Defiant Until Death (When The Scissors Cut Their Bodies Apart)

The power of a conservative Republican president hit home today when the Supreme Court, fortified with John Roberts and Samuel Alito, narrowly put an end to the brutal, needless and immoral partial-birth abortion procedure.

Those who would like to see abortion contained, constrained or eliminated best look at the GOP presidential horde in light of this decision and ask themselves who they can really, really trust to nominate conservative judges.

It was left to swing-voter Anthony Kennedy to write the decision that may well have no impact on other abortion procedures, but was death for this particularly nasty form of abortion:

"We conclude the act [the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban of 2003] should be sustained against the objections lodged by the broad, facial attack brought against it. Respondents have not demonstrated that the act, as a facial matter, is void for vagueness, or that it imposes an undue burden on a woman's right to abortion based on its overbreadth or lack of a health exception." ...

The act is not invalid on its face where there is uncertainty over whether the barred procedure is ever necessary to preserve a women's health, given the availability of other abortion procedures."

It's not poetry, but it got the job done. Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who was placed on the court without a GOP challenge despite her well-known radical liberal views, wrote with near stroke-inducing fervor against the decision:

In a bitter dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called the opinion "alarming" in that it allows a government ban on abortion procedures "found necessary and proper in certain cases by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists."

The dissent said the ruling amounts to an eroding of abortion rights under Roe v. Wade, the 1972 Supreme Court ruling that recognized a constitutional right to abortion. "The Partial-Birth Abortion Act and the court's defense of it cannot be understood as anything other than an effort to chip away at a right declared again and again by this court," Justice Ginsburg said. (WSJ)

Would that it were so, but methinks the lady doth protest too much. Abortion is a battle that's fought on a legal razor's edge, with each decision virtually standing alone, contained within a wall of carefully laid bricks of legal language. There are no landscape-wide decisions. The bloody bunch have lost one; they'll survive to abort another day.

Meanwhile, a lawyer for the abortion queens at Planned Parenthood (or Planned non-Parenthood, which is more often the result of their intervention) said,

"This ruling flies in the face of 30 years of Supreme Court precedent and the best interest of women’s health and safety. Today the court took away an important option for doctors who seek to provide the best and safest care to their patients. This ruling tells women that politicians, not doctors, will make their health care decisions for them."

There is, despite the femi-rant, no purpose for partial birth abortion that other, less disgusting and homicidal forms of abortion cannot address.

And by the way, haven't the politicians, not the doctors, been in control of the abortion debate since it began? Were it not so, what would Emily's List and NARAL do with all the political funds they raise?

Did today's decision save any lives? Probably not many. Partial birth is an uncommon procedure and in its absence, there are other ways for abortionists to kill the nearly born. But there is a morality to this decision that is powerful and persuasive, and for that we have the American voters and President Bush to thank.