The Sage Forge

In numerous reports published during the day yesterday it was noted that Ruth Bader Ginsberg took the extraordinary step, during the announcement of the decision, of reading exerpts of her dissent.  She claimed this was an extraordinary step away from Roe, and from four decades of supporting decisions, a notion echoed by numerous others on both sides of this contentious debate.

Is this true?  If so, what does it say about Roe and about the people who support it.

In the procedure the child is partially removed from the womb, feet first, its head is then punctured, and the brain is suctioned to kill the child and cause the skull to collapse.  In the State of Texas were an individual to perform a similar procedure on an animal they would be subject to a prison term.  No one in the debate can reasonably claim the procedure, which is performed almost exclusively on viable infants, is not painful.  It certainly is.  We allow protection under the law for animals from needlessly painful death, though animals have no prospect what-so-ever of gaining full human rights.  Yet, were the head of the child in such an abortion to exit the birth canal that child would have the full protection of all laws granting human rights and the procedure would instantly become full-fledged murder.  Indeed, in Texas again, the act of preparing the skull for suctioning could be interpreted as a separate felony assault, which would make the murder a capital crime. 

What Justice Ginsburg railed in support of was not merely a form of birth control or a means of providing greater health access for women.  It was the capacity under the law to find an inconvenient class of people not merely not to be people, but to be not worthy even of those protections from the most grotesque brutalities we provide to animals.  It is perfectly acceptable to her and those who believe as she does that the difference between legal humanity and legal oblivion has nothing to do with the capacity to feel, to suffer, to travel four inches further and become part of this world's chosen species.  There is no humility in her stance at all. 

The difference between human and non-entity is what we deign it to be.

This is a comfortable stance for the Left in America.  For the time being they feel secure as the definers of things.  They feel presently unthreatened by legal precedent that fails to accord any status at all to a class of human being. They know they are not members of that class.  Where the law can define away the humanity of one human class for the sake of convenience, however, it can define away that of any other.  All we need is a curtain like that of the womb to draw over the events that follow and give legal cover.  Perhaps it will be the nursing home door some day.  Perhaps it will be the asylum wall, the prison bar, or the plate-glass window.

With her defense of unabridged abortion rights Ruth Bader Ginsberg reveals this issue for what it really is- a fight to wrench law from any controlling authority whatsoever, and set on the pedestal as morality itself.  And if you become inconvenient after that day?

So long as you're not me, I'm supposed to believe, since it's legal, it's OK.