Letters to the Editor

• Can we please retire the argument

  [Read the article: Supreme Court upholds ban on "partial-birth" abortion]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  That a fetus, if "left alone" as Anu Singh puts it, will magically become a human? This is just one of the many logical fallacies the pro-life movement seems to engage in to try to convince us to ignore women's rights. Embryos are not people. Embryos become people if a woman who is gestating them eats well, doesn't smoke, doesn't drink, doesn't do anything risky that might entail the embryo dying, basically if she cares for it day and night for nine months to make it grow into a baby. And even if women do that, a huge number of embroys die on their own before the woman knows she is pregnant, and a significant portion of those that make it a few months die on their own anyway. If you leave a fetus alone - say by taking it out of the womb - it doesn't become a human, it stays a bunch of tissue with the pontential to be a human if a woman intervenes to make it one.

  The majority opinion in Planned Parenthood & Carhart is stunningly bad law, as one writer already pointed out. Just as bad, Kennedy seems to have just abandoned all notion of impartiality in his ruling and instead adopted the ridiculous language of the right, calling the fetus an "unborn baby" and prestigious OBGYNs "abortion doctors." And the random tangent about how the bond between a mother and her child is sacred? What the hell was that about? Who cares? We're talking here about women who aren't mothers, and don't want to be forced to become them, the importance of the bond between women and the children they do have is irrelevant to the abortion discussion.

  I wish I could take solace in Ginsburg's dissent, which didn't pull any punches, but I think she has clearly mapped out where things could go from here. There is no difference in the respect for life accorded a fetus in a regular D&E than in an intact D&E - it's the same fetus, the same stage of development. So now we have a ridiculous precedent saying we respect life pre-viability in the second trimester and pretty soon some legislator will recognize the incongruence of only recognizing it for the purpose of one surgical procedure and decide to ban all second-trimester abortions. This decision, aside from putting the seal of approval on legislators and judges deciding what procedures are best for doctors' patients, could turn in to the foundation of a serious challenge to the validity of Roe.

  Permalink Thursday, April 19, 2007 05:22 AM