Articles two days in a row on a national issue. First gun control and now abortion.
That’s got to be a new record for McHenry County Blog.
Don’t worry, it won’t happen often.
It’s just when I compared the rantings by Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg with what the Tribune’s Steve Chapman had to say Sunday, the interpretations were so great that I thought them worth noting.
Steinberg spends less space in his piece.
Comparing what Congress did to try to keep Terri Schiavo from being slowly starved to death and killed by dehydration, Steinberg says the Supreme Court has “popped up between the legs of the women of America and waved away any doctors who might want to perform certain late term abortions” which he says are “rare,” but “grisly.”
“…right-to-Lifers..(ha)ve lost trying to convince America to ban abortion, so instead they are nibbling away at the edges, on issues that give most decent folk pause, such as this procedure.”
I would not that such an incremental approach in the 1800’s was the way abortion was banned.
Chapman notes the problem that the decision presents abortion advocates:
It’s that it treats the fetus as more than a disposable inconvenience—as a living entity entitled to a measure of respect and protection. One you take that step, there is no telling where it might lead.
And let me share Chapman’s part describing the procedure itself:
The court cited one nurse’s account of this procedure:
The doctor, she said, “delivered the baby’s body and arms—everything but the hear.”
At that point, she said,
”The baby’s little fingers were clasping and unclasping, and his little feet were kicking. Then the doctor stuck the scissors in the back of his head, and the baby’s arms jerked out…The doctor opened up the scissors, stuck a high-powered suction tube into the opening, and sucked the baby’s brains out.”
The striking fact about the debate here is not that some people are appalled and revolted by what is done in these instances, but that some people are not. They don’t flinch from the violence visited on well-developer fetuses in the name of reproductive freedom. Any abortion, in their eyes, is a justifiable abortion.
Chapman then takes on the “health of the mother” bugaboo.
He hasn’t room to point out that the provision is not in Roe v. Wade, but in Doe v. Bolton, a companion decision handed down the same day. The exceptions for health is so broad that it includes, as the second, long ignored case states, not only physical risks,
“but all factors—physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman’s age—relevant to )her) well-being.”
As Chapman points out,
”The exception cancels the rule.”
To abortion rights groups like Personal PAC, the group whose candidate Rosemary Kurtz took me out of the Illinois House, as Chapman says without citing any specific group,
”any limit on ‘the right to choose’ is intolerable…”
…even if it is barbaric.