With the retirement of Anthony Kennedy, President Trump will be selecting a second justice for the U.S. Supreme Court. As attorney and law professor Jessica Mason Pieklo warns, “that justice will, if conservatives get their way, be the vote that overturns Roe v. Wade once and for all.” That 1973 ruling empowered the abortion industry, whose bosses are now running to the barricades, bullhorns in hand.
In similar style, the Democrat-media-celebrity axis will scream about the religious Right and the separation of church and state. In truth, the new justice, the high court, and the nation need no religious justification to oppose abortion, which is all about dehumanization. The court should understand that the offspring of human beings is human because it can’t be anything else.
Attempts to dehumanize pre-born humans as “fetal tissue” and such run up against that reality. The dehumanizers also clash with the possibilities of surgery on the preborn, and the ability to see them in the womb with increasing clarity. And as mothers and father know, human beings like to get their kicks long before they see the light of day.
These are simple realities, not a religious dogma of any kind. That is also true of the reality that life begins at conception, which was the view of late Christopher Hitchens. Like all orthodox atheists, Hitchens had no use for concepts such as “ensoulment,” some point after conception and before birth when a person becomes fully human. For Hitchens the atheist, life began at conception because there was no other place it could begin. That reality has nothing to do with any religion.
The court should also consider that, as the late Nat Hentoff observed, a change of address does not make you a human being. That, too, is a simple reality, not any kind of religious pronouncement or doctrine. So the great jazz writer and civil libertarian opposed abortion as the taking of a human life. That infuriated his leftist friends, but Hentoff was undeterred.
The abortion industry denies all these realities and maintains that life begins at birth. Even so, advocacy of “partial-birth” abortion, a truly barbarous practice, dispels even that claim.
Abortion godmother Margaret Sanger, who colluded with Ku Kluckers, saw abortion as a way to reduce the number of brown and yellow people. For doctrinaire feminists, it was a way to empower themselves and supposedly get men’s hands off their bodies. For taxpayer-supported Planned Parenthood, it’s allegedly all about “women’s health.” Actually, for Planned Parenthood, abortion is the key to big profits, and not just from the procedure itself.
The abortion industry has diversified into the trade in body parts from dismembered pre-born human beings. Planned Parenthood boss Mary Gatter saw the sale of body parts as a way she could buy a Lamborghini and she asked prospective buyers about the volume and gestational age they needed. When that emerged, pro-abortionists and their congressional and media allies did not protest the profiteering in body parts. Instead, they decried that someone had dared to record the conversation.
Planned Parenthood last year took in $500 million in government funding and performed more than 300,000 abortions across the United States. Over the past decade, the federal government boosted Planned Parenthood’s taxpayer funding by 61 percent, from $336.7 million in 2006 to $543.7 million in 2016. So by any standard, big money is at stake.
President Trump has yet to announce his pick, which Pieklo thinks could be Amy Coney Barrett, Allison Eid, Joan Larsen, or Margaret Ryan, partly to “get over the sexism that is among the defining features of his presidency.” As it happens, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has criticized the legal foundation for Roe v. Wade, which she believes went too far, too fast. At the time of her nomination, NARAL boss Kate Michelman was on record that “Her criticisms of Roe raise concerns about whether she believes that the right to choose is a fundamental right or a lesser right.”
Ginsburg was born on March 15, 1933. Christopher Hitchens believed her life began at conception and Nat Hentoff believed she was just as much a human being on March 1, 1933, as she was the day she “changed her address” some two weeks later. The publicly funded abortion industry doesn’t agree.
How and when the revamped court would deal with Roe v. Wade remains uncertain. But when it does get around to Roe v. Wade, the high court might wonder how many potential Supreme Court justices, presidents and Nobel laureates perished in those 300,000 abortions Planned Parenthood alone “performed” last year. To say nothing of the millions of extinguished human lives since the “landmark” ruling of 1973.
Photo credit: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call