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Supreme Court Should Protect Right to Abortion in Current
Partial-Birth Case
by Glenn
Woiceshyn Anti-abortionists
are making a comeback. A woman's right to abortion is rapidly being
eroded by the proliferation of state laws banning certain types of
abortions. On April 25, in a case known as Carhart vs. Stenberg
(No. 99-830), the Supreme Court will consider the constitutionality of
one such law: Nebraska's law banning so-called "partial-birth"
abortions.
When abortion was illegal in America, many women died or suffered
serious medical problems from either self-induced or illegal
"back-alley" abortions. Women streamed into emergency rooms with
punctured wombs, massive bleeding, and rampant infections.
Thanks to the Roe v. Wade (1973) Supreme Court decision, women today
have access to safe abortions by medically trained professionals under
sanitary conditions. But anti-abortionists -- so-called "pro-lifers" --
are changing all this.
State laws banning "partial-birth" abortions establish a precedent for
criminalizing other types of abortion -- as America slides down the
bloody slope to "back-alley" abortions.
Those who are truly pro-life must grasp the ominous implications of and
underlying motives behind such anti-abortion laws -- before it's too
late.
"Partial-birth" abortion, most commonly known as intact dilation and
extraction (D&X), is designed primarily to be used in the case of 5- and
6-month-old fetuses that are dying, malformed, or threaten the woman's
health or life. The procedure involves pulling the fetus from the womb,
except for the head which is too large to pass without injuring the
woman. The head is then collapsed to allow removal. This procedure is
designed for the maximum protection of the woman. The late-term
alternative to D&X, one that doesn't require partial removal, involves
dismembering the fetus in the womb before extraction -- a much riskier
procedure.
Anti-abortionists coined the term "partial birth" to suggest that the
partially removed fetus is no longer "unborn," and, therefore, Roe vs.
Wade no longer applies (so they allege). But linguistic manipulation
can't create an essential distinction when none exists. A woman has a
right to her own body, and, if she chooses to abort, then all effort
should be made to protect the woman from injury. To rule otherwise is to
negate this right.
Banning any type of abortion to "protect the fetus" necessarily grants
rights to the fetus -- an utter perversion of individual rights. If a
woman has no right to her own body, then by what logic does a fetus
(which, by definition, is a biological parasite) have a right to the
woman's body? Properly, an infant's rights begin after the fetus is
removed from the mother's body and its umbilical cord cut.
It is a woman's individual rights -- to her life, to her liberty, and to
the pursuit of her happiness -- that sanctions her right to have an
abortion. Once "fetal rights" are granted to one stage of the pregnancy,
nothing will prevent their extension to all stages. "Fetal rights" are a
gimmick to destroy a woman's individual rights.
Tragically, many "pro-choicers" have conceded the "partial-birth" debate
to the anti-abortionists and accept a ban as a compromise (and merely
quibble about its scope). Such "pro-choicers" have apparently been
hoodwinked by the anti-abortionists' strategy of emotionalism and
evasion designed to disguise their deeper purpose.
The anti-abortionists' strategy involves focusing solely on the fetus
and describing the abortion in gruesome detail. Their professed
compassion for the fetus apparently leaves no room for considering the
woman's health and happiness. For them, waving a picture of a bloody,
mangled fetus constitutes an argument. If so, then so does waving a
picture of a woman whose future was ruined because she was denied an
abortion -- or of a woman bloody and mangled by a "back-alley" abortion.
A picture is not an argument -- and should not be allowed as a cover-up.
While anti-abortionists' attacks are primarily focused on rarely
performed late-term abortions, they zealously want all abortions banned.
Helen Alvare, a spokeswoman for the Catholic Bishops and a staunch enemy
of D&X, has declared, "In a moral sense all abortions are equally
awful."
According to anti-abortionists' dogma, God places the soul in the womb
at conception. Hence, via a leap of faith, the fertilized egg -- a tiny
speck of cells -- is granted the status of human being. At that moment,
the woman's status is demoted to that of slave and breeding mare -- and
her womb becomes God's property (which, in practice, means the
government's property). The rights of the woman have therefore been
sacrificed to the alleged rights of the fetus. According to this dogma,
abortion is murder at any stage of the pregnancy (which explains why
some "pro-lifers" feel morally sanctioned to kill doctors and bomb
abortion clinics).
The anti-abortionists' war against "partial-birth" abortions is a
smokescreen to ban all abortions. Abortion is a woman's moral right. To
protect that right the Supreme Court must declare Nebraska's law
prohibiting "partial-birth" abortions as unconstitutional. Furthermore,
"pro-choicers" must reject compromise and fight any law prohibiting
abortion on principle -- the principle of individual rights -- the
principle upon which this pro-rights country was founded.
Glenn Woiceshyn is a freelance writer, residing
in Calgary. Visit his education resources website at
Powerful Minds.
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