Letters to the Editor
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Non-partial birth abortion
First of all, there is not such medical term as "partial birth abortion" But, as long as it seems that people can just make-up names for procedures, I'll submit this one. It's a substitute for the now otlawed procedure and I'm going to call it the 'non-partial birth abortion' It can be performed in the 2nd or third trimester and it goes like this. A woman carrying a severly deformed or ancephlic fetus decides to end her pregnancy. Labor is then induced and she goes through either the delivery (or cesarian). The child is born, severely deformed at 22 weeks gestation. It spends 2 weeks (maybe) in Neonatal Intentsive Care then expires. The woman and her family send the entire $100,000 bill to the Supreme Court. Works for me.
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politics creates the gap
Lynn Harris begins her article with a political poke at Bush and friends. Before you lump me in with those folks, my former posts are decidedly anti-Bush and quite agnostic in my religious beliefs. Here's how I see the mess:
As long as there is a partisan reason to for the Supreme Court to rule or Congress to debate with a jaundiced eye toward the truth, we'll continue to have this argument.
Common sense should indicate that a woman's health take precedent over that of the unborn child. Denying a non-invasive means of protecting the life of the mother is senseless.
Equally senseless and equally of no morality is the decision most pro-choice folks make about abortion in general. When wanting or not wanting a child deems the unborn as tissue or a human at the whim of anyone, we have lost our bearings. No one has the right to claim it is not a child from even the moment of conception just because it is not desirable to have a child.
As long as we accept such varying opinions of life, the child's or the mother's, and it is based on getting votes or supporting political agendas of any kind, this nonsense will live on forever.
We are afraid to call all this what it truly is, and that is part of a self-centered-who-cares nation with values of convenience.
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Supremes Reprise Same Tired Old Tune
A bare majority of the Supremes handed down a "fatwah" against women yesterday. Disregarding poll after poll after poll over the last thirty-plus years showing the majority of Americans favor retaining Roe v. Wade, the usual suspects on the court became the Mullahs of Morality...telling women how little they can control what happens to their own bodies. On the bright side, this will most certainly become a rallying-point for Progressives; the '08 election looms large for those who have, virtually, taken a woman's right to choose for granted. Abortion has become another litmus test, if you will, for all candidates in '08. The Supremes postponed for the next session, however, their ruling on when, not if, women will be required to wear a burqa when out in public.
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Call their bluff
Most states have a provision to allow women to abandon their newborns at police stations and firehouses. Do that. When there are a million, million and a half babies on the public dole, the Republicans won't want to foot that bill and short of just exterminating these children outright, you'll probably see them whip around to allow abortions pretty damn quick. Yeah Yeah sanctity of live, all god's chillun's god wings blah blah blah. But we're talking tax dollars here, and they are more important than the Fat Baby Jesus Himself. In fact I'd like to see a program where all these children are dumped on the lilly whitest, reddest rural red states of them all.
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Can we please retire the argument
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.