Fred Sneesby - Observations on Culture, Faith and Politics

Supreme Court Meets Reality

April 24, 2007

It should be the law of the land that, for any reason or for no reason, a doctor may expose the head of a nine-month old fetus, crush it, and then dispose of the fetus.

At least that is what Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg thinks. She was so incensed last week that the law prohibiting this medical procedure was judged constitutional by the Supreme Court, that she took the unusual step of issuing a verbal dissent from the bench. Ginsburg declared that, “Today’s decision is alarming.” She decried the fact that, for the first time since 1973, “the court blesses a prohibition with no exception safeguarding a woman’s health” (even though the partial-birth abortion ban very clearly states that the procedure is allowed if the life of the mother is threatened; this is something Justice Ginsburg fails to note). She further complained that this ruling “cannot be understood as anything other than an effort to chip away at a right declared again and again by this court.”

Would you call Justice Ginsburg’s position moderate? Balanced? Reasonable? I would not. I would call it extreme. For all the outcry over the nominations of Justice Roberts and Justice Alito, with the opposition wringing their hands over the prospect of what they saw as extremists being named to the bench, it seems funny now that those who raised such strident objections to Roberts and Alito would deem Ginsburg to be a model jurist. Here she is defying good sense and any measure of common decency while righteously defending the most barbarous and cruel practice imaginable in order to preserve the integrity of the pre-eminent right to choose. Stupefying.

I don’t know much about Justice Ginsburg’s career, but, judging from her tone and reasoning, she must have done extensive legal work for the National Rifle Association (NRA). That organization has become known in our day as the staunch defender of a citizen’s right to bear arms. The right is fairly clearly stated in the Second Amendment; it is quite clear compared to the hazy constitutional basis for the right to choose. Over the years, the NRA has fought against every possible infringement against this right to bear arms. Even the most reasonable restrictions and regulations of gun ownership have been vociferously rejected by the NRA. They have objected to bans of sales of certain types of weapons, they have fought against background checks and waiting periods. For them, the right to bear arms is an absolute right; not the slightest restriction of that right can be tolerated as if there is a base fear that if one inch is given to regulation, the right will be lost altogether. And so, they have earned the reputation of extremists and reactionaries.

Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg and those who share her passion have taken the strategy of the National Rifle Association and transferred it to the reproductive world. The “right to choose” has become so absolute in their minds that even the most reasonable restriction is rejected outright. Like gun ownership to the NRA, the unrestricted right to abortion must remain unassailable to the Bader Ginsburgs of the world. Just as strict NRA members don’t blink at advocating the free sale of large magazine weapons, the Bader Ginsburgs don’t apologize for endorsing the legality of even the most gruesome medical procedures. Somehow, even though such a position cannot be more extreme, the Bader Ginsburgs are cast as the defenders of the status quo and the voices of moderation.

The partial-birth abortion debate makes the extreme pro-choice advocates sputter and become even more irrational than usual. Their carefully crafted rhetoric begins to lose force. The propaganda-speak they have skillfully established in the everyday language of American life loses its magic when the brute facts of the procedure are described. With the partial-birth abortion debate, the pro-choice movement and the Supreme Court have had at long last to begin to deal with reality. And the reality is that abortion is a more complex issue than they would have us believe: it cannot be reduced to a “women’s rights” or a “reproductive rights” issue; it cannot be dismissed as a mere matter of religion or personal morality; it cannot be labeled as anything but fundamental to the health of civil society in the United States.

How exactly did “abortion on demand” become the first principle of women’s rights? Why is it that women’s rights rises and falls with how free women are to abort fetuses? I believe that the connection between unrestricted abortion and women’s rights is artificial and superficial. I say that for two reasons. First of all, unless a woman is being forced to conceive a child, it is unclear to me how she is not free in the whole reproductive process. Now I know that there are some ideologues who would view every sex act as rape, but, as far as I know, most sex is consensual, that is, the woman (and the man) is free to choose whether or not to conceive. In view of this common-sense reality, “women’s rights,” “reproductive rights,” and the right to have an abortion really become the right of women “to have sex with men they don’t want to have children with,” in the perceptive words of Ann Coulter in her book, Godless.

Secondly, reproduction is not a unilateral enterprise. In other words, bringing children into the world is not the sole responsibility or property of women. Conceiving children involves both women and men. Caring for the fetus involves both women and men. Raising children involves both women and men. Reproductive rights involve both women and men. How aborting a fetus became an individual woman’s decision is beyond me. That reasoning rests on an odd and entirely skewed understanding of creating human life and on an extremely individualistic view of the world and human relations.

The opposing sides of the long-standing abortion debate have become so entrenched and their arguments so rote that a strong dose of reality is just what the doctor ordered – for the Supreme Court and all those who think about these issues.