand.

Scarecrow up...and scarecrow down.

Do you insist upon debating only yourself?

Roe/Doe/Danforth/Webster/Casey/Carhardt need to be overturned. There are three Supreme Court Justices willing to make that change.

In all likelihood, President Bush will have the opportunity to appoint two more. If he appoints them, the Republican Congress will find a way to get them through, because they know they can't win re-election without GWB.

The future of the country depends upon who GWB appoints. And on precious little else.

Given those two more anti-Roe justices appointed and confirmed, a post-Roe nation would see some states banning abortion, others making it free and easy, and everything in between.

Which scenario is a hell of a lot better than the current one.

By the way, under the Supreme Court's Carhardt decision, a Congressional "ban" on PBA would be held "unConsitutional" unless it contained exceptions broad enough to throw Mt. Olympus through.

America is under the spiked heel of black-robed slavemasters. Nothing less. Thus the title that I added to this article.

Born-Alive

Instead of an Orwellian underscoring of the linchpin of Personhood at present (born equal, not created equal), what should have happened was a move to prosecute for homicide the killing of "hey-presto, I made it through the birth canal" infants.

Lots of talk about "women's healthcare" and "reproductive rights" ... which rights -- as any cursory look at the Libertarian platform will reveal -- revolve primarily around her right to choose the death of her child.

One of the women -- magnificent witness -- to speak today told of her current project that is collecting the state-mandated regulations for abortion clinics from across the land. She's covered about 1/2 of the 50 states thus far and 1/2 of those have no regulations at all. They most certainly don't have the 37 pages a surgical center might have, need not post whether or not their physicians can obtain malpractice insurance or have admit privileges at local hospitals, and need not carry liability insurance at all.

(Government-funded Planned Parenthood having the deep pockets in their vested interest necessary to cover legal fees and ensure protective orders when things go awry.)

Seems strange, does it not, that abortuaries as pinnacles of "women's healthcare" are such third-world operations.

Yesterday the 30th Aniv. of Roe V Wade

The Pro-Life Christians morned the American Holocaust...over 40 million Americans murdered
40 Million-of the most innocent Americans...

Ministers around the nation urged Americans to look into their hearts...and see what the Church has allowed to happen without hardly a wimper of protest let alone the outrage that should grip us...

WE no longer morn over our sins...or as a nation take action against those who would drag us down into the filth...we look the other way..we buy their music their videos we idolize them...
We are a sick people..who like to think of ourselves as special as blessed by God in the world..
How much longer will God stay his hand?...

According to biblical history...if God does not chastize America, (as Rev. Billy Graham once said) on judgement day, have to apologize to Sodom and Gommorah-

Dear President Bush, With the Surpeme Court session getting ready to close, it may well be time for perhaps the most important domestic decision of your presidency: the appointment of a Supreme Court Justice(s). The main reason why I supported you in 2000 and why I wanted Daschle out of power in 02 (and 04) has to do with the courts. I want America courts to interpret law, not write law. During your presidential campaign you said Thomas and Scalia were your two model justices. Those are excellent models. The High Court needs more like them. Clarence Thomas recently said to students that the tough cases were when what he wanted to do was different from what the law said. And he goes by the law. This should be a model philosophy for our justices. Your father, President Bush lost his reelection campaign for 3 main reasosn, as far as I can see. 1. he broke the no new taxes pledge 2. David Souter 3. Clinton convinced people we were in a Bush recession (which we had already come out of by the time Clinton was getting sworn in)

I urge you to learn from all three of these: 1. on taxes, you're doing great. Awesome job on the tax cut. 2. good job so far on judicial appointments. I want to see more of a fight for Estrada, Owen, and Pickering, but I commend you on your nominations. 3. by staying engaged in the economic debate you'll serve yourself well

I have been thoroughly impressed with your handling of al Queida, Iraq, and terrorism. You have inspired confidence and have shown great leadership.

But I want to remind you that your Supreme Court pick(s) will be with us LONG after you have departed office. I urge you to avoid the tempation to find a "compromise" pick. Go for a Scalia or Thomas. Don't go for an O'Connor or Kennedy. To be specific, get someone who is pro-life. Roe v Wade is one of the worst court decisions I know of, and it's the perfect example of unrestrained judicial power.

I know the temptation will be tremendous on you to nominate a moderate. But remember who your true supporters are. I am not a important leader or politician. I am "simply" a citizen who has been an enthusiatic supporter of you. I am willing to accept compromise in many areas of government but I will watch your Court nomiantions extremely closely. What the Senate Dems are doing right now is disgusting, but as the President you have the bully pulpit to stop it. Democrats will back down if you turn up serious heat on them.

Moreover, I think public opinion is shifting towards the pro-life position. Dems will want you to nominate a moderate, but almost all will vote against you anyways. Pro-choice Repubs will likely still vote for you if you nominate a Scalia, after all, you campaigned on it. So Mr. President, I urge you to stick with your campaign statements and nominate justices who believe in judicial restraint, like Scalia and Thomas.

Happy Memorial Day and may God bless you and your family.

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