Faith-based Decision?

I just read a recent editorial in the Chicago Tribune, Our Faith-based Justices, regarding the recent Supreme Court decision upholding a ban on so-called partial birth abortion, actually termed intact dilatation and extraction (IDX).

Here is a painfully awkward observation: All five justices in the majority in Gonzales are Roman Catholic. The four justices who are not all followed clear and settled precedent. It is distressing to have to point this out. But it is a fact that merits attention. In similar circumstances, where a decision could not credibly be explained in terms of traditional legal analysis, the same sort of observation would be appropriate and necessary if five Jewish justices disregarded precedent to vote in favor of the interests of Israel or five African-American justices disregarded precedent to vote in support of black reparations.

First of all, is there anyone who does not bring their own worldview into every facet of their lives including their jobs? It is, after all, who we are. We can apply this same reasoning to the four justices who are not Catholic. They voted the way they did because they apparently do not fundamentally hold a view that all human life should be respected and protected. It is actually their view that cannot credibly be explained in terms of traditional legal analysis.

What I mean is this. The challenge to the ban was based on the assertion that it could not be applied constitutionally because it did not contain an exception for the health of the mother. This challenge, that the law could not be applied constitutionally, is called a “facial” challenge.

Congress, when they passed the ban, had found, after examining all the evidence, that there were other alternatives available to protect the health of the mother and that if no alternative is available in a particular instance, the federal ban could not be invoked to bar IDX. The Supreme Court affirmed this finding by Congress. The court also concluded that this ban does not impose an undue burden on the abortion right, since women could still choose to have abortions, just not this particular type of abortion.

True, the majority opinion affirmed that respect for life is among legitimate government interests, but how is this a particularly “religious” view? Shouldn’t we all have respect for life? If not, why are our prisons filled with convicted murderers? Let them go! They’ve done nothing wrong, because “Thou shalt not kill” is a religious law, and we can’t be imposing religious laws on the state.

IDX is a particularly barbaric procedure that only avoids being considered infanticide by inches. Ask your doctor if he/she would ever perform this procedure on a woman whose health was at risk. If a woman’s health is at risk in the latest stages of pregnancy, the procedure of choice is delivery of the baby via cesarean section, since IDX actually would put the mother’s health more at risk.

IDX requires inducing a breach birth in a near term pregnancy, then while the baby’s head is still in the birth canal, the skull is punctured and the baby’s brains are sucked out. In a healthy mother where the baby is in breach presentation, the doctor will try to turn the baby. If unable to do so, the doctor will perform a cesarean section, since a breach birth is much more dangerous to both mother and baby. Why then, would a doctor choose IDX for a mother whose health is at risk?

Frankly, they wouldn’t. Even Justice Ginsberg acknowledges this in a twisted way in her dissenting opinion.

In this insistence, the Court brushes under the rug the District Courts’ well-supported findings that the physicians who testified that intact D&E is never necessary to preserve the health of a woman had slim authority for their opinions. They had no training for, or personal experience with, the intact D&E procedure, and many performed abortions only on rare occasions.

Oh, I see. Those doctors who routinely work to preserve the lives of both mother and child would never use IDX to preserve the health of the mother, but their opinions don’t carry authority because they have never used IDX to preserve the health of the mother.

Why such twisted logic? Why is there such an outcry over this decision from the pro-abortion forces? The dirty little secret that they don’t want to give voice to is that IDX is never used to protect the health of the mother but almost exclusively used to kill a child with birth defects.