The Principle Behind the ‘Right to Choose’
January 21, 2011
JAMES N. writes:
As you may know, a doctor, Kermit Gosnell, has been arrested in Philadelphia and charged with several counts of murder. He ran an abortuary which delivered viable infants and then killed them by severing their spinal cords. Some of the details are quite gory – apparently in at least one case one of his nurses played with a child and then killed it.
This has gone on for many years. It is alleged that he was well-known in Philadelphia, and it is alleged further that complaints to Philadelphia law enforcement were squashed by local authorities on the grounds of protecting the “right” to “choose.”
It is about time for the scope and the nature of this “right” to be fully explored. Like the many slavery cases litigated prior to Dred Scott, previous abortion cases have been either narrowly decided or decided by precedent. Arlen Specter, late Senator and a very well-connected Philadelphia legal figure, has passionately defended Roe v. Wade as a “super-precedent” which should never be overturned.
No court has announced the first principle of the current abortion regime, quite analogous to that of Mr. Justice Taney: A baby has no right that a woman is bound to respect. This is even worse than Mr. Justice Taney’s opinion, by the way. Taney’s defense of the “rights” of white slave owners was at least built on a foundation of custom, text, and precedent. The “right” to “choose” was invented out of whole cloth, with no customary, textual, or precedential authority.
The “right” to “choose” is awaiting its Dred Scott case. Mr. Justice Taney thought that, by arriving finally at first principles (in that case, that “a negro has no rights that a white man is bound to respect”), that peace could finally prevail as anti-slavery agitation would have to cease.
Oops.
This poor, driven homicidal maniac should try to get a court to announce the first principle of the “right” he was executing – that the right of a baby to live is contingent upon the subjective emotional state of an adult woman, and that killing these babies in this manner is a nullity in law because of that. As with Dred Scott, a victory in the courts might finally clarify the matter – just not in the way “Doctor” Gosnell and his many friends in Philadelphia might wish.
