Courts in conflict

Since the Supreme Court declined to take up the Acuna v. Turkish case at this point, we have what the high court would feasibly not be willing to tolerate: two major U.S. courts in direct conflict over their reading of Roe.

And that’s generating a buzz.

Linda Schlueter, the president of the Trinity Legal Center, which filed an amicus brief with the Court in the case, told LifeNews.com she is disappointed.

“This shouldn’t be about what a physician believes,” she said. “Even a physician who does not believe that an unborn child is a human being, at the very least, could provide factual information about the characteristics of baby.”

Factual, medical, scientific and indisputable truth is that a woman who is pregnant represents two patients to the doctor who treats her. The second patient, having been conceived of the species homo sapiens, is a human being, whether or not someone decides that doesn’t matter to their decision to have an abortion. And whether or not someone else decides that human being doesn’t have any rights. Start with the fact that a unique and living human being is already in place.

The full 11 member 8th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that true informed consent obtained in an abortion clinic must at least state that, and such statement is not ideological viewpoint, but biological fact.

If you’ve been following this here in the Forum or elsewhere, you know it landed in the 8th Circuit in the first place because the South Dakota legislature passed the best informed consent law in the country and Planned Parenthood immediately sought and got an injunction against it. They said it violated the abortionist’s free speech rights. The 8th Circuit disagreed. When the law went into effect, the one abortion clinic in Sioux Falls closed its doors.

But…..South Dakota remains ground zero in the abortion battles. I just finished watching a C-SPAN video of a press conference after a recent summit meeting in Washington among the national leaders of Planned Parenthood, NARAL/Pro-Choice America, and the ACLU. They have fixed their sites on defeating the South Dakota abortion ban law on the ballot in November, because they are “extremely concerned” that its passage would be the beginning of the end of Roe. They called Measure 11 “a vehicle of the religious right” to “mount a legal challenge to Roe”, and admitted South Dakota’s ballot initiative “has implications for all 50 states”.

They referred to “the very dreadful most recent decision from the 8th Circuit Court, the so-called ‘informed consent’ law as the vehicle that moved legislators to ban abortion. So-called? It is de facto an informed consent law. What would they call it, besides dreadful?

They do use words to incite emotion and obfuscate facts, which is why the abortion movement is so worried that women getting informed consent really would have a choice, and the people of South Dakota really will choose whether they want a ban on abortion in their state. 

Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation, said the initiative could threaten legalized abortion in every state, especially if it goes before a 2011 or 2012 Supreme Court that would probably tilt to the right if Sen. John McCain becomes president.

And dramatically to the left if Sen. Barack Obama does.