By Judie Brown
When the Supreme Court of the United States handed down the ruling on Box v. Planned Parenthood this week, the court upheld the portion of the Indiana law that deals with the proper disposition of fetal remains. This portion of the decision “ensures all health-care facilities, including abortion clinics, appropriately dispose of the bodies of babies killed in abortions.”
But the divide among Supreme Court justices could not be clearer.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in her dissenting opinion, Footnote 2:
“A woman who exercises her constitutionally protected right to terminate a pregnancy is not a ‘mother.’”
She wrote this in response to Justice Thomas’ positive opinion upholding certain sections of the law. He wrote in Footnote 1:
“And Justice Ginsburg does not even attempt to argue that the decision below was correct. Instead, she adopts Chief Judge Wood’s alternative suggestion that regulating the disposition of an aborted child’s body might impose an ‘undue burden’ on the mother’s right to abort that (already aborted) child.”
For those who have not followed this case, Chief Judge Wood of the Seventh Circuit Court decided the case prior to its arrival at the US Supreme Court. In that decision, Chief Judge Wood and two of her fellow judges invoked the “undue burden” argument. This argument is used to defend abortion because it is said that pregnancy creates an undue burden on the expectant mother who then chooses abortion.
This could be where Ginsburg conjured up the idea that women who seek abortion are not mothers. We know this remark is patently false.
So while we commend Justice Clarence Thomas for the insightful exposure of Planned Parenthood’s racist and eugenic background in his opinion, we must not overlook the threat posed by Justice Ginsburg’s dismissal of motherhood.
Fox News, among others, has relegated the differences between the justices on abortion to nothing more than conflicting views on the “state abortion matter.” This sort of blasé choice of words exposes how little the media really knows or is willing to admit when it comes to the substantive question of who that preborn child is and whether or not his MOTHER should have any rights to kill him at all.
Thus we agree with the suggestion that the stark differences between Justice Thomas’ insights and those of Ginsburg could set the stage for future cases that relate to abortion.
How? Because Ginsburg has, with one smug statement, said that preborn children are not babies, and therefore their pregnant hosts are not mothers! Think about it!
The fact is that every preborn child is a human being, and every one of those women who becomes pregnant is a mother from the time that baby’s life begins. If she chooses to abort her child, she is the mother of a dead baby. That is the only difference.
I see these conflicting statements on motherhood as a rhetorical civil war against motherhood and the preborn.
The only solution is to fight for human personhood—to fight for legal recognition that a human being exists at his biological beginning and any act to end that individual human being’s life is killing. Period!
Thomas’ and Ginsburg’s statements compelled me to think about Christ’s words to His disciples in John 16:2-3. Jesus said:
“They will expel you from the synagogues, and indeed the time is coming when anyone who kills you will think he is doing a holy service to God. They will do these things because they have never known either the Father or me.”
Jesus could well have been speaking to the babies! Let us never forget that. A culture that disregards God’s gift of life is a culture doomed to kill the innocent.
Ginsburg’s fatal error must be repudiated at every turn.
image: National Museum of American History via Flickr | CC-2.0