“Like a Startle . . . Like a Flinch”
John E. Dunsford on Abortion
From one point of view, the Supreme Court’s 5 to 4 decision in Stenberg v. Carhart, shielding partial-birth abortion from legislative prohibition, is a solid victory for the proponents of choice. From another point of view, however, there is reason to believe that the decision may prove to be costly to those defending abortion as a “right,” as the full implications of the opinion are absorbed by the American public and become part of its consciousness.
Abortion activists are anxiously aware that the long-range prospects of their cause are dubious, since the opinion polls indicate that the degree of public acceptance of abortion has been steadily receding. For one example, a Los Angeles Times poll shows that nearly 57 percent of both men and women consider abortion to be “murder.” Carhart will accelerate that negative trend, because (1) it illustrates dramatically what abortion actually represents, and (2) it elicits nagging questions about the legitimacy of Roe v. Wade itself.
A Gruesome Procedure
One may reasonably assume that Justice Stephen Breyer approached the task of writing the majority opinion (representing Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, John Paul Stevens, David Souter, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg) with some trepidation, precisely because the subject is partial-birth abortion.
This is a late-term abortion in which a physician dilates the mother’s cervix, inserts forceps into her uterus, pulls the lower extremity of the fetus into the vagina, forces scissors into the base of the fetus’s skull, inserts a suction catheter into the hole, and sucks out the contents of the head in order to remove a dead fetus. The name is applicable because the baby is in a position to be born except that he is killed before he emerges totally from his mother.
Early in the opinion Justice Breyer apologized for the fact that, as the procedures he would describe dealt with the termination of “potential [ sic] human life,” his prose might seem “clinically cold or callous to some, perhaps horrifying to others.” Of course, he was right.
Indeed, during the oral argument of the case, one of the other justices (O’Connor) called the methods before the Court for terminating the life of a fetus “rather gruesome procedures.” That is the reason that some 73 percent of Americans in opinion polls favor banning partial-birth abortion after receiving only a brief description of the procedure. And that is the reason some thirty states have passed laws prohibiting some form of the procedure. Three times the Congress approved similar legislation by large margins, only to have it vetoed by President Clinton.
Since five members of the Supreme Court voted to prevent the State of Nebraska from prohibiting partial-birth abortion, they could scarcely avoid the obligation to explain what it was they were allowing. As their spokesman, Justice Breyer had the unpleasant assignment of describing the D&X (Dilation and Extraction) procedure under review.
Perhaps hoping to obscure the horror of the procedure when rendered in plain English, he offered the medical definition of the D&X procedures provided by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. The College’s definition described the procedure in four steps:
1. deliberate dilatation of the cervix, usually over a sequence of days;
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more on abortion from the online archives
27.2—March/April 2014
on C. S. Lewis & the New State Paganism by W. E. Knickerbocker
24.1—January/February 2011
How Planned Parenthood's Founder Played the Christians, and Won by Allan C. Carlson
26.1—Jan/Feb 2013
on Abortion as a Matter of National Welfare by W. Ross Blackburn
more from the online archives
30.2—March/April 2017
on Reading Don Quixote in Its Original Christian Context by Luis Cortest
16.5—June 2003
on the Importance of Fathers to Churchgoing by Robbie Low
24.3—May/June 2011
The Making & Endurance of the King James Bible, 1611-2011 by Barton Swaim
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