USA Today Edward Whelan April 19, 2007
Ruling bars barbaric practice, sets stage for more abortion curbs.
All Americans should welcome the Supreme Court ruling upholding the federal ban on partial-birth abortion.
Let’s begin with the facts. Partial-birth abortion is a method of late-term abortion in which the abortionist dilates the mother’s cervix, extracts the baby’s body by the feet until all but the head has emerged, stabs scissors into the head, sucks out the baby’s brains, collapses the baby’s skull, and delivers the dead baby. This atrocity is inflicted up to 5,000 times a year in this country — generally on healthy babies of healthy mothers.
Americans on both sides of the abortion divide recognize that partial-birth abortion is barbaric. That’s why bipartisan majorities in Congress, including Democrats such as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, voted for the partial-birth law.
The five justices in the majority who upheld the law exercised judicial restraint and properly deferred to the democratic process. The four liberal judicial activists in dissent — led by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who maintains that the Constitution even requires taxpayer-funded abortion — sought to impose their own extremist agenda.
In its 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court imposed on the American people a radical regime of unrestricted abortion. Wednesday’s ruling offers some hope of moderating that regime.
In particular, the court made clear that laws regulating abortion should generally be attacked only in their application to particular circumstances.
Americans now have the green light to enact state partial-birth bans modeled on the federal ban. Legislatures should also pursue more robust informed-consent rules on, for example, ultrasound imaging and fetal pain.
More broadly, the ruling shows that the court’s decades-long power grab on abortion has failed to generate a coherent consensus among the justices. With further improvements in the court’s makeup, abortion policy can be restored to where it belongs: to citizens acting through their legislators.
Edward Whelan is president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C.
So…let me get this straight.
It’s now confirmed to be illegal to halfway deliver a baby, vacuum its brains out, and then finish delivering it.
However, it’s still legal to pull a baby out of the womb piece by bloody piece.
Some victory.
Yes, you are correct. It is really no victory at all. Perhaps this maybe an indication of some cultural shift. However, until then, we will have a skull pile made from the unborn that rivals that of Tamarlane.
The moral imperative to reduce abortion stems from a greater concern for human life that extends outside the womb. The statistics are now telling that babies are dying at a higher rate because of a deteriorating public health system and ideologically-driven initiatives to reduce social programs that assist the poor.
In Turnabout, Infant Deaths Climb in South , NY Times April 22, 2007
Note 3. Dean writes:
The moral imperative to reduce abortion rests in a recovery of the dignity of human life starting with “thou shalt not kill.” Quit trying to paint pro-lifers as uncaring about human life because they don’t agree with all liberal social programs by citing this or that report that makes no connection with abortion whatsoever.
Looking further into the article we find this:
Sounds to me like it’s related to what afflicts children across the board: the breakdown of family. Surely this needs to be addressed, but fodder for a screed against pro-lifers (or is it conservatives in general?) it is not.
It is not a screed against pro-lifers since I consider myself one, and believe there is a Christian moral imperative to sharply reduce abortion. It is a jab at some of the conservative economic policies of the last decade.
Contrary to comment by the Vatican official in the other article recently posted, Christian morality should encompass a wider range of concerns than abortion, gay marriage and terrorism.
There is certainly an association between poverty and a wide range of social and moral ills including both abortion and infant death. A society that places a higher value on tax cuts for billionaires than it does addressing poverty, should not be surprised when the rates of abortion and infant death, both begin climbing. Mississippi’s per capita spending on health care and education is among the lowest in the nation, and no surprise, it’s indicators for social well being are among the worst.
As during Hurricane Katrina we are seeing pockets of the United States that resemble the Third World. There is no doubt that breakdown of the family has strongly contibuted to the rise in infant death. The infants cited in the article were all born to single mothers with poor educational backbrounds, and had fathers who were missing or only sporadically present. Churches and charitable organizations could certainly play greater role instilling positive moral values and addresssing the physical and health care needs of the rural southern poor. But government also has a role to play coordinating efforts and directing resources, government services and block grant money to the areas where they are needed.
Dean writes:
There you go again. Did you read the article? Again:
The reasons the doctors cite are: obesity and laziness. Not pretty and certainly politcally incorrect, but I would trust the doctors on the scene, who the reporter obviously felt necessary to quote even though the undermines his thesis in the opening paragraphs — a thesis you bought hook, line, and sinker, BTW. But the facts undermine the thesis, except for a few quotes from social workers which you have to take judiciously. I guess most people don’t read beyond the first few paragraphs.
The article fits all the liberal prejudices: pro-lifers don’t care for the poor, rural southern backwardness, poor blacks, liberal programs offer a magic bullet, in short all the elements that make for unassailable moral posturing. And right when the presidential race is heating up. Imagine that.
Yes, it does but do we trust the Democrat leadership to do it right? All uniformly criticized the Supreme Court decision last week banning partial birth abortion. They have yet to face the failures of the Great Society. It’s just more of the same.
There is a connection between poverty and obesity, but it has nothing to do with laziness. If you have a limited amount of money to spend on food you can obtain the most calories for your dollar purchasing junk food and fast food. Junk food and fast food are inexpensive compared to healthier food because the are made from a product heavily subsidized by the US government, namely corn.
Corn products are calorie rich and added to almost every form of processed food and soft drink. Cheap corn is also ued to feed hogs, cattle and poultry making those meat products inexpensive as well.
Michael Pollan, author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” writes
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/22/magazine/22wwlnlede.t.html?ex=1335067200&en=56d0833dcf38897c&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
When you have a Congress that it takes it’s marching orders on agricultural policy from Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland and schools that fail to provide P.E as they once did and fail to educate students on health and nutrition, obsity among poorly educated lower-income people in not an unexpected result.
Dean Scourtes, it saddens me that you are unable to use this opportunity simply to celebrate, with many of us, even for a moment, that there may be fewer instances of what amounts to infanticide as a result of this ruling.
Note 7. Where are you going with this? First it was pro-lifers/conservatives that were to blame for an increasing child mortality rate, now it’s Cargill’s and Archer Daniels Midland’s fault. You also responded as if obesity and laziness are linked, when in fact no such conlusion was drawn in my earlier response.
Again, did you read the article all the way through? It formed the basis for you initial assertion that pro-lifers/conservatives were to blame (and one the article challenges). But now we’ve moved into the world inhabited by “The Nation” and “Mother Jones” — which is to say far from the limits of rational discourse.
So again (for the third time) let’s read what doctors on the scene said (quoted from the article you provided):
Do you see why I called your initial posting a screed?
Dean –
My 19 year old niece abandoned her infant daughter to her parents, moved out of her half-million dollar home, and shacked up with her boyfriend. That was after she dropped out of college, ruined her credit, and managed to blow through 10 jobs in two months.
I have another niece who moved out of her parents’ home to move in with her emotionally and physically abusive boyfriend. They live in an Airstream trailer. Her parents put her older sisters through college.
They’re both off having nice lives. One’s a teacher, the other does graphic design.
Both of these girls are in the process of self-destructing, while each has siblings off pursuing the American dream. Both of them grew up in religious homes with solidly middle class lives. Their families are in-tact, no divorce anywhere in my family for generations. No substance abuse issues, no physical abuse.
These two girls just flat jumped off a cliff.
Sure, poor girls have it rougher than others, but you can’t isolate out personal responsibility. Poor girls, middle class girls, rich girls – they all end up pregnant in exactly the same way. My niece had pre-natal care available, she didn’t feel like going. She ate McDonalds and drank soda throughout her pregnancy. She never took care of herself, so her baby was born early and underweight with complications.
Now her baby lives with my brother, who takes home more in a month in salary than her daughter’s boyfriend earns in 6 working dead-end jobs to keep the beer flowing.
Some people actually choose to mess up their lives, and their kids’ lives.
What, pray tell, government program is going to stop that?
The main point, which no one seems to get, is that anti-abortion initiatives stand on firmer moral ground, and are more credible, when they emerge from a more comprehensive, womb-to-tomb concern for life, rather than a narrowly-focused emphasis on just 9-months of the human existence.
A Pro-Life movement that says, we care about saving unborn children, but could care less about keeping them healthy after they are born undermines it’s own moral authority. That is why it is strange for me to see juxtaposed on the blog, one article praising a Supreme Court decision upholding a ban on a certain type of abortion, and another deploring State initiatives to expand health care coverage for children.
Well, part of the problem is that these programs for coverage for “children” often go to whole families or adults as the program is expanded, placing an unfair burden on other segments of the population.
That’s another myth from the Big Republican Book of Fairy Tales. Actually many states are struggling with how to maintain funding for their existing populations of children in poverty.
For example, the National Conference of State Legislatures reports:
GEORGIA CONSIDERS HOW TO ADAPT TO SCHIP FUNDING SHORTFALL, March 5, 2007
You know what, I do not know if it is true or not. However, I do know that the Church has a responsibility to help others. So, let us renew our efforts to help our brothers and sisters.
The main point, which no one seems to get, is that anti-abortion initiatives stand on firmer moral ground, and are more credible, when they emerge from a more comprehensive, womb-to-tomb concern for life, rather than a narrowly-focused emphasis on just 9-months of the human existence.
Oh we get it. Unless we by into the liberal/socialist view of man and government, then the “moral ground” of affirming the human person in the womb is not “credible”. And you wonder why it is so obvious to others that your a Marxist first, and probably many other things after that before you are a Christian (if at all)…
Dean, you’ve got it backwards. Democratic presidential candidates — all of them — uniformly criticized the ban on partial birth abortion. All one has to do is describe the procedure to reveal how cowardly their positions are. And the cowardice erodes their moral authority which makes your argument that prolifers (and by extension social conservatives) don’t care about human life ring increasingly hollow. People can put two and two together.
Christopher, lighten up a bit. Dean is not a Marxist. He is a Christian. Dean confuses the polemical appeals of cultural Marxism with the imperatives of the Gospel at times, but many people make this mistake. Don’t assume ill will on his part, and don’t mistake his frustration at being coherently (and often successfully) challenged as a sign he is not listening. It is very hard for a committed liberal to admit that social conservativism might be right because the change involves more than the adoption of new ideas. It requires the admission that liberal ideals function in quasi-religious terms — never an easy thing for any liberal to admit to himself.
Fr. Jacobse,
I think your way too generous to Dean (generous to a fault). By the evidence we have here, Dean is not in any meaningful or serious way a Christian. Cobbling together quotes from the Gospel’s to a fundamentally “cultural Marx(ist)” worldview does not make one a Christian, unless we want to expand the content of the word ‘Christian’ to mean almost anything.
Frankly, I don’t find the explanation you offer in the last couple of sentences very convincing. I speak from personal experience, because I was raised as a modern liberal, and was committed liberal as a young man (pro abortion activist, committed Unitarian, etc. etc.). Fact is I listened, as soon as I ran across articulate conservatives. I was fortunate to have a couple of professor’s in college (unfortunately only two) who seriously challenged orthodox liberalism. I have known many many others who were orthodox liberals who when they found real conservativism and traditionalism, engaged it instead of reacting against it.
Dean on the other hand has allegedly been “listening” for years here (and I suspect elsewhere as well – perhaps even at the Orthodox church he supposedly attends). The regular posters have engaged him more often than he deserves, to no avail. If “ill will” is not the total explanation, then it is highly probable it is part of it. The fact that he spam’s your forum (you are quite patient with it) with one inane liberal rant after another indicates a certain rudeness, if not ill will.
Let’s be honest – Dean is a simple liberal reactionary. Myself, yourself, and others have attempted to engage him for years and he slithers away into yet another liberal rant. I don’t think it does anyone any good pretending Dean is something else than what he is…
….confuses the polemical appeals of cultural Marxism with the imperatives of the Gospel at times, but many people make this mistake.
I want to speak to this also. Who makes this sort of mistake? The only folks I know of who make this mistake are those who do not understand Christianity and are in the rut of liberal protestanism. In other words the “religious left”. Secularists, when engaged just a little, usually admit they don’t know much about Christianity and find it entirely reasonable that ‘cultural Marxism’ is not synonymous with the Gospel of Christ. Only the religious left tries to maintain the fiction.
To be honest, I have not met an Orthodox person who does the same thing, at least not ideologically and systematically as Dean does. This is another reason I doubt his Orthodoxy. One simply can not be a ‘cultural Marxist’ and any sort of traditional Christian (or Jew or Muslim or Buddhist or Hindu or…) at the same time – the contradictions are just to hard to ignore.
So what sort of man would continue in such a contradiction?
You argue that a “committed liberal” would, and do to the contradictions “quasi religious(ness)” it would be difficult for such a person to “admit it to himself”.
Would this not then call for others in the Church (to which said person would have on the surface committed himself to) to correct him? And when he continues in his stubbornness, to be completely honest with him about it? What is the point of calling such a man a “Christian”?
I readily acknowlege Christopher’s assertion that abortion is, above all, a moral issue. Treating unborn children as incovenient bits of tissue rather than human beings with rights, is a devaluation of life as grave and serious as slavery or genocide. A culture that promotes the view that a human being who is not “viable”, is not a legallly recognized person, must take a great deal of responsibility for this moral catastrophe.
(Having viability as our definition of humanity makes us no better than the ancient Spartans who used to leave sick and crippled babies out in the wilderness for the wolves to eat.)
If we want to be practical and pragmatic we also have to acknowlege that soci-economic forces also play a role in driving the rate of abortion. A lack of information, education, and candid discussion leads to unwanted pregancies among teens. Structural and systemic poverty leads to joblessness among men and an unwillingness to marry. Absent fathers and uncertain economic prospects lead to desperation in pregnant, single women. Misguided family planning effots fail encourage adoption, nor do they address the dysfunctional relationships that lead to unwanted pregancies.
I agree that abortion is foremost, a moral issue. However, we can make more of a difference in reducing it’s incidence by taking a more “wholistic” approach and treating it as an economic, social, and public health problem as well.
Christopher writes: “And you wonder why it is so obvious to others that you’re [Dean] a Marxist first, and probably many other things after that before you are a Christian (if at all)…”
With all due respect — and not much is due in this case — you don’t know what you’re talking about. Dean is not a Marxist. He is not calling for the overthrow of capitalism, the state ownership of the means of production, a classless society, and so on.
If you read what Dean actually says rather than shooting from the hip with these nonsensical labels, you’ll find that Dean’s view of ethics is very similar to that of Catholic thinkers. Now if you want to make the argument that Catholics, including Pope John Paul, are not Christians, I’d be interested to hear that.
Take for example, the following from Dean:
“The main point, which no one seems to get, is that anti-abortion initiatives stand on firmer moral ground, and are more credible, when they emerge from a more comprehensive, womb-to-tomb concern for life, rather than a narrowly-focused emphasis on just 9-months of the human existence.”
Now here’s Cardinal Martino:
“The social doctrine of the Church, to date, has not placed due emphasis on the defense of life from conception to its natural end.”
Not quite the same thing, but the basic thinking is the same.
Part of what John Paul did in Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life) is to place abortion in the larger context of Catholic social and economic thinking:
Now I’m not saying that Dean is a Catholic. But his thinking on ethics has a very Catholic flavor. Thus, saying that Dean is a marxist and therefore either a non-Christian or a marginal Christian simply makes no sense. What Dean and the Catholic thinkers are saying is that abortion, poverty, sickness, war, and so on are not separate issues, but in fact different manifestations of the same issue — the protection of human life in all forms and throughout all stages of maturation.
If we want to be practical and pragmatic
By which you really mean a Marxist/socialist/modernist view of man. That is a materialist view of man. Of course, we have already been down this road many times.
…we also have to acknowlege that soci-economic forces also play a role in driving the rate of abortion. A lack of information, education, and candid discussion leads to unwanted pregancies among teens. Structural and systemic poverty leads to joblessness among men and an unwillingness to marry. Absent fathers and uncertain economic prospects lead to desperation in pregnant, single women. Misguided family planning effots fail encourage adoption, nor do they address the dysfunctional relationships that lead to unwanted pregancies….
Nothing but a litany of the standard hyper liberal (i.e. materialist) view of man and society, with all the usual buzz words and concepts. We have been down this road many times, you never listen – you just repeat the litany. We ask again, WHAT IS MAN?
I agree that abortion is foremost, a moral issue.
No you don’t. You are much more interested in the “Structural” and the “systemic”, that is the alleged material causes of abortion. If you really believed that abortion is a moral issue and not a material issue, you would not spam this forum with so much liberal gobbly gook…
test
somehow, I flipped the italics in post 21. Dean’s words are in normal type and my response is in italics…