Culture of Death Watch
The Wicked Witch
by James G. Bruen, Jr.
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
is right: the decision in Gonzales v. Carhart, which upheld a statutory ban on partial-birth
abortions, “dishonors our precedent.” That makes her apoplectic, even though
she recognizes the ban “saves not a single fetus from destruction.” Carhart,
she says, is “alarming,” it “cannot be understood as anything other than an
effort to chip away at a right declared again and again by this Court,” a
woman’s right to an abortion. Hopefully, she is right on that also. Only time
will tell whether Carhart began the undermining of Roe v. Wade or
whether it is instead an aberration.
The five Catholic Justices constituted
the majority in Carhart, with Justice Anthony Kennedy authoring the
opinion of the Court. Justice Ginsburg, a Jew, wrote the dissent, in which all
of the other non-Catholic members of the Court joined. The two opinions reflect
widely disparate views on woman as mother. When Justice Kennedy invokes “the
bond of love the mother has for her child” as an “ultimate expression” of “the
respect for human life,” Justice Ginsburg carps that “this way of thinking
reflects ancient notions of women’s place in the family … - ideas that have long
since been discredited.” She even gripes that in Justice Kennedy’s majority
opinion “a fetus is described as an ‘unborn child,’ and as a ‘baby.’”
Now, the bond of love of a mother for her
child is surely an ancient concept. That bond is rooted in nature, and it has
never been and cannot be discredited. Despite the efforts of fanatics such as
Rousseau and communists, it has persisted over the centuries and across
cultures. And it will persist despite the efforts of feminists such as Justice
Ginsburg, an abortion zealot who formerly litigated for the ACLU’s women’s
rights project.
That bond of love exists in its most
sublime form between Christ and His mother, a relationship most honored within
the Catholic tradition. Artistic representations of the Madonna and Child
attempt to portray that bond and enjoy a revered position in Catholic
iconography. When Justice Ginsburg belittles the belief that “the paramount
destiny and mission of women are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of
wife and mother,” she strikes at the Blessed Virgin, the inherent dignity of
woman, the proper relationships between husband and wife, the proper
relationship between mother and child, and Catholicism’s teaching on the
family. If the family is truly the domestic church, Justice Ginsburg is out to
destroy that church.
That destruction, she implies, is
mandated by the Constitution – or at least by opinions of the Supreme Court
that apply, interpret, and often torture the provisions of the
Constitution. Women should no
longer be “regarded as the center of home and family life,” she says, quoting
from an earlier Supreme Court decision on abortion. The Court’s opinions, she
insists, require a focus only on the woman who wants an abortion, not on the
mother-child relationship or the family. “Thus,” she writes, “legal challenges
to undue restrictions on abortion procedures … center on a woman’s autonomy to
determine her life’s course.”
The Carhart majority, Justice
Ginsburg points out, “admits that ‘moral concerns’ are at work” in its justification
of the ban on partial-birth abortion, and this makes her bitter. “By allowing such concerns to carry the
day and case, overriding fundamental rights, the Court dishonors our
precedent.” She then cites earlier Supreme Court decisions endorsing abortion
and sodomy as establishing that the state cannot legislate morality, the view
she expounds. Her stated preference for “autonomy,” not morality, though, is
actually an endorsement of immorality or amorality.
“One wonders how long a line that saves
no fetus from destruction will hold in face of the Court’s ‘moral concerns,’”
she writes, because the “Court’s hostility to the right Roe and Casey
secured is not concealed.” It’s a good question, but the threat to the
continued vitality of those abortion cases is not as real as she intimates. The
five Catholic Justices cannot be counted on to vote as a bloc to overturn Roe
v. Wade. Indeed, it would be quite surprising if they did. And it is highly
unlikely that Justice Ginsburg or her cohorts in dissent in Carhart will
suddenly abandon the Court-created right to abort.
Justice Ginsburg’s words and views are
those of a shrew capable of much evil. And, by and large, that evil remains the
law of the land. In appearance, she resembles The Wizard of Oz’s Wicked Witch of the West, a resemblance that
seems especially apt, for, as G.K. Chesterton observed in The Everlasting Man, “people would understand better the popular
fury against the witches, if they remembered that the malice most commonly
attributed to them was preventing births.”
James G. Bruen,
Jr. is an attorney.
This article was published in the June,
2007 issue of Culture Wars.
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