Using information

There’s a glut of information out there, but that doesn’t mean we’re well informed. This Pilot editorial makes the point that Justice Kennedy’s opinion on partial birth abortion is an important turning point in having a cultural debate that is more fully informed.

Partial birth abortion was an abhorrent procedure used in late-term abortions: those that take place in the 20th week of pregnancy and beyond. A child born at that stage of gestation would likely be born alive. Critical organs such as lungs and kidneys would have developed enough to function on their own.

If doctors were to deliver such a child and kill her, they would be charged with infanticide. As a loophole, a grisly procedure was developed to avoid infanticide charges. In that procedure, officially known as “Intact dilation and extraction” the child is partially delivered feet-first up to the neck. Then, only inches from birth, a hole is made in the child’s skull and her brains are sucked out. Thus, by the time the delivery is complete, the baby is dead and criminal liability is avoided.

However, as gruesome and inhumane as the procedure is, it is just but one of the ways in which abortions are performed every day. The ruling describes other procedures that obtain the same result which remain legal under Roe v. Wade. The reading of the full text of the ruling is chilling. It says that the procedure called “dilation and evacuation” is still legal. That procedure entails cutting up the child inside the womb and removing the parts.

Awareness of the barbaric details of partial birth abortion undoubtedly played an important role in providing the public support that led to the enactment of the 2003 law which was just upheld. In the days and weeks to come you will likely hear harsh reaction against this ruling from pro-abortion advocates. Why? Because they know, just as happened here, if the public comes to understand the true reality of all forms of abortion Roe v. Wade has little chance of standing.

And that’s precisely why abortion activists were quick to begin a campaign of disinformation to throw that freight train off track. So you can use information to serve a greater good, or you can use information to exploit an agenda.

There’s an interesting thread running on this over at National Review online’s Bench Memos, and though the posts have lively on this since the ruling, this particular one starts about here.

Professor Geoffrey Stone of the University of Chicago Law School has just posted his profoundly confused thoughts on the partial-birth abortion case.  Stone first misrepresents the ruling in the case.  If indeed there are exceptional circumstances in which partial-birth abortion is the safest method of abortion (the point, contrary to what Stone asserts, is hotly contested and, given the remarkable series of lies that opponents of the legislation have offered, their credibility is highly suspect), it is open to those so believing to show that and to carve out exceptions.  Those attacking the law tried to use a facial challenge to invalidate the law in its entirety.

Stone then asks what explains the decision.

This was inevitable…

His answer:  The “painfully awkward observation” that “[a]ll five justices in the majority are Catholic” and “have failed to respect the fundamental difference between religious belief and morality.”  His charge is as offensive as it is baseless.  Consider:

1.  The five justices in the majority were not imposing their own religious beliefs.  They were deferring to the entirely reasonable moral judgments of the American people, manifested through bipartisan majorities in Congress.  Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion explains that the law serves the proper governmental objective of expressing respect for the dignity of human life and of protecting the integrity of the medical profession.  Stone may well disagree with those objectives, and he may well disagree that the law serves them, but it is absurd for him to contend that the five justices are imposing their own religious views when they let the democratically enacted law take effect.

2.  It is the four justices in dissent who have a consistent record of misconstruing the Constitution to impose their own substantive policy preferences.  Stone claims that the dissenters “all voted in accord with settled precedent” but that precedent is neither settled nor faithful to the Constitution.

3.  Stone presents his former boss, Justice Brennan, as a model of a Catholic justice “separat[ing] his personal religious views from his views as a justice.”  From Stone’s account, one would think that Brennan reluctantly joined Roe v. Wade because the Constitution compelled him to.  That account is ridiculous at many levels.  Whatever Brennan’s “personal religious views,” he plainly favored abortion as a matter of policy, and it’s clear that he was the moving force behind the ludicrous Roe opinion.

The Catholic thing is a smokescreen, it’s gratuitous…and entirely predictable. We’ll be hearing more of it.