Culture of Life II

As a perfect bookend to Bush's threat to veto any stem cell bill sent to him, the Supreme Court last week upheld a law banning partial birth abortions. On the surface, this seems like an arguably reasonable move. After all, partial birth abortions are described by the right-to-life lobby as brutal - I won't give a description, but you can look it up if you are interested. And the court didn't rule on a woman's right to an abortion, just the processes used. But if you dig a little deeper, it starts to look look like this was a terrible decision, to the extent that I can't understand how any of the justices could have voted to support it based on the facts.

The best data I can find is that there are fewer than 3000 partial birth abortions in the U.S. every year. So at most this law would prevent 3000 abortions. But it won't. In most of those cases partial birth abortion is not the only option, but rather the option the doctor has determined is the best one for the mother. So now doctors are left with fewer options for performing safe abortions on women who want them. There may be some small number of abortions that are not performed, but we are in the realm of rounding error. The total number of abortions will stay about the same, so upholding this law essentially did nothing to help save unborn fetuses.

The majority opinion mentioned that some women who have the procedure done may later regret it. That was one of their arguments for upholding the law - that someone may later regret their choice. Thank you for looking out for all the women too stupid, confused, or emotional to make their own, best decisions. You know, some people move their kids to an area where the schools aren't very good, and then later regret it. Perhaps if some city passed a law prohibiting parents from moving the court would uphold that law as well. Some people smoke, and then later regret having done so. Maybe the court will uphold a ban on cigarette sales.

And then there's the issues of partial birth abortions being so brutal. But are they really any more brutal than other abortion procedures? And why does it matter? The fetus is removed and destroyed. Regardless of the procedure, the outcome is the same. Why would a fetus care how it is removed? You know who does care? The doctor performing the procedure, who now can't use his best judgment to perform the task.

So the ban doesn't really lower the number of abortions being performed, it doesn't save any fetuses, it's not better for the women having the procedure performed, it's certainly not better for the doctors. So who exactly does this law benefit, and why would the court choose to uphold it? I can only reach the same conclusion I did in my previous post: this isn't about saving the lives of unborn children. It's all about politics, and controlling the actions of pregnant women, and apparently their doctors. There's no other logic behind spending time and money going to the Supreme Court rather than dealing with 400,000 embryos, or working on birth control education, or helping adoption agencies, all of which would save lives and help ensure a quality of life. This isn't about saving babies or helping people.