9-headed Caesar

by Linda Bowles


In a 5-to-4 decision, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that Nebraska's ban of a procedure known as "partial-birth abortion" was unconstitutional in that it put an "undue burden" on a woman's right to choose.

In a blistering dissent, Justice A. Scalia wrote that "the method of killing a human child ... proscribed by this statute is so horrible that the most clinical description of it evokes a shudder of revulsion." He challenged the constitutional basis of the majority decision: "The notion that the Constitution of the United States ... prohibits the states from simply banning this visibly brutal means of eliminating our half-born posterity is quite simply absurd."

In a written opinion agreeing with the majority, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor criticized the Nebraska law for not providing exceptions for cases in which the health of the mother is at risk. She implied that laws that contain a health provision might well be constitutional.

The "health" issue is an excuse, not an argument. The medical community at large agrees with former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop that there is never a medical necessity for a partial-birth abortion. Abortionists use the "health" loophole to justify killing the babies of mothers who complain of a wide variety of vague maladies, including nervous twitches, anxieties and headaches.

Viewed with common sense, there is a critical moment of truth that occurs in every partial-birth abortion that reveals exactly what is happening and why. That moment occurs when the abortionist has brought the baby down the birth canal feet first and delivered all of the child except the head. The unborn child at that moment is a few inches and a few seconds from full delivery.

At this moment of truth, if the goal of the procedure is to save the mother from damage being done to her by the unborn baby, then, why not save her by completing the birth? With full delivery, all danger to the mother from the baby is gone. But that is not what happens. At that moment of truth, the abortionist drives scissors into the base of the skull, inserts a tube, and sucks out the baby's brains.

Transparently, the motivation is not to protect a mother. The motivation is to kill a baby.

Scalia was not content with expressing his disgust that the court had effectively sanctioned a brutal and hideous form of abortion. He accused the majority of personal bias by pointing to "the Court's inclination to bend the rules when any effort to limit abortion, or even to speak in opposition to abortion, is at issue." He said the majority decision was a "policy judgement couched as law."

In effect, Scalia accused the majority of operating outside the Constitution. This sentiment brings to mind similar observations by the esteemed legal scholar Robert H. Bork. In his book "Slouching Towards Gomorrah," Bork wrote, "Roe v. Wade ... was a radical deformation of the Constitution. The Constitution has nothing to say about abortion, leaving it, like most subjects, to the judgment and moral sense of the American people and their elected representatives. ... The Court, without authority in the Constitution or any law, has forced Americans to adopt the Court's view of morality rather than their own."

Here is the bottom line. Thirty states adopted laws banning partial-birth abortions. Both houses of the Congress of the United States passed laws banning partial-birth abortions. But five members of the Supreme Court arrogantly disregarded them all, making an absolute mockery of representative democracy, and effectively trashing both the spirit and the words of the Constitution.

In effect, these five unelected lawyers instructed the American people that as far as the law is concerned, life in the womb is subhuman, if human at all, and as such, is unworthy of protection by the human conscience, and unentitled to protection by the Constitution.

In a review of M. Stanton Evans' book, "The Theme Is Freedom," Archie P. Jones writes of the "pagan theory of kingship, which claimed that the monarch should be accountable to no man, that he should rule without limits on his power, and that he should be free to make the law whatever he willed it to be."

Thanks to the Supreme Court, an ominous parallel to the "pagan theory of kingship" has developed in America, where the collective will of the people is ignored, limits on federal power have disappeared, and the law is what the Supreme Court says it is.

When the history of the rise and fall of America is finally written, it may well be recorded that the beginning of the end was signaled by the blind submission of a pagan people to the tyranny of a "nine-headed Caesar."


© 2000 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

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11 jul 2000