I must admit I’ve been a little confused, even dismayed, by the reaction by some liberal organizations to the recent decision by SCOTUS to deny Louisiana the right to enforce their anti-abortion law while the various appeals wend their way through the federal court system, or, more precisely, Justice Kavanaugh’s dissent from that decision. Here’s a report in WaPo on liberal groups intent on pinning his dissent on Senator Collins (R-ME), as she was thought to be a possibility to vote against him in the confirmation process, but, instead, voted for him.:
Democrats and liberal groups on Friday pointed to a Supreme Court ruling in an abortion case to argue that Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, focusing their ire on Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican who supported Kavanaugh’s nomination last year and faces a tough 2020 reelection. …
While Democrats hailed the decision, they pointed to Kavanaugh’s dissent as a sign that he is poised to side with conservatives in future rulings on abortion rights.
In his dissent, Kavanaugh said there was a dispute about whether the physicians in the Louisiana case could obtain admitting privileges, and that a 45-day grace period would have provided time to settle that question.
I haven’t been following the abortion debate for a long time. I’m pro-choice, as long time readers can probably guess. One of the reasons for not following the debate can be seen at the conservative, and apparently pro-life site, The Resurgent, as half the posts seemed to include the word ‘infanticide.’ As writers, they do know – or are intellectual frauds – that utterly misusing words in an argument means your side of the argument is losing, either logically or emotionally. It’s this sort of intellectual crap that has turned me away from following the debate. (And now I revisited The Resurgent and those posts seem to have disappeared, or more likely rolled out.)
So this remark in the above report was interesting, but I have no idea if it’s an effective rebuttal or merely a head-feint by Senator Collins’ office:
Collins’s office countered such criticism Friday by noting that Democrats responded with “near total silence” after Kavanaugh provided the decisive vote in Planned Parenthood’s favor in a December Supreme Court ruling.
“During his confirmation process, Planned Parenthood was Justice Kavanaugh’s number one opponent,” Clark said in a statement. “They went after him with everything that they had. And yet, when it came to a case involving them, he was able to put that aside and rule impartially and independently.”
The net effect, though, is that someone is sounding the war drums and heading off to the prairie to fight the dread enemy.
And then there’s law Professor Leah Litman, also writing in WaPo, who is sounding the horn of doom:
It is easy to see how this kind of analysis will make safe, accessible abortions a thing of the past in many parts of the United States. If a law does not amount to an unconstitutional burden unless it does something as dramatic as close 20 clinics in a geographic area as large as Texas, almost every law would be constitutional. And if a law does not amount to an unconstitutional burden if courts can invent a justification for it, then laws would be upheld even when there is no evidence that they would help any woman, ever.
That is how Roe v. Wade will die. Not with a bang, but with a million little distinctions that judges will draw to limit the impact of any cases that invalidate restrictions on abortion. By voting to allow the Louisiana law to go into effect, four justices gave the okay to states and lower courts to limit Roe by whatever means necessary.
Again, I don’t know enough to know if this is an earnest opinion of what the future holds – or an attempt to keep the pro-choice forces in a frenzy of fear.
And it does matter. One side has turned this into a quasi-religious drive for purity, while the other casts this as a fundamental attack on their health and freedom. As a pro-choicer, I have more sympathy for the latter side. As an American, though, I see this as the sort of issue which tears us apart, makes us distrustful of each other – makes us weak.
And I worry that the pro-life folks have transitioned from any sort of reasonable approach to the issue to simply using it as an emotional trigger of their own. I haven’t glanced at a Bible since I was a kid, but from what little I’ve been told, the issue is only addressed once, as something worthy of a minor (?) fine but nothing more. Further, some pop-history accounts, meaning I have no idea if it’s accurate or not, suggests abortion was an accepted part of life in the United States during the 19th century. If so, well, again the entire ‘infanticide’ thing makes my gorge rise.
Now that I’ve spoken my piece, I can stop thinking about it. Again.
