doctors were in the middle of performing a C-section. It was actually an abortion by hysterotomy. The woman was probably six months along in her pregnancy, and the child she was carrying weighed over two pounds. At that time doctors were not especially sophisticated, for lack of a better term, when it came to killing the baby prior to delivery, so they went ahead with delivery and put the baby in a bucket in the corner of the room. The baby tried to breathe, and tried to cry, and everyone in the room pretended the baby wasn’t there. I was deeply shaken by this experience, and it hit me at that moment just how important the life issue was.
I have heard the arguments in favor of abortion many times, and they have always disturbed me deeply. A popular academic argument for abortion demands that we think of the child in the womb as a “parasite” that the woman has the right to expel from her body. But the same argument justifies outright infanticide, since it applies just as well to an infant
outside
the womb: newborns require even more attention and care, and in that sense are even more “parasitic.”
If we can be so callous as to refer to a growing child in a mother’s womb as a parasite, I fear for our country’s future all the more. Whether it is war or abortion, we conceal the reality of violent acts through linguistic contrivances meant to devalue human lives we find inconvenient. Dead civilians become “collateral damage,” are ignored altogether, or are rationalized away on the Leninist grounds that to make an omelet you have to break some eggs. (The apostle Paul, on the other hand, condemned the idea that we should do evil that good may come.) People ask an expectant mother how her baby is doing. They do not ask how her fetus is doing, or her blob of tissue, or her parasite. But that is what her baby becomes as soon as the child is declared to be unwanted. In both cases, we try to make human life into something less than human, simply according to our will.
When
Roe v. Wade
was decided in 1973, striking down abortion laws all over the country, even some supporters of abortion were embarrassed by the decision as a matter of constitutional law. John Hart Ely, for instance, wrote in the
Yale Law Review
: “What is frightening about
Roe
is that this super-protected right is not inferable from the language of the Constitution, the framers’ thinking respecting the specific problem in issue, any general value derivable from the provisions they included, or the nation’s governmental structure.” The decision, he said, “is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.”
The federal government should not play any role in the abortion issue, according to the Constitution. Apart from waiting forever for Supreme Court justices who will rule in accordance with the Constitution, however, Americans who care about our fundamental law and/or are concerned about abortion do have some legislative recourse. Article III, Section 2, of the Constitution gives Congress the power to strip the federal courts, including the Supreme Court, of jurisdiction over broad categories of cases. In the wake of the 1857
Dred Scott
decision, abolitionists spoke of depriving the courts of jurisdiction in cases dealing with slavery. The courts were stripped of authority over Reconstruction policy in the late 1860s.
If the federal courts refuse to abide by the Constitution, the Congress should employ this constitutional remedy. By a simple majority, Congress could strip the federal courts of jurisdiction over abortion, thereby overturning the obviously unconstitutional
Roe
. At that point, the issue would revert to the states, where it constitutionally belongs, since no appeal to federal courts on the matter could be heard. (I have proposed exactly this in H.R. 300.)
Let us remember, though, that the law can do only so much. The law isn’t what allowed abortion; abortions were already being done in the
I have heard the arguments in favor of abortion many times, and they have always disturbed me deeply. A popular academic argument for abortion demands that we think of the child in the womb as a “parasite” that the woman has the right to expel from her body. But the same argument justifies outright infanticide, since it applies just as well to an infant
outside
the womb: newborns require even more attention and care, and in that sense are even more “parasitic.”
If we can be so callous as to refer to a growing child in a mother’s womb as a parasite, I fear for our country’s future all the more. Whether it is war or abortion, we conceal the reality of violent acts through linguistic contrivances meant to devalue human lives we find inconvenient. Dead civilians become “collateral damage,” are ignored altogether, or are rationalized away on the Leninist grounds that to make an omelet you have to break some eggs. (The apostle Paul, on the other hand, condemned the idea that we should do evil that good may come.) People ask an expectant mother how her baby is doing. They do not ask how her fetus is doing, or her blob of tissue, or her parasite. But that is what her baby becomes as soon as the child is declared to be unwanted. In both cases, we try to make human life into something less than human, simply according to our will.
When
Roe v. Wade
was decided in 1973, striking down abortion laws all over the country, even some supporters of abortion were embarrassed by the decision as a matter of constitutional law. John Hart Ely, for instance, wrote in the
Yale Law Review
: “What is frightening about
Roe
is that this super-protected right is not inferable from the language of the Constitution, the framers’ thinking respecting the specific problem in issue, any general value derivable from the provisions they included, or the nation’s governmental structure.” The decision, he said, “is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.”
The federal government should not play any role in the abortion issue, according to the Constitution. Apart from waiting forever for Supreme Court justices who will rule in accordance with the Constitution, however, Americans who care about our fundamental law and/or are concerned about abortion do have some legislative recourse. Article III, Section 2, of the Constitution gives Congress the power to strip the federal courts, including the Supreme Court, of jurisdiction over broad categories of cases. In the wake of the 1857
Dred Scott
decision, abolitionists spoke of depriving the courts of jurisdiction in cases dealing with slavery. The courts were stripped of authority over Reconstruction policy in the late 1860s.
If the federal courts refuse to abide by the Constitution, the Congress should employ this constitutional remedy. By a simple majority, Congress could strip the federal courts of jurisdiction over abortion, thereby overturning the obviously unconstitutional
Roe
. At that point, the issue would revert to the states, where it constitutionally belongs, since no appeal to federal courts on the matter could be heard. (I have proposed exactly this in H.R. 300.)
Let us remember, though, that the law can do only so much. The law isn’t what allowed abortion; abortions were already being done in the
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